Qatar 2022: The Beginning Of The End For LGBTQ?

 

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

 

   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.

 

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

   Way back when I was a neophyte in gay media I didn't think too much about about how my activism and getting ethically responsible programing on air would work. Luckily I had a brilliant mentor who pulled me into line: "Be the apolitical journalist the profession demands. Boil it all down to asking yourself the same question you should be asking the gay community: "Do you/we have more in common than sex and oppression?" I find my self re-asking the question when I consider community failures both locally and globally. Like many men I'm angry and frustrated that LGBTQ is becoming unfit for even the purpose of responding to the challenges homophobia always re-presents. Also like many men, I'm aware that the tougher and more resilient me has a respectfully compassionate duty-of-care to my brothers. And that necessarily challenges any ideas I may have about the value of ideology as opposed to the pursuit of liberation for the sake of liberation.

 

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/

 

 
  

"1900": Bertolucci Serves Up Homoerotica With Fascism, Italian-style

   

"Although I think 1900 is a movie there is a lot to say about, my critics keep distant from it. It's as if they were fucked up the ass and refused to come."

   Bernardo Bertolucci

 

 

   And it's on that most-Italian of notes - as voiced by the most-Italian of directors to achieve notoriety by bringing anal sex to the masses - we're drawn to reconsider 1900 almost a half-century after the fact.

   Often flagged for its homoerotic undertones, Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1976 sprawling opus 1900 (aka Novecento) attempts to anchor itself in the unlikely fatalism of its male principals' relationship. The births of the two boys occur on the day Emilia-Romagna’s favored son Giuseppe Verdi dies in the early days of 1901. Alfredo is born into the landed gentry, while Olmo is a peasant, and a bastard. And they subsequently develop a close boyhood friendship premised upon attraction of opposites. Bertolucci's cards are on the table from the get-go: the painting "Il Quarto Stato" (and its attendant dashed hopes) serves as the film's precursive narration.

   1900 is indeed sprawling cinema, in much the same way that cities sprawl exponentially when ungoverned by uniform town planning. The movie’s only focused narrative is its determination to advance Communism, with Olmo and Alfredo's story being that of two opposed faces of class distinction and wealth distribution, within a specific time period of legalized homosexuality. While wildly varying attitudes to same-sex relations are intrinsic to the history and psyche of Italian males, the traditional underlying view is that it's significantly more natural to Southerners and illiterate peasants. Bertolucci knows his history well enough to flesh out his characters with enough sexual nuance to set us up for a visceral loathing of Fascism no matter how we sexually identify.

The Padrone & The Paisan

   Clocking in at well over five hours, 1900 as a bromance with Fascism as its Valentines card has decidedly more relevance today than when it was released. A century after their time we might question whether two men of opposing classes could ever bond – or more to the point – would ever be allowed to bond as boys. And yet in the lushly bucolic region of an Italy long gone they do, and they are. In their century Italian males and their patriarchy are caught up in turbulently uncertain times. In our century, so are we. Which warrants taking a fresh look at Bernardo Bertolucci's didactic 1900 as our minds ponder more seriously otherwise tangential subjects like history repeating itself.

Critics, Dicks And Director's Cuts

   Modern marketing mythology would have us believe that most cinematic efforts were (and are) unfairly and irrationally assembled by studios against the auteur's intentions and what-nots. And the romantic notion that film directors nobly ply their craft with little or no regard for the views of even the most intelligent critics is almost a given. Thus, The Director's Cut: that thing which re-sells a movie well beyond its usual shelf-life as temporal entertainment.

   Unsurprisingly, 1900 was always destined to be a candidate for revisionist appreciation and evaluation on those terms. But all is not what it seems. For starters, Bertolucci endorsed Paramount's drastically shortened American version, despite contractually holding the upper hand on any cuts which weren't his. Despite it being a critical and commercial success in Europe as was, he protesteth not too much or too long over the Stateside insult.

   As for critics (important and otherwise) he appears to avoid compromised appeasement by perversely offering what they're least expecting as response. With The Conformist, Pauline Kael warned that his obsession with style for style's sake could lead him to make "luscious fruity movies". 1900 emphatically refutes the idea: its opening summery, pastorale lusciousness is progressively drip-fed jaw-dropping wintry cruelties. He agreed with feminist excoriations of his Last Tango In Paris wherein Marlon Brando wasn't nude but Maria Schneider was. But he never responded to Ingmar Bergman's broadside that Last Tango would have been a much more truthful film if  Schneider's Jeanne had been a boy.

