Today’s gay push is a continuation of the 1970s and for the same reason
The leftist LGBTQ+ push began in the 1970s, took an AIDS break, and is now back — for the same reasons and with the same benefits as before.
Perhaps you read that Milo Yiannaopoulos has decided to grow up and leave his gay past behind him:
Milo Yiannopoulos, the gay man whose conservative messaging and willingness to speak the truth sparked riots on university campuses may well trigger more outrage now that he describes himself as “Ex-Gay” and “sodomy free,” and is leading a daily consecration to St. Joseph online.
Two years ago, when Church Militant’s Michael Voris famously challenged Yiannopoulos to live a chaste life, Yiannopoulos was not defensive. Instead, he acquiesced, and humbly admitted his human weakness.
“I know everything you’re saying, and I’m just not there yet. And I don’t know if I’ll get there,” Yiannopoulos told Voris at the time.
It seems that he has now arrived “there.”
While Yiannopoulos, in the interview, talks about having originally embraced the gay lifestyle to irritate his mother (and that must have been one heck of a mother-son relationship), I haven’t forgotten what he said really got him started down that road: He was molested by a priest and another man when he was only 13. Indeed, at the height of his flamboyance, Yiannopoulos said that it was a wonderful experience and that all gay men should get that start — which led to his fall from grace.
That assertion, of course, was both whistling in the wind and a cry for help. It is not a wonderful experience to be homosexually molested when you’re 12, even if it feels good physically. It messes with your brain’s pleasure center and leaves you confused about sex. It takes maturity, insight, and will to walk away from that. Good for Yiannopoulos for figuring things out.
Of course, Yiannopoulos is bucking a cultural trend. The “in” thing now is to be gay if you can’t find it within yourself to be transgender, with 1 out of every 6 Gen Z adults claiming to be LGBT+ — although I feel I’d like to know more about the poll that reached that conclusion. Still, there’s huge pressure on young people to embrace some variation of homosexuality, with girls, especially, being pushed to lesbianism and transgenderism. (The two, of course, are mutually exclusive because if girls are being told they’re boys, there’s no way they can be lesbians.)
I realized today that what we’re seeing now is a continuation of the push towards homosexuality that began in the 1970s. Because I grew up in San Francisco in the 1970s and worked there in the 1980s, I got a front-row seat to the gay lifestyle.
What I figured out during those two decades is that there are some men who, for whatever reason, are absolutely homosexual. I don’t know if they’re “born that way” or reflecting very early experiences, but in elementary school, we kids already knew which boys were going to be gay and which girls were going to be lesbian.
But I also figured out that children who are not naturally inclined to homosexuality can be pushed into being bisexual, gay, or lesbian. As Dennis Prager has always said, it’s easier with girls, but you get enough social pressure, and it works for boys too. I think Yiannopoulos, a young man molested as a teen and with mother issues, fell into that second category of gay men. Indeed, the flamboyance may have been the overkill he needed to fight against his natural heterosexuality.
For the young men in the second class — they really can go both ways — my observation was that a lot of their homosexuality was a toxic blend of narcissism, laziness, and selfishness. In San Francisco in the 1970s and early 1980s, male homosexuality was fantastic: Unlimited, no-strings sex (helped along by poppers and bathhouses); two-income, no kids lifestyles with another guy who was also “into” open relationships; no worries about pregnancy; no limits on sexual experimentation (increasingly bizarre practices were all just part of the spectrum); and no having to court women, which is always a pain when women are strident feminists.
Regarding courting women, a lot of straight young men today really hate having to deal with their female peers. They’re castigated as “incels” and some really are weirdly off the charts. However, many others just don’t know how to deal with the young women that leftist society grooms to be angry, neurotic, and hostile to men.
What stopped the gay party in the 1980s was AIDS. However, nowadays, AIDS just isn’t a thing. You can avoid it or live with it. You’re no longer going to die with it, as a generation of young men I once knew did.
With AIDS sidelined, all the things that drove homosexuality in the 1970s and early 1980s are back again. This time, though, institutional America is helping it along. For big government types, homosexuality has a lot of benefits: Despite the fashion statement of gay people having children, it’s mostly a non-child lifestyle. And again, before I go further, let me say that I know there are exceptions. I have known gay men over the decades who are passionately family-oriented, completely monogamous, and repulsed by the insane lifestyles of the radical gay crowd. Still, for leftists, a gay lifestyle is mostly the antithesis of the nuclear family and, of course, the nuclear family is a bulwark against the state.
Leftist gay men are also political powerhouses. They bring to their activism the testosterone of men living in an all-male hothouse and the cultivated emotionalism of women. Conservative gay men don’t show these traits. They’ve arrived at their politics rationally and they tend to have lifestyles that are built around things other than their sexuality: shared interests, careers, hobbies, family, etc. They are like other conservatives but for the fact that their sexual desires are homosexual, not heterosexual.
If you’re wondering why homosexuality is the vehicle for this leftist push, think about it: Other than food and drink, is there any urge stronger than the sex drive? There is no easier way to attract young people to the cause than to get them drunk on what seems like no-strings, user-friendly sex of all. It’s crack cocaine without the side effects and the illegality. Bring kids into the gay lifestyle — as happened with Milo — and they’re yours, although Milo went off the tracks by being conservative. No wonder every TV show, every movie, every everything has gay characters, far in excess of their actual representation in society. They’re cool, funny, hip, and free. Again, they’re crack cocaine.
I’m not a homophobe and never have been. That is, I don’t care with whom my friends sleep as long as, in other ways, they have traits I like in people: interesting minds, good senses of humor, loyalty, patriotism, a commitment to the nuclear family structure even if they don’t embrace it themselves, racial color-blindness, etc. However, I dislike leftist gay men because too many of them are everything I dislike about the left, only with the added high of emotions on testosterone.
But to my original point, make no mistake: This is not a new trend. It’s a continuation of yet another long leftist march through institutions, the institution, in this case, being the nuclear family with its subset of stable sexual mores. And the push for homosexuality is done in service to allying young people with leftism. Now that Milo has gone back to heterosexuality, he is, therefore, more dangerous than he ever was before.
P.S. The one thing I absolutely and unreservedly despise about the whole gay movement is that it took the rainbow away from society at large. Now rainbows mean “gay” instead of being a universal symbol of hope and beauty. That’s just so wrong.
Image by Karl Bewick on Unsplash (cropped)