By John McKellar
It’s the backlash, stupid!
Once upon at time it was fun to be gay or lesbian. There was something intriguing about the oppositional and outlaw character of our ethos and existence. The alienation and desperation we experienced, rather than repressing or stigmatizing us, deepened our artistic insight and allowed us to create civilization. Sadly, we replaced our bold exuberance and trend-setting originality with victimology, petulance and political sloganeering.
In 1967, Pierre Trudeau liberated Canada’s gays and lesbians when he declared: “The state has no business in the bedrooms of he nation”. But today, the shrilly, self-involved alphabet gestapo – which represents an infinitesimal portion of the LGBTQ population – stridently demands to shove the bedrooms of the nation into everyone’s face.
In today’s intolerant, coercive ‘cancel culture’, gay activism is primarily about blurring distinctions between personal and political issues, and vigorously stifling any attempts at discourse or debate. Civilized opposition and rational discourse are inexorably slammed as ‘hate’ or ‘fascism’ by activist storm troopers who implement the absolutism of all fanatics in claiming sole access to the truth.
If I could be granted one wish, it would be to convince the world how dangerous, divisive and demeaning the activist generated LGBTQ+ acronym (and its ever-shifting appendage) is to the vast majority of gays and lesbians. It’s cultish and collectivist. It’s reminiscent of Hitler youth. It’s more dogmatic than 15th century papacy. It absurdly implies that we all think the same, dress the same, act the same, vote the same, live in our own neighbourhoods, eat at our own restaurants, shop in our own stores. Society cannot reduce a person to his or her sexual orientation.
As author and podcaster James Lindsay points out: Every woke term conceals an agenda. By constantly changing and reinventing words, they are lying to us and working to transform our society into a communist utopia. Lindsay further asserts that throughout queer literature and LGBTQ activist rhetoric, it is stressed repeatedly that the term ‘queer’ is not a sexual identity but an oppositional political stance. Unlike ‘gay’ identity, which they deliberately claim is an act of affirmation, ‘queer’ is not grounded in any positive truth or any stable reality. As the very word implies, ‘queer’ does not name some natural activity or refer to some determinate object. It acquired its meaning from its oppositional relationship to the norm. Queer is whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate or the dominant.
This sort of oppositional stance attracts young people like ants to honey. Teenagers are inherently rebellious and desperately want to be at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. Sometimes that can be healthy and some of it is good. But the politics of ‘queer’ represents tearing down the system and is very attractive to adolescents. That is why the active promoters of queendom are so anxious to indoctrinate the youth. They have an inherently captive audience. There’s nothing wrong with young people advocating change, so long as the energy of change and innovation is run through the filters of adult wisdom and experience.
My life would be much simpler if I didn’t have to contend with all of this. But how can I sit still when the public image of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters is embarrassingly represented by tiny clique of radicals bent on making the whole world their closet? How can I sit still when a tendentious media gives constant and unequivocal support to the lies myths, distortions and propaganda of modern gay activism? How can I sit still when prepubescent children are being indoctrinated with spurious information and encouraged to self-mutilate? How can I sit still when my freedom is being threatened or when the traditions and institutions of my country are being compromised?
It’s the backlash, stupid!
Just 17 days into the new year 2023, and the LGBTQ victim brigade was bestowed with its first episode of righteous indignation over a hockey player who sagaciously prefers not to worship at the altar of the rainbow. And right on cue, the chorus of craven sycophants in the media were fashionably outraged and stridently demanding condemnation of a) the athlete, b) the organization and c) any religion that dares to declare moral opprobrium on pride extremism.
Three months following, hockey goaltender James Reimer and Florida Panther players Marc and Eric Staal exercise their rightful prerogative to refuse the Pride colours and get lambasted by the same inclusion zealots. It seems as if Canada’s national sport has become this year’s chosen battlefield for the Pink Triangle gang.