   Bernardo Bertolucci certainly doesn't hold back putting dicks onscreen in 1900. He claimed all his beloved actors' dicks were an extension of his own – and dutifully anoints the junior Alfredo and Olmo with dicks and earthy curiosity about each others dicks, as opposed to a curiosity about each others stations in life.

Homoerotic, Homosexual Or Homosocial? 

 

  The auteur was a neo-Freudian, and his attitude to homosexuality reflected that pre-Liberation limited analytic orthodoxy. He alleged homosexuality and bisexuality to be merely of adolescence without disapproval per se. He never made a film about LGBT existence - neither did he seek to diminish it. To his credit then, when Olmo and Alfredo reunite as young men after World War 1, it’s to his peasant Communist male Olmo (Gerard Depardieu) that he assigns overt homosexual desire within adult male friendship. It’s the dilettantish Alfredo (Robert de Niro) who wipes off his passionate kiss on the lips in shock. We're not to know whether homophobia or his ingrained contempt for peasantry has apprehended homosexuality or true equality. And since both actors singly were either side of thirty, the likelihood of them being mistaken for youthfully callow is a stretch too far.

Crossing boundaries with sex and love as the equalizer?

   That scene takes place in the barn rooftop where as boys they’d played power games with silkworms and appendages. As adults, war-fresh Olmo unexpectedly encounters Alfredo while hauling grain on his shoulders. Overjoyed at finding his childhood friend he shamelessly pins him down in submissive sexual position while ripping the buttons and insignias off their uniforms...Olmo has fought, Alfredo has been purchased a uniformed exemption. Looking lustily down at Alfredo he declares “I like you this way” and Alfredo responds with “Kiss me my hero!” But Alfredo’s only kidding. Olmo’s not, and his hand wanders lazily over his dick after being rejected.

  The director has made a political statement with homosexuality as a broad associative metaphor, although his harsher self might claim that in doing so he's sabotaging his own alleged heterosexual bias, in service to his political bias. He cuts to an obviously truncated and uneasy dialog covering rats, the wartime trenches and breadth of worldview. It ends with Alfredo humiliatingly kicking Olmo in the ass. The camera lingers on Depardieu’s face long enough to make his hurt palpable...while suggesting Bertolucci's omnipresent cinematic theme of "once a traitor, always a traitor" has collided with love and sex.

The face of something other than shame

   But Bertolucci is far from done with the homo motif to make a point. 1900's most notorious sex scene finds our "young" men in bed with a girl who Alfredo vulgarly treats himself and Olmo to. It all goes downhill again, but in reverse. Olmo can't get it up, and the paid lady suggests that Alfredo might know how to help him out. Alfredo's eager to oblige and reaches across for Olmo's dick, but now it's Olmo  who turns away, perhaps repulsed by the capriciously callous behavior of his friend, perhaps by his taunts about free love. There was a time when Gerard Depardieu fully naked was something to behold, and it's in his raw state that he becomes the conscience of the film when the girl has an epileptic fit.

The non-Joy Of Triangulated Sex

  Later in the day Alfredo meets Ada (Dominique Sanda) and brings her to a peasant's dance to meet Olmo. Ada's a full-throttle, free-spirit type in the predictable Lady Brett Ashley mold, Alfredo's smitten and Olmo wonders if he can do better than female pazzos - only to be told that he's a country bumkin who doesn't understand. Mistaking Ada for the lover of his exiled and urbane black-sheep uncle Ottavio, Alfredo has failed to grasp his beloved uncle's Bohemian proclivities but catches on quickly. Bertolucci's grand up-sweeping tableau with Ottavio as von Gloeden photographing naked boys is a much a political statement as everything else in 1900: Fascism literally destroyed many of the artist's unique niche images of Italianism - as it destroyed legalized homosexuality and more.

When Heterosexuality Can't Save The Day

Queer: Good Gay, Bad Gay, Black Gay, White Gay?

The Other Side of The Rainbow: GLAAD Alternative Hall Of Famers

   While Jussie Smollett has admitted no guilt (and indeed hasn't been found so by a jury), Kevin Spacey has "apologized" to an alleged victim. What they have in common is that as things stand  both are causing significant "discomfort" for LGBT+ Inc.

   It was bound to happen of course. As the movement forges onwards with its assimilationist agenda it tends to dismiss Queerdom as an entirely academic pursuit, somehow divorced from a self-imagined reality and undefined by critical thinking. We became the United Colors of Benetton to all intents and purposes. However, People of Color propped up on a Gay Pride float in the hubristic name of inclusiveness is a far cry from how we really feel about "gay boys who offend", and how differingly we might really feel about them along racial lines. While Spacey's accused of underage offenses and Smollett's not, the latter has recently and serendipitously showed up for big-picture consideration -  when, and if, we get past their privileged celebrity.

