Jonathan Van Ness, the most famous of the five “Queer Eye” stars from the Netflix series, spoke out on Instagram on Monday morning after they were featured in a pro-Donald Trump attack ad, just weeks before the presidential election.
The ad, which was posted to YouTube over the weekend, attacks Vice President Kamala Harris and calls her a “liberal border czar” who will give “criminal illegal aliens taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries.” It finishes with a narrator calling Harris supporters “crazy liberal Kamala’s for they/them” over a clip of Harris and Van Ness laughing together.
“Don’t think that these white nationalist Christian politicians aren’t a threat to you,” Van Ness, who lives in Austin, wrote. They added the feature in the ad was “kind of iconic, but mostly upsetting.”
“As a non binary person, whenever I’m presented with a binary choice I’m immediately leery,” Van Ness wrote in a caption. “But in this election, it’s really about moving forward in all the messy imperfection and trying to trust each other again, or it’s about going backwards to a time where women needed their husband or father’s permission to open a checking account — and where segregation was also a matter of ‘states rights’ mixed in with an authoritarian dictator who has absolute immunity from the Supreme Court.”
Van Ness added: “Please choose hope over fear. Faith over blame. Love y’all.”
Van Ness didn’t link to the ad, but the one they’re referring to appears to come from the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc, which the New York Times called one of the biggest super PACs supporting Trump. The PAC is spending around $100 million in the final weeks of the race.
Meanwhile, another person unwittingly featured in the same ad, drag queen Pattie Gonia, said legal action was on the table.
“Is this seriously the best they’ve got?” Wiley said in the post while dressed as the Statue of Liberty. “No, the Trump campaign did not have my permission to use my name or likeness. Yes, we are reviewing our legal options, and yes, I’m going to do what queer people always do: Turn our pain into something positive.”
