The Queer2Authoritarian Pipeline
on gay misogyny & queer anti-colonialism
Order your copy of the zine vol. iii here. And RSVP for the launch party on 5/22 here.
So and I interviewed each other about the pieces we cross-published on each other's Substacks. Listen on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.
Check out Pieter’s piece on how zoomers’ newfound sexual fluidity trivializes the efforts of new ex-gay ministries, and my piece on the surge in popularity of homof@scist figures like BAP, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Yuko Mishima.
I wanted to briefly expand on a few points I made in my article. But before I do so, you should also check out Stanley Bast’s Cracks in PoMo essay on homof@scism from a while back, which inspired mine.
“Gays are natural-born conservatives.”
So as I mentioned in the intro1 of the piece, most people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the notion of a gay male being a conservative, let alone homosexuality being tied in any way toward authoritarianism. Of course, we are conditioned to think of the rainbow-flag toting gays as fiercely loyal Democrats, who humbly recognize their indebtedness to the party’s commitment to normalizing homosexuality for saving them from oppression and victimhood. That may be true on a purely sociological level. But ontologically and culturally speaking, there is something deeply anti-liberal and even “anti-progressive” about homosexuality, especially between males.
On one hand, gay sex is closed off to the giving of oneself2 to another who is totally “other” and to the generation of new life—which is to say that it is “against progress”…both literally (no babies) and socially (favors self-preservation). On the other, gay culture (which I argue springs forth from the ontological implications of gay sex) tends to idealize perfect aesthetic “forms” over moral virtues:
It is this devotion to “pure” and virile beauty, strength, and power that drew many—not in the least gay men—to authoritarian political ideologies that transgressed against liberal conventions. Nietzsche’s esteem for the pagan ethos in ancient Greece that created idols out of “ideal forms”—of strength and aesthetic perfection—spoke directly to gay men’s attraction to the bodily beauty and virility of the male form (as witnessed by the normalcy of same sex pederasty in ancient Greece).
The monotheistic eschewal of gay sex as an “abomination” is tied to this affirmation of supernatural virtue/moral ideals over the “idolatry” of natural forms, as well as its proto-feminist (at least when compared to paganism) recognition of the inherent dignity of women and “feminine genius.”
Further, true beauty for Christians is not the aesthetic perfection of the flawless body—embodied by gods like Adonis or Apollo, but rather the beauty of charity, of self-sacrificial love—embodied by the less-than-perfect, wounded, and even ugly bodies of emaciated ascetics of the desert like Mary of Egypt, mangled martyrs like Sebastian and, ultimately, by Christ bleeding to death on the cross.
This is part of why classical pagan societies were indifferent to or even celebrated homosexuality. Thus the affinity of gay fin de siecle decadents for ancient Greek paganism:
Bast mentions the turn-of-the-century British and French decadent writers like Oscar Wilde1 and J.K. Huysmans as precursors to the homofascist trend. They saw classical Greek paganism—namely in their fixation with aesthetic beauty and the practice of pederasty—as a solution to the mal du siecle, (“sickness of the century”), the feeling of being tired of modern society’s unimaginative, secularized, “respectable” norms. Their taste for decadence, amorality, and flouting of the rules—and their distaste for the lowly, common, and unfashionable—was fueled by an attraction to so-called “aristocratic principles,” which Julius Evola would later draw upon to undergird his vision for Italian fascism. From this light, these dandies’ decadence was less a sign of their effeminacy and more one of their fetishization of masculinity—which they also testified to in their persistent belittling of “feminine weakness.”
Gay male misogyny
On that note, the existence of homofa@cism challenges the commonly accepted notion of the natural affinity between gay men and str8 women. We are told that f@gs and their hags are a match made in heaven: he offers her male attention without the risk of rejection, a shoulder to cry on, and honest advice on her wardrobe choices, and she provides him with applause for his fabulosity (“go off, kween!”).
But what of his choice to forego sexual relations with women in favor of men? This is not, Paglia3 (by way of Freud) would warn us, a merely neutral matter of “preference.” Behind such a choice is a deep-seated misogyny rooted in the gay man’s resentment of his mother for keeping him “trapped” in her womb and impeding on his ability to develop sexual attractions to women.
