Tim Scott's Girlfriend Is Real

Can we all calm down now?

Tim Scott, a candidate in the Republican presidential primary race, was joined by his girlfriend Mindy Noce onstage at the third Republican candidate debate in Miami on Wednesday night, drawing to a close all the euphemistic wink-wink coverage of the candidate that wondered how a 58-year-old man could possibly be single. Yes, in 2023, we resurrected the smirking innuendos of phrases like “confirmed bachelor” because, as we all know, the worst thing a politician can be is queer.

Noce is a “design and renovations manager” from South Carolina and has been dating Scott for roughly a year and a half. Whether they’re “really” in a relationship or whether this is all an elaborate pantomime designed to fool Republicans into voting for him is immaterial for several reasons. For one, Scott doesn’t stand a gay snowball’s chance in Hell of winning the nomination. For this reason, the candidate debates amount to little more than auditions for cabinet appointments in a hypothetical Trump administration; Trump appears to have the nomination locked down. For another, whether or not Scott is single or queer or whatever is not the issue we should be focussing on.

This isn’t to say that I don’t get the appeal. If Scott were a closeted queer person, then there would be an awful lot of hypocrisy for him to answer for. And I can see how this kind of easily attacked weak spot in an idealogical opponent would be awfully tempting, to say nothing of how hot such a thing would be as gossip. Even if you’re just drawn to scandal and wish to see Republican assholes fall down, the prospect that Tim Scott might be hiding something with a non-existent girlfriend or a beard can be hard to ignore.

Now that Noce has been presented, I hope we can just drop the topic altogether. This conspiracy theory-adjacent speculation about Scott’s sexuality is a bad look on us as a people. Leave that shit to the Republicans and QAnon folks who view being queer as an insult or a shame or a sin. That’s their bigotry to feed on, and it does not become us to join them. Taking glee in needling this possibility belies a desire to “out” people.

“What if he’s gay?” Yeah, what if he is? What does that mean for people who believe that’s okay? If Scott is a closeted queer man, then he suffers from the very regressive cultural standards we should be challenging and changing. It does not do us favors to take up those regressive standards as a weapon against others. What is at issue, if Scott is queer, is the hypocrisy in continuing to perform queerphobia, not the potential embarrassment of a Republican being queer. We should not delight in the idea of a queer person feeling so buried under generations of ignorance, bigotry, and shame that they not only cannot allow themselves the peace of being but can neither allow it for any other person. This doesn’t justify Scott’s wrongheaded politics or regressive values, those should be stymied and opposed at every possible turn. This is a call for reflection and self-interrogation: why does the idea of Scott maybe being queer fascinate us so much when there’s so much else to criticize him on? He voted against the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, he said he would direct the military to invade Mexico, he’s a Trump boot-licker who called the many criminal indictments against the former president “un-American.” Don’t take the low-hanging conservative fruit that is a candidate’s sexuality when there are so many other more legitimate venues to pillory them on.