Anthony Nicodemo is no stranger to hate.

When the high school basketball coach and social studies teacher came out in a groundbreaking 2013 interview, the threats got so bad that the school hired undercover cops to attend his games.

But the influx of hate didn’t stop his advocacy. It didn’t stop him from becoming a regular contributor to Outsports or from posting videos celebrating Pride and inclusion. Hate didn’t stop him from speaking out as the MAGA movement gained traction and began to come for queer educators, and it didn’t stop him from loudly supporting trans kids.

“I know how to handle it,” he told LGBTQ Nation. “I don’t get rattled.”

But for the first time, a few weeks ago, he did.  

A pair of right-wing influencers, Corey DeAngelis and Chaya Raichik (who goes by Libs of TikTok on social media), reposted one of Nicodemo’s videos in which he proudly hangs a sign in his classroom that declares, “Fascists Fear Teachers.”

And for the first time in over a decade of being out, Nicodemo went private on social media.

“This one got so nutty,” he said, referencing the tidal wave of slurs and hostility the posts provoked. “When the Libs of TikTok people start, they’re actually dangerous.” The only thing that kept the backlash at all tempered, he said, was that Raichik tagged his district rather than his personal profiles.

The right-wing fury over gay educators today feels different than it used to, Nicodemo said, so much so that, if he were still closeted, he’s not sure he would even come out in this climate.

“I would be worried of the blowback in some of the communities by the one or two parents that would create madness,” he said. While of course that madness existed a decade ago, he said people today feel “more emboldened… to attack.”

He recalled the horrendous voicemails left for his superintendent after DeAngelis posted the contact information and wondered what it takes for someone to call and complain about a teacher they had never met at a school they had no connection to.

“I don’t know if there’s anything that would prompt me to do that,” he said.

But after the haters moved on to something else, as they always do, he was able to make his accounts public again and resume his work as a fierce defender for inclusion.

“I can take the hits, I’m okay,” he said. “But I’m saddened, and I’m fearful for my people in our community who can’t, who don’t have the support of an administration or don’t have the ability to handle these kinds of attacks… Which is what these people ultimately want. They want us to be quiet, and they want to make us disappear.”

The perfect poster

“This is the perfect poster for a social studies classroom,” Nicodemo excitedly says in the video that started it all. He explains that the words are a reference to gay American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten’s new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, and he explains that fascists fear free thought and critical thinking skills.

He does not once mention today’s Republican Party or the current president. Instead, he discusses how the phrase applies to so much of the history he covers in class.

“Throughout history, the first group of people that fascists have attacked are educators,” he says. “People like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, some of the worst people in world history were fascists, and they attacked us educators first.”

He also mentioned that he has many other signs in the room, including the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

A few weeks after Nicodemo posted the video, DeAngelis found it. The influencer zeroed in on the Progress Pride flag Nicodemo wore around his neck, though he called it a “trans flag.”

In follow-up posts, he shared screenshots of the coach’s social media handles, his school’s athletic page, and the contact information for his principal and superintendent.

Once Nicodemo locked his accounts, DeAngelis posted a link to the coach’s Facebook cover photo and let followers know it was still open for comments. Sure enough, comments on the photo of Nicodemo and his team celebrating a victory call the coach “evil,” “creep,” “jerk,” and “pedo groomer.”

DeAngelis’ treatment of Nicodemo seems to have followed a template. DeAngelis posts to X dozens of times per day, reposting videos and comments from educators with whom he disagrees. Meanwhile, he actively encourages followers to harass them.

“He tweets, and then every person that retweets him, he retweets,” Nicodemo explained. “So he basically figures out how to control the algorithm.”

The hypocrisy at the heart of it all

Nicodemo finds DeAngelis’ behavior especially disheartening, considering that last year, he admitted to appearing in gay adult videos.

DeAngelis claimed the videos’ producers were “deceptive” and “lured” him into performing under the guise of making fitness videos. He was fired from his senior fellowship at the American Federation for Children (AFC), an anti-LGBTQ+ “school choice” organization, and has since had to crawl his way back into the good graces of right-wing media.

DeAngelis is a huge champion of school choice, which calls for redirecting taxpayer money to fund private for-profit schools, a major goal of anti-LGBTQ+ Christian conservatives. Such schools can reject students for any reason and operate largely without government oversight that would ensure their adherence to federal nondiscrimination laws. He also helped draft the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

DeAngelis told Fox News that public schools are “focusing more on the LGBTs than the ABCs,” a statement echoing a right-wing claim that accepting LGBTQ+ students and opposing anti-LGBTQ+ bullying in schools degrades the quality of public education. 

In the past, he alluded to the adult videos, calling himself “a victim of poor decisions and poor influences” and said he now uses the experience as “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.”

But Nicodemo sees it as good old-fashioned hypocrisy.

“He goes after gay teachers all day and all night… I don’t think there’s a bigger hypocrisy than that.”

“He’s trying to reassert himself into his movement and hoping, I think, that people forget the fact” that he did those videos. “So he crucifies gay teachers.”

The lack of integrity, he said, is what gets him the most. “People who are dabbling in the LGBTQ+ community when it’s convenient for them financially, then coming out against LGBTQ educators… It drives me up the wall a little bit. These people need to be held accountable for this.”

Stick to the facts

It’s a complex time to be a history teacher, when truth itself has been put on trial, and one never knows who might be recording or which parents’ wrath they might incur just for doing their job.

But Nicodemo believes there’s a way forward. “When you teach the truth, you’re going to be okay,” he said. 

He added that teachers in blue states or with supportive administrations that are not puppets of folks from the likes of Moms for Liberty need to speak up for the teachers who can’t. It’s one of the main reasons he keeps posting.

“There’s so much misinformation out there. I try to stick to the facts.”

Doing so, he said, is one antidote to the many lies out there that mislead voters. “You get into this almost deep fake of what reality is, and I think we have to have people on the other side, our community specifically, that are willing to push back and share our side of the way things are.”

Despite the risks, he said it’s all worth it.

“We need people who are willing to fight because they want us to be silent and they want us to not be here.”

If he goes away, then DeAngelis wins. All DeAngelis wanted, Nicodemo said, was for him to get fired or “shut up” and lose his platform.

But Nicodemo only has one thing to say to that: “It didn’t work.”