Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence roasted Mike Pence at the GLAAD Media Awards, joking that the former US vice president was secretly gay and had gone through conversion therapy.
During the LGBTQ+ organisation’s 35th annual media awards on Saturday (11 May), which was disrupted by a pro-Palestine protest, Lawrence took to the stage to tear into Pence’s alleged support for conversion therapy.
Joking that she had once fallen in love with a gay man and tried to “convert” him, before realising that “conversion therapy doesn’t work”, Lawrence went on to target Pence, quipping that he must be secretly gay.
“Did you hear me, Mike Pence?” Lawrence said. “I said: ‘Conversion therapy is not real’, even though you think it worked on you.”
While Pence has denied supporting the practice – which purports to change a person’s sexuality or gender identity – opponents, highlighting his well-publicised broadly anti-LGBTQ+ views, have claimed the former presidential candidate backs the idea.
Opponents claim Mike Pence (R), pictured with Donald Trump, supports conversion therapy. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
X-Men star Lawrence has previously been vocal in her support for the LGBTQ+ community, writing a column after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, telling queer people to “be loud” and “let this enrage you”.
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She told Vogue in 2022 that her views had caused issues within her own family, but that “you have to be political” in America.
“I worked hard in the [past] five years to forgive my dad and my family and try to understand. The information they are getting is different, their life is different,” she said.
“I’ve tried to get over it and I really can’t. I can’t. I’m sorry I’m just unleashing, but I can’t f**k with people who aren’t political any more. You live in the United States of America, you have to be political. It’s too dire. Politics [is] killing people.”
She went on to describe Trump as a “dangerous, dangerous jar of mayonnaise”, as well as condemning the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade and gut abortion rights in the US.
