When Sam Brinton was tapped for a position at the Department of Energy in February, the new Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy was already a controversial hire.
Brinton, who is a “gender-fluid” drag queen, calls the national COVID czar “Daddy Fauci” and bragged in his bio that he “has worn his stilettos to Congress to advise legislators about nuclear policy and to the White House where he advised President Obama and Michelle Obama on LGBT issues. He shows young men and women everywhere he goes that they can be who they are and gives them courage.”
He’s also what’s known as a “pup handler.” No, that’s not someone who works with abandoned puppies at the local shelter. I wish I didn’t have to explain this, and you’ll probably wish you didn’t have to read it, either, but here goes: In the gay kink community, there’s a subculture devoted to men who like to pretend they’re dogs and men who like to pretend they’re the “dog’s” handler.
After he held a discussion on the kink community at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2017, the student newspaper wrote that he regaled them with stories about “how he enjoys tying up his significant other like a table, and eating his dinner on him while he watches Star Trek.” I’m guessing that’s about as PG-13 as this sordid tale gets.
This is Sam Brinton – a drag queen and LGBTQ+ activist who was just hired to a top level position at the DOE. pic.twitter.com/2zN8s2iMUK
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 10, 2022
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(At The Western Journal, we’ve been chronicling the perverse wokeness that the Biden administration is willing to indulge — and it goes far beyond hires like Brinton. We’ll keep bringing America the truth about the moral decay the Democrats are willing to tolerate. You can help us by subscribing.)
At the time, the controversy merely had to do with Brinton’s curious lifestyle choices. Some defended him because he was normalizing something they wanted normalized. Others acknowledged he was an odd duck, but none of this stopped him from carrying out his job. The final camp noted (correctly, in my view), that a man desperately in need of serious and intensive psychiatric intervention was being put in charge of safely storing spent fissile material from nuclear power plants — a sensitive position that could be filled by any number of people who don’t engage in bestiality role play.
Should Sam Brinton have a position in the Biden administration?
The debate over the wisdom of Brinton’s hire has taken a decided turn, however, after a 2015 piece he wrote defending a gay prostitution website notorious for featuring children resurfaced earlier this week.
The National Pulse, a conservative publication helmed by former Breitbart staffer Raheem Kassam, first reported on the piece’s existence on Tuesday.
In “The Real Ramifications of the Rentboy Raid,” published in LGBT outlet The Advocate, Brinton argued federal officials shouldn’t have raided the offices of Rentboy.com and shut the service down, even as he acknowledged those behind the gay prostitution website may have broken the law.
Just so we’re clear, Rentboy.com wasn’t being shut down solely for being a sexual supermarket — although it certainly was that. In the argot of the gay subculture, a “rentboy” is a younger man who has sex with older men in exchange for money. As for the question of how young we’re talking here — well, part of the problem is that Rentboy.com seemed to have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
In a 2016 indictment, prosecutors said that Rentboy.com employees called the company’s age-verification process a “gray area” and that it “did not always remove advertisements when the advertisers failed to provide identification” of the individual’s age, The National Pulse reported.
“In one case, after an escort agency failed to provide photo identification for an escort, a RENTBOY.COM employee advised the escort agency that he had deleted photographs with the face of the subject escort, but left the advertisement online and left photographs that showed only the escort’s body,” the indictment read.
“In another case, after a different escort agency refused to provide identification for several escorts who appeared underage, the same RENTBOY.COM employee ‘suggested to [him] to crop the faces of those super young escorts.’”
This was especially true in the Asia market, where prosecutors said the company “failed to comply with its own standards requiring age verification” and ignored “employees [who] complained to RENTBOY.COM management about the quantity of underage escort advertisements.”
“RENTBOY.COM employees reviewing Asia advertisements were also told by the defendant Jeffrey Hurant and other RENTBOY.COM managers to apply lesser standards in doing age verification of Asia-market advertisements,” the indictment read.
One email mentioned in the indictment read, “In Asia ok to approve them … unless you see a baby … :)”
The CEO of Rentboy.com would eventually plead guilty to promoting prostitution.
In his piece for The Advocate, Brinton said the raid was “a devastating assault on some of the most vulnerable members of our community” and that “the dissolution of Rentboy is more dangerous than the website ever was.”
“Rentboy.com may or may not have broken the law. I don’t know,” he wrote
“But I do know, from the frantic emails filling my inbox, that the raid on its headquarters has thrown many gay, bisexual and transgender young adults into turmoil as their main source of income has been ripped away due to irresponsible and archaic views of sex work.”
The young prostitutes, Brinton said, were “reaching out to me because of my passion for ending conversion therapy, a set of the dangerous and discredited practices linked to severe depression, substance abuse and even suicide.
“The connection is horrifying: Many of the young men were forced into conversion therapy by their families — the families to which they may now have to return without a steady income. This makes it my issue.”
“The rent boys weren’t harming anyone. But now these young men might have to return to communities and homes which have rejected who they are. And that’s when the real danger begins,” he wrote in conclusion.
Brinton, an MIT grad, is hardly a stupid man. Throughout the piece, he assiduously avoids mentioning anything about underage prostitutes. It doesn’t take much to read between the lines, however.
The individuals contacting him “may now have to return” to their families or “return to communities and homes which have rejected who they are.” Sure, adults do move back in with their families under exigent circumstances — but one can make a reasonable inference from Brinton’s language that he’s not entirely concerned whether these young men have reached the age of majority yet.
It’s worth noting, too, that Brinton’s concerns are almost entirely of a bourgeois, American-centric nature. The fact Rentboy.com may have facilitated child sex trafficking in Asia either didn’t occur or didn’t matter to him — so long as young men running away from families subjecting them to conversion therapy could make a buck selling their bodies online.
In short, the piece makes it impossible to cast Brinton as a flamboyant dandy bringing a splash of Weimar, Germany, to the D.C. Beltway. It’s one thing to have esoteric sexual preferences, but quite another to enthusiastically cosign the practices of Rentboy.com while acknowledging they may have broken the law. Online meat markets cheapen sexuality and leave deep scars that take a lifetime to heal — and that’s just for adults.
As the indictment alleged, Rentboy.com didn’t necessarily know nor care whether the escorts using the service to sell themselves had even left childhood behind. But, Brinton thought it was a profitable tool for these young men to escape conversion therapy for a life of prostitution — which he saw as a fair exchange. Someone that morally adrift should not be in the Biden administration.
