12 Presidential Candidates Who Dress Like Lesbians (Besides Hillary Clinton)

As you may have read today on Slate.com, Hillary Clinton Isn’t A Lesbian — But She Dresses Like One. The article is already a massive “hit” on the social media networks, just as I suspect Slate imagined it would be, with hordes of Lesbians and People Who Dress Like One sharing passionate opinions about the article’s various sentences and paragraphs. Unfortunately, this article fails to make the larger, more important point about the relationship between presidential candidates and lesbian fashion: they all dress like lesbians. Why? Because lesbians are powerful and love to win… but rarely do.

As the great Jeb Bush probably never said out loud, but probably would if he thought it could improve his poll numbers, “Nobody wants to defund the male gaze more than I do.”

12 Current and Former Presidential Candidates Who Want to Dress Like Lesbians

Thank you to my dearest pal Heather Hogan for making these beautiful graphics for us.

1. Rick Santorum

santorum-ellen-2

Sure, Rick Santorum may actively campaign against Ellen’s rights as a lesbian and as a female person entitled to make her own decisions about her body parts — but there’s one thing both of these public figures aren’t afraid to endorse loud and clear: sweater vests.

2. Bernie Sanders

bernie-delevingne

Bernie Sanders has big plans for spreading the green around — starting with copping Cara Delevingne’s love of pea green jacket situations. It’s only a matter of time ’til these two souls will surely rendez-vous at Pea Soup Anderson’s, a charming restaurant located off Interstate 5 in California. “Your jacket matches the soup,” Cara will say in her cheeky British accent. “So does yours,” Bernie will respond, chuckling softly to himself.

3. Ben Carson

kd-3

The connection Ben Carson feels with KD Lang probably began in 1992, a big year for both of these style icons: Ben Carson released his first book,”Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence,” and KD Lang released her ground-breaking album, Ingenue. To be honest, I prefer the album.

4.  Donald Trump

trump-martina

Trump may be a fan of Martina Navratilova’s style, if not the fact that she was born in Czechoslovakia but now dares to live in Florida. What would a meeting of the fashion minds look like for these two? Well, I think we can agree on one thing: Martina Navratilova should probably whack Donald Trump over the head with a heavy object.

5. Ted Cruz

cruz-page

Ted Cruz might not have taken any political inspiration out of his meet-up with Ellen Page at the Iowa State Fair, but he clearly picked up a few important fashion pointers. Like many queer women already know, plaid flannel is the gift that keeps on giving.

6. Rand Paul

paul-stewart

It’s a universally established fact that the best way to fix your reputation as an unenthusiastic television presence is FASHION.

7. Marco Rubio

rubio-wambach

Did you hear the one about how Marco Rubio hit a kid in the face with a football in Iowa? Well, it’s true, which’s why anybody with children in Iowa should fear Marco Rubio. Did you hear the one about how Abby Wambach hit a goal in the face with a soccer ball? Me too, it was awesome.

8. Carly Fiorina

fiorina-heard

You’ve never seen Carly looking so lovely as she did tonight
You’ve never seen her shine so bright
and also so wrong about abortion, education, the affordable care act, and the minimum wage
You’ve never seen so many men and women ask Amber Heard if she wanted to dance,
they’re looking for a little romance, but don’t have half a chance! (b/c she’s married to Johnny Depp)
And you never have seen those dresses they’re wearing, except on each other one time, you have been blind!
The lady in red, is dancing with me,
cheek to cheek.
There’s nobody here, ‘cept the GOP
It’s where you’d hate to be,
But you hardly know this beauty by my side,
You’ll never forget the way she looked last night.

9. John Kasich

griner

I think I had a polo like this once. I probably got it from GapKids. I loved GapKids. My Mom worked there for a while when I was in middle school, so we got a discount which was pretty rad. I worked there too, in 1999. It was 1999! Anything felt possible!

10. Michelle Bachmann

bachman-roberts

Bachmann may not be running for president this year, but that won’t stop her from running to the runway, inspired by her #1 fashion icon, morning show host Robin Roberts. Despite not having any experience in politics, though, I think we can all agree that Robin Roberts would make a much better president than Michelle Bachmann.

