Homosexuality

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.

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Why do white men’s feelings matter more than black lesbians’?

So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offense? She dared to complain about the presence of a person with a penis – what we used to call a bloke – in the women’s changing room. Ms. Hyman is a lesbian and a singer originally from the Bronx in New York. She says she encountered a man who identifies as a woman in the changing area of the gym she uses in LA. She was shaken. "I was naked in the locker room," she said. "I turn around and there’s a man there in boy clothes, lip gloss, standing there looking at me. I’m butt naked.

trans lesbians

The ‘Senate Twink’ lands in Oz

A surprising item from Down Under: Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the former Senate staffer who was fired after he and his partner filmed themselves in flagrante delicto on Amy Klobuchar’s desk in Hart 216, has resurfaced in Australia after touring the world. Maese-Czeropski gave an interview to the Gay Sydney News about the fallout from his December 2023 rendezvous – which readers of this newsletter were the first to learn about. Maese-Czeropski, who worked as a legislative assistant for then-senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, says he spent “a little bit in the psych ward” after his firing, before moving to Sydney by way of South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean. https://www.instagram.

Senate Twink Aidan Maese-Czeropski

What’s preventing a repeat of the Senate twink scandal?

Gay-PMG Grüezi from Switzerland, friends. A Cockburn spy was recently hoping to enjoy a quiet lunch at an Irish pub in Zurich’s Old Town when he was sat next to a large group of somewhat intoxicated KPMG Switzerland employees. It was quite the liquid lunch, with beers and wine flowing for hours and one staffer suggesting a round of shots, a move that was quickly rejected from the already too-far-gone group. One American employee of the firm was waxing lyrical about KPMG’s alleged hopelessly bigoted management.

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DC bar Political Pattie’s gets hazed for being bipartisan

A new DC bar dedicated to crossing partisan lines, “Political Pattie’s,” has taken the “political” out of its name... though Cockburn will note the removal is “temporary.” Owners Drew Benbow and Sydney Bradford dropped an Instagram post on Tuesday about their name and logo change, as the “representation of the red elephant was hurtful to the community.”  “Political Pattie’s aims to be a fun, inclusive space that pokes fun at politics, not the pain politics often causes,” the post read. The disclaimer and apology (or more accurately, apologia) came after “mean-spirited online backlash.” But here’s the tea: Benbow and Bradford bought out “the Dirty Goose,” an LGBTQ bar.

Political Pattie’s

It’s Kamala Harris’s brat summer!

Endorsements for Kamala Harris have been rolling quickly since Joe Biden announced his withdrawal — chief among that of British pop singer Charli xcx.  On Sunday, she tweeted "kamala IS brat," which racked up 18 million views. Chronically online Gen Z-ers have been creating meme compilations of Kamala with songs from Charli's brat album such as "von dutch" and "360" ever since Biden's disastrous debate performance last month made his demise look likely. https://twitter.com/ryanlong03/status/1808510079382982870 The cover of the album is neon green with "brat" written in lower case black letters. Harris and her campaign were quick to respond.

brat summer memes influencers

What the Pope really thinks about frociaggine in the Vatican

Pope Francis this week apologized for decrying the "frociaggine" — or "faggotry" — in the Vatican and in Catholic seminaries for the second time in a matter of weeks. On Tuesday in a private meeting, Francis mentioned the "air of faggotry" in the Vatican, which followed his May 20 comment that "nella chiesa c'è troppa aria di frociaggine" — "in our Church there is too much of an air of faggotry." The Spectator reached out to Frédéric Martel, an anchor at Radio France, a professor at the ZHdK University in Zurich and the author of twelve books, including In the Closet of the Vatican, his explosive New York Times bestseller about the widespread hypocritical homosexual behavior rife in the higher echelons of the Church.

frociaggine catholic church pope

‘God hates pride,’ from the Colorado GOP to you

“The month of June has arrived and, once again, the godless groomers in our society want to attack what is decent, holy, and righteous so they can ultimately harm our children.” After starting his Monday morning with a nice cup of tea, Cockburn was surprised to open his email and find this attack on the alphabet community from Dave Williams, chairman of Colorado Republicans. The email, which also had last year’s email pasted below, was short and aggressive: “Thank you, and as we said last year, together, we can protect our children and future... but only if you get involved and defend the most vulnerable in our society from these woke creeps.” A clip of Pastor Mark Driscoll's sermon was linked in the email, in which he engages in a cute object lesson.