For one, authoritarian political leaders tend to conceive of themselves as demi-gods who are not subject to the moral law established by the one true God. Both paganism and fascism’s lack of regard for moral rules enabled them to feel comfortable using corrupt means to accomplish “noble” end results. And the amorality of homofascists is directly tied to their idolatry of masculinity and celebration of gay sex. And their eschewal of women and “feminine” values like mercy, patience, and fertility negates God’s complementary design for men and women. Their valorization of pleasure and strength for its own sake turns masculine virility into a value in itself, rather than a tool to be put to the service of self-gift, defense of the vulnerable, and the generation of new life.
Of course, let’s take such a hyperbolic analysis with a grain of salt…it’s Freud that we’re talking about, after all. Of course not all gays are actual misogynists. But the homofascist’s blatant disgust for “feminine” virtues is indeed a consequence of the internal logic of male homosexuality when taken to its extreme and when unchecked by liberal pieties, rather than a deviation from it. Take Oscar Wilde’s wild(e)ly misogynistic musings:
Wilde was torn between his instinctive hierarchism as an Apollonian idealist and the liberalism toward which he was impelled by the miseries of being homosexual in a Christian society [...] A character in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband declares, “Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.” The iron rod of classification is thrust before us—even if it does not fall where expected! In form and content, the Wildean epigram is a triumph of rhetorical self-containment.[…] Wilde was incapable of sympathy or collective emotion because of his Apollonian opposition to the Dionysian, the mode of the “Many” and of what I call the empathic.4 -Paglia
In sum, it is this tendency of some gay men to not only reject women as sexual partners but to also trivialize “feminine” [progressive] values and fetishize brute masculinity that disposes them toward authoritarian politics.
Is capitalism gay?
I continued on this theme of the aristocratic, anti-progressive dimensions of homosexuality in my piece on Queer Anti-Colonialism in Compact. In light of the many rainbow-toting, keffiyeh-clad pro-queer anti-colonial student protestors, I tried to highlight that in addition to manifesting itself in pagan, aristocratic, and fascist ethoses, homosexuality’s anti-progressive bent can also thrive in global capitalist/technocratic environments. Thus the cognitive dissonance of pro-queer anti-colonialists/capitalists.
But the notion that “rainbow capitalism” is a deviation from authentic queer liberation is historically shortsighted. Homosexuality and other forms of non-procreative sex threatened the bourgeois ideal of the nuclear family during earlier stages of capitalist development, in which the domestic sphere played a key role in the inculcation of values and perpetuation of conformity to social strictures. But as capitalism has entered into a more advanced stage in which consumption takes precedence over production, bourgeois respectability has given way to expressive individualism as an ideal. In this phase, instinctive gratification is prioritized over self-sacrifice for posterity, which makes queer sexuality not just permissible but an embodiment of the ideal of self-fulfillment. […]
Sociologically speaking, the institution of the family makes individuals less vulnerable to being manipulated by distant entities of power. The philosopher Michel Foucault, who like Pasolini saw an affinity between the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist revolts of his era and the struggle for gay liberation, eventually came to recognize this possibility. As David Dudrick wrote in these pages, Foucault feared that the effort to liberate sexuality by talking about and engaging in sex more freely would result not in more freedom, but more pervasive control.
Pasolini also eventually began to realize that in their attempt to “jettison traditional values,” free-love radicals inadvertently opened the floodgates to the “imposition of the mania for consumption, fashion, information” by major global corporations, which he called “the new fascist power.” As the political philosopher Augusto Del Noce warned, in their attack on “tradition,” “instead of overthrowing bourgeois society,” sexual revolutionaries “swept away the last traditional constraints that held back its expansion and finally made everything, even the human body, ‘an object of trade.’”
The revolution, in other words, didn’t present a reversal, but instead an intensification of the individualistic bourgeois ideals they had fought against. Queerness may have challenged the dominant social order at an earlier moment, but is now vulnerable to being co-opted to churn out atomized individuals devoid of agency.
Radical queer activists correctly recognize the potential for homosexuality to disrupt certain “anti-progressive” forms of hegemonic power. But ultimately, it is incapable of resisting getting co-opted by the powers that be…especially in capitalist paradigms. This is precisely because of homosexuality’s “anti-progressive” nature, which readily lends itself to a spirit of power, domination, commodification, and self-indulgence. Again, the assertion that homosexuality poses a threat to capitalism is not a matter of complete cognitive dissonance, but ultimately, the alleged congruence between the pro-queer and anti-capitalist causes proves faulty.