   A black/white male setup shouldn't be seen as either reflective of Queer global racial interactions or any specific localized example. For some gay men it is so, for some gay men it isn't. While many gay men are completely unaware of their own whiteness, no reasonable Queer assumes that black and white gays are the same, beyond their existence.

   Sameness can't be entertained as an assumptive basis for anything when black men rarely experience the status of a white man in any society: herein lies the necessity of a truthful general gendered discussion which shapes a specific sexuality as experienced discussion. While sexuality can facilitate the crossing of bridges, it isn't the bridge. Less so if it's underpinned by outright denial of disadvantage. When it comes to gay men and race, denial while virtue-signalling can be an exhausting undertaking on the best of days. Time and energy are usually better spent just listening to stories, rather than obfuscating or trying to set an agenda for the betterment of others, as we see it.

   The headline topic is also that of Professor Ian Barnard's most recently published paper (2018). With Smollett on board, the paper is even more relevant. (Barnard is of course a go-to academic whose  Queer Race: Cultural Interventions in the Racial Politics of Queer Theory serves to  effectively challenge tropes like "queer man" equates with "gay white male", all of the time, within its many other definitive insights.) 

   "Good Gay, Bad Gay..." opens with:

"As Deadline .com bluntly put it, 'Kevin Spacey Apologizes to Anthony Rapp for Alleged Sexual Advances; Chooses to "Live As A Gay Man."' The outraged response of progressive intellectuals, activists, and cultural critics to Spacey’s twofold tweet has demonstrated, inter alia, the resilience of old school assumptions and expectations about coming out and about gay identity and gay identifications. These outraged responses have come especially from younger generations of intellectuals, activists, and critics, but also across generations, genders, and sexual orientations. Despite decades of attacks on models of gay identity that center on teleological narratives of coming out, and critiques of the privileging of coming out as the apotheosis of a triumphalist gay identity as racist and ethnocentric in that privileging’s assumption of identity as coherent and univocal, and the assumption of a safe space to come out into (#BlackLivesMatter has served as a forceful reminder of the illusion of such safe spaces for black men, in particular), here we are again at a coming out crossroads, at a coming out as crossroad. 

 Here we are again swept into that narrative expectation of coming out as a crossing from innocence into experience, even when that coming out is compromised and contaminated by decades of denial (on the part of Spacey), by decades of knowingness (on the part of Spacey watchers), and now by the specter of sexual harassment and sexual assault. And despite “queer’s” supposed resistance to utopian or censorious prescriptions for positive representation, the expectation—indeed, the demand—that queer articulation carries with it a triumphal narrative of gay goodness, or, at least a triumphal narrative of victimhood overcome (“it gets better”) persists. Persistence is not always a good thing. It is as if “queer’s” efforts to decenter heterosexuality and heteronormativ-ity are, in the United States anyway, frantically skidding backward into liberal defensiveness in the wake of the Trump-effect’s jolt back to the culture wars, to a multiculturalism no longer taken as given, to kindness and empathy suddenly embattled. Or proof that the triumph of same-sex marriage across the globe is just more evidence of neoliberalism’s cannibalization of queer antiassimilation-ism. As if the antisocial turn in queer theory had not happened. Or, at least, possible evidence of its failure to yet make an impact outside of academia"

(The full - and highly readable - paper continues at Queer: Good Gay, Bad Gay, Black Gay, White Gay?)

   Neo-liberalism/advanced capitalism has form when it comes to throwing us crumbs-off-the-table "rights" like same-sex marriage. It also has form when it comes to pitting groups against each other, with the ever-growing list of LGBTI  "alphabet people" simply seen as vulnerable minority target groups who can be easily picked off without a defined and assertive Queer flag to rally around. ("Defined Queer flag" meaning that queers aren't foot-soldiers and numbers for other groups / ideologies seeking political advancement via alliance: dominion and purpose can quickly become dilution.)

   But the Queer isn't exclusively a political animal, and LGBT is far from a fully-formed personal identity. Staying in your own lane and knowing at what point to rally aren't mutually exclusive. Gay men who aren't in their own lane enough to support and promote a strong and healthy masculinism at nobody's expense have probably learned nothing from feminism. Sublimated masculinity and gender-fluidity aren't interchangeable terms, and men who come to believe they are probably won't have a lot of empathy or solidarity with brothers who in reality are doing it tougher. And yes, I use the term "brother" in both the racial and non-racial senses if there's a perceived difference.

