I said "so gay" on Facebook ... and someone was offended.

“In the gay world, some of the most enriching ... 

relationships between younger boys and older men 

can be hugely positive experiences.” - Milo

This teen boy clearly consented just by getting in the car.

What?

I was responding to a thread on Richard Dawkins.

Yesterday on Facebook a friend posted an article from Salon wherein Dawkins said 'mild pedophilia' or a little 'touching up' is not so bad: 

The biologist and author described the sexual abuse that occurred among his former classmates as "mild touching up" ... - Salon

While recuperating, I had been updating myself on the flurry of articles examining Milo Yiannopoulos, whose endorsement of what I call man-boy love, or as others prefer to call it pedophilia or even ephebophilia, for clinical/legal reasons perhaps?  Yet when it is male on male, it's historically and academically referred to as pederasty.  Call it what you will, it's gay.  Which explains why I took issue with the Dawkins statement.

Of course, gay people don't want that sort of attraction/orientation identified with gay or lgbtq culture, suggesting it is myth - but I disagree completely.  To be sure, not all gay men are interested in adolescent boys, and not all men who have been mildly touched up or involved in “relationships in which (those) older men help (those) young boys to discover who they are” seek relationships with younger men when they are older.  Nevertheless, it is a gay phenomenon.  Hence I responded on Facebook:

"He's totally amoral - our culture is totally amoral - therefore, as he says, 'a little touching up' is perfectly fine. Imagine the kid that is exploited and damaged by more than 'a little touching up'. Milo claims the same. So wrong, so disordered, so gay." - Me

Another person agreed with me, but asked if it was necessary to add the 'slur' at the end.  I said it was.  It was my point - although it wasn't necessarily a slur - perhaps I should have said 'that's so queer' because queer culture is more about sexual fluidity, genderlessness and as related to cases like this, consent and the need to lower the age of consent.

I've written about this stuff many times over the years, my POV maturing as I explore my thoughts in and through writing about it.  In my experience, growing up in the 1960's - that is, coming of age in that period, it was very common for older gay men to cultivate relationships with teen boys.  My experience was similar to that of the much younger Yiannopoulos', who says he was in a gay relationship at the age of 17 with a 29 year old man, although later defending himself against gay critics for using such sloppy phrasing, Milo originally explained that “in the gay world, some of the most enriching ... relationships between younger boys and older men can be hugely positive experiences.”  LGBTQ 'authorities' freaked out, because in saying this, the 'myth' that homos are on the lookout to molest boys is resurrected and decades worth of pro-gay propaganda, normalizing and sanitizing gay culture, is threatened by that.

(Please note: My age gap with Yiannopoulos and his experience, is similar to the age gap between my personal experience and the experience of Christopher Isherwood with his much younger lover, Don Bachardy.  I mention it to emphasize such attractions and relationships have an established history and cannot be easily dismissed as a gay myth.)

Amorality is the new morality, yet it can only be determined by subjective reasoning, and new language is required to do that.  On one hand you can't say 'gay', or 'that's so gay', but you can say 'gay' and 'I'm gay' if 'you're queer'.  Kinda sorta.  So the woman who responded to me on Facebook, wasn't looking for an argument, but evidently she did think my saying, 'that's so gay' was a slur.  But I digress.

They cancelled my book.

Milo's "bitchy gayness" and sincerity makes him likeable.

Evidently, Yiannopolous has some problems with being gay.  Therefore he may not be 'completely' amoral, according to conservative religious people?  My whole thing about the current amorality occurred to me recently as a result of the great acceptance shown to Trump and conservative politics by conservative Christians, including devout Catholics.  Not to mention watching Ellen looking for a new boyfriend for Jennifer Lopez, while I was laying bed with the flu.  No doubt, relativism has certainly played a huge role in the erosion of morals.  I'm not a social scientist so I can't really address that intelligibly, it's more an intuition or impression I get.  Anyone with a well formed conscience ought to be able to understand and recognize moral collapse into amorality, right?  Or am I rambling on and on?  Perhaps I'm too ill to write intelligibly?

It's all very complicated.*

Yiannopoulos appears to have garnered respect and sympathy from the strangest sources.  I haven't quite figured that out as yet because I've mostly listened to those critical of the support, who also seem to think Milo is in need of compassion, help, and even intervention due to his screwed up past which apparently catapulted him to his current celebrity status.  Okay - now I'm rambling.

Nevertheless, it's interesting to me that Milo continues to look back on his first love affair as an enriching and positive experience.  I can say I learned a great deal from my experience, but it was in no way enriching or positive.  Someday maybe I can write about it - although why bother?  Yet it pretty much destroyed my reputation for the rest of my life - professionally that is, if I may phrase it that way.  The relationship also really screwed up, or disordered any moral direction I might have had.  A complication which gives deeper meaning to 'objective disorder' when speaking of a May-December homosexual romance.  The facade seemed glamorous and sophisticated to me at the time, but when I felt myself becoming immersed in that milieu, it was at times painfully obvious I was not well socialized and easily scandalized, or frightened by my proximity to the debauched aspects of gay life in the 1960's, so commonly characterized by dishonesty, promiscuity and intemperance.

It's odd how stories like those which claim that a 'mild pedophilia is not harmful' can trigger flashbacks of earlier events of abuse in my life.  Such statements do so much harm, gay people should be ashamed for not admitting, that under the LGBTQ umbrella - they've always accommodated that behavior - if not publicly, then secretly.  In fact, in my experience, they covered up for people who were into it.  Today I think the behavior fits in with the Q of LGBT - that is - queer.  I may be wrong - but I think it's there someplace.

Yiannopoulos once stated: "There are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age. I certainly consider myself to be one of them, people who are sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world by the way."  For me his reasoning comes very close to the mental gymnastics it takes for a so-called ex-gay person to come to the conclusion that 'homosexuality is chosen'.  Even though there are some people who can do that, so what?

That said, just because it is controversial, the attention this guy is getting is good - albeit saturated in contempt from the right and the left - it has the potential of dispelling the myths.  For the time being.

Go to the light while you have it.

My apologies if I have offended anyone with this - remember I'm old.

And experienced.

So now I wonder why Voris is on a campaign to out priests?  Talk about 'bitchy gayness'.



*[H/T Mark Shea for his post on the Culp's support of Yiannopolous, which kept me awake last night as I suffered through my illness.  What?]

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy.

Gay.