To be gay is to necessarily be defined by sexual attraction to your own sex. The idea that falling in love with someone requires that you consummate that love sexually is a lot of rationalization, in my opinion. The fact that most (all?) of these Unherd articles about gay culture are accompanied by a picture of two oily, shirtless men embracing makes it clear to me that gay dudes, when they read stories about gay dudes, like to see pictures of gay dudes because, you know, they like gay dudes. (I also have a theory that it’s a fairly transparent act of passive-aggression by homosexuals and their more militant advocates directed at heterosexuals who don’t like having to look at that kind of stuff, but I digress.) But sure, we’ll play along and act as if it’s about love and monogamy and family if it means we can quickly change the subject. (If I don’t get at least 40 downvotes, I’m cancelling my subscription.)
What a surprise to see our resident “manly man” prancing in to give his detailed thoughts about “gay dudes”!!!!
Its almost as if he’s really really interested in those pictures of topless oiled up guys embracing…
Ah yes, that old canard whereby any criticism of gay means you must be gay. By that same token you must be entertaining deeply erotic thoughts of a certain orange ex-president all oiled up and topless.
Is it ironic, or simply straightforwardly just, that reality, which must struggle for a definition in every other arena, find its paragon in the gay debate, based on mathematical stakes? While AIDS has helped homosexual love compete, or even win (on the romantic scale) where the consequences of love are death, it hasn’t a leg to stand on when those are life?
Mike Downing
10 days ago
As an alphabet person (yawn), I have to say that I don’t really think there’s any such thing as a ‘gay community’ or a ‘gay culture’. I accept the fact that gay people will always be in a minority and that really all they have in common is sexual attraction.
For instance, they have just as much in common with other outsiders as with each other. When faced with an existential threat such as AIDS, a communal response emerged but as the threat receded, so did those temporary bonds.
To be fair, gay ‘culture’ has been invented largely in the years since the 60’s so you’d hardly expect it to amount to much in that timescale. But, at its best, it is often interesting, entertaining and gives people in the heterosexual majority culture a different take on aspects of their lives that may be just as contradictory but seem ‘normal’ because they are just taken as read most of the time.
I’ve got no time for the endless pushing of an agenda at everybody and the fantasy rubbish being foisted on young children in the name of ‘equality’ and am as heartily sick of ‘Pride’ as anybody else. But for the sake of the youngsters in our society who will grow up to be gay and will always face a certain amount of discrimination, I wouldn’t want to go back to the ‘glorious past ‘ full of name calling and petty bullying.
As long as people can get on with their lives in their own way without too much hassle, that’s all anybody could reasonably expect and historically, is a fairly even break.
Interesting that although “botty-banditry” has been legal in England since 1967, both Mr William Wragg MP, and Mr Huw Edwards BBC, were both recently destroyed by the threat of exposure to the ‘court of public opinion’.
There’s “life in the old dog yet” as we used to say.
I think in Britain there was certain amount of turning the blind eye, live and let live. People were free to do what they wanted in their homes. Somerset Maughan, Harold Nicholson, Binkie Beaumont, Harold Nicholson, John Gielgud and many men employed in the antique/art world, theatre, ballet, classical music, fashion( Edward Molyneux) hair dressing were homosexual. In the Lord Peter Wimsey books athere are characters, set in the 1920s and 1930s who were homosexual, often living in Chelsea. Perhaps the influence of the USA in the period of 1940s to mid 1960s reduced the the amount turning a blind eye, live and let live approach to life. This was largely influenced because the traitors Burgess and Maclean were homosexual.
The American influence in Paris and London from post WW1 may have increased racism. It was Americans who objected to those of African descent in bars and hotels and because they were high spending clients, many owners aquiesced to their wishes. Orwell writes about the American influence in his essays. After all Nehru attended Harrow in 1905, Prince Ranji played cricket for Cambridge from the 1890s and made his test debut fro England in 1896 and many West Indians played cricket in Lancashire in the 1930s and were better paid than many factory workers.
I suggest if we want to discuss oppression we should start with industrial fatalities and injuries. Working in a mine or on a fishing boat killed far more people than working in a fashion house or in a theatre.
So you want to get back to Orthodox Marxism? Is this another one of those theories that Socialism only fails because it loses focus and turns into a distracted Identarian nightmare of group conflict.
Sorry but overly simplistic “Class Conflict” narratives about the “Capitalist Class, Land owning class, Bourgeoise and The 1%” are the root of Identity Politics. The inference is that these are narrow classifications when in fact, they are very broad. The broadness of the classifications inevitably leads to group balkanization.
You say “I suggest if we want to discuss oppression we should start with industrial fatalities and injuries. Working in a mine or on a fishing boat killed far more people than working in a fashion house or in a theatre.”
Do you not realize there would be no fashion house or a theatre without the work of fishermen or miners? The abundance that they provided created the material conditions of prosperity that gave people luxuries like theatre and fashion. Do you not think men were out there physically constructing theatres and stores? This idea that labor is inherently oppressive is blind to a functioning society.
Is it unfortunate that difficult work sometimes results in catastrophe? Absolutely but the idea that you will have less catastrophe with more State and less private industry is not reality. Absolute poverty is far more hazardous at scale than the risk of industrial accidents. Think about State policies of forced collectivization and the resulting Holodomor famine.
I find your opinion pragmatic, sensible, and refreshing. Nice to see someone with a realistic outlook who doesn’t get caught up in the political theater, and to be sure, the entire debate is mostly theater, given the small minority of people who actually are gay/lesbian/etc. I do like that on Unherd we get to hear from some actual gay/lesbian people rather than just talking heads pushing a political agenda or sympathetic types trying to satisfy their own sense of self-righteousness in defending the downtrodden.
