gay rights

The Aughts Were Better for Gays Than the Woke Era (reprint)

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I just became aware that an article I was quite proud of is no longer available due to the site it was hosted on going offline. RIP Twink Revolution. Your podcast and written content will be sorely missed. Thankfully, I still have the old file and so am going to repost at least my own contribution to the magazine here as it was when first uploaded in December of 2020.

I do think that in the time since this piece has aged well and remains relevant.

The Aughts were cringe. Dane Cook was one of the most popular comedians. Carlos Mencia had a television show. You couldn’t enter a movie theater without being forced into seeing the trailer for ‘Stealth’ at least once. The United States had invaded Iraq as part of a rage-induced post-9/11 pathos despite that country having literally nothing to do with those attacks. Heritage Foundation interns then attempted to reconstruct the Iraqi government from a hermetically sealed governing pod called ‘The Green Zone,’ no doubt while listening to the rapidly degenerating solo career of Gwenn Stefani as she told the world that her shit was bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. 

Shit may have been bananas elsewhere, but one area where the culture was decidedly on point was on the immense strides made by the gay rights movement in that decade. Successes which, in retrospect, could not exist in today’s utterly homogenous and moralistic dominant culture. 

One of the advantages afforded by the period of chaos unleashed by 9/11, Iraq, The Great Recession, and the calamitous collapse of the Bush regime from top of the world to leaving office with around a twenty percent approval rating was that cultural norms were questioned. Not in some superficial issue-by-issue basis like we have now, but in a way that fundamentally interrogated the very foundation of our concepts of morality. Public opinion went from decidedly hostile to homosexuals and bisexuals (Jerry Fallwell even blaming them for 9/11 on live television) to overall societal ambivalence with young people moving firmly into a generally positive disposition towards such minorities over the course of roughly a decade. It is worth remembering that this change occurred in a time when both political parties were at least somewhat hostile, and no major politician willingly embraced the cause of gay rights. The rhetoric of gay rights had little to lose, so could be suitably mean. Politicians were bullied relentlessly. The endless numbers of homophobic closet cases in the GOP became a running gag. It was about asserting divergence from the norm as a point of pride rather than spreading a gospel of gay. It worked not in spite of lacking decorum but because it had no such performative scruples. No one wanted to be a “good person”, they wanted to be effective advocates. Sometimes, that meant being bad.

Compare this record to the recent dip in the growth of acceptance of sexual orientation minorities. Considering that religiosity among the young is not increasing right now, it is hard not to see this as a result of the woke culture war backfiring. Being for gay rights is no longer an anti-moral values alternative, but part and parcel of integrating into the moralistic politics of a country whose first settlers were Puritans and whose dominant culture has never broken out of their mold. The secularization of politics did not change the unchallenged assumptions of the missionary that still lurked within. The liberal adoption and promotion of a very specific and suburban subset of LGBT issues focused on marriage and personal expression rather than addressing critical disparities in homelessness and housing security shows how these issues have become just another liturgy.  

This enables social conservatives to pretend to be a brave counterculture when appealing to people neutral on social issues and thus to make gains using the same methods used by gays last decade. This is a ridiculous farce that shouldn’t even be possible as there is nothing rebellious against an ideology about the maintenance and defense of the status quo, but in the Woke Era, it is gaining traction under the auspices of the liberal establishment. The neoliberals are the dominant establishment of the discourse now and anyone too close to them will be painted in the same brush as their declining socio-economic system.

How did we get here? 

The final and drawn-out collapse of the decades-long power of the theocratic Moral Majority, which was one of the dominant trendsetters of cultural commentary in the 1980s, became a power vacuum where straight people could declare independence from a dying order by adopting causes such as equal legal rights for gays. But as more people raised within the confines of conventional American morality adopted these causes, these causes, in turn, became reflections of the morality with which the gay rights movement had made so much success opposing in the first place. 

The turning point for this resurgence of cultural reaction had to have been around 2012. While the world failed to end according to the then-popular misreading of the Mayan calendar, the Era of Edge gave way to the Era of Woke. The world may as well have ended, so far as oppositional subcultures were concerned. The reason for this was simple, the establishment realized that the new hip cause of gay rights had now become popular enough that it could be co-opted in support of maintaining their entrenched power, supplanting the role culture war had played for conservatives until this point. 2012 would go on to give us Upworthy and Kony2012 among many other imitators, the former being an example of the coming Breitbart-style degeneration of liberal media over the course of the 2010s and the latter the first go at weaponizing progressive caremongering for the facilitation of further military interventionism. Both of these would become mainstream trends as the new decade ticked on. Woke evangelism would expand part and parcel with these new trends. A social credit prosperity gospel that exists to assure its followers that they are protagonists of their own story, and all they had to do was have strong opinions on social issues. If you believe Burkean conservatism laundered through a progressive HR department is the best way to combat the forces of reaction and entrenched power, I suppose it is a success.

