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| Al-Sharq, Qatar, May 21, 2022 |
“We welcome everybody, but we also
expect and want people to respect our culture”.
~ Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, 2022
~ Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, 2022
The millions who ceased to be 'Je suis Charlie' within about seventy-two hours are the millions who know exactly what the penalty for not 'respecting our culture' is, and Salman Rushdie certainly could have clued them up if they didn't. They'd also be the millions who pay lip service to the struggle of Iranian women, while refusing to do what they ask: show solidarity by shunning the hijab. Such realities of course apparently play no part in determining how the international governing body of football (soccer) FIFA sets its moral compass: in 2010 the scandal-ridden organization inexplicably awarded 2022 World Cup hosting rights to Qatar. Its appalling human rights record - including but not restricted to LGBTQ - was matched by its logistical unpreparedness. But when it comes to homophobic complicity, it's two consecutive strikes against FIFA: Russia was awarded the 2018 World Cup. The million who flock to Qatar however won't even be giving a damn about homophobia. But for the gays, the homos, the switch-hitters...the World Cup may very well be the time we take stock of ourselves and look realistically at what 'our community' really means in the big wide world, and what we need to do, and be, going forward.
Qatar's welcome mat can't even be taken on face value since Qatari media has been ramping up its anti-LGBT rhetoric all year, and menacingly doubling down its opposition to accepting anything like what a rainbow flag demands. Nice words are meaningless when very ugly laws are the law. The claims of Dr Nasser Mohamed aren't to be taken lightly. As is entirely predictable, the furthest radical extreme of 'Western influence' is deemed to be homosexual values according to many in the Gulf states, who openly mock U.S. President Joe Biden's alliance with the LGBTIQ+ political brand. But business-as-usual is never quite what it seems in and across the Arab world, and beyond. At least one kingdom state is open to decriminalizing homosexuality, and the stop-start progress of Abraham Accords may very well soften apparently immutable stances. A window that's cracked open is a window which can open further.
LGBTIQ vs The Male Homosexual...And Female Women Too
All of this of course is but a backdrop to the very real existential crisis facing LGBTQ itself. Anti-transgender rumblings for a few years in the United Kingdom came to a head in 2022, with 'Harry Potter' author J.K. Rowling facing furious backlash for simply making a reasonable case for innate sex and innate sexuality to not be erased by either transgenderism or its accompanying ideology. Her position is solid enough to pass the exacting scrutiny of liberationist Second Wave feminism but clashes with Third Wave feminists who insist that feminism include transwomen. [1]
The firestorm which Rowling lit caused both 'leftie' female women and sex-positive male gay men to review what's going on with the LGBTQ+ brand, as peddled by our organizations. In the activist lull which followed same-sex marriage achievements the broad LGBTQ 'community' clearly appeared to have morphed quickly into something else. And that 'something else' wasn't representational of progress and empowerment - it was a Special Victims Unit which had apparently regressed to little more than a plea for tolerance, recollecting Magnus Hirschfeld from a century previous and the trauma of Ed Wood's dilemma & his angora sweater. We became a thing - 'a member of the LGBTQ+ community' - with our sex and sexuality significantly diminished both within and without said community.
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| A Miss to build a dream on |
When it comes to our organizations, seasoned activists know only too
well the difficulties faced in keeping the bastards honest. While
they gladly take credit for the results of direct actions, they're
very much closed shops and most adept at pulling the wagons around when
their business models and actual missions are questioned.
The gay press worldwide stay far away from anything like unbiased journalism - it's heavy hitting is restricted to defending LGBTQ orthodoxy as determined by advertisers. Self-perpetuation is fundamentally important to the collective: it's very much about jobs
for the boys and jobs for the girls. And they're very often mediocre
performers who are there by the grace and goodwill of lesbians and gay
men. As those organizations grow their business model becomes more
focused on bringing in the bucks for 'campaigns' ahead of providing
services to individuals beyond hotlines. And when rats are smelled the
very best idea is to follow the money while wondering how much of it's
spent identifying what's most needed by men and women who have sex with
each other, and proactively setting goals and objectives which are
demonstrably worthwhile. The dollars which surge into and around Pride celebrations are just as worthy of following as are the dollars attached to Qatar's World Cup which is shaping up as the anti-Pride parade of the decade.