I’ve always been of the opinion the ‘gay community’ and ‘gay culture’ was mostly an invention of the people who disapproved of homosexuality, many of whom didn’t actually care about homosexuality but were instead exploiting visceral reactions to generate publicity and/or political support. It was an exercise in exploiting tribalism. Nothing like setting up a straw man for the faithful to pelt with stones and rotten fruit. Makes a good spectacle for anybody who happens along and might want to join in the fun of putting down others to make themselves feel superior. Then of course the same was seized upon by the champions of minorities and grievance peddlers for the political and economic gain of their own side. What’s good for the goose after all. Long story short, what had been a social taboo that had always existed but was seldom discussed and usually ignored so long as it was kept private was gradually turned into an existential struggle for acceptance and rights and one of the supreme political struggles of our age. There never is a shortage of molehills to make into mountains I suppose.
Bernard Levin wrote an article aeons ago about this called ‘Gays go up, gays go down’ making the point that people use minorities to further their own agendas and frequently know nothing about them and care even less. So I totally agree with you on that.
In Ireland, literally within two days of the 2015 same-sex marriage referendum being passed, the activists who had worked for gay rights suddenly started shouting about trans issues, which were barely discussed before. To many gay Irish people, it looked like our only function had been as a useful soap-box, and once the job had been done the activists had to find a new soap-box, or risk getting a real job.
Obadiah B Long
11 days ago
As a side note, the principal fear-mongering scientist of the late 80s and early 90s was none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci.
AIDS was the original test run for Covid; a fear-inducing pandemic, emergency drug authorisation, a largely untested product, very little efficacy against the infection, some very nasty side effects (if you were positive but asymptomatic, the treatment AZT killed you faster than the disease as it was carcinogenic – and there are plenty of studies coming out now about the carcinogenic effect of the spike protein in MRNA vaccines) but a massive pay off with no come back.
They’re already salivating about the next pandemic or trying to give us all ‘preventative’ shots for our own safety.
The H5N1 bird flu, which has killed billions of birds worldwide, has already spread to some mammals and recently to some humans. It has a 52 percent fatality rate. That’s what happened in The Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed about 55 million people worldwide. But of course, a lot of people will brush it off. the Ebola panic freaked out people despite the fact that it is rather difficult to catch unless you are in close contact with an infected patient. Go figure.
You have raised the issue of diseases crossing the species boundary which is likely to have occurred with various types of VD. Once humans started living in settlements and domesticating animals there was an increase in disease.
It wasn’t AIDS that was the precursor of Covid it was T.B. People with T.B. were put under quarantine or sequestered, but not people with AIDS. https://www.cdc.gov/tb/programs/laws/menu/confinement.htm#administrativeOrder
People with less power, like immigrants who had T.B., were sometimes the ones to be put under movement restrictions, while gay men, having some political clout weren’t controlled in this way. Mary Mallon, for example, who was said to be a typhoid carrier was hunted down, captured and spent the rest of her life in prison. https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/tragedy-typhoid-mary
In other cases, there were wholesale arrests of thousands of mostly young and middle-aged women in the USA, the UK, and France, women who were out and about circa WWI were arrested on the off- chance they might be prostitutes or carry STD’s. They were given forced medical tests and kept under confinement, sometimes for years, with no real evidence of them having STD ‘s or spreading such. See The Trials of Nina McCall. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/books/review/scott-stern-trials-of-nina-mccall.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
The swine flu of circa 1919 wiped out millions as did the black plague. By comparison we seemed to have fared much better with restrictions around Covid, that is, except for the elderly in nursing homes who were the hardest hit and sustained a disproportionate number of fatalities.
Fauci told the public that if you had spent time in a room with a person who had AIDS you would get it as well. As a result undertakers refused to collect the deceased from their death beds. He is evil incarnate whose life spans two centuries. Claimed in the early 90s that he had found a cure for the disease at a conference in Amsterdam. Was exposed as a liar by two separate teams of scientists. One from the Netherlands and one from Israel. That he could make a carreer to his current post is truly unbelievable, unless one believes in the devil.
Graeme Archer
11 days ago
I think I’m just a few years older than Andrew. When he writes
One could say that the while the Aids crisis exacerbated the hatred and mistrust against an already beleaguered community, it also spurred activists onto the pathway to normalisation.
… I would say that he’s right and if anything this is an understatement. My (seared) memories of coming to early adulthood in the 1980s are a combination of terror (from the virus) and ecstasy (from liberation. Because the fear of death ultimately made me demand the right to seek a good life. And so even a Young Conservative from presbyterian Scotland knew that his one spell of existence – his sparrow in the cathedral – could not be spent in silent shame.)
All I ever wanted was to be normal. I knew that could never be achieved in the statistical sense – the proportion of any generation which is truly same-sex attracted is tiny. But I knew – as, I suspect, did Kramer – that the search for “virtual normality” (to paraphrase Andrew Sullivan’s excellent book) is just another way of saying “I search for the Good Life.” And most of us know – I believe this is hardwired into our genome – that for human animals, that Good Life means a search for pair-bonded monogamy. There is no bliss like it. I am even learning, in middle-age, to stop saying “pair-bonded monogamy” like the desiccated scientist I am, and start saying “marriage”.
The deviants who claimed that liberation was instead to be found in endless sexual nihilism – well, to quote Andrew’s teacher (and Kramer himself; I recall an interview where he used these very words): most of them are dead, now.
Alex Lekas
10 days ago
When you cut through the principals involved, you are left with the principle of activism irrespective of the cause: it exists for its own sake and that of those involved. Activism is not designed to address or resolve issues; it exists to perpetuate them. The old line about causes becoming businesses before degenerating into rackets resonates because it is true.
