Wintrich, like me, delights in causing outrage. But you don’t really have to try very hard. Polite, respectable gay conservatives get exactly the same treatment from the Left. When mild-mannered entrepreneur Peter Thiel revealed his support for Donald Trump, gay website The Advocate published an article arguing that he could no longer consider himself a part of the gay community.139 The message from this, and from Chadwick Moore’s experience, is clear: toe the party line, or be thrown out of the clubhouse.
In April 2013, I appeared on an edition of the British panel show 10 O’clock Live to take part in a debate. The topic was gay marriage, a cause to which I was then opposed. My opposite number was Boy George, and it was a rare occasion in which I was not the most flamboyantly dressed person on set.
My mere opposition to gay marriage was enough to baffle the audience. In 2013, gay marriage had become a kind of litmus test of social acceptability. If you were for it, you were a normal human being. If you were against it, you were a bigoted, malicious relic of the past—something to be dumped in the trash-heap of history.
I was fashionably dressed, and attractive, and charming, so they didn’t really know what to make of me. Merely being introduced on the show as a gay Catholic opposed to same-sex marriage was all that was needed to baffle my fellow panelists. Before the show was over, I was called a “homophobic gay man” and accused of “self-loathing” for my opposition on cultural grounds to gay marriage.
I pointed out that gay marriage reinforced the idea that being gay is a normal or acceptable lifestyle choice, which it isn’t—and shouldn’t be. The very term “mainstream gay” is at odds with everything homosexuals have always represented, but nonetheless we are forced to use it because gays have become a monolithic political bloc. All gay people are expected to believe the same stuff.
Mainstream gays, many of whom are happy to cast scorn on the lives of, say, conservative Midwestern families or southern evangelical Christians, simply can’t allow the possibility that someone might cast scorn on their lives. Take for example the popular drag queen Bianca del Rio, whose famous slogan is, “Not Today Satan!” When Candace Cameron, aka D.J. Tanner, a famously proud Christian, wore a shirt with Bianca’s slogan on it, Bianca called her a “homophobic Republican.” Candace responded, “Loving Jesus doesn’t mean I hate gay people,” but the damage was done. To Bianca’s nearly one million Instagram followers, D.J. Tanner now hates fags.
WHERE’S THE DANGER?
When Daily Stormer called me a “degenerate homosexual,” they meant it as an insult. But I take it as a compliment: I became a homo precisely because it is transgressive. And I want homosexuality to continue being transgressive, and even degenerate.
One of the most alarming things I’ve witnessed over the past decade is how safe the gay community has become. As the cause of gay liberation advanced, our community’s reputation went from feared purveyors of moral corruption to cuddly, married, middle-class suburbanites with neat haircuts. In short, we have stopped being dangerous. It almost makes me miss the time when we had to stay in the closet.
The gay establishment is rightly horrified by that suggestion, because it goes against everything they’ve been working to achieve since the 1990s. But before then, gay men delighted in being transgressive. It was a part of our identity.
Consider gay icons of the past two centuries. Oscar Wilde relished appalling the stuffy sensibilities of Victorian society. When he went to America, a prominent member of the clergy complained that someone who had engaged in such “offences against common dignity” was being received so warmly by high society.140 Wilde’s famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was chastised by one London newspaper as being “unclean, poisonous, and heavy with the odors of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” I live to get a review like that.
Then there was Quentin Crisp, someone whose lifetime saw the rapid acceleration of gay rights. The British writer and raconteur was even more shocking than Wilde. Not only did he find enjoyment in taking a bazooka to society’s sacred cows (he once described Princess Diana, Britain’s most beloved public figure, as “trash”), he also loved to needle the gay rights movement. He infuriated campaigners with his willingness to question his own gay instincts and lifestyle, once even stating that gayness was something that ought to be avoided if possible.141 He was a mischievous, rebellious hero.
Crisp was someone who would tolerate no limits on his independence. In the first half of his life, he plainly ignored society’s rules against his gay lifestyle. And in the second, he flouted the gay community’s expectations of him as well.
Writing in 1990, the bisexual belletrist Florence King bemoaned how the “exclusivity of Lesbianism” she had known in the 1950s had vanished, done in by “jargon-spewing socialists” and Earth Mothers “baying at the moon.” In today’s “climate of irrational humanitarianism and prime-time self pity,” the homosexuality inclined of both sexes have traded in their natural elitism for victimhood status.142
Just think of where gay people have lived and hung out in the past century. The seediest, most degenerate parts of town—think Soho in London or Times Square in New York—were also the gay parts of town. We were the outcasts, the corruptors, the devils poisoning society and corrupting its morals. We were on the very edge of culture, pushing its boundaries. And we were doing it just by being ourselves.
It’s practically impossible for gays to transgress today. Hanging out in the Village, West Hollywood or Soho is hardly shocking or rebellious. Hipsters and trend-followers crowd the streets, desperately clinging to the fading aura of forbidden cool rapidly melting away. Time Square is now a Disney store tourist trap. And just think of the horror of San Francisco! The unofficial capital of camp that once hated “The Man” has become “The Man” incarnate. Or as they’ll call it, “The Gender Non-Conforming Individual.” Is there a city in America with a more moribund culture than San Francisco?
I’m ceaselessly amazed by the gay community’s myopic eagerness to sacrifice everything that has made our lifestyle unique, exciting, and dangerous, in exchange for heteronormative domesticity.
Camille Paglia—the greatest feminist critic of all time—says it so eloquently:
Homosexuality is not normal. On the contrary it is a challenge to the norm… Nature exists, whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction. Penis fits vagina; no fancy linguistics game-playing can change that biologic fact.
…Gay activism has been naive in its belligerent confidence that “homophobia” will eventually disappear with proper “education” of the benighted. Reeducation of fractious young boys on the scale required would mean fascist obliteration of all individual freedoms. Furthermore, no truly masculine father would ever welcome a feminine or artistic son at the start, since the son’s lack of virility not only threatens but liquidates that father’s identity, dissolving husband into wife. Later there may be public rituals of acceptance, but the damage will already have been done. Gay men are aliens, cursed and gifted, the shamans of our time.143