Take the many examples of anti-capitalist/colonialist voices that view the promotion of homosexuality as a threat to their own progress.
This is why many in non-Western nations today view sexual “liberation” not as opposed to Western capitalism and imperialism but as a vehicle of it. Since the dawn of the globalization of the United States’ cultural and economic influence, many in the Arab world have condemned Western decadence as a form of jahiliyyah (“godless barbarism”). Suspicion of Western sexual mores can also be found in Africa and cultures tied to its diaspora. The Guinean cleric Robert Cardinal Sarah has decried Western NGOs and corporations for spreading “free love” (gender ideology, abortion access) and free market ideals alike as forms of “neocolonialism.” And last summer, the Ghanian presidential candidate Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia campaigned on an anti-LGBT rights ticket, arguing that if Western countries can ban African practices like polygamy, African countries can ban “Western” practices like homosexuality.
Similarly, numerous reggae-dancehall artists, drawing on Rastafarian tropes, have sung about white colonizers bringing not only economic exploitation, but also practices like sodomy, which they claim are alien to African and Caribbean cultures. In his 1990 hit “Dem Bow,” Shabba Ranks compares Jamaican men who “bow down” to play the passive role in sexual encounters to black people bowing down to white colonizers. Even far-left anti-capitalist voices in some corners of the West have expressed reservations about the expansion of gay rights. While it has supported legislation to punish homophobic hate crimes, the Greek Communist Party voted against a referendum on gay marriage in 2024, as it would “circumvent the motherhood-fatherhood relation” and risk turning children into a commodity.
I also think of the infamous tirade of the Ugandan pastor in the “why are you gae?” viral video (a true masterpiece!) and the removal of Buju Banton’s 1992 hit “Boom Bye Bye” from Spotify, which we wrote about here.
On that note, I noticed a scene in Guadagino’s Queer (which I left out of my First Things review) where Lee tries to bargain with an indigenous Mexican taxi driver, insisting to pay only 3 pesos instead of 4. The taxista drives off, muttering homophobic slurs. This monetary exchange is in a way emblematic of Shabba Ranks’s concern…kinda.
The Queer/Muslim horseshoe
Lastly, I wanted to note that I wrote last year about a potential “horseshoe” between queer theory and certain iterations of Islamic theology…thus why I don’t totally buy into the standard conservative critique of gay pro-Palestine protestors.
There is a common thread uniting our instinctive, irrational, absolutist, and dualist tendencies […] quick to skip past the level of mundane reality and jump straight into the realm of idealism…and even plunge to the depths of nihilism.
This reality-denying, idealist impulse manifests itself in numerous schools of thought: Manichaeism, gnosticism, epicureanism, Platonism, Augustinianism, apophatic theology, predominant modes of Islamic theology, both puritanical and what Cornel West calls prophetic Christianity, voluntarism and nominalism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and totalitarianism (both in its left- and right-leaning forms). It is prone to chaos and violence, disorder and destruction.5 […]
Thus, is it any wonder that younger people of a progressive persuasion tend to be more sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinians—a people they perceive to be oppressed and colonized by an entity with greater power than them, and whose Islamic metaphysical orientation aligns more with the Dionysian, fluid, gnostic stream of thought—which, though bringing this stream to very different conclusions, also fuels queer theory and the LGBT platform?6
In sum, the point of this post is not to convince you that gays are crypto-Muslim misogynist colonialists. In true cracks in pomo fashion, it is merely to challenge the commonly held conception of homosexuality as being part and parcel of “progressivism” writ large and thus categorically opposed to “conservatism.” That, and to try to boost our stats on past posts
We don’t feed the trolls
It has become clear to us that many people (here and here) struggle to comprehend and appreciate the nuances of what we’re trying to accomplish here at Cracks in PoMo. Not to worry! Here are a few links to past articles that might help you better understand what the deal is (and for those of you who already get—and love—what we’re doing, read them anyway!):
Most people take it for granted that gay men are political progressives. Given the roles of left-wing activist groups that championed the cause of gay rights, the Democratic politicians who pushed to legalize same sex marriages, and the traditional moral values held and legally backed by many right-wingers, gay men who publicly admit that they lean conservative tend to raise eyebrows. […] As much as the cause of gay rights aligns better with left-wing politics, I’d argue that these gay men’s attraction to fascistic aesthetics and politics is not exactly a “deviation” from their identity as gay men. Put simply, it is a feature, and not a bug, of their particular experience of their gayness. In the words of Yiannopoulos himself, gay men are “natural-born conservatives.”
no, I’m not saying that gay partners are incapable of being selfless/giving toward each other. I’m talking about the act of sodomy on a purely ontological level.
