How the US Voted Against Gay Rights, and How Gay Fascists Made It Possible
- Tim Cusack
- Oct 8, 2017
- 6 min read
After a week of Trump being wrong about NFL players exercising their First Amendment rights, wrong about the US government's response to Hurricane Maria, wrong about the use of diplomatic overtures to North Korea, and inviting speculation about just how wrong he will be on sensible gun control legislation following the Las Vegas massacre, it's hard to believe that a single individual could cram any more wronging into a seven-day spread.
But you would be, well, wrong.
Consigned to the back of the chorus by the razzle-dazzle of the never-ending Trump & Co floor show—whose current headlining acts include gloating about a decline in football ratings, undermining the Secretary of State, belittling foreign leaders, cashing the NRA's generous checks, and tossing paper towels at desperate people in San Juan—was a vote at the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission in Geneva last Friday condemning the use of the death penalty as a punishment for sodomy.
The US joined Egypt, Bangladesh, and Saudi Arabia, among others, in opposing the resolution (which passed 27 to 13) that included language denouncing “the imposition of the death penalty as a sanction for specific forms of conduct, such as apostasy, blasphemy, adultery and consensual same-sex relations.”
So just how do our bigoted buddies stack up when it comes to the lives of their LGBTQ citizens?
Well, 57 people have been arrested in Egypt since September 29 for “promoting sexual deviancy” after fans attending a concert in Cairo by the Lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila, led by openly gay singer Hamed Sinno, unfurled a rainbow flag during its set. (Authorities in Jordan cancelled a concert by the same band in April of last year.)
As for Bangladesh, 27 men were rounded up this past spring during a raid on a sex party outside of the capital city of Dhaka, and openly gay and lesbian people are frequently the target of death threats that result in them being forced to flee the country.
And in Saudi Arabia, following the US Supreme Court’s 2015 gay marriage ruling, the religious police fined a private school for painting a rainbow on its façade after arresting one of is administrators. Saudi Arabia is also one of the ten countries in the world where male same-sex sodomy is punishable by death (in this case specifically by stoning), although it’s only a capital offense if committed by a married man or a non-Muslim.
Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which both also voted against the resolution, belong to this dubiously exclusive club as well. However, it’s only fair to point out that there have been no executions for homosexual behavior in any of these countries for more than a decade.
Meanwhile here in the United States, Trump is now backing Roy Moore in his bid to succeed Attorney General Jeff Sessions's appointed replacement, Luther Strange, as Alabama’s newest senator. Moore believes that intimate relations between consenting adults of the same sex should be illegal and has been a frequent guest on homophobic pastor Kevin Swanson’s radio show Generations. Swanson preaches that—wait for it—gay people should be stoned to death (see above).
Once news outlets focused attention on the vote after it started trending on social media, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley tried to defend it (four days after the fact) with the by-now-ritually-mandated swipe at the Obama administration, pointing a metaphoric finger at The Black Guy Who Did It Too. Only trouble is, her statement was deceptive and misleading. Because if it weren’t a deliberate obfuscation, it would strongly imply that one of our country’s chief representatives on the world stage doesn’t understand the difference between voting against something and abstaining from voting at all.
Curiously silent during all of this have been the leading figures of the gay alt right in this country. “Masculinist” Jack Donovan chose to write on Facebook that “There is no such thing as legislation to end or prevent violence,” apparently in response to the mass shooting at the Mandalay Bay, and the most recent post on his website consists entirely of photos from a trip to Das Homeland of Bavaria. Simultaneously, his campier cousin in the Männerbund of homos dedicated to banishing people of color and Jews from the Land of Oz, James J. O’Meara, was as silent as a steam room hand job from his perch at Counter-Currents.
Meanwhile, professional pansy provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was too busy crowing about his lawsuit against Simon & Schuster getting the go-ahead, hawking tickets and merchandise for his Troll Academy Tour, and speculating that Stephen Paddock was secretly a convert to Islam and ISIS sleeper agent to even acknowledge what had happened. (Personally, I was looking forward to how Ms Y was going to defend her Daddy T’s siding with those scary, radical Muslims.)