Slogans like "Words Hurt!" beg for forensic language scrutiny, and more. Putting aside the obvious alarm bell of experienced hurt meaning victory for a bully, the self-respecting homosexual probably questions the true intent and purpose of the slogan. On the one hand words do indeed hurt, and Didier Eribon [2] makes a damned good case for language-induced trauma setting the stage for the self-doubt which plagues the lives of so many gay men, and experienced as under-achievements across most aspects of his life. On the other hand, while LGBT organizations bang the mental health drum loudly to solicit funding, it's becoming apparent that the specific mental health needs of gay men aren't being addressed appropriately, if at all.
Slogans are best paired with visuals, and the loudest drum LGBTQ bangs is the inclusivity drum. And it's a lucrative one to bang. Taking a cue from The United Colors of Benetton marketing campaigns, the original all-inclusive rainbow flag was nevertheless deemed to be not inclusive enough. Astute People of Color rightly deem the Progress iteration to be more segregationist than anything else but hey when LGBTQ is including you for the purposes of optics you don't get a vote. Your colors might just be there to lend cred for others demanding more visibility.
'Others demanding more visibility' are the many Lettered Others who have no legitimate history with matters of sexual liberation, or sex and sexuality for that matter. Looking at 'T' & 'A', we see rainbowed people from 'T' (for trans-) primarily concerned with matters of weaponizing self-identification, through to 'A' for asexuals ("aces"), primarily concerned with no sex at all. While transgenderism itself is the product of bad academia in opposition to Critical Thinking, its ideological impact is cutting across our institutions. It's in concert with popular thinking which values invented truth ahead of Truth which is apprehended by disciplined scholarship and rigorous scrutiny of all which is brought to bear.
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| Pride! Progress! Oops! |
The cunning transvestite takes his cues from Rachel Dolezal [3], whose progress via blackface was driven by academic self-identification ideology. And so it is in varying degrees for trannys, she-males, sexchanges, transexuals, troons etc who've ridden in on the horse of trangenderism, brandishing sabres of transphobic accusation. While British gay men and female women are well under way with peeling the 'T' off LGBTQ at a local community level, across the pond Joe Biden got a rude awakening mid-November when
a federal court rejected the Biden administration's attempt to redefine 'sex' in
federal law, ruling that "Title IX’s protections center on differences
between the two biological sexes."
Without a doubt the LGBTQ+ brand will survive as long as it's both lucrative and serves political expediency of the virtue-signalling kind. While constituencies rush through laws promoting self-ID and transgender ideology won't be purged from academia any time soon, LGBTQ is likely to suffer a severe bruising as the only true allies of gay men - female women - flex their muscles in the many ways they can, and will.
The show's just getting started.
Oh, The Politics Of It All...
One needn't be a Marxist of any iteration to best examine systems and come up with analysis in times when systemic analysis is dumbed down to the point that class barely rates a mention. The OECD dislikes chatter about Advanced Capitalism and prefers to weaponize terms like 'Socialism' as long as the concept is as bastardized as it's misunderstood. Thinking homosexuals often find themselves politically homeless in terms of Left and Right especially if they've questioned exactly what LGBT is all about politically...in terms of Left and Right, at least.
But LGBTQ certainly has a political home when relevant class analysis comes calling. David North's defining of the 'pseudo-left' [4] most certainly nails the collective to a modern petty bourgeois cross.
- The pseudo-left is anti-Marxist. It rejects historical materialism, embracing instead various forms of subjective idealism and philosophical irrationalism associated with existentialism, the Frankfurt School and contemporary postmodernism.
