the greatest essay ever written exposing the “gay liberation” movement

By N.S.

“gay liberation” became a public matter on June 28, 1969. That was the date of the “Stonewall riot,” which lasted until July 3.

The Stonewall Inn was a mobbed-up, Greenwich Village watering hole known for two practices: Its management’s penchant for serving under-aged customers (normal and queer alike) alcohol, and its homosexual customers’ penchant for engaging in sexual acts in the saloon. When the police busted the joint, the homosexuals rioted.

homosexual liberationists’ story was that they endured terrible violence, discrimination, and oppression, against which they were heroically fighting back. It was virtually all a lie. I say, “virtually,” because surely some time a bully would call a homosexual a “fag,” and beat him up.

homosexuals, like feminists, were imitating the so-called civil rights movement. Each group invented a fictional world, in which its members suffered horrific persecution, and fought to attain “equality.” The reality was that each group was motivated by a totalitarian will to power, and refused to have its will limited.

The greatest accomplishment of the homosexual liberation movement was to spread the aids epidemic. When I returned from five years’ exile in West Germany on August 26, 1985, one of the first local New York City news broadcasts I saw showed a demonstration in which a hispanic man who was dying of aids screamed, “Ronald Reagan murdered me!”

Although I was no fan of Reagan, I recall thinking how pathetic the activist was: Can’t you die with a little dignity?

The author of this long, leisurely essay, Midge Decter (1930-2022), used to summer during the 1960s on Long Island’s Fire Island, where homosexuals constituted app. 60% of the populace. She and her family were among the “straights.”

The homosexuals were privileged people, in fields like the arts and publishing, and like most homosexuals at the time, were hardly closeted.

“When the homosexual-rights movement first burst upon the scene a little more than a decade ago, a number of people I used to know must have been—as I was myself—more than a little astonished. These were the heterosexuals (in the current parlance of homosexual/heterosexual relations, the ‘straights’) who, along with me and my family, used to spend summers in a seaside resort community called Fire Island Pines.

“In the years that we all summered there, Fire Island Pines was, at a rough count, about sixty percent homosexual. Though we didn’t yet have a name for the phenomenon, the community was distinctly a ‘new-class’ enclave: on the whole young, affluent, enlightened, and breezy in both its styles and attitudes. Most of the houses there—they were high-grade beach shacks really—were informally well-appointed and by the standards of the day expensive. The snobbery of the place, which was considerable, had to do not with old notions of class but with the relative distribution of up-to-the-minute high taste in dress, decor, and opinion. And its denizens, homosexual and heterosexual alike, were predominantly professionals and people in soft, marginal businesses—lawyers, advertising executives, psychotherapists, actors, editors, writers, publishers, gallery owners, designers, decorators, etc. Since included in the estimate that put the heterosexuals at forty percent were hordes of young children and a large number of husbands who remained in the city and commuted to the beach on weekends, the dominance of the homosexuals over the general atmosphere was even greater than the numbers imply. All this was in the early 60’s.

“What must have been astonishing some years later to the straights of Fire Island Pines was not so much that the homosexual community had given birth to a Gay Lib movement—by the 70’s movements were after all a commonplace; everyone was professing to be roused to action about something—as the particular claims this movement was making about the condition of its constituency. Like every movement inspired by the political culture of the 60’s, Gay Lib had its radicals, its moderates, and its fellow travelers, each group speaking at a separate decibel level and in a slightly different tone of voice and each addressing itself to a seemingly different set of demands, ranging from the radicals’ vision of nothing less than a complete rewriting of the sexual and social constitution to the fellow travelers’ plea for nothing more than a new spirit of toleration. Nevertheless, through all the variations there ran the same general assertion about the status of the homosexual in American society. This was that for an altogether private preference for sexual partners of his own gender, the homosexual had been hounded from pillar to post. He was discriminated against in such areas as housing and employment; he was held up to ridicule, treated as an object of loathing; he was frequently the victim of violence at the hands of the police and other rough customers; and possibly worst of all, he was made an outcast and pariah by his own family.

“Whatever the remedy held to be most essential for overcoming this state of affairs, from revolution down to the simple recognition of the homosexual’s legitimacy as an alternative human possibility, the homosexual community was serving notice that it would no longer sit still for what had become its accustomed treatment from straight society. Homosexuals were no longer to be called ‘fags,’ ‘queers,’ ‘pansies,’ or (how archaic the word seemed even then) ‘fairies.’ They were to be called ‘gays’—a term implying admission of the unrecognized and unconfessed envy throbbing in the heart of every anxious heterosexual. They were no longer to be mocked in public entertainments. They were no longer to be deemed sick by a mental-health profession caught up in the treacherous confusion between the statistical norm and normality. They were no longer to be kept out of desirable housing or barred from employment—most particularly employment as schoolteachers.

“In short, they were no longer, to be forced by social and economic necessity, and above all shame, into living a life of concealment. Henceforth their homosexuality was to be deemed, by themselves as well as others, a perfectly natural inclination among all other natural inclinations. Indeed, throwing off the shackles of a dead and arbitrary if not perverted religious piety and an ugly and oppressive bourgeois sensibility, they were to bring spiritual cleansing to everybody by asserting their preference defiantly, with pride: the process now known to the world as ‘coming out of the closet.’