It’s how you have the grandchildren of black people who lived through the ‘colored only’ era in the US claiming that nothing has changed. It’s how feminism has become this weird caricature caught between pretending to struggle under the yoke of “the patriarchy” while also acting as if “woman” is some new word no one can define. And it’s why the list of allegedly aggrieved and offended minority groups keeps going to the point where collectively, they are a majority of the population.
Mark Vernon
10 days ago
“Many gay rights groups, of course, opposed same-sex marriage.”
Didn’t the call for justice move seamlessly from civil partnerships to gay weddings, in the UK at least? That marriage had been deemed patriarch etc didn’t seem to bother the activists and, personally, I thought a pause might be helpful, to learn from state prosecution to state recognition in barely a generation.
I wonder whether the situation now might be less of a mess if there’d been time to ask about sexuality and identity, as opposed to seeing it solely as a question of justice, though that’s no doubt naive wishful thinking. The politics was always engaged as a zero-sum game, on both sides.
Colorado UnHerd
10 days ago
Apart from the single mention of lesbians helping gay men during the AIDS crisis, we are conspicuously absent from this story on “gay” monogamy. Very little of what the public thought of as “gay” and which continues to be depicted as “gay” even today applies to lesbians who, last I looked, also are homosexual, just largely invisible by dint of being women. This is a gross generalization, but gay male partners have generally impressed me as men times two (read: a lot more emphasis on sex) and lesbians as women times two (a lot more emphasis on relationship). Our only obvious commonality has been attraction to our own sex and now largely disappeared discrimination on that basis.
I lived through the AIDS crisis, too, and witnessed how lesbians comforted and helped stricken gay men while many of their fearful own stayed away. It would be lovely if more gay men — in addition to the marvelous Andrew Sullivan — now repaid that solidarity by publicly opposing gender ideology. This cult disproportionately harms emerging gay youth of both sexes by convincing them they are instead trans. But it does particularly grievous harm to girls and women in efforts to erase their historical single-sex spaces, including but not limited to sports. On the bottom of the heap are lesbians, suffering the same trespass as straight females, but additionally pressured (and in some instances required) to admit trans-identified males to their social and sexual lives.
So true. Gay men (redundant) have never been inclusive of women/lesbians who are routinely referred to as “bleeders, breeders, b*tches, witches and fish” by many gay men. While there are some standout gay men like Andrew Doyle who consider women noteworthy, when it comes right down to it most men immersed in gay culture see women only useful as nurses, surrogates or beards.
Yes, that picture above.
Mother Nature has equiped us with that feeling of revulsion called disgust. I am fed up having to experience that squirm and churn of disgust and, in this rights-filled society, if I were to complain the answer would be “Tough – get over it …you hater”.
I just knew that jumping into the comments section will dispel the author’s claim that gay monogamy (and homosexuality, in general) has become normalised and accepted. It has not.
Even by the author’s words: “Those who bleat about their oppression as gay people in climate of widespread TOLERANCE are luxuriating in a kind of perverse nostalgia”, he is tacitly admitting society is not accepting of it, merely tolerating it. There is a distinction between the two.
I will concede that in most Western societies like the US, UK, and Australia, the laws have been updated so that homosexual relationships are given legitimacy, just like any heterosexual relationships. But surely, if you widen your scope to the rest of the world, one can see that there is still oppression of gay men and women. I doubt it if the author, being openly gay, will admit that if he and a straight counterpart were to travel to Dubai, Qatar, or Indonesia with strict laws on homosexuality, they will have equal considerations and anxieties about those destinations.
In Dubai, an unmarried couple caught engaging in sexual intercourse may be prosecuted. If you are a gay and unmarried couple, you face the double-whammy of having sex outside of marriage AND having gay sex.
I would argue that gay people who are living in Western societies, like the author, and who continue to claim that it’s all fine and dandy are the ones luxuriating in the myth that homosexuality is “unremarkable”. I hope they can see beyond their privileged positions and see that homosexuality is still in fact considered remarkable in so many countries, and not in a good way.
I think he is aware of it. I am not so sure he appreciates it as one should. Otherwise, he wouldn’t arrive to the conclusion that “homosexuality is unremarkable” or be critical of those who believe that gay people are still oppressed. At the very least, he would mention that his claim is only true for Western societies.
I am a fan of Doyle’s work on free speech and his pushback on the excesses of contemporary LGBT activism. But it is just untrue to say that gay people are not oppressed. And I must admit, I have a particular peeve about this and makes my hackles rise when I hear it.
Maybe his vision is clouded by living in the West. One could take your comment, substitute women for gays and have the same result. Western women still complain about how difficult their lives are in the EU and US, while ignoring how they would fare in, say, Saudi Arabia or Gaza, or those other places whose cause they have taken up.
I really don’t think he intended to make any comment about non-western places.
UnHerd Reader
10 days ago
Is it ironic, or only straightforwardly just, that reality, while it must struggle for a definition in every other arena, stumbles upon an unequivocal one in the gay debate? Thanks to AIDS we are free to romanticise the consequences of love as death… rather than life.
Allison Barrows
10 days ago
Frankly, I don’t want to hear about anyone’s sex life. It’s none of my business.
Kelly Madden
10 days ago
“Gay monogamy is no longer seen as an oxymoron.”
But isn’t it an oxymoron, in fact? In other words, isn’t this just linguistic slight-of-hand?
Statistics are hard to find, but the evidence indicates that half of gay marriages, minimum, are “open marriages.”
I worked at one time for several years in the early ’00s in a place where LGBTQ+ people represented at least 50% of employees. Monogamy, as heterosexuals understand it, was non-existent. I’m still in touch with many of the friends I made there, and open marriages–a decade after the legalization of gay marriage–are still the majority.
