Ric Grenell’s very ‘normal gay’ implosion

Last June, I wrote about Richard Grenell’s desperate, almost demented insistence that he is a “normal gay.” In a Politico interview, he blabbered about Melania Trump’s generosity (LOL!), railed against cancel culture (He would know), and assured anyone listening that, despite being gay, he was one of the good ones (He’s one of the worst — ever).

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I wrote at the time that the concept of a “normal gay” exists only in the closeted hypocrisy of Christian conservatives, and that if Grenell was the face of normalcy, I was grateful for my own abnormality.

After that column hit, the reaction was furious. While the clicks climbed, I heard from so many abnormal gays like myself about how repulsive Grenell’s comments were. What I should have anticipated, though, was that karma is a bitch, and how spectacularly and very normally, Grenell would flame out.

Related: Oh, to dream the impossible dream of being a ‘normal gay’ like Richard Grenell

Grenell’s mouth, along with his ambitions, was way over the top. In late 2024, Grenell apparently decided that his reward for years of loyalty in the service of Donald Trump, the diplomatic PR stunts (He has a PR background, so do I, but I know what I’m capable of), the flowery Truth Social cheerleading, the gleeful participation in MAGA, and a political movement that has spent two of Trump’s god-awful terms systematically erasing LGBTQ+ people from public life, should be the secretary of state job.

Secretary of State? How pompous can one “normal” gay man be? Only someone with a wildly and desperately inflated ego would think their razor-thin resume would make them qualified to be America’s top diplomat.

His abnormal ambition was absolutely absurd. Say what you want about Trump, but I’m sure he thought, “Grenell? A gay man? For Secretary of State? LOL!” Trump gave the job to Marco Rubio instead, which should have been Grenell’s first clear message about exactly where he stood in the hierarchy of loyalty and reward in Trumpworld.

Related: Trump reveals GOP congressman’s ‘terminal’ medical diagnosis at Kennedy Center meeting

Related: Gay Republican group invited by Ric Grenell heckled and booed musician Yasmin Williams at Kennedy Center

And, as an aside, after Rubio’s disastrous performance thus far, maybe Grenell would have been a better choice? Just kidding!

Instead, Trump gave Grenell something more glamorous, and, in Trump’s warped head, probably more befitting of a “normal” gay man. He handed Grenell the presidency of the Kennedy Center, Washington’s crown jewel of arts and culture. Grenell was presumably dispatched to MAGAfy it.

What followed was an unmitigated disaster — a “Failure 101” on how to destroy a beloved institution in twelve months. Ticket sales cratered, falling to their lowest levels in years, with nearly half of all seats going unsold by late 2025, compared to a 93 percent sell rate the year before. Subscription revenue dropped by roughly 36 percent as longtime patrons simply stopped coming. The Hamilton national tour withdrew.

The Washington National Opera ended its 50-year residency. The Martha Graham Dance Company walked. Pride events were canceled without explanation. The Kennedy Center Honors, hosted by Trump himself, drew a record-low audience, down 25 percent from the prior year.

And on and on and on. Oh, and Trump stuck his name on the outside, so it’s now “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” If Trump weren’t so narcissistic, I’d say the renaming was a “normal” idea floated by his lickspittle Grenell.

But alas, it was the board that Grenell ostensibly oversaw, stuffed with billionaires and Trump loyalists, that voted to rename the institution, triggering immediate legal challenges from Congress and the Kennedy family, who correctly pointed out that only Congress has the authority to rename a federal memorial.

It got so bad that Trump came up with the phony excuse to close it for renovations, even though it had been renovated just a few years ago.

Related: Trump to close Kennedy Center after takeover. Here’s everything we know

And Grenell, the self-described normal gay, oversaw the cancellation of every LGBTQ+ program in the building while apparently considering this entirely consistent with his “normal” identity. Also, I’m sure as a “normal” gay, he loathes things like ballet and opera, like the manly Timothee Chalamet, preferring to listen to the nail-on-a-chalkboard sounds of Kid Rock and Ted Nugent.

Lawsuits followed. Senate Democrats launched investigations into cronyism and luxury spending. The whole operation became, as one observer put it, a MAGAfication so thorough and so swift that it left the building financially gutted and culturally humiliated.

And then, this week, Grenell was out. He says he stepped down. Sure he did! The White House’s explanation was that he was never meant to stay long-term and that his departure aligns with that “planned,” phony two-year renovation. Sounds like a bad PR person came up with that fairy tale. Fairy, in this instance, is not meant to imply “abnormal gay.”

Related: Ric Grenell to step down as Kennedy Center president after controversial tenure

Trump praised Grenell for his work on “the transition and fundraising.” I’m not sure where Grenell had any success in those areas. His replacement is Matt Floca, a vice president of facilities operations. Who? And what?

Not a cultural visionary. Not a political figure. A facilities guy. I worked in retail for many years. The facilities guys are great, but I’m not sure how well-versed they are in “transition and fundraising.”

Here is what Grenell never understood, what every Trump loyalist eventually fails to understand: if you get too close to Trump, you blow up, disintegrate, and lose all sense of yourself.

Grenell was foolish enough to believe that Trump rewards loyalty. He does not. The list of people who gave Trump everything, their credibility, their careers, their dignity, only to be discarded the moment they became inconvenient is long enough to fill those empty Kennedy Center Concert Hall seats, which, incidentally, are now 43 percent empty on a good night.

Grenell spent years suppressing his own community, lapping up all the homophobia and filth from Trump and his allies, who banned trans people from military service, scrubbed LGBTQ+ people from government websites, and gutted protections the community had spent decades earning, all in the hope that restoring “normality” would be rewarded.

And that’s the part Grenell never seemed to grasp when he insisted, so loudly, on being “normal.” There is no reward for it. No dignity in it. There’s just the same ending as everyone else who kissed Trump’s derriere. As Trump himself would say, “What a loser.”

I’ll say it again, Ric: if that’s what normal looks like, thank God I’m not trying to be you.

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