Gay Republican Reid Rasner Sues His Own Party Over Paedophile Smears
Reid Rasner knows exactly how old this playbook is. The openly gay Republican running for Wyoming’s only US House seat is spending the final stretch of his campaign in court, suing fellow conservatives he says branded him a paedophile because of his sexuality.
Rasner, 42, a financial adviser who came out at 20, has already settled one case against an Iowa man who repeatedly posted the slur under his campaign’s Facebook posts. In a sworn affidavit, the man admitted he had no firsthand knowledge and had simply repeated what he read online.
Another suit is still running against a former Wyoming state senator Rasner accuses of leading a whisper campaign about sexual misconduct; a judge knocked back the ex-lawmaker’s bid to have it dismissed this month.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this in my entire life,” Rasner told Semafor. “This just isn’t the Wyoming I knew or thought I knew. The state needs to come to terms with the hate and ignorance that’s fueled death threats and violence against me, all because of my sexuality.”
His advisers told him to let it slide. He disagrees. “Everyone told me: Don’t file lawsuits,” he said. “I should have filed them on Day One.”
Where The Rumours Started
Rasner says the smears took off after his headline-grabbing US$47.25 billion bid to buy TikTok in 2025 (Oil City News, 2025). They then spread through Republican circles in a state where his sexuality was already being used against him. A May poll run for rival candidate Chuck Gray told respondents Rasner had “married his gay husband in New York”, and his support dropped once voters heard it.
The gay-men-as-predators lie has been thrown at our community for decades, and it still does damage. Even the Log Cabin Republicans, the party’s LGBTQ group, are backing his fight. “I am surprised, because Reid is a very, very conservative person,” president Ross Hemminger said. “Policy-wise, he probably outflanks most people who hold office in Wyoming.”
Worth being clear-eyed here: Rasner is a staunch Trump supporter whose positions on transgender issues sit to the right of the president’s. He is fighting one prejudice while campaigning on policies many in our community would find confronting. Both things are true at once.
His suits also land as Republican support for same-sex marriage keeps sliding, with Wyoming sitting below the national average at 58 per cent (PRRI, 2025). Whatever happens in his primary, where polling has him trailing Gray, the cases ask a bigger question: can the oldest anti-gay smear in politics still be used without consequence?
A State With A Dark History
For historical context, let’s not forget that Wyoming is the state that saw one of the most shocking hate crimes committed in the United States. In October 1998, Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay University of Wyoming student, was robbed, beaten and tied to a fence outside Laramie, then left to die in near-freezing conditions. He never regained consciousness and died six days later. His killers received life sentences, and his name sits on the federal hate crime law passed in 2009. Wyoming itself, nearly three decades on, still has no comprehensive hate crime law of its own
