STOP STIGMATIZING GAY MEN.

These numbers tell some truths about pedophilia. 

The recent uproar in payback media against Milo Yiannopoulos, the gay provocateur and free-speech advocate, comes unsurprisingly after Milo's national cable-TV appearance on Bill Maher's Real Time show on HBO. I have to congratulate Bill Maher for being true to his stated commitment to free speech and diversity of ideas. However, the same dark reactionary forces who would gladly undermine Bill Maher, if he were not a popular national voice of Liberals with a bully pulpit, have decided to single out a gay man who dresses and speaks provocatively in the abrasive tradition of Lenny Bruce.

An edited video of a stoner talk show from the internet was released by The Reagan Battalion, a Center-Right PAC which backed independent Evan McMullin for U.S. President in the last election. Evan McMullin is a former CIA operative, investment banker, a former Republican-Party consultant and Mormon, born in Utah. He is anti-gay-marriage and anti-choice. He has been vocal against Donald Trump after losing his own bid to become U.S. President without any previous elected government experience. In fact, he has proposed a popular movement to remove the elected President Trump from office. It is unclear to me how he plans to do this without sparking a populist revolution with himself at the head of some mob. Perhaps his tactic with Milo is a preview of how he plans to demean President Trump out of office. 

The spurious attack on Yiannopoulos' personal character with inference that he is a pedophile or pro-pedophilia is frankly reminiscent of McCarthyism, that peculiar Congressional madness of the 1950's in which Ronald Reagan himself reveled. McCarthy was homosexual, closeted, Roman Catholic and a Democrat. He vented his insane fear of Communism by victimizing U.S. citizens, many of them Jewish, who supported Leftist ideals. Perhaps Evan McMullin is a reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy who died in 1957.

I grew up with consciousness of my own homosexuality in working-class America of the 1950's and 1960's. My mother was a first-generation Russian-American. My father's mother was descended from a Jewish family which converted to Catholicism to avoid Prussian persecution in the 19th century. Listening daily to hatred of Russians, hatred of Jews and hatred of homosexuals in all aspects of media and society has shaped my view of the world. It certainly has given me radar to perceive a real creep when I see one. My radar goes off with a blast whenever I see Evan McMullin sanctimoniously railing against Donald Trump. I am fairly certain that time will tell his true story.

I have published some statistics above from the U.S. Department of Justice website. Why? The Reagan Battalion's obvious attempt to use ignorant prejudice against gay men to silence Milo Yiannopoulos is aimed at an age-old erroneous assumption among the ignorant that gay men are all sexual predators. I grew up around this ignorant prejudice.  

My decent, devoutly Catholic father, who blushed at the word "sex" and never used a word of profanity, warned me about homosexual predators in the first grade. He actually took me to a local alley and said, "If a man ever tries to pull you into an alley like this, never go with him. Run away. And never let a man take off your clothes." This conversation totally puzzled me at the time. A few years later, my father stopped our car in our city's shopping district. He pointed out a man walking along the sidewalk. "See that! Never talk to anyone like that!" Again, I had no clue what he was talking about. Later, when I was years older, I saw the man and realized he was a local hairdresser. 

In light of today's LGBTQ+ sensibilities, my father was paranoid. And his hateful indoctrination of his homosexual child could be considered child abuse. He was trying to teach me to be self-loathing, in other words. Luckily for me, other people in my childhood provided me with the antidote to this mental poison. 

The 2012 U.S. D.O.J. statistics at the top of this essay (click on it to enlarge) tell us something interesting. Of the 1,800,000 adolescents sexually abused in the U.S. in this sample, only 324,000 (18%) were boys. 1,440,000 (82%) were girls. In other words, heterosexual pedophilia is a far larger problem than gay-male pedophilia by the numbers of victims (4.4 times greater). But gay pedophilia remains a powerful red herring in politics and religion. It is a surefire method to demean or devalue an opponent ... just the inference that that gay male opponent 'supports' pedophilia is enough to gather sharks. Ask John Podesta, Dennis Hastert or Barney Frank.

(Note: The statistics cited are not broken down by declared sexual preference or gender of perpetrator. These variables would most likely increase the ratio of heterosexual-bisexual sex crimes against underage males vs. homosexual male sex crimes against underage males. In other words, even fewer cases may well be classified accurately as gay male pedophilia.)

I am 67 years old. I was never sexually approached by an adult homosexual male when I was a child. As an adult, I have never sexually approached anyone under legal age for sex. Yet I have endured the indignity of being told to stay away from the children of my own family members after I came out as a young gay man. I taught high school for two years in the early 1970's. I later saw one of my better students ten years later in a gay bar. He exclaimed, "Mr. Creeden, what are you doing here?" I laughed, but I also saw that his Catholic indoctrination had left its mark. 

I think Milo Yiannopoulos is a poor standard-bearer for most gay men by any measure. He is no more representative of all gay men than the loony self-loathing gay men who fawn over man-hating feminists and Muslims. That bunch are overly representative of us in gay politics and mainstream media. They are sell-outs to the globalist agenda. They do not realize how dispensable they will become when the global elite have managed to subvert nation-based democracy in favor of global totalitarian oligarchy. But, Milo Yiannopoulos does not deserve to be tarred and feathered with ancient prejudice against gay men which is founded in myth and sexual repression. I would see him openly debated and proven wrong in some of his views. That is the way to gain support in a truly civilized society.

Addendum, 02.21.2017: Milo Yiannopoulos held a press conference today. He apologized for offense to fellow pedophilia victims who may have been offended by his remarks in the released videos. He admitted to saying things off the cuff which were irresponsible. However, he asserted clearly that he had not and would never condone nor advocate for pedophiles. Frankly, as a gay man, I feel his apology more than satisfied any doubt that he was indeed misunderstood. Nonetheless, the fact still remains that the attempt at smearing his reputation was a deliberate political act, perpetrated by people who are not concerned for victims of pedophiles or the damage their act could cause to the general perception of gay men by the public. If Milo were a heterosexual celebrity in a similar circumstance, I suspect the mainstream press would have dealt with the story very differently, if at all.