On the totalitarian tedium of "gay"

By An Old Friend

sun, apr 2, 2023 5:33 p.m.

On the totalitarian tedium of "gay"

Tal Bachman is a musician (son of Randy Bachman of Bachman-Turner Overdrive) who's part of Mark Steyn's entourage.  He writes an occasional piece to appear at Steyn's website, such as the excellent one below.

Below Bachman's essay I've pasted the comment I added online.  (Such comments can only be made, and viewed, by members of the Mark Steyn Club.)

https://www.steynonline.com/13376/why-does-everyone-have-to-be-gay-all-the-time

Why Does Everyone Have to be Gay All the Time?

by Tal Bachman
April 2, 2023

Why does everyone have to be gay all the time now? I don't get it.

Wanna be gay? Great. I don't care. No one I know does. I grew up in a small, almost entirely Christian, dairy farming town in Washington forty plus years ago. No one there even cared. Sure, the jokes and teasing between friends were more common than now. But in terms of locals getting genuinely upset someone in the community might be gay? Nah.

Outside our little community, out in the big wide world, metropolitan gay populations did their own thing. They had their own favorite musical artists (The Village People, Bowie, etc.), their own favorite bars and neighborhoods, their own favorite slang terms and books and movies—their own subculture. They didn't seem to care what straights did. Straights didn't seem to care what they did. That was just how it was. Live and let live.

Even the crusty old military veterans from World War II, Korea, and the recent Vietnam War I knew growing up didn't care. Several times, I heard older fellas say things like, "We had a guy in our platoon I'm pretty sure was queer, but I'll tell you what—he was one of the best damn soldiers we had. Wonder how he's doing now."

This wasn't détente. Détente implies mutual hostility had existed previously. But from what I could tell, there hadn't been much, or any. At least not recently. It seemed like what there had mostly been was America, where people—whatever their personal beliefs—didn't much care what consenting adults did in the privacy of their own homes. Straight couples didn't walk around publicly trumpeting whatever intimate hijinks they'd gotten up to at home. Neither did gays. That was just good manners. It was the code.

That said, obviously, around the country, there were cases of bullying. Those victims have my sincere sympathy. I'm only saying that, for the most part, by the time I came along in the '70s and '80s, a live-and-let-live ethic predominated in America when it came to homosexual behavior and subculture.

Things have changed. Live-and-let-live isn't good enough anymore, evidently. Now, everyone and everything has to be gay, or go gay, so to speak, at a moment's notice.

(I guess I should clarify "be gay" and "go gay." I'm using these phrases in an expansive sense, so as to include verb phrases like "to publicly fawn over," "to fly flags about," "to wildly applaud and cheer for," "to dress up in flamboyant colors and march in parades for," "to wear celebratory logos on my team jersey for," "to view as a sacrosanct population whose self-appointed representatives can never be questioned about, or faulted for, anything," etc.).

My question is:

What about those of us who couldn't care less what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes? I don't care if they're gay or not. People like me are happy to leave everyone else alone. The problem is, a growing population of fanatics are no longer happy to leave us alone. For the radical leftist gays, with all their straight, virtue-signaling, suck-up subs—everyone must celebrate gayness in exactly the way they decree, at any given moment.

As a result, if you don't feel like exulting about how your favorite sports team just ran out for battle wearing an iridescent, rainbow-themed Gay Pride jersey right out of a 1992 Richard Simmons exercise video, these folks now label you a "hater." And if you're an actual player who doesn't want to wear one? It's the end of the world. Our cultural overlords, including our "liberal" sports commentators, now just can't wait to bash any Christian athlete who resists.

One of them, for example, is NHL Network commentator E. J. Hradek. Kitted out in a "fabulous" hot pink zip-up jumper (no doubt in a pathetic attempt to boost his "I REALLY LOVE THE GAYS!" bona fides), Hradek demanded last January that Flyers' defenceman Ivan Provorov "go back home to Russia." Provorov's crime? He boycotted a warm-up skate rather than put on a Gay Pride jersey. In Wrongthink Exterminator Hradek's telling, this non-compliance proves Provorov has refused to assimilate to American culture (which, obviously for Hradek, is now thoroughly synonymous with Gay Pride celebrations). Provorov therefore no longer belongs in America.

To stick with NHL commentators for a second, Hradek's not the only bully around. toronto star columnist Bruce Arthur recently branded sharks goalie and devout Christian James Reimer a "bigot" for declining to wear gay pride regalia. (In his piece, Arthur also goes on to label religion in general a "skirt for bigotry," criticizes opposition to underaged drag queen shows as "hatred," and announces his finding that Jesus—a devout Jew from rural Galilee—would have felt absolutely fine with the entire 21st century gay pride explosion. Right.)

