In the age of allowing anyone to identify as anything on the LGBT rainbow, far-left California should be the kind of place where people can freely express whatever orientation they happen to feel at the time.
But when the state is busy distributing payments based on the gender and sexual proclivity of business owners, there’s a clear motivation for people to pretend that they’re a member of the rainbow coalition if only to get a piece of that taxpayer-funded pie.
Instead of recognizing the inherent unfairness of excluding straight Californians from the process, however, lawmakers instead decided to make lying about being gay a crime.
As the Daily Caller reported, they’ll even make you prove it in some unorthodox ways:
City Journal points to Supplier Clearinghouse, a group that verifies the eligibility of minority/female/gay/veteran owned businesses for CPUC benefits.
Supplier Clearinghouse provides applicants several means of proving their gayness: a marriage license, joint living arrangement paperwork which names a same-sex partner, three reference letters from “personal contacts” who have known the applicant for over one year and can “vouch” for his gay status.
If the newspaper “explicitly” refers to your gayness, you can submit a copy of that article as proof of your homosexuality.
By far, the funniest evidence accepted by Supplier Clearinghouse is a “[p]hysician or attorney letter establishing LGBT status of owner.”
That is to say, a doctor’s note.
“Yeah, my back’s been bothering me lately. By the way, did I mention I’m a lesbian?”
There’s much to be gained by being gay, or pretending to be gay, in California. A business owner might be incentivized to go to the doctor, admit he’s been a deeply repressed bisexual all along, and profit.
Not so fast. Any person who falsely represents a straight-owned business as a gay-owned business in the procurement of utility company contracts may face a $5000 fine, imprisonment in a county jail or prison for up to a year, or both.
The issue sparked some social media chatter:
It’s not too late to get your company gay-certified, my friend
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) June 16, 2026
Like most dudes, I would have no trouble finding three friends to call me gay on official letterhead https://t.co/BwY2zdTOhJ
— Geoffrey Ingersoll (@GPIngersoll) June 16, 2026
What if I'm a man who identifies as a woman who identifies as a man? I'll change my name to another name that is spelled the same and sounds the same.
— grant hornin (@GrantHorni29864) June 17, 2026
Here’s a portion of City Journal’s report:
The scheme operates through the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates privately owned utility companies. California utilities spent more than $43 billion in 2024 on contractors—fuel suppliers, surveyors, engineers, and others—whose work helps deliver water, gas, electricity, and internet service to California’s 39 million residents.
In 1986, Governor George Deukmejian signed Assembly Bill 3678, which required certain CPUC-regulated utilities to submit annual “plans” for buying goods and services from woman- and minority-owned companies. Two years later, CPUC created its “Supplier Diversity Program,” which would enforce the law and set contracting “goals” for large utilities.
Under a series of Democratic governors, the program has expanded to include gay-owned businesses. In September 2014, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring CPUC to recognize “LGBT-owned businesses” as eligible for supplier-diversity benefits. Five years later, Governor Gavin Newsom expanded the program further, “encouraging” other companies involved in the energy sector to award contracts to gay-owned firms.
In the years that followed, CPUC faced activist pressure as it implemented the gay expansion. BuildOUT California, a since-rebranded LGBT building-industry organization, sent a letter to the commission arguing that “homophobia” existed within “the ranks of the utility companies.” The state’s legislative LGBTQ caucus suggested in a 2021 letter that even considering lower gay-procurement targets was “an insult to the LGBTQ+ community.”
By 2022, CPUC had fully implemented the expansion. In practice, this meant establishing a “goal” for utility companies with annual revenues exceeding $25 million to buy things from state-certified LGBT businesses: 0.5 percent of procurement in 2022; 1 percent in 2023; and 1.5 percent in 2024 and beyond. If “large” CPUC-regulated utilities met these “goals” in 2024, they would have sent roughly $633 million to LGBT-owned firms.
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