Louisiana Voice

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There’s a feature film called Outrage, released in 2009, that is basically an effort to out closet gays in public life. One of those identified in the film was Jim McCrery, then a U.S. Representative for the northwest part of the state, namely the Shreveport metropolitan area.

The outing of McCrery was accomplished by Act Up Shreveport, a local chapter of a nationwide organization. A principal of the Shreveport chapter was responsible for the McCrery outing

Now, another book by one of the sources in Outrage is scheduled for next year which will out another alleged gay U.S. Representative from the same congressional district: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

“I’m in the middle of outing Mike Johnson” said the author, a Louisiana Tech University graduate who wishes to remain anonymous for the time being. Of course, that anonymity will dissipate quickly when his book, which he says already has a publisher, hits the bookstores. For the time being, we’ll just call him Ray.

Ray said Johnson met his wife through her ministry when she ran a conversion therapy service and that he had relationships with at least one of her clients.

He said that his book “will detail what Johnson is doing.” He said among other things, Johnson sexually abused interns in his office and one of those subsequently “had to be institutionalized in Shreveport.”

Ray turned down The Guardian, The New York Times in favor of working with The Washington Post, he said. As a result of the McCrery story, he said “people have unfriended me on Facebook.”

“I gave The Washington Post an exclusive on the Johnson story until Jeff Bezos decided not to endorse either candidate in the 2024 presidential race,” he said. “That soured me on The Post. The reporter told me that didn’t involve him, that the non-endorsement decision was beyond his pay grade. But I still knew who he worked for, so I terminated conversations with that reporter.”

Ray, who is himself gay, said Johnson was an attorney in the private sector when he had affairs with two married men, affairs that ultimately resulted in divorces and that Johnson was known to have frequented a Shreveport gay bar, Central Station, with other men.

Ray was emphatic in saying his objections were not with Johnson’s gay proclivities but that in true hypocritical fashion, he was going to such lengths to hide the fact by over-compensating with his history of championing anti-LGBTQ legislation first as a private sector attorney and later as a state legislator and congressman.

Pete Buttigieg, Johnson supporters might be quick to point out, is gay and was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 and served as President Biden’s Transportation Secretary. “The difference is Buttigieg never attempted to conceal the fact that he is gay,” Ray pointed out.

Likewise, former Massachusetts U.S. Rep. Barney Frank was openly gay. A leading Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, he was a leading co-sponsor of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act which enacted sweeping reforms following the 2008 Wall Street collapse and ensuing Great Recession.

Johnson served as a litigator and spokesman for Alliance Defense Fund (later Alliance Defending Freedom; ADF), a conservative Christian legal advocacy group that has consistently pursued an anti-LGBTQ rights agenda. In 2005, he also helped guide “Day of Truth,” an ADF-led action against “Day of Silence” protests targeting anti-gay bias in schools. 

Johnson, for example, while with the Kitchens Law Firm in Minden, was an attorney for state officials in the Robicheaux v Caldwell case which was a Fifth Circuit court challenge from several same-sex couples against the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Johnson also helped the state defend its ban in three individual district court cases that comprised the Fifth Circuit case.

Other anti-LGBTQ cases in which Johnson was involved included:

• 2004: Johnson represented judicial candidate John B. Wells, who ran campaign brochures touting his pro-life and pro-marriage positions and challenged the state’s code of judicial conduct, which prohibited judicial candidates from making “cases, controversies, or issues that are likely to come before the court.”
• 2013: Johnson represented Louisiana as the state attempted to bar a mother from adopting her wife’s biological son.
• 2015: Mike Johnson defended Louisiana’s ban on allowing same-sex couples to jointly file state income taxes and to register two parents on birth certificates, until the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutional right of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges.

In fact, Johnson has a decades-long anti-choice, pro-religious fundamentalist legal history besides his anti-LGBTQ cases. To learn more, go HERE.

Johnson also was at one time named dean of a non-existent law school for what was then Louisiana College (now known as Louisiana Christian University) to be located in Shreveport and to be known as the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law.

As dean of the proposed law school, Johnson embarked on a major fundraising campaign and described a big-dollar event in Houston with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, then-Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Pressler, according to an account Johnson wrote in a 2011 alumni magazine. No accounting of funds raised for the failed effort was ever given.

Pressler was an influential figure of the Southern Baptist Convention who in 2015, endorsed U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz for the Republican presidential nomination. Pressler, who also had served as a Texas state legislator and later as a district and appeals court judge, allegedly touched a young man’s penis in 2017, according to sworn testimony in a lawsuit that was settled in 2023. In that lawsuit, Pressler was acused of first having raped the victim, Gareld Duane Rollins, when Rollins was 14 and that he had continued to periodically sexually assault him for the next 24 years. He told the youth whom he taught in his Southern Baptist youth group that he was “special” and that their “relationship” was special but need to be kept secret because “no one but God would understand,” according to a 2017 lawsuit.

Ultimately, eight men came forward to accuse Pressler of sexual misconduct stretching over decades and varying from unwanted invitations to join Pressler naked in a hot tub to actual sexual assault. Pressler died in Houston in 2024.

Those who are gay and attempt to hide that fact might be putting themselves in a position of compromise or even to being blackmailed. For example, Johnson, as Speaker of the House and second in line for the presidency, appears willing to bend to any wish of Donald Trump, no matter how absurd, immoral or illegal it might be – including the apparent willingness to do whatever necessary to avoid a House vote on releasing the Epstein files. That conceivably could be because Trump may know about any secrets, sexual or otherwise, he may have and does not hesitate to threaten to reveal what he might know.

Imagine, if these accusations are borne out and if he were to become president, how a foreign adversary might use that same information.

We do know, however, that he does seem to bend over backward to appease Trump. Maryland Democratic Rep. JAMIE RASKIN recently accused Johnson on MSNBC of “surrendering” Congress to Trump, adding that the Louisiana Representative would go down as “the worst speaker in the history of our country.”

With Ray’s latest revelations, the question must be asked: by his refusal to allow a vote on the resolution to release the Epstein files, is Johnson protecting Trump or is he protecting himself from the exposure of an entirely separate sex scandal, one that could torpedo his own career?