My husband recently bought our cats a tiny stuffed plush unicorn with rainbow ribbons for its hair and a sparkly, fuchsia horn. When I was obsessed with unicorns at age eight in the 1980s, unicorn toys were actually fairly hard to find. There were all of two or three at Toys ‘R Us and my indulgent parents bought me at least two of them. One was a hand puppet. None of them had rainbows, though I would have loved it if they did. Unicorns certainly were not ubiquitous enough to be found in the form of a cat toy and they were not flamboyantly gay.
If there is a year that anyone can pinpoint where gay truly became mainstream, I would place it around 2010, five years before gay marriage was legalized in the US. Politics is always downstream of culture. In my corner of the Midwest, being gay was already no big deal. Around the time when I graduated college in 1994, a young gay man made an attempt to shame me for using the term BFE. (I used saltier language back then!) The term means butt-f***ing Egypt and refers to terrifying backwaters where rubes torment newcomers with brutal, sodomite initiation rites. It’s a funny term and always has been. The young man had no sense of humor — he was Woke decades before it was cool — and he immediately put me in my place. I was younger then and I deferred. The current me would probably not be as kind, and would be quick to point out that anal sex is not the exclusive domain of gay men. As an aside, every straight woman I knew as a young person experimented with butt stuff long before her gay male contemporaries.
Gay used to have a specialness and a glamour about it that made it scintillating and fun. Gay used to mean homosexual and was not an umbrella term for deviants, perverts, autistic sociopaths, and open air pedophiles. Transsexuals were not lumped into the gay spectrum because many gays had no gender confusion whatsoever: some feminine women chose other feminine women, and they were called femmes. Masculine men who preferred other masculine men were not pressured to flip sexes in order to fall into straight stereotypes. There were also boyish girls and girlish boys who had no desire to castrate themselves or obtain mastectomies and hysterectomies. Gay may have been closeted and underground, but it was free of sanctimony. When LGBTQIA+ inclusion coopted gayness, it took with it the joie de vivre that made gay interesting and… well… gay.
The frenetic desire to belong to a tribe is completely understandable. When I first went vegan, I was desperate to find other vegans. Once I did find other vegans, I quickly realized that I wanted to get as far away from other vegans as possible. Just because people share a similar interest does not mean a group of them has any business getting together. I may like horror movies, but that does not mean I will have anything in common with others who enjoy them. I was pretty much born enjoying horror movies. I have loved them since I understood the difference between film and TV and real life. My predisposition does not make me in any way unique.
The drama/attention trap
Theater kids truly do ruin everything. The most dramatic gays are the theater kids who camp it up from an early age. The gay theater kid will often spend the rest of his life confusing reality with the stage, and that means he is a creature of emotional turmoil in every moment except perhaps young childhood. When he is bullied for his gayness at age thirteen, he will spend the rest of his life marinating in the victimhood of that era. Never mind that straight kids are bullied with great frequency too and that girls are turned into victims of sexual harassment or plain old sexual assault more often than boys. The current LGBTQIA+ movement was spawned by the theater gays of the eighties and nineties who were stupid enough to think communism and forcing their cartoonish ideas of gayness down the throats of straights and everyone else would terminate in a Skittles rainbow utopia of free love and hot sex. Instead, they have managed to wear on the general public like a sticky, highly-elasticized tank top on a sweltering summer day. They are annoying and make us long for cooler weather. The theater gays got busy in the wake of gay marriage, paving the way for the erasure of gay women as TERFs and of gay kids as would be straights in the form of trans sex-swapping. The movement has gone far enough now that a swing in the opposite direction is underway. Expect an equally retarded return to “traditional” values soon, with all the crappy caveats for both sexes.
What ever happened to live and let live?
My earliest memories in the defense of gays was the notion of leaving well enough alone. If only the nosiest among us stopped being so morbidly preoccupied with the bedroom antics of Sara and Lisa or Steve and Dan, the world would be much better, I rationalized. Gays were the creative backbone of civilization and unfairly persecuted at that. If only we had a more enlightened society where being gay did not mean prison time and shock treatments, that would be great. Christians seemed especially threatened by gayness, and of course the most vitriolic anti-gay preachers were secretly gay themselves. Jim Bakker was rumored to have numerous same-sex romps. Numerous gay scandals swirl around televangelist preacher Ted Haggard to this day. And let’s not leave out the Catholic church, which is infamous for its gay subculture from the Vatican on down as well as its pedophile protection rackets. The worst behavior among gays used to be associated with Christian hypocrisy until the mid-2010s when drag queens and transsexuals rose from the depths to claim the title.
Desmond Napoles is to the LGBTQIA+ movement what Greta Thunberg is to Davos climate activism. Both have acted as human shields to deflect the wrath of regular people towards a sinister crew of demonic swamp monsters who sit conveniently in the shadows and pull their puppet strings. Greta, now 22, is a laughingstock and a meme. She is a good example of what happens when high-functioning autism goes horribly wrong. Desmond, once known as Desmond is Amazing, is only 18 at the time of this writing. He is sadly on a similar trajectory as Thunberg, doubling down on what made him famous as a young person in hopes of recapturing public attention. Neither of these two know it is over. Thunberg is still yelling at random people and Desmond is still caking on neon makeup and insisting on being referred to as “them”. At least now Desmond is at an age where the advances made upon him by perverted old gay men are no longer straight up pedophilia. At least now there is some sense of him being able to give consent. Seven years ago, however, he was certainly groomed and put in harm’s way by his mother, who ought to be ashamed. He was pimped out from age eight. Who knows when the real abuse began? Infancy? Soon he will also be a meme, put to pasture by an increasingly hostile wave of anti-grooming conservatives.