Honestly, while I couldn’t care less what sort of lifestyle people choose–as long as it harms no one else–declarations that legalizing gay marriage means gay spouses have adopted the same behaviors as cis spouses are simply untrue.
Why all this may be, I have no idea. Nor do I wish to denigrate anyone’s choice of lifestyle. But, it is disingenuous of us all to ignore the fact that LGBTQ+ relationships are–as a whole–simply different from traditional marriages.
And it will probably always be so.
This is the ‘bathhouse theory of sex’; that gay men only went to bathhouses because they didn’t have the same rights as heterosexuals. Well this may be partly true, but of course they also went there because it was fun, exciting and a form of socialising to boot.
So you’re right; homosexual relationships will probably always be different to heterosexual ones as, by and large, children aren’t involved, they have lots of money and time to spend and two male sex drives at work.
I myself was quite happy with Civil Partnerships and can’t see the point of gay marriage. It was just an ‘equality’ fight, keeping up with the Joneses.
Gay life in a big city is very different from gay life in small towns and rural settings, where many gay couple choose to live specifically to avoid the ‘open marriage’ atmosphere of urban gay circles.
Caroline Ayers
10 days ago
Great article Andrew – thank you! I love your work. Keep it up.That’s making me giggle but basically I just want to say you have a fine mind, you are brave and you tell the truth. So actually I love you.
Arthur King
10 days ago
Promiscuity eventually meets reality … syphilis is now widespread. And with widespread treatment will likely mutate. Oh and monkey pox. Oh, and treatment resistant gonnorhea.
D. Gooch
10 days ago
“Many gay rights groups, of course, opposed same-sex marriage. To them, it was a way to control gay people, to bring them within the same heteronormative yoke that dominated the rest of society.”
I lived in the U.S. and Canada over these years and I don’t recall ever hearing of a gay group opposing same-sex marriage. Does the writer have any examples to back-up this claim?
Also, since when is it “Aids?” It’s “AIDS.”
Ardath Blauvelt
10 days ago
LGBTQ…… acceptance is quickly being compared to being “color blind”. Be careful what you wish for….
Steven Howard
10 days ago
As a straight man, I enjoy that all the gay unherd articles have sexy gay photos in them. It bothers me, and then it makes me realize I was bothered, and then it makes me think.
LeeKC C
10 days ago
Im very bored by all this stuff. I’m so sick of the bleating in the gay community in general. It has become a religion. What makes me laugh and feel some derision is the ‘prideful’ peacocking – pushing their sexuality front and centre and almost in everyone’s face. That, is your identity.. . Do you have no other? Rather shallow in my view.
Where once l supported, l am now indifferent. Everyone else gets on with life. Perhaps about time you lot do too. No one cares anymore.
LeeKC C
10 days ago
I would like to add one more comment to this.
Perhaps in the discourse of ‘gay’ becoming widely accepted and as you said becoming part of society no longer deems you ‘special’ or different – perhaps can l dare to point out that maybe there is a fear amongst this also. If you ( LGBTQI) are to live as accepted amongst all of us, as society, then does not then mean that you all must adhere to societies laws. Does that not also deem you open to scrutiny like everyone else. To conform to the more widely held social contract. I know many gay men, spoken to them and had some interesting conversations. As ‘men” and humans, you, like everyone else in society have people amongst you, whose intentions and actions would be deemed questionable. Speaking with some younger gay men, some speak of some of the dangers and damage also done. What some think should be acceptable where others do not. In my estimation, relationships, power, sexual mores, coercion, consent, expectations etc are rife with the same old moral calamities that all humans face.
Perhaps, like the rest of our sexual landscape, it would require an element of conforming in public.
I.e. toning down the ‘in your face’ sexuality that hetero’s are and would be shamed for. No one cares about consenting adults behind closed doors but l sure do give a damn in public with my children. It is behaviour, not sexual orientation, with children, around children, in public that matters.
Like the rest of us.
M. Jamieson
9 days ago
I’m not sure that I agree with Doyle’s observation that disust at those of a differernt sexuality seems to be hardwired. Perhaps it’s true for some people, but I don’t really think all.
I do suspect that there may be something of a hardwired disgust for extreme sexual licentiousness, maybe particularly among women. I don’t think that should be a surprise. Totally apart from the social dangers that come from unhindered sexual desire, particularly for women, it is a huge vector for disease. Not just AIDS, sexual infections of one kind or another have been around forever, and the more promiscuous a society is, the more varied and virulent they are likely to be. And ultimately these things will affect the childbearing population and children too. So no wonder women might be biologically primed to avoid them.
Gay men, as Doyle describes, unhindered by the more conservative sexual choices of women, are always more likely to display that kind of risky sexual behaviour. Despite the attempts in previous decades to depict that as a product of marginalization and lack of access to marriage, it looks now like those things weren’t the cause after all.
UnHerd Reader
11 days ago
“ But at least to be gay is no longer defined solely by the sexual act, and that for one man to fall in love with another is widely considered to be an unexceptional fact of life.”
For one man to fall widely in love with another is considered to be normal? Only amongst the gay community.
Sex is NOT love. Just ask Randy Steve Kraft, Ron Jeremy or Derrick Todd Lee. Why do some people try so hard to conflate the two. Is it to put the gloss of mutual caring on the activity? B.S.