But wait. With all the notoriety hockey was getting, the boys of summers didn’t want to be left stranded in the bleachers. So the Toronto Blue Jays staged their own contrived controversy during the first week of June by offering one of their star pitchers, Anthony Bass, as a sacrificial lamb to the Pride cult. He’s a very hot dude and I’m sure many gay men would love to smother themselves in his crotch. Instead, the perpetually peeved polemicists decided to achieve their orgasms by cancelling his career.
To no-one’s surprise, the 2024 Juno Awards provided Canadians with a huge head-shaking, eye-rolling incident of strident queer activism. The singing duo Tegan and Sara, who are more renowned for their LGBTQ politics than their mediocre music, decided to ruin the party with a churlish display of victim mongering. The most egregious portion of their message occurred when they called out the Alberta government for protecting children from abuse and mutilation. Their self-serving, insensitive rant not only sent a shiver down my spine, but fomented more homophobia than all of the purportedly nasty right-wing politicians or preachers combined.
In my days as a gay college student, I soon fathomed the political chicanery of the clubby, leftist lemmings who comprised the early gay activists. They were dull, depressing, and always looked and acted as if they were born to be offended. They could never discourse for more than 5 minutes without hitting on some tiresome barrier of resentment or ideology.
Decades later, the beat goes on. In 20 years, we’ve sadly gone from acceptance to coercion; from equality to cancel culture. Without victims, any activist movement dies. The ethos of persecution and discrimination must always remain alive to justify the existence of the various lobby groups.
Another essential theatre of operations for the militant gay lobby is the school system. Recently, there have been a number of skirmishes between supporters and opponents of raising the Pride flag. Of course, the media routinely sides in favour of the Rainbow advocates under the rubric of tolerance, safety and inclusivity.
Bullying and harassment of LGBTQ teens is rare in contemporary times, but greatly exaggerated for political reasons. The common mantra among the various pressure groups is that Pride and the Rainbow are essential to combat hate and divisiveness. Fake news! I’ve been warning for years that the gay lobby’s obsession with victimology reinforces every prejudice against gays and lesbians and CONTRIBUTES to homophobia rather than relieving it.
Pride does not stop just because summer ends. It continues with manifold and intensified rigour when school returns in September. To me, it’s hardly surprising that my radical brothers and sisters seek to introduce kindergarten and grade one students to alternative behaviours and lifestyles. But it’s unfathomable that a majority of educators, school trustees and teachers’ unions have been cowed into endorsing such nonsense. For God’s sake, leave the kids alone and allow them to enjoy their short period of innocence and sexual latency.
It’s the backlash, stupid!
No major world religion has ever endorsed homosexuality which, for centuries, has been openly practised in peaceful, affluent, cosmopolitan times. My radical brothers and sisters need to stop bitching about sincere Christians, Jews and Muslims who are merely exercising their Charter/Constitutional rights to free speech and whose vast philosophical perspective easily triumphs over the provincialism and amorality of the gay world.
When well-meaning, but foolish, self-serving politicians march in our Pride parades, they’re not doing the LGBTQ community any favours. The cringing media anoints them cutting-edge and overflowing with compassion. The sad reality, however, is that Pride does more harm to gays than a few fractious sports celebrities uttering homophobic slurs. Or an over-zealous pastor with a megaphone haranguing in the Village.
Yes, I know that Justin Trudeau’s flag-waving, pink-shirt-attired presence at the 2017 Pride in Montreal and Toronto represented a historic first for a Canadian PM. But did any of the drooling lackeys in the chattering classes take note that 5 months later, he expressed unreserved admiration for Fidel Castro whose despotic regime imprisoned and executed gays? Or that in 2023, he vacationed in Jamaica – the most anti-gay island in the Caribbean.
In the midst of the current hockey/rainbow/pride brouhaha, the repressive nation of Uganda passed a law to jail people who identify as LGBTQ. In recent times, we’ve witnessed ISIS beheading gays and Chechnya undergoing a massive gay purge. Yet, we in the affluent West are apoplectic about such trivialities as who will or will not bake a same-sex wedding cake, or which public washroom is appropriate for your whimsical gender assignment. Heaven forbid that we allow genocide or serious human rights violations ruin our party, pageant and parade ethos.