   Aspirational chatter about equality is quite empty when the Gay Dream (or whatever it is), is predicated upon the assumption thats it's equally within the reach of any and all black men. The hail-brother niceness of it all doesn't quite cosmetize what's  essentially archly conservative exclusion. An older generation of gay men for the most part prefers to side-step all intersectionality issues which Queerdom insists he face up to. The young queer man tends to get intersectionality concepts, but he faces significant challenges going antisocially into an age of Pseudo-modernism.
 
   We've become intellectually sloppy when we don't know the difference between inclusion and tokenism, and revert to old gay habits from the self-defeating closet. Changing times always create newer opportunities for adaptive "passing", and gay men like Milo Yiannopoulos serve to remind us that self-imagined empowerment at the brutalizing and divisive expense of others isn't sustainable anyhow.

   With reactionary forces ominously looming worldwide, LGBTQ+ needs to significantly pick up its game, and look at how it stumbled around "handling" Jussi Smollett and Kevin Spacey. Western alt-Righters have successfully made subtle but deadly inroads, and are ready and waiting with recycled factoids like "gays are racists and pedophiles" and "black men are homophobic", to name two of the more obvious. "Bravely fighting back" will simply evidence that we've lost control of the narrative. We've all got skin in the man game, and we're wise to know it.

   The above notwithstanding, it's easy to see that "man problems" of the non-gay variety aren't going away any time soon. What's not so easy to see is what gay men are doing about our own "man problems". Are we sweeping racism and our gender under every inappropriate carpet we can dream up? 

Sex-positive Isn't A Medical Condition

In a world of free-wheeling nosiness, I’ve come to believe that a “frank” question like “Are you gay?” deserves a truly frank (and reasonably unisex) answer: “Nah – I just like to have sex with other men. Do you know any attractive ones?” I figure that getting laid is more important than doing P.R. for identity causes, or other things things I’m even less interested in. It’s served me well, and I don’t have to get into the peripheral stuff like how I missed out on the gay decorating gene. Non-gays who are asked the same question often get to point by being upfront about what they’re after.

But I acknowledge that it’s a gay thing to get all fey when the topic implies cocksucking and M2M anal sex. Few of us can claim Arabic male modesty, as even fewer can claim to have asked ourselves just how sex-positive we truly are. Do we flaunt our homosexuality, or is our flaunting more about other things than the down-and-dirty basics?

The basics of course are nothing new. All kinds of men have had all kinds of sex with each other across all times. Homosexual sex, in all its prurient filth, forms part of the male heterosexual narrative. Gay Libbers in the early Seventies sharpened their focus on homosexuality as definitive of The Homosexual, within broader demonization of "The Other". As a menacing “whatever” cocktail of faggotry, sissyness, Jewishness and Commie tendencies, “The Other” was most successfully pressed into service by American war machine propaganda from the 1930s onwards. Not quite sophisticated racism, but a very close relative.

By focusing on liberating homosexuality itself, a more sharply defined narrative can be seen to deviate from earlier “pleas for tolerance”, bad psychiatry and de-sexed “sissies”...as figures of menace, ridicule and general entertainment. Sex sells, and for the first time in millennia the concept of gay rights had both a face and a groin and a determination to assert both, as sex-positivity with no apologies.

Politics & The Price of Free Love

It was always going to be an uphill battle to assert the sex-positive underpinnings of Gay Liberation when middle-class white gay men followed their muse of assimilationism, as determined by their middle-class suburban backgrounds and the sexual permeations of same. Or, more succintly, they didn’t leave their neuroses behind when they became “gay”. As a consumerist class we just bought what was sold by our early lifestyle sponsors: porn and alcohol. We mistook the former for sex education, and the latter as numbing medication for the psyche. We may have also missed the fact that we were vulnerable to our homosexuality being exploited by pernicious politics, and all that advanced capitalism determines will be. As we enrich the condom industry far beyond its wildest expectations, we don't often pause to ask if perhaps marketing principles like competition aren't preying on our male sexual insecurities.

Ill-prepared when AIDS hit in the 80s, guilt and shame obscured whatever sex-positivity we may have had. AIDS was a tremendous win for sex-negativity, inasmuch as assumed trust between men was replaced by life-or-death fear. Such a climate is likely to kill love unless we're acutely aware of the fact. We clearly see this evidenced by the embracing of “dating” as a new mating/sex ritual in response to AIDS. The ritual is a time-honored post-war American practice - born of American Puritanical prohibitions on sex, and its assumed immorality. To transfer that heterosexual sensibility to men who have sex with each other implies that the boy/girl dynamic must be clunkily reimagined in terms of how sex is transacted, rather than prioritizing whatever love may be in the situation. Dating might serve some men who want to “glue” a relationship and tease or trap a potential partner, but it can’t remotely be seen as a characteristic of sex-positivity, or leading to it.

