Gay Pride is Asymmetric Exhibitionism

Why a closet for me and not for thee?

I recently published an article pushing back on my friend John Arcto’s view that gay marriage should be a “red line” for the modern right. I think my arguments were very strong (and they inspired even better insights from people in the comments section), so I am putting the gay marriage issue to bed for now, as it doesn’t really animate me.

That said, I don’t want to leave the topic positioned as a “pro-gay right winger” either.

I can’t negotiate effectively with future interlocuters like Dave Greene if they can’t trust me to take a stand against obviously annoying aspects of the gay movement. And I certainly can’t have them suspecting that my high-minded talk of coalition building was merely a flimsy excuse for getting TracingWoodgrains to retweet me while engagement farming hot takes on substack dot com.

W.B. is a mischievous chap from time to time, but he’s certainly no cynical grifter!

The tricky thing is that on issues like surrogacy Greene and I actually are substantively opposed purely on the merits of the issue. And I actually will be quite cross with tradcaths if I ever marry a girl with fertility issues and these guys manage to ban IVF. On many issues there simply are intractable differences, and this has caused some of my podcast alumni to question whether overtures to Greene will be of any interest to him—and even whether I am truly a man of the right!

But I’ve also gotten enough of a feel for Greene as a thinker to understand that he actually does value effective rhetoric and an intelligent understanding of metapolitics. Meanwhile (as was mentioned in my initial article), our worldviews clearly overlap more than my own does with Trace’s. I suspect Greene and I just negatively polarized each other into a pissing match due to a misunderstanding borne of mostly aesthetic differences. At the absolute least, our mutual fondness for young Arcto suggests some dispositional overlap that could serve as a basis for future collaboration.

And since Greene is the latest person to be nice to me online, I feel enormously compelled to offer some support to traditionalists, and to show how I might be a useful coalition partner to them on issues where we can find common ground.

That’s because on at least some vital issues I think we are uniquely positioned to broadside Big Gay from both directions, like in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie:

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One really annoying thing about the gay movement—and particularly the idea of “gay pride”—is that it leads to a kind of asymmetric exhibitionism.

By this I mean that whenever a gayman mentions his “boyfriend,” or holds hands with a guy in public, he sort of forces me to think about the unconventional way he fucks. He is forcing me to experience a brief subliminal image of him engaging in anal sex with a sweaty dude with a gross hairy man ass. That doesn’t bother me too much because I grew up on 4chan, but to normie chud guys it’s sort of emotional terrorism.

The typical pushback to this idea (which I hear from Lisa Simpson-type straight women who project straight woman sensibilities onto gays, and not gays themselves) is that *I* am the weirdo for making it sexual, and a gayman mentioning his boyfriend is no different from me mentioning my girlfriend. This take is obviously retarded.

Homosexuality is meaningfully distinct from heterosexuality in its biomechanics, courtship rituals, cultural norms, and so on. It is a distinct sexual subculture with its own rules. Mentioning you have a boyfriend as a dude advertises your membership in this subculture in a way some people won’t like, particularly when it’s done around old people or more innocent women, and especially around kids.

Most of the people who dislike it are low openness, high conscientiousness normie types with a strong disgust reflex. But you are also going to piss off extremely high openness and low agreeableness heterosexual degenerates like myself, because you are essentially exploiting the gray area between homolove and homosex to engage in a sort of exhibitionism in a way that straight nonconformists aren’t really allowed to.

Dave Chappelle makes this point best:

If you are a straight guy with an intense fetish, or someone who engages in lifestyle BDSM, or somebody involved in a subculture like sugaring or swinging, your participation in these behaviors is as much part of your identity as a homosexual’s gender preference is for him. But it’s considered weird creepy sex pest behavior for a straight guy to bring these things up in public. If my girlfriend calls me “daddy” in Publix it’s entirely acceptable for some old lady to furrow her brow and chastise us. We can’t hide behind “we’re just in love~” manipulations of gullible straight women.

And it really is HR liberal straight women who object to this comparison in practice. Actual gay guys tend to be high openness sorts who understand the similarity and will typically agree with me. They realize that them saying “my boyfriend” isn’t the same as me saying “my girlfriend,” but is more comparable to me saying “my sugar baby” or “my slave” or “my little” or “daddy’s princess” or some shit. It turns heads.

When a guy says “my girlfriend” he isn’t offering any new information about himself that will make your mental model of him diverge from your model of the statistically average male. But saying “my boyfriend” or “daddy’s princess” advertises unabashed sexual nonconformity in a way that some people will find weird or groace, and that is why both I and the gayman are obligated to be more circumspect in our dealings with normies (particularly in family settings) than a sexual conformist.

Not everyone has to know how we fuck—especially more conservative types. And it shouldn’t even come up around old people or kids as a matter of simple courtesy.

And to be fair, a lot of gays are pretty private about it when operating in more conservative ecologies. These types understand the practical need to mask / code switch in mixed company, and might say this asymmetry works in my favor, as it is trivial for me and my girlfriend to present as conventional vanilla heterosexuals. A more conservative / monogamous gayman would probably LOVE to have my problem.

The thing is I find a lot of aspects of mainstream hetero dating culture just as repulsive as the idea of taking it up the ass. The way most straight men act around their girlfriend in public these days is incredibly neutered and off-putting, as is the casual acceptance of dating apps like Tinder, which are structurally designed for ghey guise and simply double the number of incels when adopted by straights.

I don’t want to go along with the “happy wife, happy life” culture of mainstream heterosexuality. It very much feels like pretending to be gay. I find it onerous and grating when I answer for my girlfriend in public and some hatched-faced virago snaps “I was talking to her!” But I don’t chimp out in these situations because I am a well-socialized and functional participant in modern civilization and I have made my peace with the practical need to mask in mixed company.

This makes it incredibly annoying to encounter the type of gay who aggressively demands the right to leave the closet but never thinks to advocate for nonconformist straight men. It’s true these types usually don’t go after us in the manner of incels / chuds / Lisa Simpson girls, but they seldom use their power and special protections to advocate for us in the way we advocated for them back in the 70s and 80s.

That feels like betrayal.

Either we all get to leave the closet together, or none of us should be allowed to.

And if you won’t aggressively have my back when radfems call me a rapist for dating a 23 year old, don’t expect any support from me if guys like Greene or Arcto find traction trying to push you back into the closet.

If anything I’ll be pulling you back in myself.