Other sports have had their own holdouts, of course. But rather than recite a list of them, let me pause to point something out. I've described Arthur and Hradek as bullies. Which they are. But to put it more accurately, what they and all their fellow cultural overlords really are, are fanatically intolerant secular monoculturalist extremists. They and all their pals talk a big game about "diversity." But all they mean by "diversity" is what I would call the diversity of meaningless, where the shapes and sizes and colors and preferences all change, but the One True cultural stalinism underneath remains absolutely monolithic, unquestionable, and sociopathically enforced.

There is nothing multicultural or "liberal" about these people at all. They hate real diversity—that is, any divergence from their own extremist ideology. You can't even say, "Look—I don't care what these people get up to. I just don't want to politicize or sexualize every single endeavor and institution out there. Enough already", without them freaking out.

And so, under the tyrannical rule of our wrongthink exterminators, everything and everyone must be sexually politicized. It's not just hockey. Did you know football was gay, too? In case all you football-loving hicks couldn't put that together, enlightened nfl administrators even created a special remedial video for you in 2021 to get it through your thick, retrograde, red-state skulls. They even entitled the video "football is gay," just so you wouldn't accidentally miss the point. They also included extra details for you. Football is not just gay, the video says. It's also "lesbian," "transgender," "queer," "bisexual" and "everything." (How can football be "everything"? How can anything be "everything"?)

Anyway, as you might have heard, the military is now gay. hallmark movies are now gay. tv ads are now gay. Novels, elementary school curricula, baseball, popular songs, marriage, Christian denominations, basketball, children's library readings—all gay. Everything is, or can be, any time the cultural stalinists decide. And everyone must instantly erupt in wild, pro-gay cheering whenever our overlords command, just like north korean peasants when Kim Jong-Un shows up for a public appearance. Included in this new mandatory cheering law are all those people who are totally indifferent to private, adult-consenting, sexual behavior. If you don't instantly cheer or comply on command, you're a "hater." (That most of us are "indifferenters", and just want to watch a football game—not suffer through yet more stentorian declamations from guys like Roger Goodell—has never crossed their mind).

Thinking over all this, you start to wonder if there's some point where ordinary people are going to kind of get "gayed out" (I just made that up). Maybe the constant hectoring will transform indifference into exasperation, and then exasperation into something like aversion. How would that be "progress"?

I even wonder if the radicals might one day frazzle mainstream gays. Seriously, how many gay guys or gals do you know who constantly evangelize their gayness to everyone? The gay guys I know aren't like that. They're just gay. They're not loud, hectoring, needy, obnoxious shouters, demanding everyone start pro-gay cheering for them. They're just gay. And you're just straight. And if you're friends, you're friends. Easy. You wonder when or if the mainstream guys are ever going to tell the loudmouths to tone it down—and even more, tell them to get off the underage drag queen shows and leave the kids out of things (perhaps a topic for another day).

I don't know where this all ends. All I know is, what consenting adults get up to behind closed doors, I don't care about. And I know that when I want to watch a sporting contest or a movie or TV series, I just want to watch that thing. I don't want to watch a miniature gay pride parade shoehorned into that thing—no more than I'd want to see a miniature straight pride, White pride, black pride, midget pride, tall people pride, or any other kind of pride shoehorned into it.

Contrary to what that nfl video declares, anything can't be—and shouldn't be—"everything". Some things—lots of things—most things—should just be themselves.

Just one cranky man's two cents.

==

My posted comment:

Charlton Heston, speaking at the Harvard Law School in 1999: "If you accept but don't celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe." (You can still find the video and transcript online.)

An obvious hater, that man!

I'm not hostile to homosexuals, per se. But I **am** completely hostile to **political** homosexuality, the insistence that we pay attention to homosexuals and go gaga over them. That's what George F. Kennan, the wise man of American diplomacy in the mid 20th Century, characterized as "...the weird efforts to claim for homosexuality the status of a proud, noble, and promising way of life, ..."

Yes, "pride." Why be proud to be a homosexual? Or black? Or white? Or a woman? Or a man? Pride is something I associate with accomplishment, not mere existence.

There's also the ruination of the previously useful word "gay," a point made by Isaac Asimov. That the ruination is essentially complete is exemplified by an experience I had in Los Angeles in the late 1990s: I met a woman of Chinese lineage who'd immigrated from Malaysia in about 1985, and she didn't know that "gay" had any meaning apart from "homosexual"!