Hypocrisy, Homophobia and Our Current Political Moment
I wrote this piece a few weeks ago in response to an editorial cartoon from The New York Times, but with Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest “troll” I think it’s a good time to share:
When the New York Times released the newest episode of Trump Bites on Monday to coincide with the Helsinki Summit, there was a collective groan across social media. The trope of President Donald Trump as sexual submissive to Vladimir Putin is deployed with greater frequency by the day, but this animated video depicting an adolescent Trump pining for Putin dragged a tired insult from the depths of Lefty digital publications to America’s paper of record.
Homophobia is usually an accusation levied against the Right, and not without cause. But lately, voices on the Left have been far too willing to employ it — as long as the target is politically expedient. No matter our opinions on foreign policy or the President, it is unacceptable to weaponize the sexual preferences of gay men against any cis heterosexual, white man we disdain. Allegedly, the modern Left promised a more welcoming home for the LGBTQ+ community, but in the age of Trump, I’m frequently reminded of the Left’s anemic attachment to us.
Growing up in the South as an Evangelical and from a family that strongly identified as Republican, my youth required attempting to reconcile my feelings for the boy who lived next door and the idea that “AIDs was a punishment for the homosexuals.” I’m under no illusion that the Right wants to tolerate or accept the LGBTQ+ community, but they haven’t taken our political contributions or virtue signaled to our activists that they are our champions. Consistency is the most underrated virtue in our politics, and the Left is in short supply when it comes to same-sex sex.
Enter “The Resistance” and its cultural heroes, such as the Late-Night hosts, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, Comedians Kathy Griffin and Chelsea Handler, and even its institutions, such as the venerable opinion pages of the New York Times. Colbert referred to President Trump as Putin’s “cock holster,” because in his mind, male-on-male sex is both funny and deviant — therefore it needs to be mocked. Jimmy Kimmel and Chelsea Handler adopted this trope, but took it a step further by accusing FOX host Sean Hannity of “bottoming” for Trump. For my heteronormative readers, in homosexual sex the receptive partner is “the bottom” and the penetrative partner is “the top.” Not only is Kimmel castigating same-sex sex as a pejorative, his joke demeans receptive sex partners.
As these icons urge America to #Resist and “stand up to Trump,” they do so by claiming that the President likes to perform male felatio or is the receptive male sex partner. These attacks are undergirded by the assumptions that the sex gay men have is dirty — an inversion of the natural order. Further, that engaging in these queer acts makes one “less of a man,” a gender traitor. If this language sounds familiar, it should be. It’s historical rhetoric of the Right against gay people.
When confronted on how their language presupposes that same-sex sex, specifically for a receptive partner, is demeaning they counter “attacking a homophobe as the thing he truly hates is the best way to put him down.” This “say anything to own the opposition” mentality only creates a web of excuses for others to do it. In deploying this language, the “woke” Left becomes what it hates.
What’s important to note here is that every time the Left weaponizes homosexual acts and homosexual love against President Trump, they aren’t resisting, rather they are galvanizing archaic attitudes about sexuality. These jokes reinforce the notion that receptive sexual partners deserve to be humiliated. Humiliation for my perceived masculine failures is something I endured through childhood, adolescence and college. I never liked the sportsball or showed a proclivity for it — my attention was always on the other players — and I definitely ended up on the wrong side of a garbage can for this. What I find baffling is how the Left, which is engaged in a perpetual cycle of language governance for race, ethnicity, gender, sex and sexuality, has tolerated the abasement of homosexual men by its heroes.
Recently, the New York Times ran a piece on the “Age of the Twink,” a common slang term for many younger gay men. To many in the LGBTQ+ community, the piece came across as tone-deaf and heteronormative as the article highlighted wealthy, powerful men of Hollywood, who happen to be lean, as the personification of Twink. The term “twink” is rife with positive and negative connotations (on the one hand “skinny” or “pretty,” on the other “shallow” and “poor”). It’s a nuanced word. However, it did not take #Resistance twitter long to take the Times’ header and image, replacing the original subject with Jared Kushner — elevating the label’s disparaging context in service of their political goal.
As a gay man of faith with libertarian tendencies, I don’t fit neatly into a specific tribe nor this political moment. But social groups are the biggest catalysts for cultural debate, these days summoning storms of social media outrage to “gleefully savage” the out-group object of their scorn. Too often, the rush to perform this ritual leaves important considerations about what our words accomplish behind. Weaponizing sexual preferences to humiliate our opposition, only humiliates the person who is closeted and afraid to accept themselves or the out person trying to live a life without internalized shame. If we want LGBTQ+ people to really believe that #ItGetsBetter, we need to take real action to make it better. We can begin with changing how we talk about things.
