A far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ activist has been fired from the Kennedy Center after his past history of homophobia and racism was revealed.
Floyd Brown served as a Vice President of Development at the Kennedy Center for just two weeks before he was terminated.
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He shared news of his hiring two weeks ago in a post to LinkedIn; as of Thursday, his page still listed him as “VP Development, The Kennedy Center.”
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His firing followed a CNN investigation documenting Brown’s racist and homophobic statements, including calling homosexuality “a punishment” upon America and condemning the legality of gay sex.
Brown has also falsely claimed that former President Barack Obama is a Muslim and promoted conspiracy theories about him having a forged birth certificate, a theory the current president has also promoted.
Who hired Brown is unclear.
Ric Grenell, the gay director of the Kennedy Center, who was installed in his post after Trump fired the center’s top leadership, claims he had not met with Brown, did not know him, and was not involved in his hiring, according to Kennedy Center sources.
On Thursday morning, Brown posted a lengthy response to his dismissal, targeting Grenell as responsible.
“I had met @RichardGrenell during my time as a political organizer in Arizona. I asked for an explanation of my dismissal, and I asked to speak to @RichardGrenell. Both of those requests have been ignored,” he wrote.
“The only explanation is the one given to me at the time of my firing. ‘Floyd, you must recant your belief in traditional marriage and your past statements on the topic, or you will be fired.’ Needless to say, I refused to recant and was shown the door. My beliefs are much more common to Biblical Christianity,” he wrote.
“My only conclusion is @RichardGrenell was intimidated by a @CNN story, which hasn’t been aired or published, so he preemptively fired me for my Christian beliefs on marriage,” he concluded.
CNN has since published the story.
I was fired yesterday by @RichardGrenell from the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. One month ago, I was recruited to join the Kennedy Center as a Vice President. My firing came approximately two hours after @CNN sent an email asking me to comment on my past…
— Floyd Brown (@floydbrown) May 29, 2025
Brown is a long-time political consultant and helped found Citizens United, the conservative non-profit plaintiff in the landmark 2010 Supreme Court decision that granted corporations and unions a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. He was also behind the infamous and racially charged Willie Horton ad deployed by George H. W. Bush in the 1988 presidential campaign.
At the Kennedy Center, Brown reported to Lisa Dale, the Development Department’s senior vice president. Both Dale and Brown were advisors to former Arizona Republican candidate Kari Lake, a notorious anti-LGBTQ+ election denier.
In his role as a far-right commentator, Brown once attacked CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) for “an acceptance of the open promotion of the gay lifestyle inside the tent of conservatism.” He’s called same-sex marriage both “godless” and a “hoax,” and mocked LGBTQ+ people with cartoons that attacked the “queer military.”
On his website “exposeobama.com,” Brown attacked the then-presidential candidate in 2008 for saying homosexuality was not a choice and not believing that homosexuality was “immoral.”
In 2023, the former Capitol Hill staffer spoke at a Christian event where he referenced the “dirty little secret” that gay staffers work for Republican lawmakers.
“They literally worked for the member 24/7 and then went out to Adams Morgan and had their gay sex, and then came back to work the next day,” said Brown.
In his farewell post after being fired, Brown said, “The amazing beauty of the MAGA movement is we have people of many different beliefs inside our tent. We are all working together in unity to Make America Great Again.”
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