To be gay is to necessarily be defined by sexual attraction to your own sex. The idea that falling in love with someone requires that you consummate that love sexually is a lot of rationalization, in my opinion. The fact that most (all?) of these Unherd articles about gay culture are accompanied by a picture of two oily, shirtless men embracing makes it clear to me that gay dudes, when they read stories about gay dudes, like to see pictures of gay dudes because, you know, they like gay dudes. (I also have a theory that it’s a fairly transparent act of passive-aggression by homosexuals and their more militant advocates directed at heterosexuals who don’t like having to look at that kind of stuff, but I digress.) But sure, we’ll play along and act as if it’s about love and monogamy and family if it means we can quickly change the subject. (If I don’t get at least 40 downvotes, I’m cancelling my subscription.)
What a surprise to see our resident “manly man” prancing in to give his detailed thoughts about “gay dudes”!!!!
Its almost as if he’s really really interested in those pictures of topless oiled up guys embracing…
Ah yes, that old canard whereby any criticism of gay means you must be gay. By that same token you must be entertaining deeply erotic thoughts of a certain orange ex-president all oiled up and topless.
Heh
There goes my breakfast!
Thanks. How am I going to get that picture out of my mind? Gross.
I’m worried about you.
That’s not very manly of you…
There isn’t a more profound expression of masculinity than the desire to protect the weak.
Possibly. But that’s not what you said.
For a “manly man” you really don’t seem to understand masculinity very well!
Is it ironic, or simply straightforwardly just, that reality, which must struggle for a definition in every other arena, find its paragon in the gay debate, based on mathematical stakes? While AIDS has helped homosexual love compete, or even win (on the romantic scale) where the consequences of love are death, it hasn’t a leg to stand on when those are life?
As an alphabet person (yawn), I have to say that I don’t really think there’s any such thing as a ‘gay community’ or a ‘gay culture’. I accept the fact that gay people will always be in a minority and that really all they have in common is sexual attraction.
For instance, they have just as much in common with other outsiders as with each other. When faced with an existential threat such as AIDS, a communal response emerged but as the threat receded, so did those temporary bonds.
To be fair, gay ‘culture’ has been invented largely in the years since the 60’s so you’d hardly expect it to amount to much in that timescale. But, at its best, it is often interesting, entertaining and gives people in the heterosexual majority culture a different take on aspects of their lives that may be just as contradictory but seem ‘normal’ because they are just taken as read most of the time.
I’ve got no time for the endless pushing of an agenda at everybody and the fantasy rubbish being foisted on young children in the name of ‘equality’ and am as heartily sick of ‘Pride’ as anybody else. But for the sake of the youngsters in our society who will grow up to be gay and will always face a certain amount of discrimination, I wouldn’t want to go back to the ‘glorious past ‘ full of name calling and petty bullying.
As long as people can get on with their lives in their own way without too much hassle, that’s all anybody could reasonably expect and historically, is a fairly even break.
What an excellent synopsis, thank you.
Interesting that although “botty-banditry” has been legal in England since 1967, both Mr William Wragg MP, and Mr Huw Edwards BBC, were both recently destroyed by the threat of exposure to the ‘court of public opinion’.
There’s “life in the old dog yet” as we used to say.
I think in Britain there was certain amount of turning the blind eye, live and let live. People were free to do what they wanted in their homes. Somerset Maughan, Harold Nicholson, Binkie Beaumont, Harold Nicholson, John Gielgud and many men employed in the antique/art world, theatre, ballet, classical music, fashion( Edward Molyneux) hair dressing were homosexual. In the Lord Peter Wimsey books athere are characters, set in the 1920s and 1930s who were homosexual, often living in Chelsea. Perhaps the influence of the USA in the period of 1940s to mid 1960s reduced the the amount turning a blind eye, live and let live approach to life. This was largely influenced because the traitors Burgess and Maclean were homosexual.
The American influence in Paris and London from post WW1 may have increased racism. It was Americans who objected to those of African descent in bars and hotels and because they were high spending clients, many owners aquiesced to their wishes. Orwell writes about the American influence in his essays. After all Nehru attended Harrow in 1905, Prince Ranji played cricket for Cambridge from the 1890s and made his test debut fro England in 1896 and many West Indians played cricket in Lancashire in the 1930s and were better paid than many factory workers.
I suggest if we want to discuss oppression we should start with industrial fatalities and injuries. Working in a mine or on a fishing boat killed far more people than working in a fashion house or in a theatre.
So you want to get back to Orthodox Marxism? Is this another one of those theories that Socialism only fails because it loses focus and turns into a distracted Identarian nightmare of group conflict.
Sorry but overly simplistic “Class Conflict” narratives about the “Capitalist Class, Land owning class, Bourgeoise and The 1%” are the root of Identity Politics. The inference is that these are narrow classifications when in fact, they are very broad. The broadness of the classifications inevitably leads to group balkanization.
Lancashire Coalfield – Wikipedia
Aberfan disaster , 116 children killed.
One does not need rescue station in a shop.
Boothstown Mines Rescue Station – Wikipedia
Aberfan disaster – Wikipedia
Penlee lifeboat disaster – Wikipedia
You say “I suggest if we want to discuss oppression we should start with industrial fatalities and injuries. Working in a mine or on a fishing boat killed far more people than working in a fashion house or in a theatre.”
Do you not realize there would be no fashion house or a theatre without the work of fishermen or miners? The abundance that they provided created the material conditions of prosperity that gave people luxuries like theatre and fashion. Do you not think men were out there physically constructing theatres and stores? This idea that labor is inherently oppressive is blind to a functioning society.
Is it unfortunate that difficult work sometimes results in catastrophe? Absolutely but the idea that you will have less catastrophe with more State and less private industry is not reality. Absolute poverty is far more hazardous at scale than the risk of industrial accidents. Think about State policies of forced collectivization and the resulting Holodomor famine.
You have the wrong end of the stick.
Communism is Tent City Economics.