11. Mike Huckabee

huckabee-lynch

Mike Huckabee is just like you and me: an ordinary American who doesn’t want to lose his sunglasses, or run out of pockets for fishing tackle. Jane Lynch is also like you and me: she finds women sexually appealing and enjoys having relationships with them. One thing is for sure: Jane Lynch is taller than Mike Huckabee, and probably has cooler things in her pockets.

12. Sarah Palin

palin-chaiken

I’m sorry, we had to.

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Riese

Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3266 articles for us.

85 Comments

  2. When someone starts wearing wide brim fedoras and bowties with leather jackets; that’s my candidate!

      • I always figured I’d go into politics. Growing up in New Hampshire does that to a kid. The only thing scandalous I’ve done (so far) was in college when I would frequent strip clubs. I think that alone would get me cred with some GOP good ol’ boys. You know, if they just disregard me being a democrat, pro choice, and a massive homo.

  7. Thank you, Autostraddle’s Riese, for making a simple lesbian clickbait journalist the happiest person on the internet with this article.

  10. one million rainbow stars for riese.

    and twelve million more when the first politician gets a side mullet.

  13. This is great but one note. Andersen’s Pea Soup is about 80 miles west of the 5. It’s on the 101 in Buellton.

  15. My first thought was “Wait… Ellen Page is running for President of the USA?” swiftly followed by “Isn’t she Canadian?”

  23. Thanks autostraddle. I just had the thought: “Huh, Sarah Palin is kind of hot.” … Time to take a shower.

  25. Wait a minute. I don’t want to be that person because this is a great post but I kind of need to be that person. Since some of these women are bi or don’t identify as lesbian. I know it works for the headline but I generally think Autostraddle doesn’t do bi erasure.

        • Thanks! I read it. I do appreciate the struggles writers have with the limitations of the language we have, especially when we’re trying to get things done every day and appeal to the widest audience possible and I know the whole point of the post is to respond to the Slate piece. I’m a working journalist but it’s hard to divorce this conversation from my needs as a reader. But I do think in general, while yes, we can’t be perfect and as the comment policy mentions queer isn’t a catchall, lesbian isn’t more of a catchall than queer. I guess it’s an SEO thing mainly as stated but it sucks that because mostly straight men are using my sexuality for amusement on the internet, we have to feed into that.

    • Honestly for this post the priority was the joke, that’s all — and it was Slate’s joke, so we used Slate’s language. Like the entire post is non-sensical and satirical and a joke. Usually if we use lesbian in a headline for SEO purposes, we indicate who isn’t a lesbian within the post itself — and we did for Amber Heard, but it wasn’t possible to maintain the joke and get it in there for Cara or Kristin Stewart — but nothing about this post is real, you know? The priority was the joke and finding perfect matches for a lot of these was hard and required digging beyond lesbian-identified people into a vaster territory of queer women.

      As it ALSO says in the comment policy, sometimes “lesbian” is an adjective describing a thing besides a person, and that was the case here, the “thing” being the stereotypical idea of “lesbian apparel,” which again, was Slate’s joke, we’re just riffing on it.

  30. This post gives me life and I wanted to illustrate it with a gif but the best gif for the job is a set of human lungs inflating. However I am a mature adultish human who realises and considers the sensitivity of others who might be disturbed rather than inspired by how a human organ goes from a sad little pile of jelly to big beautiful bubble gum thing.

  31. The pea soup Andersons reference really speaks to me. Also how many platforms can I use to talk about Ellen Page posting about this??

  35. I inhaled water laughing at the Rand Paul caption. Thanks for the beautiful brightening of my day, Riese.

  38. Yesss, so glad for the truth to be revealed: every presidential candidate is taking wardrobe cues from us!!! (If I see one more ridiculous article about Hillary’s wardrobe, tho…#ugh).

  40. This article prompted an interesting discussion on my feed wherein someone stated “Ok, i read the article haha i can see there is a lot more to “dressing like a lesbian” than just flannel!”

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