Jaimee Michell remembers staring slack-jawed at her phone as she watched a video in which children were taunted by a pink neon sign that read "IT'S NOT GONNA LICK ITSELF!"
A myriad of videos recorded and shared by parents who attended the 'Drag the Kids to Pride' show in June hosted by Dallas, Texas gay bar Mr. Misster, featured scantily clad grown men dancing, walking down a makeshift runway, and collecting money from children.
She looked to her fiancée, Sasha, who was equally aghast at the viral videos consuming their social media feed. They wondered, Is this what they think we support?
Michell previously fought to secure her right to marry, which had been achieved and was seen as the final bastion for gay rights.
As a gay millennial, she didn't face pushback from society as suggested by LGBTQ+ activists, or "the alphabet mafia," as she refers to them.
Michell became critical of activists as they expanded and adopted other communities appearing to shift the goal post from equality to superiority, as herself and others in the gay community viewed it.
However, Michell drew a line in the sand when LGBTQ+ activists advocated introducing children to sexual orientation, gender identity, and transgenderism under the guise of "education."
She could stay silent no longer as the phenomenon of drag queens being labeled "family friendly" suggested children were being preyed upon by groomers and pedophiles seeking to hijack the gay and transgender community.The Gay Who Strayed: Gay And Conservative In The New Millennium
"I told my mom and my dad and my whole family as soon as I fell in love with [a] woman," Michell told Timcast in an interview. "I was never ashamed of it."
She grew up in a Jewish family whose main concern was finding another Jewish partner.
"I've never really cared what people thought about me," she said. "I don't hide anything for fear of how somebody would think."
While her family took time acknowledging her attraction to other women as more than "just a phase," they showed her nothing but happiness. Her friends, likewise, never felt different towards Michell after coming out.
"Some people do deal with their family excising them, they lose friends — but overall I don't think the country is there anymore," she said, acknowledging the majority of pushback came from folks with deeply-rooted religious objections to the idea of homosexuality.
Michell further discussed growing up gay in American culture prior to the inclusion of LGBTQ+ ideas in education and entertainment:I grew up watching movies, [with] all straight people on TV shows, magazines ... I didn't think anything of it ... I loved the L Word. ... But ... I didn't feel like "othered" or hidden. It was just normal to me ... It wasn't a big deal. And it still isn't ... adding in diverse characters trying [to] fill the gay slot or any minority spot in a TV show or movie, I am personally disgusted by pandering. I think it's all fake.
"Very few people in this country care who you sleep with or who you love," she said, rebutting mainstream arguments of LGBTQ+ activists.
Michell didn't have a traditional red-pilling experience, having never been a Democrat. There was no "a-ha!' moment that led to her current beliefs. However, she cites Ron Paul's 2008 Presidential bid as an event that opened her eyes to politics; she's long considered herself "staunchly anti-establishment."
Following the 2008 election, she became rather disengaged with politics but threw support behind Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' 2016 bid for the Presidency because she viewed him as an anti-establishment candidate.
"He turned around and immediately endorsed Hillary Clinton for President and I was like, 'oh no,' ... Ron Paul would never do that," she said.
Following Sanders' support for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, Michell became interested in former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign — similarly viewing him as anti-establishment.
She publicly addressed her support for Trump and revealed her conservative beliefs shortly after.
"Right-wing gay people have come out twice," she added. "Coming out as conservative was much harder — not [because of] hate from the right, but hate from the left."
Michell further recounted losing a friendship of 30 years after revealing her political beliefs: "She thought I was evil for being a conservative."
In 2017, having previously shared political memes on her personal Facebook page throughout Trump's first bid for the Republican Presidential nomination, Michell opened an Instagram account adopting the moniker "The Gay Who Strayed" — a play on the Democratic LGBT voting bloc.
Her goal was simple: share funny memes and hand out red pills
A graphic designer by profession over the last 15 years, Michell expanded her brand by opening "the Based Patriot" merchandise line through her Instagram account.
"The meme 'graphic design is my passion' — it literally is!" Michell said. "I make everything ... whatever you see, I do it all."Gays Against Groomers
After five years, Michell became bored with The Gay Who Strayed, saying she felt unfulfilled recycling and sharing the same political memes as the vicious 24-hour news cycle continued.
"But then I came up with the idea for 'Gays Against Groomers' and it just lit a fire under my ass that I didn't even have with the Gay Who Strayed," she said, noting she made many independent and conservative-leaning gay and transgender friends through Instagram.
"I was like, 'Hey guys, I'm starting this group, I have this Idea, Gays Against Groomers, do you wanna join?'"