That our very own homonationalists are apparently ignoring this incident is relevant because reactionary leaders like Trump, to whom they have allied themselves to varying degrees, have appealed to gay white cis-males (none of these men believe trans people actually exist) through the explicit promise that they would keep us safe from being beheaded or thrown off a roof by Middle Eastern fanatics. Or from being gunned down in a queer space like the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a tragedy Yiannopoulos in particular exploited to convince gays to vote for Trump.
Pim Furtyn, the openly gay and virulently Islamophobic Dutch politician assassinated in 2002, was the first figure on the far right to figure out that appealing to understandable LGBT fears of homophobic violence could be a winning way around the contemporary queer community’s ideological commitment to progressive politics.
Since then, in addition to Trump, Marine Le Pen in France and openly lesbian Alice Weidel in Germany have simultaneously appealed to working class conservatives and urbanite gays by demonizing non-white immigrants and Muslims. Both head political parties that have histories of overt hostility to LGBT communities, and yet it’s estimated that Le Pen had the support of 36.5% of the gay vote in the French presidential election this year, with even higher numbers among younger gay men.
Another curious paradox about many of the queer ultra-white nationalists is that they are in long-term relationships with people of color. Alice Weidel’s domestic partner is of Sri Lankan descent (the women also illegally hired a Syrian refugee to clean their Swiss residence). Jack Donovan’s boyfriend is Mexican, while Milo just married a black man—who’s also Muslim—in Hawaii last weekend. He’s been quoted in Bloomberg as saying that his new husband, John, is the only Muslim he approves of. Perhaps sleeping with the enemy Other is how we gays can do our part to support Trumpian “extreme vetting.”
Then again, maybe John’s not the ONLY Muslim he tolerates.
BuzzFeed’s bombshell report on Thursday about how Breitbart used Milo as the homo Jewish chocolate queen cover for its racialist agenda also included several juicy tidbits about his assistant of Pakistani descent, Allum Bokhari, and their working relationship. The entire article is a must-read, but I was particularly struck by its revelation that Bokhari ghostwrites most of Yiannopoulus’s “journalism.”
However, when Bokhari asked for a co-byline on Breitbart’s big alt right piece (since he, umm, actually wrote it), he was initially refused under the pretense that its racially charged nature made it potentially dangerous. He replied in an email that “I think it actually lowers the risk if someone with a brown-sounding name shares the BL,” which begs the question if there is an Urdu equivalent for “Uncle Tom.” (When it eventually ran, they both were credited.)
He also addresses Yiannopoulus as “Mein Fuhrer.” Yes, really.
But what’s even queerer than their deafening quiet about the Geneva vote or their sexual fetishizing/economic exploitation of the very people whom they are oppressing is that they have taken gay activists to task in the past for their perceived inadequate attention to the existential threat that Islam poses. After all, way back in 2006 Donovan wrote in his book Androphilia: “It seems that if gay advocates today were truly concerned about real oppression, they’d be concentrating their efforts on political asylum programs for homos in Muslim countries, where accused homosexuals are still routinely executed.”
Of course, the man whom they supported for President has now made it impossible for queer people from several of those countries to seek political asylum here because of the travel ban. His State Department has voted against a resolution that could potentially protect them in their home countries. How one squares their present silence on all of this with their past statements of support boggles the rational mind.
Unless, of course, we remember the real reason the United States voted against the resolution (and abstained previously). Its language did not advocate for an outright ban on the death penalty nor was it strictly concerned with it being used against LGBT minorities. Rather it calls for member states not to apply it “arbitrarily or in a discriminatory manner” against any citizens, including women, ethnic minorities, and economically disadvantaged peoples.
And here’s the rub: Mountains of data have shown time and time again that people of color and the poor in this country are far more likely to be tried, convicted, and executed under capital statutes than wealthy white people. For the gays invested in the belief of their own racial superiority, ensuring that the state can legally kill as many black and brown people as possible will always outweigh any feigned concern for queers threatened by fanatical adherence to the Quran.