It's not a direct link. It's not as clear cut as saying "if Perez does a bad thing, then everyone watching will hate gays". And the comparisons made here with "if Nadia did a bad thing everyone would hate straights!!!" are really just another tedious example of heterosexuals thinking they are in any way relevant, comparable or marginalised, lol.
I think from Michelle's viewpoint she spends 90% of her time living, working with drag queens and overly-dramatic people, but these are (for the most part) stage characters and masks that're put on for a show. She doesn't usually deal with these sorts of people (as hysterical and melodramatic as Perez) in a 24/7 environment. So she's quite used to distinguishing the "on-stage" and "off-stage" personalities of drag queens.
Whilst, yes, we should accept that people who identify as gay have a wide variety of personalities and some of them are going to be as toxically awful as Perez's, at the same time there are those who're 100% unfamiliar with gay people. I know this to be true, I'm surrounded by tiny little white villages where everyone's happily married and the gays are these weird little foreign identities. So the whole cause she's a part of is of a relevance that's different to every community. In New Jersey (where she's from), it's more of a case of "we want marriage equality", whereas in other places it's just the right to be represented and heard. I'm sure that 99% of people on here are able to see that Perez =/= all gays. I'm not sure that a lot of others are.
I don't know. I'm conflicted about the whole thing
I can see why she's appalled and worried by the prospect of people judging a community by him, but at the same time obviously they shouldn't. It's just a question of whether they do. In my experience some do.
And obviously a lot of people are writing her off because of connected incidents with Alicia, and how she's aligned with Katie Hopkins. Believe me, I'm probably the most frustrated by the latter fact
But they're really unrelated incidents.