Launched during Pride Month this past June, Gays Against Groomers branded themselves as a "coalition of gay people who oppose the recent trend of indoctrinating and sexualizing children under the guise of 'LGBTQIA+'"
"Our community that once preached love and acceptance of others has been hijacked by radical activists who are now pushing extreme concepts onto society, specifically targeting children in recent years," their mission statement continued: We’re saying NO. There are millions of gays within the community that want nothing to do with the Alphabet religion and join the fight with parents and concerned people everywhere to protect children. We also aim to return sanity and reclaim the community we once called our own. The gay community is not a monolith. Those pushing this agenda do not represent or speak for us all, nor we do not want to be associated with them in any way. What we are witnessing is mass scale child abuse being perpetrated on an entire generation, and we will no longer sit by and watch it happen. It is going to take those of us from within the community to finally put an end to this insanity, and that's exactly what we're going to do.The overwhelming majority of gay people are against what the community has transformed into, and we do not accept the political movement pushing their agenda in our name. Gays Against Groomers directly opposes the sexualization of children. This includes drag queen story hours, drag shows involving children, the transitioning and medicalization of minors, and gender theory being taught in the classroom. The activists, backed by school boards, government, woke media, and corporations, have been speaking on our behalf for too long. When fighting for equality, our goal was to successfully integrate ourselves into society, but now these radicals aim to restructure it entirely in order to accommodate a fringe minority, as well as seek to indoctrinate children into it their ideology.
Although Michell originally saw the group growing between five to ten thousand followers in the first year, their following exploded as the organization made headlines.
"It caught me totally off guard," she said. "It basically happened almost overnight."
Gays Against Groomers originally brought members on as content creators assisting Michell in elevating the organization's reach. However, over time the team naturally assumed leadership roles.
"I've been letting people shine at whatever they're best at," she said. "We have some regional leadership, some chapter leadership, some writers for our blog, [and] content creators."
Running the organization isn't without risk, however. A series of credible death threats were directly made towards Michell and the organization's members following her Nov. 22 appearance on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Michell and host Tucker Carlson discussed Balenciaga's photo shoot scandal, featuring children surrounded by sexually suggestive imagery, along with November's shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Critics of Michell and Gays Against Groomers suggested the group's "anti-LGBTQ+" rhetoric directly caused the attack.
"I want to be very clear that being 'anti-groomer' and 'anti-child sexualization and mutilation' is not 'anti-gay.' It's not 'anti-LGBTQ,'" she told Carlson.
Michell further explained Gays Against Groomer's concern with mainstream LGBTQ+ activists:Saying 'groomer is an anti-LGBTQ slur’ … is doing irreparable damage to us as a whole, and it's putting a really large target on our backs. Unfortunately the tragedy that happened in Colorado Springs … was expected and predictable. … Gays Against Groomers saw this coming from a mile away, and sadly I don't think it's gonna stop until we end this evil agenda that is attacking children. ... Our priority is to protect children, but we're also here to protect ourselves and defend ourselves because … what's being done in our name is putting us all in danger.
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"Everything I said was absolutely true," she said, criticizing "blue check marks" and the media overall suggesting the organization condoned the shooting. "That obviously isn't what I said at all."
Michell further said the mainstream LGBTQ+'s push towards child sexualization and incorporation of gender theory was hurting the gay and transgender community and encouraging real anti-LGBTQ sentiment in the country.
To combat bad actors and critics seeking to destroy the organization from within, Gays Against Groomers subjects new team member to background checks that include social media screenings and interviews.
"I hope we don't have to exist that long. I'm not glad we have to exist at all," she said of the organization's future. "None of us wanna have to be doing this. ... It's disgusting, but we have to."
She added: "Just us having these numbers behind us, getting on the news ... we're destroying their narrative. We're not okay with this, and we're gonna stop you from inside the community."
The organization's influence has expanded to five other countries seeking chapter membership within Gays Against Groomers, which is also currently building chapters in every state in the U.S.
"We're completely independent, we don't have any funding behind us," she said. "Our followers [and] supporters donate ... none of us take a dime, we just put it back into the movement."
Gays Against Groomers also plans to provide resource operations for parents including education, Michell confirmed.
"We want to bring on professional therapists ... you can't trust these therapists anymore ... they prescribe you with puberty blockers after one visit in many cases with these kids."
Along with credible threats of violence, Gays Against Groomers has also been "cancelled" nine times across eight different companies including payment processors Paypal and Venmo, Google, Donately, and Linktree. The organization's account was also banned from Tik Tok and Twitter twice.
In an exclusive report, Timcast previously covered that Gays Against Groomers were most recently dropped from on-demand printing and warehousing company, Printful, in early December. The organization was producing and selling merchandise designed by Michell through the company, but has since temporarily resumed business with a different company.
“[We will] soon be taking our business to an independent company that supports our values and freedom of speech,” Michell said at the time.
Michell said the phenomenon of critics referring to the exclusively gay and trans organization as "anti-LGBTQ" is a catch-22.
