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It is October 2005 in Springville, Alabama, a town of about 1,200 people, and a teenager stands in a yard in the cold beside a couple of trash bags.
His father has just stuffed his clothes into them, taken his phone and his car keys, locked the door, and told him not to call or come back.
The offense, as the young man tells it: his parents asked why he had been at a Birmingham bar called the Quest, and he told them the truth. "Because I'm gay."
Eight months later, in June 2006, according to "The CLOSETocracy," a documentary released Thursday on The Young Turks' YouTube channel, Sen. Lindsey Graham voted to advance a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.
That juxtaposition is how the film introduces its first witness.
The man in the yard is called Corey. He is one of three men in it who say they had sex with the longtime South Carolina Republican who died in July.
Cenk Uygur, the host of The Young Turks, promoted the film on X on Wednesday evening.
"The issue isn't someone's sexuality, but there is a serious national security issue," he wrote. "One of the incidents was highly illegal - and on tape!"
None of the men's accounts have been independently corroborated. Graham, who denied for years that he was gay, cannot respond to them.
Corey says he was working as an escort in Washington when a booking came in for an overnight stay at $1,500. A private driver with a metal-detecting wand picked him up at his hotel and took him to the Mayflower.
The man who opened the door, he says, was polished, avoided eye contact and spoke in a thick Southern accent that took Corey back to Alabama.
Corey says the man asked for dominant-submissive role play built around degradation, and that the more degrading it was, the more the man liked it.
When it was over, Corey says, he offered to stay and have a drink. The man declined. "That's kind of what I needed," Corey recalls him saying.
A month or two later, Corey says, he heard a voice from a television in the background and recognized the man from the hotel: Lindsey Graham.
The film shows a CNN clip of Graham speaking, dated December 2015, which fits Corey's "month or two." It then cuts to footage dated June 2015 of Graham being introduced as "the next president of the United States."
Graham was a declared candidate for the Republican presidential nomination that fall. He ended his campaign on Dec. 21, 2015.
The film also shows a phone photo of bills laid out in a row on a bed, which it presents as his payment. The photo's metadata reads Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2015, 8:41 p.m., with a location that corresponds to the Washington Plaza Hotel, where Corey says he was staying, a short ride from the Mayflower. Corey says the booking message came on Nov. 9.
The photo shows no face, nothing in it shows who paid, and it does not itself place him at the Mayflower.
Kelvin's account is the one that moves the film from scandal to something darker.
He says it was July 2001. He was 17, working as an escort, and says Graham, then a House member, contacted him ahead of time.
The film's narrator places Graham in Arizona that weekend as a guest at Sen. John McCain's cabin near Sedona for the Fourth of July.
Graham was one of McCain's closest companions. He, McCain and Joe Lieberman were known as the "three amigos," and the trio traveled the world together. Graham was also a guest at the cabin, including at a 2008 barbecue there. The film says the McCains held Fourth of July parties at the property.
Kelvin says he arrived at a house that looked staged for a shoot, and that Graham stopped when he realized how young Kelvin looked and accused him of being under 18.
He says he insisted he was 18, and that Graham then had him say his age out loud for what Graham seemed to suggest was a camera. Kelvin says he saw a red light blinking, and that Graham told him not to look at it.
He says he was paid $120, and that the encounter turned more aggressive than the role play they had agreed on.
Beyond Kelvin's own on-camera telling, the film shows nothing to support his account, including any recording. Whether one exists is a question for the film's producers.
Jesse, identified in the film by his first name only, says he met Graham in 2012 at the Beacon Hotel in Washington after a friend steered him toward escorting while he was in school.
He says Graham didn't give his name but he recognized him, and that the two had oral sex and mutual masturbation, with no penetrative sex.
Graham, he says, paid slightly over his $250 rate, and Jesse kept the change. Jesse says he told friends at the time, and that none of them was surprised.
None of this is new in kind. The rumors have followed Graham, who never married and had no children, for most of his career.
In 2009, a former South Carolina congressional candidate, Linda Ketner, said Graham and other state politicians were homosexual but closeted. She later apologized.
In December 2010, the activist blogger Mike Rogers tweeted that he had "pictures of a man who spent the night" at Graham's house, just after Graham voted against repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Rogers later said he was holding off, and the trail went cold.
That year, Graham answered the talk in a New York Times interview with a joke about a secret affair with the singer Ricky Martin. Then he said it plainly: "I ain't gay."
A long-shot primary challenger called him "ambiguously gay" at a press conference. In 2017, Mike Huckabee suggested it in an interview with Laura Ingraham.
In 2018, Rosie O'Donnell called him a "closeted idiot" on Twitter, and Chelsea Handler used National Coming Out Day to take aim at him.
At Reagan National Airport, Grahamtold TMZhe didn't care what she said. "To the extent that it matters, I'm not gay," he said.
In June 2020, the adult film performer Sean Harding tweeted that a homophobic Republican senator had hired many male escorts. He didn't name him, but"Lady G" trended, and many took it to mean Graham. Another sex worker wrote a since-removed Medium post claiming an encounter.
Graham never addressed any of it publicly.
In 2024, the Trump ally Laura Loomer wrote on X that everyone knows he is gay. In a 2025 deposition, she said Trump staffers had told her so in confidence.
After Graham's death in July, a transgender author, Jesse James Rose, posted on Instagram that Graham had once hired her for sex work. That claim was also unverified, and Graham's office did not respond to it.
Not everyone cheers on this kind of coverage. Log Cabin Republicans has opposed outing in all circumstances, and critics of Handler's tweet said it made being homosexual the punchline. Defenders of outing, like Rogers, argue a politician's privacy ends when he oppresses the group he belongs to. The debate over outing is an old one.
That is the contrast the film draws, and it turns on what Graham did in office. His record on homosexual rights stretches across more than a quarter century.
It begins in 1996, when, as a House member, he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred federal recognition of same-sex marriages. A decade later, on June 7, 2006, he voted yes on the Marriage Protection Amendment, the vote the film pairs with Corey's night in the yard. "Traditional marriage is an institution worth protecting," he said that week.
The fight over hate crime law ran alongside it. In September 2000, still in the House, Graham offered a competing motion to keep a hate crimes provision out of a defense bill. It failed, 196-227.
On June 15, 2004, he voted no on a Senate amendment extending federal hate crime law to cover sexual orientation, which passed 65-33.
On Sept. 27, 2007, Graham voted no on the cloture vote that attached the Matthew Shepard hate crimes bill to a defense bill. The measure, named for a gay college student beaten and left to die on a Wyoming fence in 1998, advanced 60-39, and Graham predicted a veto.
On Oct. 22, 2009, he was among the 29 senators who voted against the final bill, which passed 68-29. He called the provision a "power grab" that did not belong in a defense bill.
Two months later, on Dec. 18, 2010, he voted against repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," which passed 65-31. In 2013, he voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
That May, in a Senate Judiciary Committee clip the film shows, he defended people who believe in traditional marriage, saying he would not accept that they are "inferior."
The same line of argument carried into his last years in the Senate. In an August 2022 CNN interview, he said states should decide the issue of marriage and that he would oppose the Respect for Marriage Act. Asked about interracial marriage, he called the question a distraction. He voted no when the bill reached the Senate floor, which the film dates to Nov. 29, 2022.
His home state is, as the film notes, one of only two in the country without a hate crime law. The other is Wyoming, where Matthew Shepard was killed.
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