Gay

Friday

Cockburn

Milo Yiannopoulos holds forth on the origins of homosexuality 

Are we becoming “faggotized?” According to Milo Yiannopoulos “everything has gone gay” – food, music, fashion, showbiz and – significantly – politics. On a new installment of The Tucker Carlson Show the former Breitbart journalist and Kanye West consigliere set out his general theory of male homosexuality.  Male gayness is not something you were born with, argued Milo, but is instead a “set of behaviors” caused by something misfiring about a man’s relationship with masculinity at an early age. For this devouring mothers or “nebbish fathers” are usually to blame; indeed, much of the rest of a male gay’s life can be seen as an elaborate attempt to get revenge on the parental figure who failed them.

milo tucker

Sunday

Ella Whelan

It’s hard to take Pride

For the entirety of June each year, companies and institutions go rainbow for Pride. But this year, social media seems a little less awash with multicoloured flags – and fewer and fewer companies have bothered with their annual logo change. Could it be that we have all, finally, tired of this mandatory rainbow charade? Donald Trump has certainly made his feelings known. World Pride was held in Washington DC this year. An awkward stage for the annual global celebration considering that when asked what his position was on Pride, Trump’s spokesperson said that the president was "fostering a sense of national pride that should be celebrated daily". Eek.

Pride

Wednesday

Ben Sixsmith

Dave Rubin’s lazy new book

I didn’t want to review Dave Rubin’s Don’t Burn This Country. One Dave Rubin book seemed like enough — arguably too many — for a lifetime. Yet like a burglar who retires from his life of crime only to pass a mansion with its doors wide open and the glint of jewels beyond the hallway, I was pulled in again. Just one more job. In case anyone has never heard of Mr. Rubin, he is an interviewer and commentator who began as a mildly left-wing contributor to the Young Turks and then drifted towards the “anti-woke” realms of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” where his talk show became a hub of the phenomenon as he interviewed anyone and everyone who didn’t like “safe spaces” and blue-haired transsexuals.

Friday

Francesca Peacock

Ocean Vuong’s immature poetry

Time is a Mother — Ocean Vuong’s second poetry collection — should have been a scene-stealer, a much-awaited literary event of the type normally reserved for a J.K. Rowling. The collection has been talked about in the breathy, excited terms not normally associated with poetry — the least glitzy of the literary genres — and in a way not heard of since the blockbuster release of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998). Vuong, rightly, won the T.S. Eliot prize in 2017 with Night Sky With Exit Wounds. The collection had flashes of brilliance and was a mark of a young poet making his way in the world. It also won the Forward Prize for best first collection, and, in 2019, Vuong was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant.

Friday

Chadwick Moore

When Joy Reid was an anti-gay witch hunter

MSNBC host Joy Reid claims she hates Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, aimed at stopping public school teachers from teaching young children about sexual orientation and gender identity. But the Joy Reid of 2009 was all about hating on gays and would have championed this bill wholeheartedly. Here’s what we know so far about the Joy Reid hacking scandal: after Reid's homophobic blog posts dating from 2007 to 2009 were uncovered and published by Mediate in 2018, Reid deployed a hired gun to claim her blog had potentially been hacked. This claim by an “independent security consultant” was amplified by NBC News’s press agents.

Wednesday

Ed Shaw

What would a conversion therapy ban mean for gay Christians like me?

From our UK edition

As a gay Christian, I'm worried about the calls to ban 'gay conversion therapy'. Of course, it's right that gay people are protected and some of the practices referred to as conversion therapy are deeply wrong. But there's a danger that  badly-drafted legislation could make life impossible for those working in churches when gay people come to us for help. I’ve worked on the staff of Anglican churches for twenty years. Over that time the people I have served have asked to talk and pray with me about their families, workplaces, dreams, failures, marriages, singleness, finances, addictions, sexualities, gender – and more. I have heard it all, but have welcomed each unique human being, and the chance to try and help them as best I can.

Thursday

Julie Burchill

What’s happened to all the lesbians?

From our UK edition

As a proud resident of Sussex, I had to laugh when I heard that Facebook had threatened to ban references to Devil’s Dyke — the 100-metre-deep South Downs valley which has been a tourist attraction since Victorian times — for ‘violating community standards on hate speech’. The touchy bots even slapped a 48-hour ban on a man who posted a photo of a bus bearing the beauty spot’s name as a destination with the caption ‘Heading up to the Dyke’. It’s nutty, but it sparked a serious thought: where have all the lesbians gone? Just the other week the lesbian Joanna Cherry was sacked as the SNP’s Westminster spokesperson for not being ‘inclusive’ enough over the issue of gender recognition.

Nushy Rose

Why have all my boyfriends turned gay?

From our UK edition

Until August last year, I’d pretty much been in back to back relationships for the previous seven years. The guys I dated varied in height, race, age, style and personality. But one thing linked them together. What? Almost all turned out to be gay. And the few that weren’t would rather sleep in their jeans than sleep with me. There was the boyfriend that broke down crying in the car after we’d been to see a drag queen cabaret. During a song about the struggle of coming out to parents on a London council estate, my ex had given my hand a meaningful squeeze. Little did I know how much he empathised with the performance. Three days later I was the one crying in Soho, when he broke up with me citing communication issues.

Sunday

Debbie Hayton

Is the past being rewritten in LGBT+ history month?

From our UK edition

Did you know that February is LGBT+ history month? If you have a 'progressive' employer you probably do. Banks, universities, local councils, NHS services and train operators are all getting on board. Rainbow flags are flying high above buildings across Britain. But do lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people really need their own month to reflect on the past? Or is this more an occasion to virtue signal in the present? To be fair to the Bank of England, when it raised the rainbow flag on Threadneedle Street on 1 February, it was also commemorating Alan Turing. A war hero, who was gay, it is believed Turing took his own life after undergoing chemical castration following his 1952 conviction for 'gross indecency'.

Monday

Andrew Sullivan

Where have all the lesbians gone?

From our UK edition

I miss lesbians. It is true that most homosexual men don’t have too many integrated in our lives, but most of us have a few. And we need them. They check our sometimes tenuous grasp of reality, they roll their eyes at our hedonism, they show us how marriages can last, and take care of us when we get sick. I generalise, of course. Many lesbians have little or nothing to do with men, including gay men. But there is a special chemistry between the men and women in the gay and lesbian worlds that it’s sad to see dissipate. Same-sex worlds can get unbalanced fast. We both need a bit of ballast from each other.