CONSERVATIVE HOMOSEXUALS?

Homosexuals are taught subtly, and often not so subtly, that they are anomalies from infancy. Statistically speaking, this is simply the way it is. A vulnerable child responds to this with instinctive fear. The child in an environment steeped in ignorance and/or neurosis may well seek belonging/safety by pretending to be a different gender, the gender which matches his/her emerging awareness of sexual attraction.

The stronger child from a better emotional environment will resist self-loathing and adapt. He/she will learn to play the part of a heterosexual perhaps. But the truly strong will assert their sense of self as homosexual without becoming self-denigrating. The swishy male athlete is an example. Or the butch female artist. 

Homosexuals who accept themselves internally operate as themselves in the heterosexual world more comfortably, some more discreetly than others. Homosexuals who loathe themselves are often centered on their sexuality as a barrier to living an adapted life in the straight world. This latter group is more susceptible to addiction and economic failure. 

Conservative gay men have historically been seen as closet cases by the more adapted homosexual group. And this is based in simple observation. When I was coming out through my early sexual experiences in Boston of the late 1960's, my first lovers were insurance executives and bankers. Half of them were, or had been, married to women. Some had children my age. 

My homosexual peers at the time were adolescent (like me) street hustlers. Many of them were runaways. We met on The Block, a section of Commonwealth Avenue near the Boston Public Gardens. We provided on-demand sex for the posh men who lived in the townhouses of Back Bay and Beacon Hill. 

I never accepted money myself, so I became rather popular with the older men who considered themselves more principled. Before long, I traveled in the elite circles of Boston homosexual life. I was eighteen, a junior at college. I spent weekends at posh cocktail parties and salons. My hosts were Ivy League and wealthy. I was tutored on worldly sophistication as much as I was flattered. 

I laugh at the arrogance of some gay conservatives today who scoff at older gay men who adopt adolescent homosexuals out of a sense of compassion, not pedophile lust. Adolescent homosexuals have relied on older homosexual men to teach and protect them throughout the ages. Conservative gay men today have disloyally poisoned that well of homosexual heritage for political reasons. It does not help. It harms.

Conservative gay men after Stonewall often condemned Gay Liberation from the sidelines. Their economic superiority in the homosexual subculture was suddenly diminished by the exuberant openness of young gay men and lesbians. It was the beginning of a different kind of gay youth culture, in which young gay men looked to each other for support and comradery outside the gilded rooms of conservative homosexual clics.

The 1968 play, made into a 1970 film (above), The Boys in the Band, is a dramatic representation of pre-Stonewall urban male homosexual life in coastal America. Watching it today brings the harsh realization that the same gay male subculture has moved very little in half a century, despite legislative gains. 

The legislative gains in America have been accomplished by conservative gay men and lesbians who have turned mass liberation demonstrations into legalistic lobbying efforts through non-profits. This current institutionalization of gay lobbying was formulated largely during the AIDS epidemic. National and local AIDS non-profits discovered the ability to extract money from the older and more conservative gay male and lesbian populations through conventional fundraising methods.

The Ivy League crowd once again asserted its ability to coin its social provenance to buy legal tolerance in lieu of acceptance. Military service and heterosexual-styled marriage are conservative homosexual ideals, despite being embraced by all social classes of homosexuals after the fact. These tolerance initiatives have had benefits, especially for those homosexual men and women who needed a structure for functioning more successfully in heterosexual society. 

These structures have not worked for those whose self-loathing has led to acting out in order to demand acceptance or power in heterosexual society. The focus of these homosexuals on transgender issues indicates the failure of legal protections to treat their individual mental dysfunction. 

Conservative homosexuals were once the vanguard of homosexual tolerance in society. Now they are seen as traitors among the LGBTQIA establishment, which seeks absolute acceptance to the point of altering the Constitutional rights of freethinking Americans. This is an unfortunate media-driven madness which may well lessen tolerance and acceptance of homosexuals in heterosexual society.

During the blooming days of Gay Liberation, I was in the radical camp. I applauded the Stonewall riot. I applauded the San Francisco riots after the Milk assassination. While I appreciated what conservative gay men had done for me as a young man, I felt it was time for liberation from mafia-dominated gay social life in the shadows. I lost most of my older conservative friends who disapproved.

Today's extremists in the LGBTQIA establishment are riding the pendulum of history. They themselves are becoming the new conservatives in a way. Rather than seeing the potential for a new homosexual subculture based on more secure individual contributions to the greater heterosexual world through individual education and skills development, they are fixated on a kind of goose-stepping acceptance of a fringe mentality which will never happen in the greater society, even in the permissive West. 

But this is all short-lived. As the population of homosexual men rebounds from the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, a large population of homosexual men with the security of legalization will advance through the economic and social hierarchies of heterosexual society in greater numbers. Rather than obsessing on acceptance, they will focus on achievement and individual social and economic power. They will have the ability to form groups to challenge the fringe LGBTQIA establishment. 

That will be a good thing. I have come to the conclusion after fifty years of living as an out gay man that many of my conservative tutors of the pre-Stonewall generation were wise. Many of them made lives of functional happiness against great odds. They were stronger and smarter than those who must hide behind a mob to feel empowered. 

The LGBTQIA establishment is not the future of the Gay Liberation of my youth. That Gay Liberation sought to incorporate the best of what had preceded. The LGBTQIA establishment today is a misshapen creation of media and non-profit money. It is racist against White men. It is sexist against gay men who prize masculinity. It is sexist against lesbians who do not support the transgender dominance of feminism in the LGBTQIA establishment. It seeks to reject and erase centuries of homosexual contributions to Western Civilization in its enthusiasm for Marxist globalism. 

The future of the Gay Liberation of my youth, the actualization of its courage and vision, lies with the conservative gay men and lesbian women who support individual freedoms in the face of forced mob (LGBTQIA) ideology which seeks to denigrate or eliminate our long homosexual history of personal adaptation, creativity and survival in the face of conformist oppression.