“Think of [Pride] as the Olympics for meth, alcoholism, public fornication, corporate pandering, and hairy a**es shoved in the faces of children.”
That didn’t come from a Family Research Council press release or even Phyllis Schlafly via Ouija board. It’s from a June 17 column in Spectator magazine about the upcoming World Pride celebration in New York by Chadwick Moore, a conservative gay writer in New York. The column provides a revealing glimpse into the mindset of a certain breed of gay conservative public figures — “homocons,” as they’re sometimes called — that has arisen, or at least grown louder, in the era of President Trump. Unlike tragic closet cases like Roy Cohn, figures like Moore, Milo Yiannopoulos and others are comfortable with their sexuality. But despite presenting themselves as out-and-proud gay men, they share with Cohn a willingness to abase themselves for a seat at the table with right-wingers who provide it only on sufferance.
Moore’s column is illustrative. After essentially characterizing remembrance of the 1969 Stonewall riots as just another case of identity politics run amok, it ridicules contemporary activism like the boycott of Chick-fil-A over its donations to anti-LGBT organizations and urges gays to “celebrate shame” so that straight people will appreciate rather than merely tolerate us.
In contrast to that ideal, it depicts the upcoming June 30 celebration as a bacchanal of exposed private parts. “[Come] Monday morning after World Pride, millions of gay people will experience some of the deepest, darkest shame of their lives as they wake up in a seedy apartment in a mysterious zip code, Cher’s Farewell Tour blaring from the television, a mountain of cocaine on the table, with a sore backside and limbs of indiscriminate origin flung about them,” Moore writes. “We’ve all been there; it’s part of the Pride experience.”
I must not have been cool enough to get on that invite list, because I’ve never been there, nor have I witnessed anything truly X-rated at the New York Pride March. Even the nudists spare spectators a full view, as public nudity is illegal.
Moore’s exaggerations of Pride degeneracy aren’t just a clumsy extrapolation of his own experiences and a few cases of bad taste to LGBT people generally. They’re a confirmation of his right-wing audience’s nightmares about how gay people live. So too is the garish cartoon of gay life that is Yiannopoulos’ public persona. So too is a June 11 tweet by right-leaning gay Quillette writer Andy Ngo of a news story about a Drag Queen Storytime reader in Houston turning out to be a convicted child molester. It’s a disturbing if isolated incident, but also a convenient dog whistle for those who see danger in drag queens reading to kids, as evidenced by the numerous tweets in response from people emphatically unsurprised that a gay man would be a sex offender.
If you’re a conservative who already thinks LGBT people are shallow hedonists, sexual predators and shrill social-justice warriors, these guys are happy to affirm that view.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being LGBT and having conservative political views, distaste for various aspects of the subculture or disdain for left-wing rhetorical excess. However, that’s a far cry from not only aligning oneself with political movements that actively work against the LGBT community, but also reinforcing their prejudices by demeaning the rest of us.
That especially goes for when homocons attack transgender people, as they do somewhat frequently. Moore dutifully took a shot at them in his column, calling them “men who think they are women” as he mocked efforts to recognize their often overlooked role in the Stonewall riots.
But even if inveighing against transgender people, Muslims, abortion and other boogeymen of the right earns them a seat at the conservative table, the best homocons can hope for is paper plates and plastic cutlery while the people whose favor they seek get to use the good china and silverware. They shouldn’t expect their affections to be reciprocated in any meaningful way.
After all, Trump has worked hard to undermine and undo LGBT rights in office. While homocons celebrate his every phoneme of lip service to us or his disingenuous pledge to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide, he has packed his cabinet and the federal courts with venomous homophobes, including judges with lifetime appointments. He has tried to ban transgender people from the military. He has sought to give adoption agencies receiving federal funding the green light to cite religious beliefs to discriminate against same-sex couples and rolled back anti-discrimination protections in health care. Homocons typically respond to all this with silence or attempts at rationalization.
Closeted gay conservatives of yore were driven by obvious self-hatred. What drives these gay conservative public figures today isn’t self-hatred, but self-abasement. Like the misfit who turns his back on his friends in school to curry favor with the popular kids, the homocons condescend to fellow LGBT people, while licking the boots of homophobic bullies. But though the bullies may smile and congratulate their gay adulators on their same-sex weddings, many of them will go right back to snickering and calling them anti-gay slurs as soon as they leave the room.
If there’s any shame going on here, it’s the sort that would have even Roy Cohn beaming with pride.
DeArment is a journalist in New York covering the drug industry. His Twitter is @biotechvisigoth.
