Gay Mike Pence doppelgänger uses his looks (and hot pants) to raise money for LGBT groups
A man who bears a likeness to Vice President-elect Mike Pence is usings his looks to raise money for LGBT+ charities.
Mike Hot-Pence, played by Glen Pannell, wears a suit and tie on his top half and hotpants on his bottom half.
He has been collecting hundreds of dollars in donations to LGBT charity the Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood and The Natural Resources Defense Council.
He tells Dazed: “My sister was the first person to call out the likeness.
“That was this past summer right after the RNC convention. It started to snowball after that as his profile in the media rose. More and more friends and co-workers started telling me that I looked like Pence.”
Hot-Pence adds that his costume started as a Halloween costume.
“We don’t have to imagine how women’s health and the environment and the LGBTQ community and refugees will suffer under the incoming administration,” he says.
“This isn’t speculation. Mike Pence has a voting record on these issues from the last 16 years and it scares me.”
Hot-Pence plans to raise money for the International Refugee Assistance Project, and he says he has already raised more than $2,000 for the other groups.
Of an important issue – the dropping temperature – Hot Pence says: “I may need to weather-proof my shorts.”
Earlier this year, Pence’s evangelical voting bloc helped add a plank to the Republican platform opposing a ban on gay cure therapy on ‘religious freedom’ grounds. His spokesperson did not address this to the NYT.
Of course, the former Governor of Indiana has a much longer anti-LGBT record.
Pence, who has been influential in packing the Trump administration with anti-LGBTconservatives, recently confirmed plans to roll back Barack Obama’s executive protections on LGBT rights, so that “the transgender bathroom issue can be resolved with common sense at the local level”.
Pence earlier this year appeared unable to answer when asked whether it should be legal to fire people because of their sexuality.
The Governor of Indiana stirred up international outrage last year when he signed Indiana’s controversial ‘Religious Freedom Restoration Act’, giving businesses the right to discriminate against gay people on the grounds of religion.
Pence claimed the law was intended to “protect” organisations from having to provide services for same-sex weddings, saying: “I support the freedom of religion for every Hoosier [Indiana citizen] of every faith.
“The Constitution of the United States and the Indiana Constitution both provide strong recognition of the freedom of religion but today, many people of faith feel their religious liberty is under attack.”
An investigation also found that Pence approved extreme anti-LGBT articles when he was the head of the Indiana Policy Review journal in the 1990s.
In an item published under his editorial tenure in the December 1993 issue, Pence’s journal criticised The Wall Street Journal for taking part in a job fair for gay journalists – suggesting that “gaydom” was a “pathological condition”, and arguing that gay journalists would be biased in their coverage because of their sexuality.
It claimed: “The more extreme of the gay movement consider themselves members of a sexual determined political party.”
Another edition published in 1993 attacked Bill Clinton for reforms to permit closeted gay people to serve in the army.
It claimed: “Homosexuals are not as a group able bodied. They are known to carry extremely high rates of disease brought on because of the nature of their sexual practices and the promiscuity which is a hallmark of their lifestyle.”