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A history of the LGBTQ+ aspects of the Boy Scout movement

Today, gay activism may seem synonymous with incompetent nonprofit employees shutting down traffic to demand you use ze/zir pronouns because made-up pronouns, and only made-up pronouns, will fix global warming. But once upon a time, gays understood strategy better than nearly any other special-interest group in America. They were the best in the game. Sarah Schulman’s masterful AIDS history, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT Up New York, 1987-1993, details how the HIV activist group ACT UP took a good-cop/bad-cop approach to fighting for life-saving medication.

Scouts

How progressive will the new Doctor Who be?

The fourteenth series of Doctor Who returns to international screens imminently — and this time there’s a twist. Thanks to the heavy financial investment of Disney+, who have become co-financiers with the BBC, the show now has a considerably higher budget than it has done before, of around $130 million per season. Little wonder that the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie commented, only slightly tongue in cheek, that “we’ve got to thank – a lot – our partners, Disney+, who came on board so that the Doctor can travel even more widely across the planet in a slightly flashier Tardis.

doctor who

Staffer filmed having gay sex in Senate office will not face charges

The Senate’s gay sex scandal started with a bang, but has ended with a whimper. This morning, the Capitol Police announced that they will not be pressing charges against Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the disgraced former Ben Cardin staffer filmed having sex with a male partner in the Hart Senate Office Building, as first reported by Cockburn. “For now, we are closing the investigation into the facts and circumstances surrounding a sex video that was recorded inside the Hart Senate Office Building on the morning of Wednesday, December 13,” the Capitol Police said in a statement. “Despite a likely violation of congressional policy — there is currently no evidence that a crime was committed.

hart senate gay sex

Kevin Spacey is finally free

This morning in a London court, a jury handed down a verdict. The actor Kevin Spacey stood accused of nine counts of sexual assault, which had sparked up in the aftermath of #MeToo; six years later, the jury acquitted him of all of them. Though he had remained stoic during the trial, he cried as the final “not guilty” was read aloud. The two-time Oscar winner, star of House of Cards and American Beauty, former artistic director of the famous Old Vic theater and reluctantly outed gay man was free. He turned sixty-four years old today.   To some, this is a massive miscarriage of justice.

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The new Rock Hudson doc shows the fun side of Hollywood’s Golden Age

There’s a quote often but falsely attributed to Oscar Wilde that reads: “Everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” It’s universal truth, but the attribution to Wilde is not incidental. It’s a line that could only come from a gay man. Certainly, there are boudoir power dynamics between men and women, but they’re directed outward; at somebody whose attraction comes necessarily through their difference from yourself. But to love men, as a man, is a constant form of self-evaluation. As Daniel Mendelsohn best captured in The Elusive Embrace: When men have sex with women, they fall into the woman. She is the thing that they desire, or sometimes fear, but in any event she is the end point, the place where they are going. She is the destination.

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Men at War examines homosexuality among World War Two soldiers

As a little boy, Luke Turner, like so many other little boys, was fascinated by World War Two. He used to spend hours carefully making Airfix models of warplanes, and his favorite haunt was the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon, a suburb of North London. Men at War, his second book, is an attempt to explore and explain both this interest and his own sexuality (he is bisexual, with a female partner), in response to what he sees as the dominant, jingoistic attitude propagated via general British cultural discourse. He claims that we do not see those who fought as individuals, but as clipped, heroic avatars, like Captain Sir Tom Moore, who raised millions of pounds for NHS charities during the lockdowns: dignified, silent, brave.

