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:
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.
Interesting article, and I've enjoyed seeing your recent thought process unfold on this. Reading this one in particular, I can't help but feel that it's an excellent article from a conservative twenty years ago.
I realize many on the right aren't particularly wild about this, but the mundane reality of homosexuality in this day and age is that it is, in large chunks of society, vanilla—and it certainly feels that way to the median Pete Buttigieg gay dude. It doesn't turn heads, it doesn't feel like weird creepy sex pest behavior, it doesn't cause drama. In theory, I know some people have an issue when I say "my husband" (or, before, "my boyfriend") or hold hands in public. But it's a theoretical knowledge divorced from practical utility. It doesn't actually impact any part of my day-to-day experience in any measurable way. It's not something that comes up.
There has not been a single time in my personal life—in the military, in Utah, in Nebraska, anywhere—that it has caused the least stir or facially apparent awkwardness. Some right-wing sorts will attribute that purely to social pressure, and I'm sure that plays a role, but it plays a role in every sort of social nicety. In many ways, "things there is social pressure to act normal about" defines normality by definition.
In other words, I will actually have to play, in a way, the role of the Lisa Simpson–type straight woman you mention here. In an honest and a pragmatic way, I do think you're the weird one for making it sexual. The sexual elements are very (I would say obnoxiously) present in gay subculture! Those absolutely can and should be used as differentiators! But things like holding hands are not examples of it. "We're just in love~" might be annoying, but it's also simply true. As for sex? Nobody other than my husband knows or particularly should know the details of my sex life, because I'm a prude who does not care to discuss sex in public.
Sex norms are culturally malleable. It's an old canard, but showing ankles or unveiled heads can be unbearably sexual in some cultures. The project of deciding what is culturally appropriate and what is objectionable is a cultural one, with disputes between the sexual liberals and the sexual conservatives of each culture. In US/western culture as it stands, "normie-gay" activities like holding hands fall firmly on the "appropriate" side of the line, not as coincidence or as abrupt imposition but as the result of decades of cultural negotiation. There is neither a practical need nor a practical way for me to mask in mixed company, and it would be culturally Weird for me to do so.
I don't have any great love for mainstream culture nor any great disdain for alternatives. I can get along in a wide range of different cultures. If someone wants to make it more or less restrictive, in particular by demonstrating how their preferences can be turned towards prosocial or noble ends—by all means. I'll have my opinions, but I recognize the culture-forming process. But I'm not persuaded that short-circuiting the negotiation process with an obligation to aggressively advocate for anything and everything is prudent and, indeed, think it contributes to many of the trends you find distasteful.
For anyone unconventional: want respect? Be respectable. Make it easy to advocate for you and hard to advocate against you. Demonstrate your sanity and your prosociality; demonstrate that you can make your path work. This isn't special pleading—I aim to practice the same and encourage it in other gay men. But there is nothing prurient about holding hands or using the word "boyfriend" in public.
Agreed. A slit in the dress is so much sexier than seeing the whole thing. Tension is where it’s at.