Right-wing Gays?

Time I think to start over, and begin making my thoughts and investigations into alternative political, sexual and spiritual agenda slightly more systematic! For various reasons, now seems a good opportunity to recap what progress - if that is the correct word - I have made so far. For some time now I've been investigating right-wing Catholicism in the Twentieth Century and various relationships between Catholicism and Zionism, Catholicism and Nazism, and indeed Zionism and Nazism. (On the subject of Nazism and Catholicism, in fact, the book Hitler's Priests might be an interesting one to get hold of.) Inevitably though it drifted into investigations into right-wing gay Catholics as well.

1. Gay Xenophobes (and Libertarians)

In England, right-wing gays tend to be very much of the liberal right/left. They're often academics and intellectuals, such as David Starkey and Alan Sked (the founder of UKIP), or Madsen Pirie (of the Adam Smith Institute) or Douglas Murray (who before he became almost the only English intellectual to out himself as a "neocon" wrote a literary biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, who, like his gay lover Oscar Wilde, ended up becoming a "devout" Catholic). I'm sure there are similar people in America. (Chris Crain and Jeff Gannon, anyone? - not to mention the Log Cabin Republican, GayPatriot and GOProud gangs!) In America of course the Left is much more homogeneous and tightly knit than it is in Britain and Europe, and so there is very little room for any sort of split between gays and Muslims, for example. (Witness the hilariously awful film-version of V for Vendetta, where Muslims are such obvious, natural allies of the gays in their struggle against the Christian fascists!) On this side of the Pond, however, anti-Muslim gays do exist. In this country of course the EDL has its very own "LGBT Division". In Europe anti-Muslim politicians tend to be labelled "far right" when really they're just neoconservative liberals. Geert Wilders is a good example, even though he isn't gay, because his politics are very much in the footsteps of Pim Fortuyn. Wilders is also a lapsed Catholic, and in France too the "far Right" FN are ditching traditionalist Catholicism in favour of racism of the neo-libertarian variety. The key point about these sorts of "right-wing" gays of course is that it's really the being gay that makes them appear to be right-wing, in that it leads quite logically to Islamophobia, neo-libertarianism, faux (fey) cultural conservatism, anti-Catholic bigotry, and so on.

2. Right-wing Closet Cases

Also in Europe though are people like Jorg Haider - another lapsed Catholic - who just happened to be gay. Haider was more of a closeted "traditionalist" rather than an openly gay neocon. Similar things, it is now quite clear, used to go on in the old British National Front, and looking further afield Terreblanche was presumably supposed to fit into this tradition, though to be honest liberal post-mortem fantasies about him probably owed more to the ongoing gay liberal sex fantasies about fascism. (P J O'Rourke's famous nostrum clearly also applies to homosexuals: even gays find rightism more of a turn-on than leftism.) Perhaps Ian McKellen will end up playing Terreblanche in the anti- biopic: it could be his version of Martin Shaw's Rhodes! Either way, I'm sure Peter Tatchell would enjoy it. (The implication of the film JFK would seem to be that these were the sorts of people who killed Oliver Stone's hero.) The tendency amongst these gays clearly is hypocrisy and cover-up rather than an authentic ideological or aesthetic connexion between their fascism and their sexuality.

3. Fascism = Gay

Then again, of course, there are the genuinely right-wing, genuinely gay pederasts. Michel Caignet would be a good example for France, Jessie Dumanch perhaps for Germany. The American blogger James O'Meara over at Where the Wild Boys Are seems to think along similar lines. In this country of course there are the gay skinheads, many of whom though they claim not to racist still get their jollies out of dressing in Nazi-style bondage gear. And I'm sure quite a few of my teachers at school were similar. (Given the choice, they'd prefer to butt-fuck beautiful little blue-eyed blondies. I've heard tell that NaPola is something of a cult film there.) You can't really tell me that Dr. Fredrick Töben isn't a bit of a woofter on the side. And it's worth bearing in mind quite how many pederasts have come from militaristic backgrounds. (For some reason Nona leaves General Gordon and Wilfrid Owen off his list of famous perverts and doesn't mention the famous Verlaine/Rimbaud relationship at all.) Think of T E Lawrence and Laszlo Almasy. Think of the Round Table Conspiracy - which the Marxist Left tried to associate with the Catholic Church of Pope St Pius X - see here, here and here, and so on! These gays clearly are at the other end of the spectrum from the first sort. Here the homosexuality has a sadomasochistic element to it. is a logical extension of a perversely militaristic, hyper-masculine, Fight Club-esque lifestyle.

4. Gay Pagans

And then of course there's paganism. Coming right up to date, an article in The Catholic Herald (of all the dullest places to find anything remotely interesting!) got me reading about Wicca, the Feri "tradition" (which emphasises sensuality rather than fertility, and which therefore probably isn't really "traditional" at all) and the Minoan Brotherhood (who are actually an offshoot from Wicca, albeit an even more silly, gay version). My big problem with Wicca is that it identifies witchcraft and magic with paganism - something a lot of dimwitted people (since Margaret Murray) have pretty much taken for granted, including Letts and Sloman, and Terence Dudley and the people behind Hetty Wainthropp. One of the first "pagan" books I ever tried to read was Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. To be honest, even as a moderately observant Catholic teenager going to Confession semi-regularly I'd have lapped up the incest. It was the paedophilia that actually made me freak out. It comes as an odd sort of relief then to find out that the author herself was actually married to an outspoken paedophile - albeit a gay one. (Now there's a surprise! And that last link is from this site, BTW.) Before she died, apparently, Marion Zimmer Bradley gave up on her experimentations with witchcraft/paganism (and presumably gay and lesbian fantasy porn) and returned to the Episcopalianism of her childhood. Not unlike Anne Rice, I suppose, who returned to her traditionalist Catholicism after a bout of cancer (or some such unpleasantness), and whose lapsation had seemingly gone hand in hand with writing homo-erotic/paedophile vampire stories such as Interview with the Vampire. Rice's work was actually in much the same gay paedo "Catholic" vampire tradition as Montague Summers's had been. She also brought up her son Christopher as a homosexual. I remember seeing a TV interview with him on a documentary about his mother, and he was an absolutely gorgeous little boy. Now he apparently writes gay pseudo-porn of his own. Sadly, Rice wrote one Catholic book about Our Lord when he was a little boy, posted a bit on the traddy web forum Angel Queen (Ahem!), and then lapsed again when it turned out (Quelle horreur!) that actually the Catholic Church is not terribly keen on gay marriage (even in this day and age, when the Pope entertains semi-nude male acrobats in the Vatican). Almost by definition it's impossible to analyse why someone would become interested in paganism, though in the sense that both paganism and homosexuality imply a rejection of Christian norms and a longing for the sensual the two things are clearly compatible, albeit only up to a point.

So, in between the right-wing liberals, who use their gayness to justify their xenophobia, through the neo-fascist closet cases who use their fascism to cover up their poofery, right up to the right on right-wing pervs for whom fascism (and/or paganism) is a means to to justify all sorts of whacky sorts of sexual deviancy, is there any room for the likes of me?

To be honest, I doubt it.