"We're throwing this huge wrench into their agenda," she said. "[Gays Against Groomers] completely dismantles their narrative. No matter how many companies take us down, we appreciate the free press and helping us grow."
As of December, Gays Against Groomers has amassed over 325k followers across Twitter and Instagram.Reclaiming The Community
In 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges — by all measures achieving the goal of equality under the law valued by Michell and the gay community.
"If I would have understood, when I was younger ... fighting for my rights as a lesbian would mean allowing children to drag shows, attaching child molesters to our community, and allowing children to change their sex before they even knew what their favorite color is, I would have never done it," one Gays Against Groomers team member candidly said in a viral Tik Tok video.
Folks originally opposing same-sex marriage invoked the concept of the slippery slope by suggesting the normalization of same-sex marriage would eventually lead to the normalization of pedophilia.
"I don't want to speak for everybody in the organization, but some of us do [agree with that team member]," Michell said. "[We all] thought that those people were crazy ... I'll never forgive the radicals for basically proving these people correct."
Michell continued suggesting LGBTQ+ activists and critics of the organization were damaging previous progress made by gay rights advocates.
"We fought for a really long time to kind of dismantle these binary gender stereotypes ... I'm a tomboy, I wear men's clothes ... looking back at pictures of me when I was a kid, it's evident that I was gay ... I was never a girly girl."
She suggested modern LGBTQ+ activists advocating for gender theory and identity would have suggested herself and other children not displaying stereotypical gender characteristics were in fact transgender.There's a lot of straight women that were tomboys growing up, and they're not men ... so the idea that if a girl doesn't like pink and wants to have short hair and likes sports ... more than playing dress up. [They're] being told they were born in the wrong body ... It's incredibly dangerous and dismissive ... for the most part these kids would otherwise grow up to be gay ... telling them that they're trans with the intent of getting them on ... chemical castration drugs and eventually undergoing these barbaric procedures of removing their body parts and creating new ones. It's incredibly dangerous.
Michell said she personally finds the suggestion that she and Gays Against Groomers are homophobic and transphobic is "absolutely vile."
"It's gaslighting, and they're only trying to say that so we shut up," she said, reiterating the organization isn't concerned with adults consensually engaging in adult conversation and activities with other adults.
"[The] red line is children, and it's been crossed," she said. "Our only goal is to stop this from happening to kids ... this push to transition children and confuse them is what we have a problem with."
Michell said she felt a tsunami of support growing behind anti-grooming and anti-pedophilia following the mainstreaming of child sexualization in entertainment and education.
"The media is saturated with it ... it's talked about everywhere," she continued.The line is being crossed teaching and having it in schools. [It's] not appropriate. The only thing that kids should be taught in schools is to respect and treat everybody the same. We're all people ... we all deserve dignity and respect. Any other further discussion about sexuality or one's gender identity ... [is] a conversation for parents, or for peers of theirs if they don't feel comfortable telling their parents. It isn't the teacher's place or the school's place, or any organization ... to plant this idea in their head. Kids are so malleable and easily manipulated, and quick to believe whatever.
She further suggests activists are conflating personality types with gender identities.
"There's two sexes, two genders, and an infinite amount of personalities ... I don't think a kid can know ... without outside influence from an adult ... kids don't have a concept of sexual orientation," she said. "I don't think a child can identify as gay or straight until they really understand what that means ... With the push to teach about sexual orientation and gender identities ... that's planting the idea in their head a lot earlier ... pushing them to think they're something that they're not necessarily."
Michell said being gay or transgender wasn't a choice, but referenced a social media meme suggesting "a transgender four year old is like a vegan cat — we all know who's making the decisions."
'"I think it's very intentional ... rainbow flags are very exciting to kids ... bright colors, rainbow stuff ... kids like that, so they're gonna be drawn to it," she said noting mainstream LGBTQ+ activists were targeting children. "Kids aren't able to make permanent decisions ... they don't know themselves well enough. One day a kid wants to be an astronaut, the next he wants to be a cowboy."
Groomers are not necessarily pedophiles, she said clarifying the organization's use of the term though noted groomers were pedophile-adjacent.
"All groomers are not pedophiles. To be a groomer you have to be actively teaching, actively putting them in precarious inappropriate situations," she said. "Some groomers are obviously pedophiles, and some are just accessories to the crime ... [they don't necessarily] go hand-in-hand ... they're all a part of this terrible agenda ... which is pedophilic in nature."
She said parents were grooming children in preparation for pedophiles in an attempt to virtue signal.
"It's like pedophiles are higher up on the Totem Pole than gay people."
Michell concluded by saying Gays Against Groomers and religious critics of homosexuality have a common enemy: child predators.
"We are not a monolith. These trans-rights, radical activists don't speak for us," she said. "[Gays Against Groomers] will stand next to anybody that is against this ... Even if we don't agree on everything we have to unite to end this."
