Cruel & Unusual

How Gay-Affirming Culture Fosters Same-Sex Abuse

In February 1988, some two hundred activists met for a first-of-its-kind "war conference" to establish a national GLBT agenda. The top recommendation, according to the final statement, was "a nationwide media campaign to promote a positive image of gays and lesbians."¹ The following year, two Harvard-educated gays who had attended the conference, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, published After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the '90s. Admittedly "a program of unabashed propaganda, firmly grounded in long-established principles of psychology and advertising," the bestseller became colloquially known as the Gay Manifesto.

In the final chapter, the authors got remarkably candid about the empty life awaiting most gay men after the inaugural rush of sex. "So many gays seem silly, superficial, little wiser at fifty than at twenty." By age thirty, the hot and sexy years will give way to "widespread disillusionment and unhappiness," eventually culminating in "misery . . . by the age of thirty-five or forty at the latest."²

To mitigate this unfortunate but predictable result of a lifestyle centered on individualistic sex, they proposed that gay men adopt "a viable alternative to the heterosexual family." Here's how it would work: Older gay men should "court" youth for the purpose of initiating relationships that would be equal parts "father-son, teacher-student, and big brother-little brother . . . with the superadded bond of explicitly sexual love." The relationships would last for a time and then end, at which point the younger partner, now an adult, would seek out a child of his own to "love." The Greeks did it, they said, and so this "new ideal for gay men—a family structure of their own" was only a return to Greek love.

The propaganda strategy laid out in After the Ball centered on talking about gayness loudly and often, and in ways that portrayed gays as victims and opponents as hateful oppressors. Clearly, it has been wildly successful. Most Americans now either celebrate or shrug at gayness. But what about this "modest proposal" (yes, they really called it that) prescribing age-disparate sexual liaisons as the new gay "family"? Most of us do still draw a line at grown men pursuing adolescent boys for sex. Most of us still call that sex abuse. Or do we?

A Culture of Abuse

Robert Oscar (Bobby) Lopez has been talking about same-sex abuse for years, since long before #MeToo came to the aid of women exploited by men. In an American Thinker article provocatively titled, "To Affirm LGBT Ideology Is to Support Abuse,"³ he wrote that gay culture is itself a culture of abuse and that all of gay-affirming society is complicit in it.

To illustrate, he told his own "nightmare" story. When he was thirteen, two older teenage boys got him drunk, held him down, "and did things they had apparently learned from older gay men." They convinced him he was gay and that he had wanted it. Massively confused, he internalized the lies and went on to engage in a string of trysts with older men throughout high school, even though he found the sex painful and revolting.

When he tried to make a fresh start in college by dating girls, he was mercilessly beaten into submission by a relentless onslaught of gay-enforcing cant: "People are born this way." "Look at how you talk—how can you deny yourself?" "You can't change." "If you don't accept this, you will kill yourself." Terribly in need of somewhere to belong, he capitulated. Had it not been for a cancer diagnosis at age 27, he might never have escaped the gay web of delusions.

Mass Deceit

"Everything about gay ideology is a series of hideous lies," he says. Here are three big ones:

• "You are born gay."

• "You know from a very young age that you are gay."

• "There is nothing wrong with the sex act, that there's nothing objectively more difficult about engaging in homosexual activity than heterosexual activity."⁴

There is no evidence to support the assertion that people are born gay and plenty of evidence to refute it. Lopez calls this "pure and simple . . . a pickup line." And the companion line that says kids know they're gay from a young age is a gross and insidious generalization, completely unsupportable by any standard of evidence.

As for the idea that gay sex is merely a benign counterpart to heterosexual sex, this is demonstrably false. Lopez tactfully explained on the Eric Metaxas Show how anal sex is inherently unhealthy and can inflict long-term damage on the male body, especially when practiced repeatedly over time. It's simply a biological fact that the part of the body that expels waste contains high levels of bacteria and pathogens. Combine this with the way male sexuality tends to be more aggressive and more promiscuous, and it should come as no surprise that gays have higher rates of injuries, infections, and cancers in the private areas.

It should come as no surprise, but it might. The medical profession is all but silent on these things, especially after Dr. Paul Church, a prominent urologist and Harvard Medical School professor, was banned from four Boston hospitals after refusing to affirm gay sex.⁵

Perpetuating a System of Abuse

Lopez followed up "To Affirm LGBT Ideology Is to Support Abuse" with an Inside Higher Ed opinion piece. In "Same-Sex Abuse Should Not Be Invisible,"6 he discusses three ways gay-affirming culture is abusive.

First, there is the physical. Gay sex for him was painful, coercive, and injurious. He later learned that this is common to gay male sexuality, and in 2017, MassResistance put scientific backing to the claim with the publication of The Health Hazards of Homosexuality: What the Medical and Psychological Research Reveals, a 500-page volume containing peer-reviewed medical analysis that catalogs the disproportionate rates of diseases and disorders among homosexuals.

Second is the psychological. Propaganda is a form of psychological warfare. Another gay lie, now being enforced in some states in the form of therapy bans, says, "If you try to change, you will kill yourself." Taken together, the gay lies construct an alternative reality that closes in on confused youth like a vise, sealing off avenues of escape from "being gay." "None of [gay ideology] had anything to do with helping me as a person or advancing any humanitarian cause," Lopez wrote. "It had nothing to do with human rights. Sleazy men wanted to sleep with me, and these arguments would ostensibly keep me in their dating pool."

And finally, there is the silencing of victims. Gay-affirming culture frames "coming out" as a liberation—boys aren't being groomed and abused; they're being liberated, mentored, and "loved" by father-teacher-brothers. Truth-tellers aren't whistleblowers but are "homophobic" and "antigay." Abuse is put forward as love, and truth-telling as abuse. This is tantamount to telling boys that what is being done to them isn't abusive. The result is that youth who are being actively targeted by predators have few resources affirming sexual truth and few safe harbors from would-be abusers. "For female victims, a whole society has rallied to support them," Lopez wrote. "For male victims, a whole society has rallied to affirm their abusers."

Kirk and Madsen acknowledged a real deficiency in gay life. They would have better served America by stopping right there. Instead, they recommended sucking children into the void—as if boys existed to meet the "needs" of gay men. That right there should have tipped us off that there was something very wrong with this movement. We used to call things like this perversion. Now they fly under the banner of Pride. Only hell itself would put a positive spin on that.

Notes
1. thedallasway.org/stories/written/2017/11/26/the-war-conference-of-1988.
2. After the Ball, pp. 361ff.
3. Alex Aradanas (pseudonym): americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/to_affirm_lgbt_ideology_is_to_support_abuse.html.
4. Interview with Eric Metaxas: youtube.com/watch?v=k-my3AtcThc&fbclid=IwAR0JBLa6I2RsirG6iYoUFjWrse46L4MISf3WbyiE1BnN8YWvUr96BEKD1RA (approx. 5-minute mark).
5. massresistance.org/docs/gen3/17c/Dr-Church-expelled/index.html.
6. insidehighered.com/views/2020/01/09/same-sex-abuse-victims-need-more-support-opinion.