“All this, as I said, must initially at least have caused a certain bewilderment among the heterosexual former residents of Fire Island Pines. (I say ‘former’ because the Pines, as we called it, has in the intervening years become completely homosexual—world famously so.) Not that we were not aware that certain of our homosexual summertime friends and neighbors lived ‘in the closet,’ or anyway with a high degree of care and discretion, in their other, wintertime lives. Some of these—one, I remember, the superintendent of schools in a high-status suburban town near New York City—were regularly pointed out to newcomers, perhaps in explanation of the noticeably nervous intensity with which they were to be seen cavorting on the beach. Most, however, were quite straightforwardly homosexual the year ‘round and everywhere; and in any case, the circumstances under which we came to know and observe them offered not the slightest hint of concealment. Even those who were married men, and turned up each year with their wives and children, were at small pains to conceal their real predilections. (They were for the most part charming and amusing fathers, rather like favorite uncles. And their wives . . . drank. We all, to be sure, drank a great deal—alcohol was in those years the drug of preference of the new class—but the wives of homosexual husbands in Fire Island Pines were like classic army wives or the heroines of Southern gothic fiction, tippling sherry at breakfast and befuddled by dinnertime.) Thus while we were certainly aware of the phenomenon of ‘closet queers,’ our attention was rarely engaged by this aspect of homosexual experience….”

The elegant essay, “The Boys on the Beach,” was published in 1980 in Commentary Magazine, which was then America’s leading intellectual journal. It was run for roughly 50 years by now 92-year-old, Jewish neoconservative, Norman Podhoretz, who promoted meritocracy, opposed the counter-culture, after the 1967 Six Day War, supported Israel, and who was married forever to Midge Decter.

Norman Podhoretz wrote and published one of the gutsiest essays on race ever to come out in a mainstream American publication, “My Negro Problem—and Ours.”

Thirty years later, in a “Postscript,” the elder Podhoretz lamented that America was even more dishonest in matters of race than in 1963. (I am not sure if the following quotation is the complete, 1993 “Postscript,” or a pungent excerpt.)

“The almost complete abdication of black responsibility and the commensurately total dependence on government engendered by so obsessive and exclusive a fixation on white racism has been calamitous…. It has thereby contributed mightily to the metastasis of the black underclass—a development which, in addition to destroying countless black lives, has subjected more and more whites to experiences like the ones I described going through as a child in "My Negro Problem."

“In 1963 those descriptions were very shocking to most white liberals. In their eyes Negroes were all long-suffering and noble victims of the kind who had become familiar through the struggles of the civil rights movement in the South—the ‘heroic period’ of the movement, as one of its most heroic leaders, Bayard Rustin, called it. While none of my white critics went so far as to deny the truthfulness of the stories I told, they themselves could hardly imagine being afraid of Negroes (how could they, when the only Negroes most of them knew personally were maids and cleaning women?). In any case they very much disliked the emphasis I placed on black thuggery and aggression.

“Today, when black-on-white violence is much more common than it was then, many white readers could easily top those stories with worse. And yet even today few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime.

“Telling the truth about blacks remains dangerous to one's reputation: to use that now famous phrase I once appropriated from D.H. Lawrence in talking about ambition, the fear of blacks has become the dirty little secret of our political culture.

And since a dirty little secret breeds hypocrisy and cant in those who harbor it, I suppose it can still be said that most whites are sick and twisted in their feelings about blacks.

And yet, Norman Podhoretz collapsed already in his 1963 essay. He was what then passed for a liberal, and as such, entered into an adulatory disquisition on the racist, pompous, dishonest James Baldwin (1924-1987). Baldwin was then apparently claiming that we needed to become blind to race. If he said that, he didn’t believe it.

Ultimately, the elder Podhoretz argued that Whites must commit collective suicide through miscegenation. (There’s a 50-year Postscript, which includes part of the 30-year version.)

Midge Decter (1927-2022) was the mother of John Podhoretz (1961-), who inherited the position of editor-in-chief in January, 2009. These days, Commentary is run on the nepotism principle.

(Full disclosure: I freelanced for John Podhoretz during the late 1990s, when he was the op-ed page editor at the new york post. We even shook hands the first time we met. However, the younger Podhoretz was unaware that yours truly was working for him. I had submitted my work under the pseudonym “Robert Berman,” and I never told anyone at the post that that was a fake name. I suspected that Podhoretz would not have run my work, and I am quite sure I was correct.

One day in 1998, possibly the first time Podhoretz ran my work, he also ran an op-ed by a woman who had just escaped years of teaching in the New York City public schools for the suburbs. She told of her terrible experiences in the city schools. One story stood out. A young thug in her class set up a boom box on his desk, blasting noise, and told her not to even think of shutting it off.

That day John Podhoretz ran an unsigned, house “chaperone” editorial, in which its author claimed not to understand why on Earth the teacher had insisted on being published anonymously.

No adult in the world could possibly have been so stupid or ignorant.

If the post had published the woman’s memoir under her real name, someone would have contacted her new employer, who would have found some pretext for firing her, and then both her most recent employer and the New York City Board of Education would have rendered her unemployable when any new potential employer inquired into her background.