WASHINGTON — Conservative education activist and Project 2025 contributor Corey DeAngelis issued a statement on Tuesday, following reported allegations that he may have acted in gay porn videos under the name Seth Rose almost a decade ago.

“As an activist for parental rights and school choice, my passion is personal,” DeAngelis wrote on X. “Just like everyone else, I have made mistakes throughout my life, learned from those mistakes, used that as an opportunity to grow and tried to channel that experience into something positive. I was a victim of poor decisions and poor influences. I have turned that experience into the fuel that fires me to save young people from being put in the same position I was put in and to help parents protect their children. I will never stop fighting for what is right.”

Although DeAngelis was a rising figure in right-wing politics and a culture warrior embraced by the Heritage Foundation and similar outfits, research into his outing as a sex worker indicates that the campaign started within the anti-public school movement itself.

The DeAngelis case sheds light on another, more obscure culture war — which could be called both cold and civil — within one of the sides of the main, society-wide culture war.

On Sept. 20, far-right Texas news site Current Revolt published a gossip item as a part of its “Many People Are Saying” column stating that DeAngelis was “allegedly the star of several videos hosted on gay porn websites. The man, who looks and sounds exactly like DeAngelis, can be seen masturbating and performing other lewd acts. In one video he participates in what the video calls a ‘jerk-off race.’”

The Current Revolt item — which included graphic photos — was picked up by gay content and news blog Str8UpGayPorn, which republished the allegation, adding a pro-LGBTQ+, anti-MAGA framing to its lambasting of DeAngelis to the accusations of duplicitousness and hypocrisy from the original, right-wing source.

“Today,” Str8UpGayPorn wrote, “we have a lesser known right-wing freak being exposed for his erotic antics, and this one’s been endorsed by Donald Trump for his work to dismantle the public school system in favor of ‘school choice,’ a.k.a. for-profit education that enriches corporate billionaires while leaving students uneducated and teachers’ unions gutted. His name is Corey DeAngelis, and he’s a senior fellow at the ghoulish American Federation for Children, but in 2014, he was better known as GayHoopla’s Seth Rose, a ‘hot otter’ who appeared in multiple gay porn scenes.”

Str8UpGayPorn noted that “news of DeAngelis’ work as a gay porn star was surprisingly exposed by another psychotic right-wing group in Texas (you have to love MAGA infighting) called Current Revolt, but it’s not clear if his gay porn past will have any impact on his role as a member of the ‘anti-woke,’ far-right cabal of brain-dead dipshits.”

The gossip item was then picked up by more mainstream LGBTQ+ sources such as The Advocate and Them, which led to wider coverage by less specialized outlets.

By the end of the week, DeAngelis’ main employer, the Betsy DeVos-backed anti-public education organization American Federation for Children, placed him on leave pending an investigation and erased his name from its website. He was later reportedly fired.

A Civil War Among Texas’ Anti-Public School Activists

An in-depth survey of the situation was published on Sept. 24 by conservative education news site The 74 Million. DeAngelis had written extensively for the site — which claims to be neutral but whose funders are part of the conservative “school reform” and “school choice” movements — between 2018 and 2023, during his time as a fellow of the Hoover Institution.

The 74 Million article explained that the gay porn allegations against DeAngelis — whom they called “a school choice gadfly” — had “roots in MAGA-infighting and Texas groups that view vouchers as government encroachment.”

According to 74 Million writer Linda Jacobson, the outing of DeAngelis originated in the murky backwaters of extremely online right-wing Texas groups known to spread conspiracy theories, which are also staunchly opposed to a proposal by Gov. Greg Abbott to implement a system of school vouchers.

Jacobson explained that Current Revolt’s gossip item was preceded in July by a thread on X by conservative podcaster Sarah Fields.

“School choice isn’t merely a lucrative scam; it’s a cunning ploy to enable government oversight of all educational avenues through a web of regulations and accountability tied to public funding,” Fields wrote.

Although the main point of the thread was to express her opposition to the pro-voucher (or school choice) movement, for which DeAngelis served as main evangelist according to her, Fields added, “Side note — Corey A. DeAngelis, the face of school choice, was a model that catered to the gay community.”

Fields also “included a black-and-white photo of what appeared to be a shirtless DeAngelis in a suggestive pose,” Jacobson reported. 

Fields runs a group called the Texas Freedom Coalition, which has opposed COVID lockdowns and “views vouchers as another form of government overreach,” Jacobson reported, who added that Fields told her, “My post is what caused several people to start asking questions” about De Angelis past. The anti-voucher activist also “gave Current Revolt, a far-right site that has posted Hitler memes, credit for digging into gay porn sites to find the film and other photos.”

According to Jacobson, conservative activist Mary Lowe, who started a Moms for Liberty splinter group called Families Engaged for Effective Education, criticized Abbott for bringing “slick salesman” DeAngelis to testify “before the Texas House education committee on the topic of ‘parent empowerment’ in 2022, despite the fact that he was single with no children at the time.”

“Our moms’ intuition was like ‘There is something missing to this story,’” Lowe told Jacobson. “‘There is something not right here.’”

Libertarians Come to DeAngelis’ Defense

DeAngelis also contributed to libertarian organizations the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation.

On Tuesday, after DeAngelis’ statement claiming to be “a victim” of his own “poor decisions,” Reason magazine published an article by Robby Soave calling DeAngelis’ loss of his lucrative engagements ”classic cancel culture,” and asking for a public shaming of both LGBTQ+ activists for “falsely insinuating that school choice must be anti-gay” and conservative activists for “acting like it is.”

Acknowledging that DeAngelis is currently still a senior fellow at Reason magazine publisher the Reason Foundation, Soave confirmed that DeAngelis had been fired by the American Federation for Children.

Although DeAngelis “regularly feuds on social media with supporters of the education status quo, including Democratic politicians, media figures, and teachers union leader Randi Weingarten,” Soave wrote, the exposure of his past — as Jacobson also noted — put him “at odds with some allies who have turned on him following revelations that he previously performed in a pornographic film for gay audiences.”

For Soave, the DeAngelis case “is a classic example of cancel culture: He is being punished for a regretted incident from his distant past that has nothing to do with his current job. Conservative organizations may well have morals clauses in their contracts, and they are free to hire and fire at will. But any institution that purports to oppose cancel culture, yet refuses to work with DeAngelis on this basis, is engaged in hypocrisy.”

Free Speech Coalition (FSC)’s Director of Public Affairs Mike Stabile told XBIZ that DeAngelis “seems to be the latest casualty in a war raging on the right between establishment Republicans and more conspiracy minded far-right groups.”

The leak of his adult history from a far-right site, Stabile explained “was strategic — it forced out one of the top voices advocating for school vouchers, which some on the far right see as a government surveillance scheme. In some ways, it’s the reverse of what we saw last month with Mark Robinson in North Carolina, where more establishment voices leaked the gubernatorial candidate’s browsing history in an effort to force a more aggressive right winger out of that race.”

For Stabile, the lesson in both cases is clear: “When you ally with groups who don’t respect sexuality or privacy, you risk them eventually coming for you.”