A movement propelled to success by being offensive, contrarian, and against the (then) cultural zeitgeist is now held up to be the very model of our intersectional empire with much of its history sanitized for mass consumption by being presented as an inevitable outgrowth of cautious patience and faith in progress. In fact, it has so much cache that it’s increasingly common for de facto heterosexuals to call themselves ‘queer’, usually for just having a bad haircut and gangrene-tinted dye job. But being an agoraphobic nerd is not a sexual orientation. The hijacking of the discourse around sexual orientation by what are effectively Habanero Heteros is precisely why the contrarian gains of the past have been watered down into nothing more than a public performance and recycled versions of old-timey moral panic. What better way to keep ideological competition from piercing the bubble of establishment media than a new and obscure litmus test? 

What is to be done about this? While no future will ever be identical to a past era, these types of moralistic fads do tend to come and go. But rather than just wait for the woke tide to recede out the way of its evangelical predecessors (who can even tell when that will be?)  we could learn from one of the few good things of the Aughts…its delightfully oppositional and contrarian rhetoric. Reject unity with the discourse and embrace divergence and rebellion, even if that makes you, gasp, an edgelord. Have the courage to have views based on knowledge and experience rather than the dogmatism of trendy and ephemeral alliances and established ideological camps. Minorities do not do well under forcefully homogenized societies and it is our task to create a new subversive counterculture to this bloodless liberal pantomime whose only purpose is to stroke its own ego as society decays around it. Woke techno-neofeudalism vs an empowered and invigorated far right as its only opposition is not an acceptable choice, but it is the only choice left if we do not break with the pieties of the present era for something else entirely. If we do not provide an alternative our enemies will do it for us.

Localizing Pride

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(Getty Images, Brazil)

I used to love Pride Month. Before the corporations and police colonized it as part of their Current Year virtue signaling it really was something that represented subcultural divergence and a celebration of survival in struggle. Particularly after the mass die offs of the AIDS era and the Reagan Administration’s hostility to addressing the problem. Nowadays, Pride seems more like a celebration of Mayo Pete being the worst Transportation Secretary in the history of the country and the fact that corporate HR makes their employees wear rainbow lanyards and state their pronouns on emails. In other words, it is no longer a celebration of divergence but one of not only assimilation, but adoption of the WASP monoculture where everyone, not just a specific community, must declare their goodness and rightness with some kind of Obamaesque statement about the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice. A new moral majority for that mid-wit managerial class person who voted for Hope and Change® in 2008 but never realized they got neither of those things. As it is, I already wrote about the decline of the gay rights movement from what it once was to what it became in the late 2010s here.

I had my break with Pride in 2018. The DC pride parade started right outside of my apartment in the West End/Dupont Circle area and I got to see all the costumers getting ready. I understood this was DC so it was going to be extra douchey, but I had attended the 2016 and 2017 parades and they were OK (if with expectations regionally adjusted.) But that year, coming hard on the heels of the first traumatic Trumpian year for the City of Hillary, really caused the establishment to close ranks with anyone it thought would be in the anti-Republican camp. And so the 2018 Pride Parade was filled with police, defense contractors, and the like.

I left early.

Unfortunately, (and more on this from me later) this process of assimilation into the Late Imperial Phase is not just a DC thing but rather, increasingly an American thing. As the world moves away from American Unipolarity, the United States leans on its declining soft power to compensate for its even more rapidly declining ability to deploy hard power whenever and wherever it wants. The problem is everyone knows this since (and this one thing, at least, is not a criticism) the American propensity for having messy public fights about everything is on full display.

The problem is that the Americanization of Pride means it is (often rightly) seen as foreign intervention and sympathies when exported to other countries. No longer a symbol of international solidarity for the gays, it comes across as a symbol of international solidarity of the gay community with the cultural and political influence of the United States. Considering recent (and sometimes less recent) history, it is understandable that this rankles government authorities in other countries. The U.S. loves to use marginalized groups abroad to undermine foreign states, after all. By adopting Pride, the Americans have undermined it save as a tool for their own NGOs.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. While within North America full Langley-Buttigiegification is in effect, embattled gay rights movements in other countries can opt out of this Devil’s Bargain and take a path more fitting with the deglobalization trends of the times. In many countries, anti-gay laws come from European (usually British) colonial era precedent and thus are themselves a foreign imposition. And any country not riddled with Abrahamic religion as state policy can basically turn alternatives to heterosexuality into a recapturing of its lost subcultural traditions. The gay rights movement in India has been particularly apt at this, correctly pointing out that the various laws and norms they struggle against are largely Victorian in nature and not based in pre-colonial culture.