Defiance, dollars, and..? (Photo:Ed Freeman)

The Queer movement challenged the exclusive-but-assimilationist tendencies of the gay men who in many ways squandered the opportunities presented by the 70's sexual revolution. For many, their approach to sex was simply an exploitative party which hurt as much as it healed. Sexual acting out isn’t sexual liberation if its origins are in prudish suburbia. Dating itself presents many great opportunities to grow real and lasting love between men. Conversely, we’re sabotaging ourselves when we go down the counter-productive path of assuming we have unlimited choices. We don't, and many are simply swiping their way back to existential loneliness - while paying for the privilege of  suspended reality in the form of ads and more.

Mark Brennan Rosenberg at HuffPo wades into the mud when he asks "Why Do Gay Men Make Dating So Hard For Themselves?"  Indeed...when the numbers get crunched, gay men might just end up happier with arranged marriages if their still-exclusive hopes and dreams hinge on superficial drivel like income, where we’re at sexually and what we have in common. One thing's for certain: vague ruminations about "chemistry" (and when it might happen) aren't the sign of a man who's genuinely looking for anything substantial.  Addiction to searching-into-perpetuity probably precludes actually ever finding something worthwhile, now or later.

Cultural Cringe

Queer Nation's early 90's upending of middle-class gay and lesbian narratives (as preached to the choir) saw the group cut through to America by speaking directly through tabloid media. National talk shows like "Nine Broadcast Plaza" were chasing Jerry Springer's audience, and very quickly learned that well-dressed "real live queers" almost coming to blows with homophobes gave their viewers just what they wanted. What producers also learned, to their complete shock, was that 'Hilary's Deplorables' actually supported things like gays in the military, and didn't want preachers telling people to boot their gay kids out either.

LGBT has a great unacknowledged debt to low-brow exploitative culture. The shoddy, emotive, not-for-primetime documentaries about transgenderism in the early Noughties paved the way for Caitlin Jenner's Vanity Fair cover "triumph". Hollywood's pretensions to art and entertainment represent a need to learn from trash TV.

"Naked Attraction": dick pics first, gentlemen!

The U.K. has made an artform of the genre, and it's current shocker is the very Queer-friendly "Naked Attraction". It's posited on the idea that everybody wants to closely examine genitals before they see faces or hear voices, and that's what dating is really all about. With no snickering or genital shaming, it's Grindr and Tinder come to life for one and all.  Contestants invariably represent the non-professional classes, but a nevertheless relatable range of Gen Y queer men.

As a cultural statement it's a graphic statement of liberation: "It's perfectly fine and fun for girls and boys to really like dicks and asses". What's not perfectly fine is that "Naked Attraction" is confined to adult viewing, when it should be shown in schools for sex-ed classes.

Sex Education...a.k.a. You're Gay  - No Need To Get Into That Homosexuality Shit!

The Homoerotics of Orientalism

    While Homosexual History is a disjointed affair – the 1870's Victorian term “homosexual” being a relatively new concept comprising definition, pathology and vilification in equal parts – we the men who desire and have sex with other men can glean much from the past to know about our present day selves beyond modern Western ideas about identity.

We’re wise to take a “Well, yes and no…” approach when trusting academia to stay in its own lane: Queer integrity necessitates viewing LGBTIQ as a political collective whose successes rise and fall on being able to rally around overarching goals...goals which coincidentally intersect with race and broader gender issues only some of the time. Masculinity itself as an academic pursuit somewhat surprisingly however has been most poorly studied, and is consequently misunderstood. And male homosexuality as an offending sub-species of masculinity isn’t likely to fare well within that contextualization.

It’s then overwhelmingly impressive when an academic with impeccable credentials publishes something like “The Homoerotics of Orientalism”. Joseph A. Boone’s 520-page masterpiece (a fascinatingly informative and satisfying read) manages to take Orientalism from its old-tymey connotations and frame so much about how homosexualists are very real (and perhaps universal, if not timeless) participants in masculinity, although currently disenfranchised when it comes to effectively shaping masculinity.

No slouch himself when it comes to nutting out the finer points of Queerdom, race and transnational culture, (the following extract from) Eng-Beng Lim's excellent review highlights the degree of critical thought which pervades the book:

In Joseph A. Boone’s monumental tome, The Homoerotics of Orientalism , the conundrum of engaging in the evidentiary politics of homo-orientalism itself becomes a critical challenge. What the book helpfully provides is a surfeit of historical evidence for their comparative quotidian and sensationalist treatments. Such an exhaustive examination of the ‘cross-cultural interplay of homosexual desires and taboos throughout history’ is best read as a contribution to world sexuality studies rather than queer studies even as it steers astutely clear of identitarian-based readings of homosexuality.

