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Through a comparison of two qualitative studies, this article compares the ways in which elected officials who have made their homosexuality public and leaders of Muslim organisations grapple with the republican doxa. Such a doxa strongly constrains the public speech of minority spokespersons by imposing a universalist framework and a strict separation between public and private life. Based on the analysis of semi-structured interviews, we distinguish three modalities of the “minority republicanism” among our respondents. First, the discursive performance of a republican loyalty through a reiterated opposition between universalism and communalism. Second, the de-specification of claims touching upon their minority group. Third, the fashioning of a self-ethic made of modesty and discretion. These common strategies are distributed differently in the two case studies, due to the growing suspicions of weak republican allegiance directed at Muslim populations. This relative asymmetry paves the way for a broader reflection on the possible conditions for comparing various processes of othering and their effects on minority public expression.