- The pseudo-left is anti-socialist, opposes class struggle, and denies the central role of the working class and the necessity of revolution in the progressive transformation of society. It counterposes supra-class populism to the independent political organization and mass mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system. The economic program of the pseudo-left is, in its essentials, pro-capitalist and nationalistic.
- The pseudo-left promotes “identity politics,” fixating on issues related to nationality, ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality in order to acquire greater influence in corporations, the colleges and universities, the higher-paying professions, the trade unions and in government and state institutions, to effect a more favorable distribution of wealth among the richest 10 percent of the population. The pseudo-left seeks greater access to, rather than the destruction of, social privilege.
- In the imperialist centers of North America, Western Europe and Australasia, the pseudo-left is generally pro-imperialist, and utilizes the slogans of “human rights” to legitimize, and even directly support, neo-colonialist military operations.
Within that paradigm, the Post-AIDS political gay himself tends to be a fairly fluffy piece of work. Absolutely defined by an academia polluted by Foucault and devoid of respect for Critical Thinking skills and doggedly declining knowledge of his history, his always-relativist approach to progressing himself (and 'his own kind') hasn't yielded a lot of actual progress in three decades. From the understandings / misunderstandings of Sartre to Madonna via Foucault one could expect a few dynamic reinventions, as opposed to fizzlers of the shooting oneself in the foot kind. When it comes to shooting oneself in the foot, gay men who hide behind the skirts of trans activists in 'solidarity' may very well be committing firearms offenses of the worst kind. If social media is anything to go by, trans activists clearly have male gay men in their cross-hairs, and are maliciously doing psychological warfare on our innate sexuality.
A characteristic of the Post-AIDS political gay is to respond from a distinctly non-empowered bunker mentality to challenges, with a backlash often relying on that old pseudo-left standby: accusations of being in bed with the 'far-Right' and invocations of Nazis under the bed. Reasonably, it doesn't take a lot of forensic work to identify who and what he - on behalf of LGBTQ+ - is in bed with politically. He's averse to taking a good hard look at all so-called allies who've infiltrated the movement: an apparently diverse mob comprised of neo-socialists, Palestine-freers, Antifa and the remnants of the Occupy movement are the tail which intends wagging the dog. The sexual liberation of the homosexual male is destined to suffer, not thrive, at the hands of new internationalism. We'll need to be the aggressive gatekeepers of our own homo- and bi-sexuality for what it is.
Pride Without Progress
In failing to effectively combat homophobia as perceived on the critical real-world battlefields where homophobia is best defended and perpetuated (like men's sports) then most certainly the LGBT collective has lost its way, and reasonable people reasonably ask what the hell is their purpose. Does LGBTQ actually foster the perception that gay men in male sports are unwelcome victims? Quaint and hokey P.R.-curated personal 'coming out' tales from grown men are rarely the dynamic stuff of grown men asserting their sexuality as alpha-males...the role models who are desperately needed since homophobia itself is housed in all matters to do with male sex and male sexuality. Contrasted with the footballer star-power of LGBTQ 'ally' David Beckham currently pimping Qatari tourism for a fortune, media stories of men's men of lesser status coming out with a dash of victimhood seem a bit suspect.The LGBTQ collective long ago began white-anting principles of sexual liberation in favor of what favors it: abstract identity over objective sex and objective sexuality [5]. Men who have sex with other men stand to be the biggest losers because the reality of lethal homophobia is that it impacts more on males than anybody else. Movements change in a strictly temporal context, and across its century-long history the movement generally known as Gay Liberation has waxed and waned. The stale and untrue belief that 'alphabet people' have the very best interests of homos at heart is becoming hard evidence of the need for a hard reset, of the liberationist kind. We look at a society saturated in LGBTQ orthodoxy, yet a society unable or unwilling to come up with anything more than a tepid response to FIFA or Qatar.
The reductive homogenization of the male homosexual as a 'member of the LGBT community' is as dangerous as it's demeaning. We blinked, and society blindsided us in the name of including us on their no-dissenters-tolerated feel-good mission which is as anti-male as it's anti-sexual. We're essentially tied by the balls to Western ideological ideas of human rights, while the West itself appears to be on the skids globally. And Qatar 2022 is the ideal wake-up call for male men to critically examine the anti-male and anti-sexual aspects of LGBTQ as a causative flaw in the movement's abject failure to advance globally.