Readers who marvel at the book’s interdisciplinary visual, literary, historical and ethnographic scope may be struck just the same by its particular strength as an encyclopedic endeavour. Its coverage of same- sex encounters or male-on-male love over a period of 400 years primarily in the Islamicate world and secondarily in Anglo-Europe and the United States is at times breathtaking and at times overwhelming. The sheer range of Western and Middle Eastern objects (miniaturist painting, salon art, diaries, travel writing, canonical texts, films, ethnography, pornography, advertising, cartoons) is itself a useful resource. Many visual artefacts are given relatively long treatments for those seeking close readings of representative images as texts. They are richly descriptive and often outweigh the theoretical framings ghosting them. This encyclopedia-plus approach serves as a kind of repository or locus for myriad meanings generated by the ‘echo’ chambers in the study. As Boone surmises, ‘reading these cultural manifestations contrapuntally, listening to their echo-effects they create, adds a density of texture that illuminates the staying power, connotative energies, and accretion of meanings that emanate from them’ (p. 53).

In this regard, the mounting evidence of what might count as orientalist homoerotica or homo-orientalist art reads like a ‘discovery’, toggling between colonial anthropology and the legal definition of the term to produce a kind of self-conscious, defensive or enlightened form of critical reading. It would seem that this archive of homo- evidence is so big that it can anticipate both homophobic pre-emptions and queer interrogatories around the question of same-sex desire and erotic practice from the precolonial to the transnational Islamic world. The book makes the case for a more textured, if also benign, form of humanistic understanding that is untethered from the overdeterminations or preformulations of power that some scholars are said to model (badly) after Edward Said and Michel Foucault. The result is a compendium of sex acts, courtship behaviours and eros between men that are sometimes observed in their own right as homoerotic evidence. Suffice to say, the book’s engagement with the critical ruminations of Said, Foucault or other theorists is secondary to the full descriptions of identifiable themes, encounters and tropes (such as the beautiful boy, the pasha and the eunuch) that appear in its many sympathetic readings of works by European writers and artists. Boone adopts a largely detached stance in his writing, which shines in the literary interpretations. Elsewhere, it seems almost campy as readers pore over rare images and graphic descriptions of men doing things to other men as he maintains his resolute tone of directed indifference.

    Boone's own preface reveals his clear understanding of the nuances of sexuality which must shape such a broad subject lest it be undone by dualistic assumptions, or an overemphasis on differences. He expertly rises to the challenge of addressing both homosexual acts as well as identity, as they've historically played out for, and by, men of what was once known as The Orient. The author hasn't assembled a linear history as such - more a highly successful attempt to empirically gather evidence which isn't assembled to suit any narrative or foregone conclusions.

von Gloeden's 1890s Orientalized Sicilians

An actual Oriental / Ottoman same-sex couple circa 1920s

 






In focusing on Orientalism, Boone is able to relieve homosexual history of being determined by, or rooted in, Occidental Classicism and its uncomfortable associations with pederasty. In fact, more modern bridging images (as photographed by the likes of von Gloeden) appear to be of rather old  'boys': he coated his subjects in emulsions and used filters to peddle real men as 'youths'. (Anti-pornographers and their missionary kind are usually smart enough to avoid scapegoating von Gloeden as an exploiter of the poor and/or non-consenting: his models received good royalties from their images, and did so with the blessings of their communities.)

Von Gloeden's images are important inasmuch as they are the earliest photographic evidence of homoerotic Orientalism as it straddled the art vs smut divide. They also effectively refute how European art had traditionally insisted on mitigating the penis size of sexually mature males from Classicism onwards. While some insist that the photograph itself is more of a vehicle of pornography  than any painting or sculpture (due to its infinite possibilities for reproduction), there's no doubting its superior ability to document. But what von Gloeden documented wasn't penises of exotic races - he documented forays into erotic Arcadianism and Orientalism by virtue of a then-revolutionary medium. In a way he made homoerotic Orientalism more real, and in doing so dignified it.

It would however be quite wrong to suggest that von Gloeden (or any image for that matter) defines or best represents homoerotic Orientalism, or that it had, or has, watershed moments. The Homoerotics of Orientalism successfully prevents the topic (and the men) from being dismissed as products and images of Western projection: Orientals themselves certainly bring enough meaningful homoeroticism to inform the topic.

