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Some gay Tories marched for pride when people like Jacob, who tweeted this, were infants. You and your ilk don’t own my mind, Jacob, no more than any other bigot owns my desire. So it’s tempting to retort: stay in your self-dug hole, and scream at the sky, and call that “Pride” if you like; the rest of us are free to stand in the sun and laugh.
Gay Tories are traitors.
Yes, there are many individual members of the Conservative party who support LGBTQ rights in some form or another, but the party as a whole has always stood in the way of queer liberation.
Just felt the need to say that in the run up to London Pride.
— Jacob Trueman (@TheJacobTrueman) June 26, 2018
Tempting, but insufficient. The propaganda from the Left against gay Tories is relentless (remember Munroe Bergdof?), and it means something, way more than simple disagreement over voting choice. My intuition is that the origin of the “you can’t be gay and a Tory” propaganda — and the rationale for its viciousness — is to be found in the linked propaganda against the words “lesbian” and “gay” themselves.
Don’t believe me? Visit the homepage of Pride in London and do a search for “lesbian”: no matches. Gay men and lesbian women are being written out of the official transcript of 21st-century homosexual British life. It’s not wrong to wonder “why?”
I’m aware of the potential irony, here, in a gay man complaining about usage of the word ‘gay’. The point is that the word itself is being deleted, along with the noun to which it refers; ‘LGBTQ’ is not a new synonym for ‘gay’. I am a gay man, not an ‘LGBTQ’ one; ‘LGBTQ’ is a political identity, not a sexual one (and ‘queer’ is a word I’d recommend not to apply to me, not within earshot.)
To understand why this is happening, ask any woman — gay, straight, Left or Right — who queries the demands of some transgender lobby groups that gender no longer be defined as anything to do with innate biology. (Note: my ire is aimed at lobby groups, not people, all of whom deserve dignity and respect.) Such pressure leads at best to the farce of charities targeting their cervical cancer campaigns at ‘human beings with a womb’, rather than ‘women’; at worst to the abomination of rapists self-defining as women in order to be moved from male to female prisons. And the women who question this are monstered, de-platformed, vilified, censored: the attempt to silence their (very mainstream) opinions is as alarming as it’s informative.
And so the propaganda; thus the sly elision, between transgenderism and the quite distinct psychosexual construct, homosexuality. Attach the ‘T’ to the ‘L’, ‘B’ and ‘G’ and hey presto: a ready-made vehicle to drive at anyone whose perspective on gender doesn’t conform to the lobbyists’ insistence. Because fail to conform and by re-definition you’re homophobic, even if your best mate’s gay and you cried when he finally got married.
If my theory is correct, we also have an explanation for the special fury with which gay Conservatives are treated by the Left-wing LGBTQ ‘community’. Let’s get personal. The most important day of my life was indeed my wedding. Viewed from within my head and my heart: the universe exploded, scattering stars across the heavens, where they collided and fell back into singularity, all at the instant he said “I do”. From the outside, however: nothing out of the ordinary happened. Two guys got married, like millions of couples do nearly every day of the year.
Liberation, at least for this Conservative, has been about normalisation. All those decades I marched, I chanted, I refused to pretend to be that which I’m not, I pushed however hard I could against whichever dickhead said I couldn’t, all to change society so that society could, more or less, stay the same.
Other gay people have different objectives; that’s fine. We’re no more politically homogenous than any other random sample of citizens. Or, at least, we oughtn’t to be. With the rise of the new bigots, however, fuelled by lobbyists who’ve hijacked the normalisation success achieved by gay people, in order to push an agenda we may or may not share, the drive to conformity is strong.
Well, not in my name, buster. You don’t get to write my politics because you know that I sleep with a man, and you don’t get to erase my sexuality because my politics don’t align with your own. But watch out: gay people, like Jewish citizens, are the canaries in any liberal society’s mine. Freedom’s enemies always, always, come for us first. (“Use the back door, Smeeth” is from the same style-sheet as “Gay Tories are traitors”.) Once we’ve been dealt with — once our political identities have been strangled to death — whose turn do you think will be next?
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