I find your opinion pragmatic, sensible, and refreshing. Nice to see someone with a realistic outlook who doesn’t get caught up in the political theater, and to be sure, the entire debate is mostly theater, given the small minority of people who actually are gay/lesbian/etc. I do like that on Unherd we get to hear from some actual gay/lesbian people rather than just talking heads pushing a political agenda or sympathetic types trying to satisfy their own sense of self-righteousness in defending the downtrodden.
I’ve always been of the opinion the ‘gay community’ and ‘gay culture’ was mostly an invention of the people who disapproved of homosexuality, many of whom didn’t actually care about homosexuality but were instead exploiting visceral reactions to generate publicity and/or political support. It was an exercise in exploiting tribalism. Nothing like setting up a straw man for the faithful to pelt with stones and rotten fruit. Makes a good spectacle for anybody who happens along and might want to join in the fun of putting down others to make themselves feel superior. Then of course the same was seized upon by the champions of minorities and grievance peddlers for the political and economic gain of their own side. What’s good for the goose after all. Long story short, what had been a social taboo that had always existed but was seldom discussed and usually ignored so long as it was kept private was gradually turned into an existential struggle for acceptance and rights and one of the supreme political struggles of our age. There never is a shortage of molehills to make into mountains I suppose.
Bernard Levin wrote an article aeons ago about this called ‘Gays go up, gays go down’ making the point that people use minorities to further their own agendas and frequently know nothing about them and care even less. So I totally agree with you on that.
In Ireland, literally within two days of the 2015 same-sex marriage referendum being passed, the activists who had worked for gay rights suddenly started shouting about trans issues, which were barely discussed before. To many gay Irish people, it looked like our only function had been as a useful soap-box, and once the job had been done the activists had to find a new soap-box, or risk getting a real job.
As a side note, the principal fear-mongering scientist of the late 80s and early 90s was none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci.
You read that on Breitbart?
On PBS of all places, a news channel well known for its illiberal far-right views: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/how-dr-fauci-handled-aids-crisis-jexipk/26361/
AIDS was the original test run for Covid; a fear-inducing pandemic, emergency drug authorisation, a largely untested product, very little efficacy against the infection, some very nasty side effects (if you were positive but asymptomatic, the treatment AZT killed you faster than the disease as it was carcinogenic – and there are plenty of studies coming out now about the carcinogenic effect of the spike protein in MRNA vaccines) but a massive pay off with no come back.
They’re already salivating about the next pandemic or trying to give us all ‘preventative’ shots for our own safety.
The H5N1 bird flu, which has killed billions of birds worldwide, has already spread to some mammals and recently to some humans. It has a 52 percent fatality rate. That’s what happened in The Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed about 55 million people worldwide. But of course, a lot of people will brush it off. the Ebola panic freaked out people despite the fact that it is rather difficult to catch unless you are in close contact with an infected patient. Go figure.
You have raised the issue of diseases crossing the species boundary which is likely to have occurred with various types of VD. Once humans started living in settlements and domesticating animals there was an increase in disease.
It wasn’t AIDS that was the precursor of Covid it was T.B. People with T.B. were put under quarantine or sequestered, but not people with AIDS.
https://www.cdc.gov/tb/programs/laws/menu/confinement.htm#administrativeOrder
People with less power, like immigrants who had T.B., were sometimes the ones to be put under movement restrictions, while gay men, having some political clout weren’t controlled in this way. Mary Mallon, for example, who was said to be a typhoid carrier was hunted down, captured and spent the rest of her life in prison.
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/tragedy-typhoid-mary
In other cases, there were wholesale arrests of thousands of mostly young and middle-aged women in the USA, the UK, and France, women who were out and about circa WWI were arrested on the off- chance they might be prostitutes or carry STD’s. They were given forced medical tests and kept under confinement, sometimes for years, with no real evidence of them having STD ‘s or spreading such. See The Trials of Nina McCall. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/books/review/scott-stern-trials-of-nina-mccall.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
The swine flu of circa 1919 wiped out millions as did the black plague. By comparison we seemed to have fared much better with restrictions around Covid, that is, except for the elderly in nursing homes who were the hardest hit and sustained a disproportionate number of fatalities.
Fauci told the public that if you had spent time in a room with a person who had AIDS you would get it as well. As a result undertakers refused to collect the deceased from their death beds. He is evil incarnate whose life spans two centuries. Claimed in the early 90s that he had found a cure for the disease at a conference in Amsterdam. Was exposed as a liar by two separate teams of scientists. One from the Netherlands and one from Israel. That he could make a carreer to his current post is truly unbelievable, unless one believes in the devil.
I think I’m just a few years older than Andrew. When he writes
… I would say that he’s right and if anything this is an understatement. My (seared) memories of coming to early adulthood in the 1980s are a combination of terror (from the virus) and ecstasy (from liberation. Because the fear of death ultimately made me demand the right to seek a good life. And so even a Young Conservative from presbyterian Scotland knew that his one spell of existence – his sparrow in the cathedral – could not be spent in silent shame.)
All I ever wanted was to be normal. I knew that could never be achieved in the statistical sense – the proportion of any generation which is truly same-sex attracted is tiny. But I knew – as, I suspect, did Kramer – that the search for “virtual normality” (to paraphrase Andrew Sullivan’s excellent book) is just another way of saying “I search for the Good Life.” And most of us know – I believe this is hardwired into our genome – that for human animals, that Good Life means a search for pair-bonded monogamy. There is no bliss like it. I am even learning, in middle-age, to stop saying “pair-bonded monogamy” like the desiccated scientist I am, and start saying “marriage”.
The deviants who claimed that liberation was instead to be found in endless sexual nihilism – well, to quote Andrew’s teacher (and Kramer himself; I recall an interview where he used these very words): most of them are dead, now.