More importantly, whether a country has a more or less hostile past to the concept is not as relevant as its future. And a future were activists fight for a distinct locally adapted version of their rights is a far more likely one to meet some success than one where they adopt the iconography, slogans, and strategies of a declining world power with a known record of universalizing its own domestic pathologies. I don’t pretend to know how each and every country or culture will do this, but I can guarantee it would be a better path forward than looking like outsiders following what appears to many as a strange foreign fad.

There should be many Prides, rooted not in a global neoliberal monoculture but rather localized, indigenized, and divergent from the U.S. attempt to become the Pope of the Gays. Since there are gay people everywhere, no matter what local reactionary elements might claim, there is always a history, a culture, and a localized tradition to draw from.

‘Decider Issues’: Or in the humanities some opinions are objectively wrong

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neoliberal evolution

I pride myself on avoiding echo chambers and groupthink. I believe whether they be big media entrenched interests or small diseased hives of conspiracy theorists or cause loyalists, its not the size but the monotone that dooms ones ability to critically think. But this does not imply that I assume all opinions start equal until proven otherwise. And despite my own repeatedly demonstrated ability to evolve my views when confronted with (superior) evidence for changing them, it would be only natural if every 5-10 years I draw a line or two on issues where compromise is capitulation-because one side is just that objectively wrong.

Keeping away from obvious cases where actual scientific evidence is at play which makes drawing such lines obvious and really an exercise of the sane vs the unhinged (man made pollution’s effect on the climate, the need for evolution in science class, the scourge of anti-vaxxers, etc) and sticking straight to the humanities only, I can think of one issue last decade and one issue in this where compromise cannot and must not be made with the unhinged-lest we simply want to give up and join the postmodernists in their quest to believe any simple uninformed opinion is the final arbiter of reality.

Last decade, this issue was gay rights. It is not something I talk about much on this blog given its foreign policy focus, and it wasn’t my primary or sole issue of concern a decade ago either, but it was what I might call a ‘Decider Issue’. So named for the famous declarative statement of ‘I’m The Decider’, the then chimpanzee-in-chief, George W Bush-himself an example of a presidency that could be considered a great example of a Decider Issue in how it is interpreted.

There was no rational nor logical nor even purely blinkered individual self-interest argument against expanding legal rights for gays. There wasn’t. None. The only arguments were fear of change and utterly brain numbing religious screeds from those too foolish to put aside what should be their private culture for the public good. There were policies that mitigated harm to no demonstrable increase in harm to another-a rare in politics. Any aggreivement of enacting such policies was perceived and self-projection only, not in any way real or material. There was, quite simply, no actual compelling case for opposing gay rights. And even with a solid and successful push on many fronts and gay marriage now legal across the entire nation-the most important fights (housing and employment nondiscrimination) have yet to move beyond the state and federal employee level to the same degree as the more performative (if symbolic) marriage fight did. The fight remains, but most of the cultural side of it appears to be won. This is good. It helped immensely that when the fever seemed to break around 2006-2009 or so that an enormous amount of right wing cultural warriors from senators to ‘public policy experts’ to clergy were exposed as closet cases or with sex lives which deviated from their own stated norms in new and interesting ways. Larry Craig, Ted Haggert, George Reckers, Rick Santorum-ok, I made up that last one (but come on, you at least suspect to the same level one does Pence), the parade of humiliation and hypocrisy was like a conga line of rejects tagging on the back end of a pride parade. Their side was wrong. Debate was legitimizing them, they needed to be mocked, defeated, and crushed. This was an issue to end friendships over (and I almost never advocate doing that for political reasons).

A new such issue has arisen this decade. It is in foreign policy-something increasingly relegated to the back-burner since the anti-war movement got sidelined in the Obama years by the  visage of a respectable technocrat apparently taking it over from the frat boys of the Bush years. Because of this sidelining, this issue isn’t as clearly an obvious choice to most people-but it should be. That issue is NATO intervention in Syria. So, in a weird abstracted kind of way, Syria is the gay rights issue of today. A debate where one must draw the line of people who have a legitimate point on one side, and people who quite honestly should shut the hell up and go away on the other. I had a useful professional contact and acquaintance who was both pro rebel and said ‘if you sympathize with the Damascus government or the Turkish coup plot, defriend me now.’ Well, I did exactly that. I have no regrets. No one can learn from people so involved with their own ideology no matter its actual effects.