 

Professor Joseph Boone address (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute 2016)

 
Of course "The Orient" nowadays refers to territories, races and peoples far removed from what and where Orientalism flourished - Boone's milieu encompasses cultures of North Africa, Asia Minor and a broad Arabia. Language, dress and religion have significantly gutted the Middle-Eastern man of his benign homoerotic appeal, and Boone is courageous enough to invoke Abu Ghraib images of men to demonstrate that demonically dark side of homoeroticism, as practiced by men (and women) who torture.

Orientalism as a viable homoerotic pursuit probably had its last days of innocence in our own times immediately before the demise of the busy cruising areas around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. They hosted Israeli and Palestinian men coupling in the name of Eros...oblivious to the reality of The Other being rapidly recast as The Enemy. Given what came before (The Crusades) and what has since transpired, it's not too simplistic to isolate these acts of homosexuality as possibly the only tangible evidence of men behaving with any degree of sanity toward each other in the entire region, for a very long time.

Is That All There Is...to a Holocaust?

   

 

 

   Another Holocaust Memorial Day will come and go. Some will pause and reflect on what it means to humanity going forward. Others will just do what they do all year long: invoke Shoah to deceptively promote the very ideas which thrive when remembrance is nefariously re-purposed as emotive buzzwords and worse. Moral man has no great difficulties comprehending the annihilation of an individual and his or her family and culture - immoral society however collectively eschews what the numbers really mean. 

 
Holocausts and stuff…I’m reminded of delivering one of my best friends’ eulogy when he succumbed to AIDS. Steve loved the very best of everything, especially literature. For him I drew on Hemingway’s “A Farewell To Arms”, and how Papa H. likened the dead World War 1 soldiers to becoming nothing more than concrete numbers and dates on roads and regiments. And how honor and courage seemed like obscene abstractions. (I lost my audience in that little chapel early on: neither an ashamed mother nor a motley collection of homosexualists drew comfort from my words. But the non-denominational celebrant at least claimed to get it.)

 Broadway initially felt a direct effect of AIDS because it hit their bottom line hard: a multi-million dollar business was built on the back of homosexual creativity. The shows had much difficulty going on. But that particular loss was in and of itself. Schlagers and tits and feathers aside, it doesn’t address legacy or community: the cumulative knowledge and extraordinary talents of an era’s gay men weren’t handed on to homo replacements on Broadway or anywhere else. Our rate of replication couldn’t quickly assure that clever hands and astute minds would be replaced in a generation. Gay men worldwide lost our best and brightest across the boards, and as a generation or two of men on the planet we’re diminished for it.

 

Come as you are. Or are not.

 The fact that the modern skinhead haircut was pioneered by gay AIDS activists as a Holocaust reminder is something apparently forgotten by gays and fashionistas alike. Analogies don’t always work because nothing is quite the same as anything else. But Shoah teaching principles aren’t as exclusively Judeo-centric as one might think, and homosexualists can draw much from them. As we note that effects ripple from cause, we also note that ACT-UP was as much about honor and courage as it was about anger.

Perhaps all that some of us will take away from the Holocaust is that we’ll never meet or know the grandsons. Those nice Jewish and Gypsy and Slavic guys we should be meeting. And that’s okay, because at least we’re relating the 'then' to the 'now'. We can, and should, collectively remember 'our own kind as well. And also ask ourselves what legacy of theirs we’ve been deprived of. (Notably, our own kind weren’t liberated from concentration camps when the good guys showed up: they were transferred to other prisons to complete their sentences…‘cos, well, the law (for fags) is the law.)

Holocausts and stuff…we’ve recovered somewhat but only somewhat. One does not need to be a Jew or a homosexual to observe who and what's been lost in terms of homosexual culture. The generational continuance of history, knowledge, intellect and strong leadership was indiscriminately decimated, and the vacuum is sucking in sewerage. Better medical interventions and same-sex marriage don’t make the ever-increasing threats to our being go away. Legal changes by stealth and hubris are more threatening than ever. Political elites of all persuasions do their dirty deals without ever really acknowledging human rights – let alone bargaining for it. Many brothers-in-deviance are probably wishfully thinking our future is still just somewhere over the rainbow, at best.

Or is this the ideal climate from which the homosexualist can, or could, emerge to confidently and purposefully help reset the future? Our feminist sisters are also realistically seeing problems ahead for women, and they’re asking “Where are the gay men? We were there for you front and center when AIDS hit.” Are we forgetting our friends while we pretend to not hear the narratives about fags lives not mattering?

And, most of all, aren’t we forgetting that being a victim isn’t an easy job, and that one gets no thanks for it? Shoah teaching is most definitely not about perpetuating a state of victimhood as perceived or experienced. As we remember, we're encouraged to never again be victims for starters. We don’t have to be pacifists to make that fundamental thought-leap to becoming the change we wish to see in the world. We just have to change our mind about ourselves first, and then see optimism and opportunity. 