When you cut through the principals involved, you are left with the principle of activism irrespective of the cause: it exists for its own sake and that of those involved. Activism is not designed to address or resolve issues; it exists to perpetuate them. The old line about causes becoming businesses before degenerating into rackets resonates because it is true.
It’s how you have the grandchildren of black people who lived through the ‘colored only’ era in the US claiming that nothing has changed. It’s how feminism has become this weird caricature caught between pretending to struggle under the yoke of “the patriarchy” while also acting as if “woman” is some new word no one can define. And it’s why the list of allegedly aggrieved and offended minority groups keeps going to the point where collectively, they are a majority of the population.
“Many gay rights groups, of course, opposed same-sex marriage.”
Didn’t the call for justice move seamlessly from civil partnerships to gay weddings, in the UK at least? That marriage had been deemed patriarch etc didn’t seem to bother the activists and, personally, I thought a pause might be helpful, to learn from state prosecution to state recognition in barely a generation.
I wonder whether the situation now might be less of a mess if there’d been time to ask about sexuality and identity, as opposed to seeing it solely as a question of justice, though that’s no doubt naive wishful thinking. The politics was always engaged as a zero-sum game, on both sides.
Apart from the single mention of lesbians helping gay men during the AIDS crisis, we are conspicuously absent from this story on “gay” monogamy. Very little of what the public thought of as “gay” and which continues to be depicted as “gay” even today applies to lesbians who, last I looked, also are homosexual, just largely invisible by dint of being women. This is a gross generalization, but gay male partners have generally impressed me as men times two (read: a lot more emphasis on sex) and lesbians as women times two (a lot more emphasis on relationship). Our only obvious commonality has been attraction to our own sex and now largely disappeared discrimination on that basis.
I lived through the AIDS crisis, too, and witnessed how lesbians comforted and helped stricken gay men while many of their fearful own stayed away. It would be lovely if more gay men — in addition to the marvelous Andrew Sullivan — now repaid that solidarity by publicly opposing gender ideology. This cult disproportionately harms emerging gay youth of both sexes by convincing them they are instead trans. But it does particularly grievous harm to girls and women in efforts to erase their historical single-sex spaces, including but not limited to sports. On the bottom of the heap are lesbians, suffering the same trespass as straight females, but additionally pressured (and in some instances required) to admit trans-identified males to their social and sexual lives.
Amen to all you wrote.
So true. Gay men (redundant) have never been inclusive of women/lesbians who are routinely referred to as “bleeders, breeders, b*tches, witches and fish” by many gay men. While there are some standout gay men like Andrew Doyle who consider women noteworthy, when it comes right down to it most men immersed in gay culture see women only useful as nurses, surrogates or beards.
Eeewww. In your face, all the time.
Yes, that picture above.
Mother Nature has equiped us with that feeling of revulsion called disgust. I am fed up having to experience that squirm and churn of disgust and, in this rights-filled society, if I were to complain the answer would be “Tough – get over it …you hater”.
Get over it!
Yep, I tolerate it … between consenting adults in private … not in my face.
Islam. Will not get over it.
I just knew that jumping into the comments section will dispel the author’s claim that gay monogamy (and homosexuality, in general) has become normalised and accepted. It has not.
Even by the author’s words: “Those who bleat about their oppression as gay people in climate of widespread TOLERANCE are luxuriating in a kind of perverse nostalgia”, he is tacitly admitting society is not accepting of it, merely tolerating it. There is a distinction between the two.
I will concede that in most Western societies like the US, UK, and Australia, the laws have been updated so that homosexual relationships are given legitimacy, just like any heterosexual relationships. But surely, if you widen your scope to the rest of the world, one can see that there is still oppression of gay men and women. I doubt it if the author, being openly gay, will admit that if he and a straight counterpart were to travel to Dubai, Qatar, or Indonesia with strict laws on homosexuality, they will have equal considerations and anxieties about those destinations.
In Dubai, an unmarried couple caught engaging in sexual intercourse may be prosecuted. If you are a gay and unmarried couple, you face the double-whammy of having sex outside of marriage AND having gay sex.
I would argue that gay people who are living in Western societies, like the author, and who continue to claim that it’s all fine and dandy are the ones luxuriating in the myth that homosexuality is “unremarkable”. I hope they can see beyond their privileged positions and see that homosexuality is still in fact considered remarkable in so many countries, and not in a good way.
Fair enough, but do you really think that AD doesn’t understand the different climates towards homosexuality around the world?
I think he is aware of it. I am not so sure he appreciates it as one should. Otherwise, he wouldn’t arrive to the conclusion that “homosexuality is unremarkable” or be critical of those who believe that gay people are still oppressed. At the very least, he would mention that his claim is only true for Western societies.
I am a fan of Doyle’s work on free speech and his pushback on the excesses of contemporary LGBT activism. But it is just untrue to say that gay people are not oppressed. And I must admit, I have a particular peeve about this and makes my hackles rise when I hear it.
(Surely a “perve” not a “peeve” ? ED)
Maybe his vision is clouded by living in the West. One could take your comment, substitute women for gays and have the same result. Western women still complain about how difficult their lives are in the EU and US, while ignoring how they would fare in, say, Saudi Arabia or Gaza, or those other places whose cause they have taken up.
I really don’t think he intended to make any comment about non-western places.
Is it ironic, or only straightforwardly just, that reality, while it must struggle for a definition in every other arena, stumbles upon an unequivocal one in the gay debate? Thanks to AIDS we are free to romanticise the consequences of love as death… rather than life.
Frankly, I don’t want to hear about anyone’s sex life. It’s none of my business.
“Gay monogamy is no longer seen as an oxymoron.”
But isn’t it an oxymoron, in fact? In other words, isn’t this just linguistic slight-of-hand?
