three men say lindsey graham paid them for sex while he voted against us. his sister won't "entertain" it. we'll do it carefully.

Photo: Lindsey Graham in Des Moines, Iowa. Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The CLOSETocracy (The Young Turks), Newsweek, Mediaite and The Advocate

"I'm not even going to entertain that question." That is Sen. Darline Graham, walking away from a reporter who has just asked whether her late brother used gay escorts. It is the only on-camera answer anyone in the Graham family gives in The CLOSETocracy, a documentary The Young Turks and Swamp Watch Studios put on YouTube Thursday morning, in which three men say Lindsey Graham paid them for sex.

Graham died on July 11, Mediaite and the Advocate report. His sister was appointed to his seat and is now running for a full term against Democrat Annie Andrews, which is why Donald Trump was in South Carolina the night before the film dropped, calling Andrews a slur.

what the documentary alleges

A man the film identifies as Cory, whom the Advocate names as the adult performer Cory Burns, says he was booked overnight for $1,500. In the film he says a driver picked him up at the Washington Plaza and took him to the Mayflower Hotel, where the client asked to be degraded, and that he recognized the man as Graham on television a month or two later.

A man identified as Jesse says he met Graham at the Beacon Hotel in Washington in 2012. He says Graham never gave his real name and paid him $260 against a $250 rate, and that he kept the change. It is the most mundane sentence in the whole film.

The third man, Kelvin, opens the film: "My name is Kelvin. I had sex with Lindsey Graham when I was 17." He says it happened in July 2001 at a house near Sedona, Arizona, and the film's narration places Graham, then a congressman, there as a guest of John McCain over the Fourth of July. Kelvin says Graham repeatedly accused him of being 17, that he insisted he was 18, that the encounter continued anyway, and that he was paid $120. Arizona's age of consent is 18, Newsweek notes.

Cenk Uygur, who founded The Young Turks, went further on X, writing that "some of these sex acts were taped" and adding: "And yes, there are others." The film does not show any tape, and Kelvin's account of a camera is that he saw "a blinking red light."

what nobody has proven

None of this is corroborated. Newsweek says so in plain words. The Advocate says it has not verified it. We have not either. There is no court record and no police report, and the man accused cannot answer. In life, Graham publicly denied being gay. A spokeswoman for the Grahams did not respond to Mediaite.

What is on the record is the part he did in daylight. On November 29, 2022, Graham voted no on the Respect for Marriage Act, which passed 61 to 36. The film plays that record against the men's accounts, and that contrast is the whole argument. The "LG" rumor itself is not new: Burns first posted about an unnamed senator with those initials in June 2020, the Advocate reports.

the "we all knew" crowd

Which is why a large share of X spent Thursday announcing it had known for six years. Fine. Nobody who knew in 2020 managed to make it cost him a single vote.

The film ends on Jesse, who has a closing argument ready: "Your gas prices are high because of policies that people like Senator Graham were supporting while they were paying people like me for sex. Does that make you mad?"