Bomp bomp bomp bomp
… It was while Reagan was governor that he was ‘shocked’ to find a closet gay nexus operating under his nose. Lou Cannon’s book Ronnie and Jesse quotes Reagan as responding to this revelation, ‘My God, has government failed?’ After Lyn Nofziger purged the gays, Reagan could joke about it. When Truman Capote visited him, to plead for men on California’s Death Row, he lovably wisecracked: ‘Perhaps we should trawl him [Capote] through the halls to see if any of them are left.’…
Why does the right torture itself about homosexuality? The flagellation is partly a consequence of the overlap between extreme conservatives and the more traditional wing of the Roman Catholic Church. Then there is self-protection — honesty means loss of power, so gays on the right toe the line and gay-bash. [Rep. Robert] Bauman tells of sabotaging a Maryland fair-housing bill because it prohibited discrimination against homosexuals. And Terry Dolan mailed out a NCPAC fund-raising letter (he did object to it, later) that said: ‘Our nation’s moral fiber is being weakened by the growing homosexual movement.’ There is, of course, self-hatred in all this, personal but perhaps ideological. The latter stems from the neurotic identification by some conservatives of homosexual conduct with weakness, cowardice, even treason. To these people, the gay world is a lethal compound of E.M. Forster’s morality, Guy Burgess’s loyalty, and John Maynard Keynes’s economics. See how Jim Bakker squeals, not at the accusations of attempted rape of a female teenager or the actual swindling of a credulous congregation or at Jerry Falwell’s charge that he could not get an erection, but at the mere suggestion that he gave a man the eye! And remember, when William Buckley had just been called a Nazi, what the worst thing was that he could think of to hurl at Gore Vidal.
Yet history speaks of a long and not so surprising connection between homosexuality and the right. One can look to the church and the military. ‘Gay’ has never necessarily meant ‘left.’ Before Yukio Mishima committed ritual suicide after failing to restore fascism in Japan, he wrote in Forbidden Colors that the homosexual should always hate democracy. He argued that gays should identify with the right because they had everything to lose by majority rule. This was also a big theme in the early stirrings of the gay right in Nazi Germany. Other ultra-conservative homosexuals have also ranged themselves with the snobs and with the elitists, just as neo-conservative propagandists like Joseph Epstein and Midge Decter have crudely identified radical homosexuality with decadence and the effete.
The way through this morass is clear. It is marked by a simple signpost reading ‘Out.’ Once Bauman, Dolan, and others acknowledged their homosexuality, they began to evolve politically…
–Christopher Hitchens, ‘The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name,’ Harpers, August 1985.
The Straussian school places homosexuality (‘sodomy’, as it insists upon terming it) under a rigorous ban. Not only does homosexual practice attack the root of family values but it erodes patriotism and the other manly virtues. Harry Jaffa, who collaborated with [Allan] Bloom on books about Shakespeare’s politics, later denounced Bloom as a gay proselytizer for the sapping of the American morale….
Whether you are a creationist like Pat Robertson, or a Catholic like Pat Buchanan, or a materialist believer in ‘Natural Law’ like Jaffa and others, you can’t avoid the fact that the creator, or the Divinity, or Nature, or Evolution, has evidently mandated that there be a certain quite large number of homosexuals. The proportion may seem to fluctuate, as do attitudes towards it, which is why the classical and traditional schools have so much trouble with their attitude toward Greek antiquity. But there it is, like a lion in the path of the anti-humanists. They cannot, without admitting to the chaos of their worldview, seriously affirm that men and women are simultaneously designed to be sick and commanded to be well. So they take refuge in various confected ‘laws’, and, when these inevitably break down, they resort to simple-minded denial….
–Christopher Hitchens, ‘Bloom’s Way,’ The Nation, May 15, 2000.