Moreover, no-one in Rainbow Land seems to fathom that you cannot force massive reeducation on the population without fascist obliteration of all freedoms. And since freedom is vastly more important than identity politics, you can rest assured that any perceived threat to freedom will result in a societal backlash that will guarantee oppression of all LGBTQ members.
It’s the backlash, stupid!
How incongruous that the aesthetics and creativity level of Pride are wretchedly inferior to such events as the Santa Claus Parade or Caribana. Since when do half-naked men dressed in pink tutus and combat boots acting like immature buffoons in the middle of the street constitute high culture? Or blaring bad music, cheesy impersonators, public hard drug consumption, public intoxication and public sex acts?
Of course, the aforementioned trailer park sleaze will be minimized – if not totally ignored – by a tendentious media, and the public nudity given a pass by law enforcement. Or as my beloved lesbian provocateur Camille Paglia once said: “If you don’t swing with the Sodomites, you’re nowheresville on the A-list.”
As a fierce defender of individual liberty, I fully supported the original concept of Pride which began in Toronto as a protest against the 1981 bathhouse raids. But I’m afraid that laudable act of resistance against police authority has been virtually forgotten by the properly-hyphenated, history-challenged gay bourgeoisie and the prevailing party-till-you-puke atmosphere.
Likewise in America, the modern gay scene has completely abandoned the drag queen spirit that gave birth to its liberation. Gay males don’t want to be reminded of an era when gay meant effeminate. Camille Paglia recalls that before Stonewall, gays and lesbians mixed quite freely, both socially and in the bars. But in the 1970s, gay men, feeling ebullient from their newfound freedom and confidence, segregated themselves and rapidly descended into a bacchanalia of narcissism and promiscuity which eventually collapsed into the hell of AIDS.
From Hollywood Boy Parties to Fire Island, from Gay Pride to Gay Games, my homosexual brothers are relentlessly searching for ‘Mecca’. Even at the Annual Global Conference on AIDS, the nightlife is more noteworthy than the daytime activities. Every night, the discos are packed with gay doctors, nurses, activists and researchers shamelessly cruising one another. Likewise, the bathhouses do land-office business. In spite of the solemnity and tragedy in dealing with a wasteful and fatal disease, the hedonistic, promiscuous, sex-carnival atmosphere never lets up.
Pride also perpetuates a false dichotomy of gay vs. straight by over-politicizing and polarizing viewpoints, and labeling people pro-gay or anti-gay with no room between. Urbane pre-Stonewall gays like Gore Vidal were true revolutionaries because they lived in the world rather than in spite of it. Homosexuality is in danger of becoming pathological again if it persistently separates itself from the continuum of life.
In the affluent, cosmopolitan West, ‘homophobia’ is a bloated chimera. The epithet was manufactured by self-interested partisans for the sole purpose of invoking guilt and intimidation and to shut down dissent before it begins. Real persecution against gays occurs in places such as Jamaica, Africa and the Middle East, but the majority of my brethren are too self-absorbed and comfortable to passionately or sincerely address this bonafide injustice.
If Oscar Wilde were alive today, he would be totally exasperated with the whining, hysterical malcontents who dominate today’s gay lobby. From fractious students taking school boards to human rights tribunals. . . to peevish wedding planners demanding that Christian owned caterers service their ceremony. . . to the GayKK conducting an ignominious witch hunt against the CEO of Mozilla… to a comedian being dragged before a kangaroo court for ‘’offending’’ a pair of stridently humourless dykes, this has been a stellar decade for LGBTQ victimology.
Historical icons such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus, Tchaikovsky, Somerset Maugham, Richard the Lionheart, Christopher Marlowe etc. were allegedly homosexual and most likely experienced hardship and repression. But look what they gave to the world! Look how they advanced the cultural heritage — gay and straight alike! They were too creative, cultivated and cosmopolitan to be concerned with the trivialities of sexual pride, queer studies, diversity and whatever other pop culture banality dominates our Kardashian landscape.
