Tucker Carlson condemned by LGBTQ+ activists after yearbook page goes viral

An unearthed page from Tucker Carlson’s 1991 Trinity College yearbook went viral this week, apparently linking the controversial Fox News host to an assassin who killed Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected politician.

The yearbook entry tied Carlson to the Dan White Society, potentially named for the San Francisco supervisor who fatally shot Milk as well as the city’s mayor, George Moscone, in 1978.

“I’m rarely at a loss for words, but this is truly despicable and well beyond the garden variety homophobic crap we’ve come to expect from this guy,” said the LGBTQ+ activist Cleve Jones, whom Milk mentored.

“I just can’t wrap my mind around the depth of his depravity.”

Political commentator Travis Akers posted the yearbook reference to social media on Wednesday, a day after Carlson attacked the Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, whom he called a “mentally unbalanced middle-aged man”.

Carlson accused Wemple of pulling out his “dusty college yearbook” to see if he’d “done anything naughty at the age of 19”.

“Perhaps this is the story that @TuckerCarlson was trying to get ahead of,” Akers tweeted.

A representative for Connecticut’s Trinity College told TheWrap that “the so-called ‘society’ didn’t seem to exist at the school”.

“How many other hate groups is Tucker Carlson a member of?” tweeted the Lincoln Project, a Never Trump organization.

Carlson’s yearbook entry also referenced the Jesse Helms Foundation, probably alluding to a former North Carolina senator who strongly opposed funding Aids research and treatment because he said the disease was caused by “unnatural” and “disgusting” behavior, according to the New York Times.

“Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,” Helms once said. “And nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.”

Ray Mabus, the former secretary of the US navy, blasted Carlson for his apparent dig at Milk, a former navy diver.

“I named a ship after #HarveyMilk bec/ he represented our values & he served,” Mabus tweeted. “Still trying to learn which branch #TuckerCarlson served in”.

The comedian Billy Eichner also weighed in, questioning whether “it’s too easy to think maybe the vast majority of these guys are deeply self hating closeted gays”.

“Doesn’t matter if they are anyway – not an excuse AT ALL – but one does wonder! Also fuck them all forever, closeted or not,” he tweeted.

Related: Lachlan Murdoch backs Tucker Carlson in ‘white replacement’ furore

Carlson has been charged with homophobia many times before, including for actions that have been interpreted by advocates as an anti-gay hate crime. The television host said that while in high school, a man “bothered” him in a bathroom.

“I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the, you know, and grabbed him, and ... hit him against the stall with his head, actually,” he said. “And then the cops came and arrested him.”

He later clarified that the man “physically grabbed” him.

“I wasn’t angry with the man because he was gay,” Carlson said. “I was angry because he assaulted me.”