Liberation Psychology vs Ideological Universality
Old habits die hard. Western chauvinism towards modern Middle East and North African Islamist men is underpinned by what conceals itself nowadays: with a few tweaks, contempt for 'the Arab' determined by early 20th Century European sexual neuroses becomes a contemporary need to have him conform to prescribed sexual mores of the West (as signified by the excesses of eroticism as public spectacle). A determination to 'civilize' by way of a Pride parade (that) what's of true conservatism only demonstrates complete disrespect and lack of understanding of what male sexuality is, and how it's experienced in any given time and place. Western conservatism may indeed have betrayed itself and become something else decades ago, but it would be erroneous to assume that that the modest and private sexuality of the Arab male is up for debate or reinvention in the name of modernity in wolf's clothing.
From Western Sahara to Iran, fifty years of taught Islamist homophobia is certainly evident. In a relatively short time-frame it's erased much of North Africa's traditions of private male sexuality which never conformed to European homophobic imperatives. The innate and historic homosociality of 'The Arab' is still enough to trigger discomfort in the sexually neurotic Westerner, homosexual or otherwise.
The vanity of LGBTQ+ can never escape its foundational sexual neuroses - it's after all just a series of reactionary responses to American suburban middle-class neurosis. Its pretenses to sexual liberation for the Arab male aren't quite as bravely altruistic as it would have you believe, or ever likely to meet with any success when grafted onto old European sex-driven prejudices toward said males. As LGBTQ becomes more obviously anti-male in its gender-obsessed rhetoric, it will will lose, not gain, traction with 'The Arab'. He'll see that none of it is based in personal or cultural respect and demonstrated trustworthiness. When cultural respect acknowledges the difference between life-affirming conservatism and the brutality of its modern radical extremist cousin, the imposition of other sociopolitical ideology is doomed to failure. As the 21st Century ascendancy of the Arab male is assured, Westerners may be in for the rudest of awakenings when LGBTQ in both form and ideology is dismissed as cultism at best, and Western imperialism at worst.
With that in mind, I'm refreshed and not depressed that the planets are lining up as they should. My brothers doing it tough in Qatar aren't 'Arab gays' - they're my brothers. Qatar reminds me of that. Islamism reminds me. The World Cup reminds me. Free, fit and attractive men playing football reminds me about political footballs. The World Cup will come and go and David Beckham will continue to pimp homophobic Qatar as a place to go, with no impunity.
So all in all it's a good time for homos to review the situation, as they say. It's a good time to think holistically. It's a good time to think globally. From there we might think decisively about how best to prevail in a world which doesn't even promise survival. The great ideas after all have their genesis in the imagination, and the great battles are won with purposed strategies.
If everybody gets to 'transition' then gay males get to transition into men who set the course of history, as opposed to being dedicated followers of fashion who are told what to be, and how to be it. Perhaps a weary world is waiting to make way way for us rather than opposing us.
[1] J.K. Rowling's apparently new 'radical feminism' is no such thing. Germaine Greer - arguably one of the finest incisive thinkers of the Twentieth Century - faced twenty-five years of academic vilification for her well-reasoned opposition to male-to-female transgenderism. So-called radical feminists who foresaw recent reversals of women's rights have been fairly reminding gay men for years that their alliance is required - citing the extraordinary contributions of female women to the lives of gay men during the AIDS crisis.
[2] Didier Eribon: Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (1999)
[3] Dolezal's most recent hustle is an OnlyFans account https://nypost.com/2021/08/19/rachel-dolezal-launches-onlyfans-for-foot-pics-and-squats/
[4] From foreword to The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique (2015)
[5] A. Camperio Ciani et al https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18561014/
[4] From foreword to The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique (2015)
[5] A. Camperio Ciani et al https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18561014/
