Mike Pence's New Chief of Staff Once Called Gay Sex "Repugnant"

Old tweets are out -- it's all about old college newspaper columns now!

Marc Short, Mike Pence's incoming chief of staff, has a history of of disparaging queer people, especially those living with HIV, the Daily Beast reports. In an early 1990s column for his college newspaper, Short called gay sex "repugnant" and blamed it for the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Short wrote the column in response to an interview in the school's newspaper, The Ring-Tum Phi, with an HIV-positive alumnus of his school, Washington & Lee University in Lexington City, Virginia. Short wrote that while he felt "sympathy" for the alumnus, "that does not mean that we glorify homosexuals' repugnant practices of frequent anal intercourse nor should we consider them brave for coming out of the closet."

He then said that gay men who who "pursue unhealthy lifestyles and engage in high risk sexual behavior, specifically anal intercourse, may very well end up like Mr. Wright."

In the column, Short also called LGBTQ+ activism around HIV/AIDS a "propaganda campaign ignited by gay activists and carelessly perpetuated by journalists whose intent is to scare all heterosexuals into believing they are prime targets for contraction of the disease."

He said the purpose of this campaign was to "destigmatize the perverted lifestyles homoesxuals pursue" and claimed LGBTQ+ people lauded Magic Johnson's HIV diagnosis because it "shocked the world into believing this nonsense that everyone is prone to infection."

Short published the column in the conservative student newspaper The Spectator, which he founded in 1989 at Washington & Lee University.

In a statement to the Daily Beast, Short apologized for the language he used at the time.

"I regret using language as an undergraduate college student that was not reflective of the respect I try to show others today," he said. "We have all learned a lot about AIDS over the past 30 years and my heart goes out to all the victims of this terrible disease."

Prior to Short's time with the vice president, he was Trump's chief congressional liaison and president of the Koch Brothers' political fund.

Short's new boss Pence also has a terrible record when it comes to HIV/AIDS, having caused an HIV outbreak in southeast Indiana by defunding Planned Parenthood, the area's only HIV/AIDS service provider, and advocated for funneling money that went toward fighting HIV/AIDS to instead fighting conversion therapy.

ACT UP activist Peter Staley told The Daily Beast that he did not buy Short's apology.

"I wrote stuff in college too. And I don't look back and say, 'Oh, sorry, it was my college years.' You're either on the right side of stuff or the wrong side." Staley said. "He was taking classic Jesse Helms-style rhetoric from the late '80s and putting an early '90s spin on it and sounding like the fools they all were... Guys like him wanted us to die. And they had an effect."

RELATED | Watch Rep. Deb Haaland's Tearful Plea Against the #TransMilitaryBan