When I have spoken of Syria before on this blog I have largely done it by appraising the interests of each actor and how I believe that the best realistic solution (and this I have held as a consistent view since 2012 when I first got engaged with the issue) is government victory. I have never pretended to be happy agreeing so heartily with Russia (see gay rights positions, above) on an issue, and I have never used it as a generic ‘NATO is bad’ argument, which is tiresome and usually moralistic. This is geopolitics, there is no good and bad. But there is stupid and smart though. Rebel victory, (most likely just a total sectarian Balkanization of the country in effect with some kind of caliphate as the strongest faction) would be demonstrably bad for Syria and most Syrians for sure. But even speaking from the purely American standpoint-it is bad for NATO too. Already, by jumping on the regime change bandwagon but backing different mutually hostile factions, Washington and Ankara-the two biggest NATO contributors-are ready to tear their alliance apart. And for what? As it is the prolonging of the war (thanks to American arms and allies) has increased the refugee crisis which in turn increases the far right (the real threat to most trans-atlantic alliances and Russian containment in Europe). Idlib is possibly the greatest outdoor zoo of Al Qaeda the world has seen, and Iran-that great bogeyman of the west-is stronger than before.

Much like with opposition to gay rights before, a strange cavalcade of unqualified theorists and gibbering loons is swarming over the media, hoping to make a quick buck or get a signal boost from playing on the famously vulnerable heartstrings of a public addicted to quick fix media and knee jerk moralism. Samantha Power and Anne Marie Slaughter, the appropriately named duo, wax poetic about the dangers of not setting moral lines across the globe, as if the UN will collapse if we don’t scold Assad on using weapons I honestly would rather be killed by than many conventional munitions. These are simply cranks of a dying order, saying their piece before irrelevancy takes them. They are supported by legions of journalists who really are nothing but establishment cheerleaders and who imply anyone who denies America’s role as Global Ruler-Bearing Nun-Cop is either a foreign agent or dangerously unhinged.

The philosopher John Gray, writing in one of his more recent books of antihumanism, noted that one of the reasons Mesoamerican human sacrifice is so interesting is because they were societies that were really very honest about the performance of blood ritual in the maintenance of power and hierarchy. Most other societies invent elaborate charades like ‘just war theory’ or messianic prophecy and other dances around issues of ‘having to do something’ to cover up their naked thrusts for power-no matter how misguided and even self-destructive such policies can be. The worst ones even believe this rhetoric is truth, and these both humanitarian charity workers and defense contractors alike enjoy the services of the best. Seen in this context, the recent American airstrikes in Syria are a type of ritualistic bloodletting, the ceremonial reminder of international hierarchy for audiences both and home and abroad. Though I increasingly suspect their effectiveness is waning-but more abroad than at home. Much as the historical record in Mesoamerica shows that as the states began to come off their height of power, their sacrifices for public spectacle only increased until they couldn’t anymore. No one needs more reassurance that the hierarchy stands than those in decline. One fears for the future if present trends continue. Even if you change the government, the Democrats too have shown their propensity to love virtue signalling by cruise missile.

In such a situation, a firm line must be drawn. I do not simply *disagree* with those who support further or continued intervention in Syria, I despise them. They are my enemy. I wish them ill not only professionally but also personally. They have had seven years to realize the errors of their ways and if they have not done so yet, nor noticed the accurate depictions of those of us who have consistently predicted how the conflict would go, only to be ignored as the same talking heads who championed Iraq and Libya argue for another go on specious intelligence. They have chosen their camp and they are not to be reasoned out of it as they are clearly not motivated by reason. They are incapable of performing any kind of cost/benefit analysis-which is the real key to informed political views- and thus are nothing but ideologues. For any improvement to be made they must be confronted, shown to be the hollow shouters they are, and utterly disrespected at every turn. Those of us opposed to the neocons, Bolton, Kristol, Rubio, and the like, should make their opinions on these issues as loathsome and shameful in the public sphere as once happened to their forebears. This is The Decider Issues at work.

As a notable aside, Rubio is wrong on both of these Decider Issues of mine. In fact, I have generally taken the view that Rubio is always wrong on everything-and that if he has an opinion it must be wrong no matter what it is. Just as once my greatest political moment was seeing Rick Santorum’s kids cry on live tv as he lost his senate re-election, so too do I long for the day when Rubio, Power, and their ilk mope pathetically as they realize their time is over.

P.S. Considering that conservatives have lost the cultural war on gay rights issues (for now), I am far less bothered by temporary alliances with paleocons for mutual foreign policy interests than I am the general Democrat trend of allying with neocons and the Beltway War Lobby but being woke on social issues. Its easy to be ‘woke’, and often politicians do it performatively anyway. It is much harder to strike against the established moneybags of Big Defense and Gulf lobbyists. Hence the picture used for this post which might as well be the new MSNBC logo.