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Is Mayor Francis Suarez too ‘woke’ for the GOP?

Miami mayor Francis Suarez is running for president, and his opponents already have plenty of attack ad images. The Cuban-American Republican with leading man style might have checked the boxes for an early 2010s GOP. Now it’s 2023 — and it seems no one told Suave Suarez that posing with a Pride flag-emblazoned mayoral sash is way out of style. Suarez’s Twitter feed is littered with rainbow flag paraphernalia. In June 2021, Suarez posted a video pledging Miami’s support of Pride Month. https://twitter.com/FrancisSuarez/status/1403449097453985798 The year prior, Suarez signed an “LGBTQ ordinance” to recognize “the decades of contributions by the LGBTQ Miami residents to the economy and diversity of the city!

francis suarez pride

Has Mark Meadows shopped Trump to the Justice Department?

The speculation in Trumpworld surrounding Mark Meadows, and whether the former congressman and White House chief of staff handed Special Counsel Jack Smith the tools he needed to indict the former president, continues to rise.  It’s already known that Meadows’s staff was the source of an audio recording where the former president made comments about the classified documents he took from the White House — they recorded an interview in July 2021 at Bedminster for Meadows’s memoir about his time in the White House, The Chief’s Chief, which you can purchase at Amazon in hardcover for a very modest $8.07. Trump discussed a document, one that he said he ought to have declassified before leaving the White House, about potentially attacking Iran.

mark meadows

Behind the ludicrous travel advisories deeming Florida ‘hostile’ to minorities

Three prominent civil rights organizations in America have launched what appear to be coordinated attacks designed to hobble both Florida’s critical tourism industry and Governor Ron DeSantis’s impending campaign for president.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, and Equality Florida, an LGBT advocacy group, issued advisories warning travelers of the dangers of visiting Florida, a state one Democratic strategist says is becoming a “terrorist state.” The attacks will likely fail, but they illustrate how these groups now function solely as advocates for the narrow interests of the Democratic Party, rather than the interest of the groups they purport to champion.

travel advisories

Forbidden love in the Great War

Alice Winn’s beautifully written and engrossing debut, In Memoriam, comes hot on the heels of Tom Crewe’s debut The New Life, which followed the tortured relationship between two men at the turn of the century, and was loosely based on the life of the scholar John Addington Symonds. Winn has turned her impressively attuned eye to World War One, and two young men who fall in love at their public school (old money, military and aristocratic connections, tailcoats and buggery), before heading off to the front; the flower of their generation, doomed to die as the mechanistic future tears apart chivalric ideals, and society starts to question its very nature.

Winn memoriam

Tom Crewe’s The New Life is sophisticated, intelligent and gripping

Tom Crewe’s highly accomplished debut novel, The New Life, concerns the suppression of sexual feelings, and how utopian visions can falter when they come up against cold hard reality. It begins with John Addington (closely, though not entirely, based on the nineteenth-century man of letters John Addington Symonds), fantasizing about a homosexual encounter in a London underground train. The carriage is crammed: a man is pressing his buttocks into John’s crotch; John’s excitement cannot be concealed; soon they are in the throes of passion, despite the crowds around them. It’s a claustrophobic, tense, almost nightmarish scene, executed with minute attention to detail.

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Hoover damned

When J. Edgar Hoover died in May 1972 at seventy-seven, he had been director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for forty-eight years, ever since progressive attorney general Harlan Fiske Stone had promoted the then-obscure twenty-nine-year-old Justice Department bureaucrat in 1924. With fewer than 400 agents, limited responsibilities, and a reputation badly tarnished under a corrupt previous attorney general, what was then called the Bureau of Investigation offered modest prospects. Still, the new boss set out to clean house, institute stringent hiring standards and impose a culture of science-based crime-fighting on his federal agents. One new hire in 1928 was Clyde A.

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