Had Desmond (is Amazing) Napoles been a one-off incident of a child being thrown under the bus, there would be no backlash. Instead, Desmond’s grooming was symptomatic of a trend that is still trying to take over the world and announcing its intention at every turn.
During the worst possible time — Covid lockdowns — gay theater kids took it upon themselves to announce they were taking the world by storm, via un-ironic fascism a.k.a. being in lockstep alignment with large corporations. Disney’s boardroom was awash with patently obvious gay luxury communist programming agendas. Genderqueer, a nasty, soft porn graphic novel that depicted fellatio among the underaged, was forced into public school libraries while the entire subject of math was being questioned for its racism. TikTok was rife with purple haired elementary schoolteachers going into excruciating detail about their kinks, and they weren’t fired until a decent amount of outrage was stirred by Libs of TikTok, which of course was promptly doxxed. Trans, the idea that a child who is not able to legally drive a car or buy alcohol or cigarettes is able to make lifelong decisions about future fertility and medical dependency, swept the land in waves, drowning many who will never recover from the barbaric amputation of their private parts and permanent chemical sterilization and its attendant side effects.
This, plus the insistence that gay was whatever they felt at the time and that a black woman should and would be able to identify as a genderfluid ostrich, stole the joy and light of gayness. Gone was the acid wit of Oscar Wilde. Its gold was replaced with leaden accusations of pronoun crimes and men cutting off their junk in order to present as perpetually depressed, although pretty women. Drag shows went from impromptu bawdy, underground laughter sessions in dive bars to Story Hours where sick freaks paraded their obvious fetishes for toddler rape.
The mainstreaming of the gay movement and its transformation into LGBTIA+ alphabet soup heralded its erasure and downfall. Gays did this to themselves; don’t feel sorry for them. Gays really were persecuted once upon a time. The 1980s, though far more friendly to gays than the 70s or any era before that, were still marked by vicious crimes against gay people and a general disdain for gayness. When we called someone “gay” back then, it was half joke and half slur. Nowadays it just seems quaint. Gays and the various others who lump themselves into LGBTQIA, however, still operate as if any deviation from the heterosexual norm is still grounds for teasing and bullying if not torture and murder as it was back in the 1980s. Drama queens will always need to see themselves as an oppressed class. This also goes hand in hand with liberalism. They want to be a persecuted class because this helps them avoid thinking about all of their own culpability in macro and micro aggressions against their own victims. Playing the victim means you cannot be the oppressor, or at least it means you have an excuse for being an oppressive bastard.
Gay is neither transgressive, progressive, nor titillating
Nobody cares if you’re gay. Seriously, nobody cares. Mixed race couples used to be scandalous too. Being gay is about as scandalous as having a mixed race relationship. In 1960, mixed race relationships raised eyebrows. Nowadays, they do not. Trotting out gayness, gender fluidity, or whatever is supposedly against normal is actually the new normal. Everyone is a little gay, just as there are mixed race kids running around in every neighborhood, whether it is the slums or McMansion Row. When various pop stars drop hints that they’ve kissed a girl or wear full bondage regalia at their concerts, it’s Dullsville. Show me something I haven’t seen in a while. Show me actual talent. Gay does not shock and it does not appall. I didn’t care what gays did in their private homes then and I don’t care now. Blue and pink hair is not flamboyant when every other person has it. Phallic sex toys are not salacious when old ladies writing books about tidying and organizing mention having a dildo collection1. Even Diddy’s hatred of women and his thirty odd year run of sexual blackmail of other males is not shocking. It is as if we knew it all along.
We don’t care if you are confused about your gender. David Bowie and every other glam rocker wore more makeup in a month than most women wear in their entire lives. They wore higher heels too. Though it was fun to watch, drag wasn’t a topic of deep conversation that required loud declarations of identity. It should go back to that.
We don’t care if you were born asexual. Some people never get horny for anyone else, and some people find they never get horny enough to make it worth pairing off with a mate. In the old days, you had the option of becoming a vestal virgin, a priest, or a nun. Nowadays, becoming a priest or a nun seems to be nearly synonymous with truly subversive, demonic crap, so try at your own risk.
We don’t want to hear about your sexual needs and desires. As for losing desire, lesbian bed death is no different than the heterosexual kind. Being monogamous isn’t always exciting, it’s just that heteros in long term relationships don’t feel the need to blab about our sex lives (or lack thereof) to everyone all the time. Perhaps we don’t need as much external validation.
The average straight person has no problem with anything gay unless you make it her problem. Sadly, the last ten to fifteen years have been all about making gay into a cause for consternation instead of cause for celebration.
In Margareta Magnusson’s book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, she makes a lame joke about downsizing her dildo collection.
Me, I lay all the noise down to neo-marxism as practiced by the make-believe liberals of our time. Foucault, Derrida, and others with a passion for blurring any lines, anywhere, anytime. Yes, at one time gays were fun. People aren't their genitals or what they do with them. Mostly, although those that are we used to call (now forbidden) bad names.
Yeah. We don't care. You don't need a parade. Just be gay. It was going well. People were gay and they were integrating just fine with heterosexuals until it suddenly became a thing, just after Occupy Wall Street actually. It became an issue, a movement, a class. Let's all go back to having fags and dykes so I can go out drinking and dancing with them again.