 

   

(Revised January 2023)

A Culture of Suicide: Enough Already.

It’s no secret that men’s mental health in Australia is worsening at an alarming rate, and suicide statistics confirm it. If eight lives a day were being lost to terrorism the whole damned country would be on red alert, with a national hysteria of unprecedented proportions. Suicide in itself isn’t necessarily a desire to kill oneself as much as it’s a desperate attempt to make overwhelming distress and emotional pain stop.

We’ll never know how many of those men were actually troubled by their homosexual thoughts – when researching the subject some time ago I turned up anecdotal evidence of “suicide-instead-of-coming-out” notes secretly destroyed by shameful families, and a Sydney imam as a matter of course advising a young man that suicide was the only honorable option for a Muslim man with homosexual desires. By default, the Australian culture is apparently unable to effectively respond to male suicide - past and present. The above anecdotal snapshots are indicative of the pernicious and diverse co-factors which need to be addressed, and it's doubtful they're included in the key LGBTI stats:

• LGBT people aged 16 and over scored an average K10 score of 19.6, indicating moderate psychological distress
 • 15.15% of LGBTI people aged 16 and over report current thoughts of suicide in the past 2 weeks
 • 37.2% LGBT people aged 16 and over reported being diagnosed or treated for any mental disorder in the past three years
 • 35% of Transgender people aged 18 and over have attempted suicide in their lifetime
 • 60% of people with an intersex variation aged 16 and over had thought about suicide on the basis of issues related to having congenital sex variation
• 20.3% LGBTI people aged 16 and over reported that they had been diagnosed with anxiety in their lifetime
 • 30.5% of LGBT people aged 16 and over have been diagnosed or treated for depression in the last three years
• 16% of LGBTI young people aged 16 to 27 reported that they had attempted suicide

 Queers now have an opportunity to positively shape the future of mental health in Australia for LGBTI people of all ages, and men in general. With a bit of effort we can step up and proactively be the guys who make a difference.

 The recently-released Fifth National Mental Health Plan will seek to establish a national approach for collaborative government effort over the next five years, with a focus on achieving a better integrated service system for consumers and carers. LGBTI inclusion must be approached as a priority rather than a sidebar. The National LGBTI Health Alliance encourages members, project partners and networks to actively participate in these consultations to support adequate inclusion of LGBTI people and communities. Consultation dates and times across the country are underway, and listed on the above Plan link rollover.

Please contact MindOUT / National LGBTI Health Alliance in your capital city if you are attending a consultation / workshop and wish to discuss LGBTI inclusion in the Fifth National Mental Health Plan.

Aberrance Is Its Own Reward: The Michael Lucas Edition

As a veteran of the Queer Wars of the 90s, I’m all ears when an activist with a dissenting voice is denounced as a revolting extremist, a moronic bigot, a hate spewer, a hypocrite and a whore. (It’s par for the course, and you’re probably not doing anything worthwhile if you haven’t been similarly denounced by “your own kind”). The reactionary loathing which Lucas’ brand of Zionism attracts from Queerish gay men isn’t substantiated by logic or reason, and we’re wise to ask why. While not wishing Israel well isn’t proof of anti-Semitism, it just happens to be one of the very best indicators currently at our disposal.


For close to a decade, Michael Lucas has been a very uppity homosexual. He’s the aberrant homosexualist par excellence. Not happy to just live the shadowy dual persona of pornographer and pornographee, he regularly walks the burning coals between political left and political right and lives to yell about it.  An opinionated homosexual is nothing new, but one who can actually put up without drowning himself in Post Modernist rhetoric certainly is.

One case in point is the subject of Israel. Lucas regularly picks at one of the sores of sloppy liberalism: concurrent promotion of gay rights as well as so-called Palestinian rights... a cause which bathes itself in claims of no anti-Antisemitism whatsoever. It’s indeed a rich mother lode to be mined by the skeptic: the narrative is always framed in terms of a juggernaut of Israeli violence committed against innocent victims, with but one historical reference being the Holocaust - as in “They’re doing exactly what Hitler did!” That the fallacy isn’t regularly repudiated by facts - or simply laughed off – is certainly indicative of a mindset which doesn’t accommodate at its core a Jew’s basic right to exist. By logical extension, you can be certain that a militarily-protected homosexual state would similarly unleash a hatred which is masked by sympathy for the “victims”, no matter how loathsome their beliefs or what ends they desire. Lucas was quick off the mark to point out a fundamental lie of the broadened “Islamophobia” trope: despising a murderous religious ideology can’t be seriously construed as racism unless you're a stupid dilettante, or worse.