Kyle Luebke wants to be the first openly LGBTQ+ Republican on Charlotte City Council

What’s happening: Luebke, who is running for Charlotte City Council at-large, is facing an uphill battle in a city that hasn’t elected a Republican citywide in over a decade. But the more difficult struggle, he says, is for the future of his party.

• Luebke is the first openly gay Republican to run for City Council.
• Charlotte has had other leaders who identify as LGBTQ+, such as former council member LaWana Mayfield, who is also running, but they’re Democrats.

Flashback: Just over six years ago, the Republican-led General Assembly approved House Bill 2, known as the “bathroom bill,” which required people to use public restrooms that corresponded with the sex listed on their birth certificate.

• The law unleashed international condemnation on the state, and lost North Carolina billions in business.

Why it matters: There’s a contrast between some GOP leaders in Charlotte — who authored a draft of local nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups — and the Republican lawmakers across the nation moving to restrict the rights of transgender people and advance “Don’t Say Gay” bills.

• Also, North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson last year called homosexuality and transgenderism “filth.“
• Luebke has been a vocal critic of Robinson’s. But he’s not deterred by people like him.

“It’s easy for me to attack Democrats on something if I want to, because they’re not in the same party as I am,” he says. “It’s much more difficult to tell people in my party: be better.”

Reality check: Any GOP candidate is a long shot to win an at large seat in a county where Republicans make up just 21% of registered voters.

• Republicans like Luebke would have to capture a large portion of the 36% of registered voters who are unaffiliated.
• But local GOP leaders believe that this is their best shot in recent memory, with midterm elections nearly always hurting the president’s party, and a summer general election for City Council that may have low turnout.

Luebke and many of the Republican candidates are part of a “slate” spearheaded by District 6 council member Tariq Bokhari. The group focuses its messaging on local issues, like affordable housing and public safety.

Luebke, an attorney with McGuire Woods who also does pro-bono work representing tenants facing eviction, says his personal experience has shaped his views.

The 32-year old’s parents sent him to conversion therapy when he was just 15, and when he was 17, they put him in a residential program in Memphis. “I was angry. I was bitter because I felt like what I had thought my life was gonna look like had been completely taken away from me,” he said.

When he was 18, he got a job at Office Depot, where he earned the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

• “I’ve experienced what it’s like to just be questioning constantly, whether or not you are going to be able to survive, you know, have a place to live, whether you’re gonna have to live out of your car, whether you can afford to even have food,” he said.

Luebke moved to Charlotte from Minnesota in 2018. He’s a self-described urbanist who quickly became involved with community efforts for the 2040 plan and Unified Development Ordinance, an effort to rewrite the rules around development.

Background: Still, for much of his life, Luebke voted for Democrats, because he felt like he had no other option. Voter records show that he voted in the 2020 and 2019 Democratic primaries in Mecklenburg County (he says he voted Republican for most races in the general elections).

• “I felt like I had to be a Democrat, because gay people have to be Democrats, and that’s the message that has always been told to me,” he said.
• “I always wrestled with (the question): how do I live with integrity when all my views are conservative, and over here, but then my sexuality is over here?”

Shortly after Luebke moved here, he confided in Bokhari’s wife, Krista, that he was unsure whether there was a place for him in the GOP as a gay man. She pointed him to the Mecklenburg County Young Republicans.

• Bokhari tells me he was quickly impressed with Luebke. He later asked Luebke to help him draft the nondiscrimination ordinance. “Being a gay man that is an outspoken leader in a top 20 size city, that’s hard,” Bokhari said. “He gets all kinds of pushback and flack and headwinds from that and he takes it in stride.”
• Luebke is also president of the Log Cabin Republicans of North Carolina, an LGBTQ+ Republican group.

The other side: Democratic strategist Dan McCorkle is skeptical that Bokhari’s “slate” has a shot, even in a low turnout election.

• “They’re going to be running against very well known, very well-funded Democratic incumbents who know how to win,” he said.
• He also told me Luebke can’t run solely on being a unique Republican: “He would have to translate that into actual policy and actual vision and where he stands on issues before he makes any headway.
• “They’re not going to vote for him because he’s gay.”

Luebke counters that: “If anyone thinks that I am running simply as a gay Republican and that’s why you should vote for me, they haven’t been paying attention to what I’ve been talking about,” he says.

Luebke says that he’s running on his ideas.

• On affordable housing: He believes the city should reform its downpayment assistance program and incentivize developers to create affordable housing for purchase, not just for rent. And he wants to petition state lawmakers to allow Charlotte to give its own property tax breaks to struggling homeowners (currently not allowed).
• On transit: Luebke takes public transit to work Uptown every day, and for the first three years he lived in Charlotte, he didn’t own a car. He believes the city needs to build out bus rapid transit, and increase bus frequency to at least 30 minutes on every route, before prioritizing light rail.

The intrigue: Current District 1 council member Larken Egleston, who would be Luebke’s opponent in the at-large race if they make it through the primary, praises Luebke.

• “Obviously I believe the Democratic Party as a whole is a better advocate for members of the LGBTQ community, but I am always encouraged when I see folks willing to push back on some of the maybe older historic stances of the Republican Party that I find particularly problematic,” he said.

In early March, Luebke and the other members of the “slate” lined up in front of news cameras to file for office. But that was only one of the major events in Luebke’s life that day.

Just before he and his fellow Republicans walked into the Board of Elections building, his partner Bryan proposed. This time, more than 15 years after sending him to conversion therapy, his parents were there to witness it.

• His mother cried. His father congratulated him on the engagement on Facebook. And they are constantly talking about the two having children.
• “I think when we humanize things, I know that for me, when I have humanized my sexuality with them, it causes people to think about things, it causes people to reflect,” Luebke said. “They love me, they love Bryan. And they want us to be successful. And so that’s, I think, better than anything that I could ever ask for.”