Now compare those cultural giants with the likes of Egale or Glaad whose members revel in self-inflicted martyrdom and whose incessant smear tactics and shrill caterwauling demean the civilized majority of gays and lesbians. To my radical brothers and sisters, sexual orientation is not only a lifestyle, but a religion and a vocation. It’s their whole identity. How sad and how absurd. From the exalted creativity of the Renaissance to the vulgarity of Gay Pride, we’ve managed to dumb ourselves down to the level of barnyard animals.
I have often stated that the stridency of a person’s gay activism or public exhibitionism is directly proportional to the number of times they were called faggot in high school. We all suffered as gay adolescents, but it’s absurd and self-injurious to carry that baggage around forever. A little teenage bullying prepares you for the gladiatorial arena of life and the cutthroat competitiveness of the corporate world. Exposing your private parts in a parade once a year is neither productive or therapeutic.
It’s patently evident that world history is not a required subject in today’s journalism schools. What else would explain why no-one in media or the chattering classes seems to know that homosexuality has swung from repression to debauchery numerous times since the beginning of civilization. We didn’t suddenly become tolerant or enlightened in the late 20th century.
History shows that male homosexuality flourishes with urbanization, soon becomes predictably ritualized and always tends toward decadence. And in the event of a political cataclysm, gay males are always first to be purged. So my message to all you self-righteous ‘progressives’ who servilely and unthinkingly parrot the gay establishment party-line is: with ‘friends’ like you, who needs enemies?
It’s the backlash, stupid!
Anyone who has studied history will also know that the obsession toward androgyny always occurs at the end of a civilization. Today, transgenderism has become a fashion and a convenient label for young people who may simply feel alienated culturally for a variety of reasons. Indeed, transgender mania is the new beatnik or hippie culture.
My flag is the Red Maple Leaf and not the ‘gay’ Rainbow banner which is a crude misappropriation of its founding concept of racial diversity and harmony. The Pink Triangle brigade tries to latch on to the Black civil rights movement and most Blacks angrily reject this shameless hijacking of their important cause. Discrimination against skin colour, ethnicity or religion is not fully comparable to the complex resistance of virtually all societies in history to open homosexuality, which always involves thorny questions of morality and psychology.
I wish I could pinpoint the year, or even the decade, when ‘pride’ changed from being a vice to becoming an attribute. The classical definition of pride has always been that it is a negative and destructive force. The dictionary explanation of ‘pride’ is inordinate self-esteem. . . an overweening opinion of one’s own quality and attainments which gives rise to superiority over and contempt for others. It’s also one of the Seven Deadly Sins — and happens to be the first one on that list. Pride cometh before the fall — or in the case of gay and lesbian culture, the backlash.
And rest assured, history shows that there will be a societal backlash.
* You can’t be constantly hostile and disrespectful toward religion, and not expect a backlash.
*You can’t take comedians to human rights tribunals because you are offended by their jokes, and not expect a backlash
* You can’t vilify rational criticism or stifle civilized debate, and not expect a backlash.
* You can’t make your so-called suffering the only suffering, and not expect a backlash.
* You can’t engage in amoral tactics of deceit, defamation, intimidation or extortion, and not expect a backlash.
* You can’t disingenuously spin same-sex marriage as a human rights issue, rather than a social value, or as matter of equality, instead of parity, and not expect a backlash.
* You can’t dismiss as homophobic genuine parental concern over the public school sexual curriculum, and not expect a backlash.
* You can’t attempt to make the whole world your closet, and not expect a backlash.
Centuries ago, Plato cautioned that democracy would crumble and pave the way to dictatorship, because a foolish majority would turn liberty into license. Today, the backlash clock is ticking. . . and ticking. . . and ticking.
It’s the backlash, stupid!
hopenow2004 