Statistics are hard to find, but the evidence indicates that half of gay marriages, minimum, are “open marriages.”
And a Pew study last year found that 75% of gay people think an open marriage is “acceptable.” https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/09/14/views-of-divorce-and-open-marriages/
I worked at one time for several years in the early ’00s in a place where LGBTQ+ people represented at least 50% of employees. Monogamy, as heterosexuals understand it, was non-existent. I’m still in touch with many of the friends I made there, and open marriages–a decade after the legalization of gay marriage–are still the majority.
Honestly, while I couldn’t care less what sort of lifestyle people choose–as long as it harms no one else–declarations that legalizing gay marriage means gay spouses have adopted the same behaviors as cis spouses are simply untrue.
Why all this may be, I have no idea. Nor do I wish to denigrate anyone’s choice of lifestyle. But, it is disingenuous of us all to ignore the fact that LGBTQ+ relationships are–as a whole–simply different from traditional marriages.
And it will probably always be so.
This is the ‘bathhouse theory of sex’; that gay men only went to bathhouses because they didn’t have the same rights as heterosexuals. Well this may be partly true, but of course they also went there because it was fun, exciting and a form of socialising to boot.
So you’re right; homosexual relationships will probably always be different to heterosexual ones as, by and large, children aren’t involved, they have lots of money and time to spend and two male sex drives at work.
I myself was quite happy with Civil Partnerships and can’t see the point of gay marriage. It was just an ‘equality’ fight, keeping up with the Joneses.
I don’t think there are “LGBTQ+” relationships. There is no way, for example, you could include lesbians in your observations about gay marriages.
Gay life in a big city is very different from gay life in small towns and rural settings, where many gay couple choose to live specifically to avoid the ‘open marriage’ atmosphere of urban gay circles.
Great article Andrew – thank you! I love your work. Keep it up.That’s making me giggle but basically I just want to say you have a fine mind, you are brave and you tell the truth. So actually I love you.
Promiscuity eventually meets reality … syphilis is now widespread. And with widespread treatment will likely mutate. Oh and monkey pox. Oh, and treatment resistant gonnorhea.
“Many gay rights groups, of course, opposed same-sex marriage. To them, it was a way to control gay people, to bring them within the same heteronormative yoke that dominated the rest of society.”
I lived in the U.S. and Canada over these years and I don’t recall ever hearing of a gay group opposing same-sex marriage. Does the writer have any examples to back-up this claim?
Also, since when is it “Aids?” It’s “AIDS.”
LGBTQ…… acceptance is quickly being compared to being “color blind”. Be careful what you wish for….
As a straight man, I enjoy that all the gay unherd articles have sexy gay photos in them. It bothers me, and then it makes me realize I was bothered, and then it makes me think.
Im very bored by all this stuff. I’m so sick of the bleating in the gay community in general. It has become a religion. What makes me laugh and feel some derision is the ‘prideful’ peacocking – pushing their sexuality front and centre and almost in everyone’s face. That, is your identity.. . Do you have no other? Rather shallow in my view.
Where once l supported, l am now indifferent. Everyone else gets on with life. Perhaps about time you lot do too. No one cares anymore.
I would like to add one more comment to this.
Perhaps in the discourse of ‘gay’ becoming widely accepted and as you said becoming part of society no longer deems you ‘special’ or different – perhaps can l dare to point out that maybe there is a fear amongst this also. If you ( LGBTQI) are to live as accepted amongst all of us, as society, then does not then mean that you all must adhere to societies laws. Does that not also deem you open to scrutiny like everyone else. To conform to the more widely held social contract. I know many gay men, spoken to them and had some interesting conversations. As ‘men” and humans, you, like everyone else in society have people amongst you, whose intentions and actions would be deemed questionable. Speaking with some younger gay men, some speak of some of the dangers and damage also done. What some think should be acceptable where others do not. In my estimation, relationships, power, sexual mores, coercion, consent, expectations etc are rife with the same old moral calamities that all humans face.
Perhaps, like the rest of our sexual landscape, it would require an element of conforming in public.
I.e. toning down the ‘in your face’ sexuality that hetero’s are and would be shamed for. No one cares about consenting adults behind closed doors but l sure do give a damn in public with my children. It is behaviour, not sexual orientation, with children, around children, in public that matters.
Like the rest of us.
I’m not sure that I agree with Doyle’s observation that disust at those of a differernt sexuality seems to be hardwired. Perhaps it’s true for some people, but I don’t really think all.
I do suspect that there may be something of a hardwired disgust for extreme sexual licentiousness, maybe particularly among women. I don’t think that should be a surprise. Totally apart from the social dangers that come from unhindered sexual desire, particularly for women, it is a huge vector for disease. Not just AIDS, sexual infections of one kind or another have been around forever, and the more promiscuous a society is, the more varied and virulent they are likely to be. And ultimately these things will affect the childbearing population and children too. So no wonder women might be biologically primed to avoid them.
Gay men, as Doyle describes, unhindered by the more conservative sexual choices of women, are always more likely to display that kind of risky sexual behaviour. Despite the attempts in previous decades to depict that as a product of marginalization and lack of access to marriage, it looks now like those things weren’t the cause after all.
“ But at least to be gay is no longer defined solely by the sexual act, and that for one man to fall in love with another is widely considered to be an unexceptional fact of life.”
For one man to fall widely in love with another is considered to be normal? Only amongst the gay community.
To “fall…in love” with another person is indeed widely considered to be normal. Have you tried it?
Sex is NOT love. Just ask Randy Steve Kraft, Ron Jeremy or Derrick Todd Lee. Why do some people try so hard to conflate the two. Is it to put the gloss of mutual caring on the activity? B.S.