Even today, as camp has faded, part of the male-homosexual world still follows a vanished aristocratic code: class consciousness, racial stratification, amoral veneration of youth, beauty, and glamour, love of scandal and gossip, and use of the stinging bon mot and theatrical persona of the androgyne of manners. Thus Wilde’s English epicene has secretly transmitted British hierarchism to other lands and other times...
Language in Wilde aspires to an Apollonian hierarchism. His epigrams turn language from the Dionysian “Many” into the Apollonian “One,” for as aphorism and conversation-stopper the epigram thwarts real dialogue. Cutting itself off from a past and future in its immediate social context, it glories in self-created aristocratic solitude. The epigram is the language of the Apollonian lawgiver, arbitrarily imposing form, proportion, and measure on life’s fluidity. […]
Wilde demonstrates the congruities between high society and the male-homosexual world... The male homosexual, by his Wildean self-conceptualization, carries on the work of western imagination...This is the pagan voice of the Hellenophile Wilde. Complete self-realization: was this not sought by Nero? Attila the Hun? Hitler? -Paglia
Reminder, this is neither a condemnation nor an endorsement of our worldview. I’m just spelling it out for you to the best of my (limited) ability. As a member of my generation, I fully own up to being a deconstructionist. I by no means claim to be immune. I’d rather sit behind a screen and critique problematic ideas/structures (in my case, I devote most of my time to critiquing the constructs of neoliberal secular neutrality, bourgeois suburban ideology, racial identity, and sexual orientation), than actually building something substantial.
I know that my pushing the deconstructionist ideas of Nietzsche, Foucault, Radical Orthodoxy, the dirtbag scene, Milbank, Cavanaugh, and other “postliberals” runs the risk of being critical to the point of self-indulgence and even nihilism, to the point of never actually doing anything. Yes, we harp on how cringe and ideologically flawed liberalism and the American project are…but at least people who buy into it, who work within the system, are actually doing something rather than sitting at home ranting about their countercultural meta-discourses.
I know this attitude is a problematic one…and I’m sure (at least I hope) I’ll outgrow it as I get older. But for now, I think there is some inherent value in being a deconstructionist and critiquing the system…in the sense that it echoes the cries of the prophets of yesteryear. They may have never built anything useful, but somebody’s gotta play the John the Baptist or Isaiah up in here…
While the younger generations tend to be drawn to idealism and deconstruction, the older generations tend toward building and realism. Their Apollonian bent is immersed in reality and is unafraid of its dirtiness and moral complications. While us youth can be accused of skipping past the demands of reality, our elders can often be accused of giving up on the hope for something better. Quick to swat away the idealist musings of the young, their exaltation of realism and order can easily devolve into a false idol—one that conceals it’s violent, destructive tendencies behind a mask of “law and order.” This impulse manifests in stoicism, Aristotelianism, metaphysical realism and the Natural Law tradition, Thomism, Machiavellianism, cataphatic theology, predominant modes of Jewish theology, what Cornel West calls Constantinian Christianity, and liberalism, Enlightenment rationalism.
I’ve hinted previously at the capacity Islamic theology and culture have for fostering a decadent aesthetic sensibility, which is due in part to its Dionysian and Platonist tendencies. […] Islamic art and aesthetics carry a charge that in some ways overlaps with the sensibility found in some works of art born of a queer sensibility. […]
Besides, think of the aesthetic appeal that many pro-Palestine protests have…with the numerous non-Arabs dressing up in keffiyehs out of a sense of solidarity but also as performance art, and its ethos of revelry and the carnivalesque. Not exactly the same as the kind of costumes one will find at a Pride parade, but I rarely see such an aesthetic draw to pro-Israel protests (correct me if I’m missing something, of course).
And is it any wonder that older generations of a more conservative persuasion tend to be more sympathetic with the cause of the Israel—a State which they perceive to uphold law and order (even if by any means necessary), and whose metaphysical worldview aligns more with the rigid Apollonian stream of thought?
Okay cool guy. Thanks for writing this (and always linking to other posts, etc).