Richard Gere told the truth about USAID. Trump’s bully answered like a schoolyard bigot

Richard Gere said something true, something decent, and something urgent, and the White House communications director’s response was to dredge up a decades-old, untrue smear about his sex life.

Trump’s mouthpiece is Steven Cheung, who is less a human being than a sniveling, childish, Jabba the Hutt knockoff who doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to respond in a dignified manner to anyone who dares to point out what Trump’s lethal policies are actually doing to people.

In a June interview with the Associated Press, Gere defended the work and significant relevance of USAID, which was, before Trump brutally tore it apart, the principal U.S. government agency responsible for administering civilian foreign aid, managing overseas development, and providing emergency humanitarian relief to promote global economic growth, strengthen democratic societies, and improve public health in developing nations.

He spoke emphatically as someone who spent decades doing humanitarian work. He called it close to the best thing America ever did. He was right. It was a program that provided health care, education, and support for women and people who had absolutely nothing.

Related: Richard Gere Wins Humanitarian Award

Gere also pointed to what the agency’s HIV/AIDS work accomplished, crediting it with saving tens of millions of lives before the Trump administration shut it down on day one. He was justifiably angry and harsh about the ignorance behind that decision.

He also said he was ashamed that a country that never stops calling itself the richest and most powerful in the world used that position to walk away from the people who needed help the most.

The human toll of dismantling USAID is starting to become tragically documented. A report from House Oversight Democrats found the agency's collapse had already contributed to roughly 600,000 deaths, most of them children. Further, it found HIV-prevention supplies and contraceptives bought and paid for by American taxpayers sitting rotting in warehouses because no one in this administration cared enough to get them where they were needed.

That is the catastrophe and verifiable death sentence Gere was responding to.

Related: An out former USAID official speaks on the fatal global fallout of dissolving its LGBTQ+ programs (exclusive)

The belligerently bombastic bastard Cheung ignored the truth about Gere’s comments and, without saying a single word about USAID, instead wrote that he wasn't going to listen to a man who "may have put a gerbil up his ass." He was reviving a tabloid rumor about Gere that has been debunked for decades and that Gere himself has long dismissed as an urban legend with no basis in reality whatsoever.

I'm old enough to remember when that rumor first made the rounds in the 1980s, back before social media, before anyone thought to ask where it actually came from or whether there was a shred of truth to it.

I remember it as playground talk, young teen guys making jokes about something they probably heard from one of their homophobic fathers. There was a guy in our class who had a gerbil, and he was mercilessly ridiculed. If you were the least bit effeminate, guys would tell you that you stuck gerbils up your butt.

The implication, of course, was that you were somehow different.

It brings back some painful memories. Not because I was a target of the gerbil garbage. I wasn’t. But it made me uncomfortable because I knew I was different in some way. And I think the rumor got started because Gere boldly took on a gay role early in his career.

In 1977, Gere starred on Broadway in Bent, a play depicting the persecution of gay men in Nazi concentration camps. Playing a gay role was incredibly unusual and risky for a rising Hollywood heartthrob at the time, as it invited intense scrutiny.

The production featured a strikingly candid opening sequence that famously served as the sexual awakening for an 11-year-old Anderson Cooper, who later went backstage to meet the actor and was left entirely speechless by a topless Gere in his dressing room.

Related: Anderson Cooper Describes How Richard Gere Made Him Realize He's Gay

So, from there, I think it became attached to Gere because of that role and the fact that his looks were disarming, and someone, somewhere decided they didn’t like it, so they created this falsehood, probably while inserting a gerbil into themselves.

More than forty years later, Cheung decided that was his best rebuttal to a factual conversation about children dying without medicine. Cheung comes from the same virulently homophobic wing of the GOP that spent the days after Sen. Lindsey Graham's death indignant about people discussing decades-old rumors regarding his sexuality.

Those rumors, too, had circulated for decades, but with more heft. Conservatives insisted the talk about Graham was ugly, unfounded, beneath the discourse, and an insult to a man's memory. But guess what? No one in the party is condemning the slimy Cheung for what he said about Gere. He reached for the ugliest, most homophobic version of a rumor precisely because Gere is a man widely associated with the Democratic Party.

But no one should be surprised by that hypocrisy from the party of Speaker Mike Johnson. And no one should be surprised that Cheung stooped so low. This is just another day for him.

Gere was right to say what he said. USAID's collapse is a moral catastrophe. Of course, Cheung had nothing to say about any of that because it’s indefensible. So he dredges, again, from his endless pit of malice and immaturity.

If anyone has the room and capacity to swallow up a gerbil, it’s Steven Cheung, because his bottom knows no bottom.

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