Tainted Love: Why it’s no longer virtuous to be proud of Pride

There are plenty of good reasons for gay people to distance themselves once and for all from the cavalcade of nonsense and dangerous buffoonery that purports to represent them. In fact, ladies and gentlemen, it is an existential imperative.

It’s past time for the thinking members of the gay community to wake up to the widespread, insidious politicking and ideological capture that has infiltrated that once-proud platform that sought in a nostalgic, bygone era to liberate same-sex attracted people and welcome them with open arms into broader society. I’m talking, of course, about Toronto Pride, the local manifestation of an annual celebration of the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969, that was first instituted in the Big Apple in 1970, and spawned across the border eleven years later in 1981.

Achilles Lamenting The Death of Patroclus by Gavin Hamilton (c.1760-1763).

I am writing this in the lull after Toronto Pride month, when many gay men and lesbians sigh audibly with relief, now that the carnival of libertines, the public parading of nudity and fetishes and absurd narcissistic sexual fantasies has finally drawn to close. This year, rather ironically, the parade itself was stopped in its tracks three quarters of the way through by a small handful of pro-Palestine protestors calling for an end to ‘pinkwashing’—whatever that was supposed to be about. Let me guess: Too many Pride corporate sponsors invested in Israel? Bingo!

Only utterly deranged same-sex attracted individuals would knowingly support a theocratic regime that demands as a core tenet of its religious beliefs the summary execution of gay people. The refrain, “Go jump off a cliff,” comes to mind. In fact, no one should be in the slightest surprised by movements with names like ‘Queers for Palestine,’ because drug use across the gay community is so pervasive and widespread that any sober member of society should logically anticipate incoherent patterns of thought such as these. It stands to reason. It reminds me of Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, Albert Hitchcock’s protagonist in North By Northwest, caught driving drunk and then attempting to walk in a straight line at the police station.

But hold on a moment. Queers for Palestine? Why not Gays for Palestine? These words are no longer synonyms, not in 2024, in the post-Queer Theory world championed by academics like Judith Butler. Queer is an adjective that everyone agreed once equated with same-sex attraction, but has now broadened to include absolutely anyone departing from the norms of sexuality and gender. So, the whole thing is misleading—much like everything else in this topsy-turvy world of chase-to-switch meanings and pernicious truth subversion. The group wants you to believe it is gays and lesbians who paradoxically advocate for Hamas, when in fact it is an activist movement comprising a much larger demographic slice: straight people with a kink, or adults still undecided about their sexuality. A recent US survey found that almost a third of Gen Z adults self-identified under the 2SLGBTQIA+ umbrella. But setting that quibble aside, what’s truly comic is that Sunday’s Pride finale, the whole proud parade, simply ground to a halt, the organizers citing public safety reasons.

Now, when you consider that gay men and women faced off against hostile crowds and police officers in 1970 at considerable risk to their personal safety, and here in our own city as recently as 1981, patrons of the city’s bathhouses were rounded up by Toronto police, this feeble response by Toronto Pride’s mandarins is the kind of limp-wristed and half-hearted level of commitment serves only to utterly embarrass those of us who championed gay liberation in earlier decades. For the straight readers out there, this is no better than a young ingenue generation interrupting a Remembrance Day observance and earnestly mocking our war heroes.

Yet among that same sassy and non-confrontational coterie of Toronto Pride grandees, is an ideologically captive subgroup of neo-Marxist nonsense-speakers who are ready and willing to scream bloody murder and cast ad hominems left and right, indiscriminately labelling rational dissenters as ‘bigots’ and ‘transphobes’ until the rest of the world falls into line and appeases their demands. These are the self-styled transgender activists—many of them not in the slightest bit transgender themselves—simply allies of a cause that at its ideological heart calls for the medicalisation of children and the shaming of same-sex attracted people such as myself.

Many are white and middle-classed and preoccupied with defending and amplifying their own status in the dinner-party game of one-upmanship. These days, in polite society, being a ‘trans parent’ is widely thought of by this echelon of society to be a totem of progressiveness and moral virtue. Look at Dr Who’s David Tennant, for instance, who was so blind in his advocacy for trans rights that during his acceptance speech at the British LGBT Awards for ‘Celebrity Ally’—indisputably one of the least coveted gongs in show business—he superciliously derided former UK Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenok, a black woman, and called for her to “shut uppppp!” We have a word for people like this.

But beliefs such as these constitute a very private, complex and somnambulant state of delusion, one of deep and reflexive denial that will never, ever admit to the objective reality: namely that this very same credo justifies the experimentation and mutilation of their own children. As Helen Joyce, articulate and justifiably outspoken advocate for Sex Matters has so accurately portrayed these trans parents, “It’s a fight to the death as far as they’re concerned,” because they will do absolutely anything to avoid admitting they participated in the mutilation of their own child.

This, then, is the new homophobia. Much like antisemitism, this deeply embedded prejudice for those in society that are attracted to members of their own sex mutates and responds to environmental pressures, taking on new forms, hiding in plain sight in novel and unexpected places. As with viruses, the change is swift and difficult to track unless assiduously monitored, and it evades the vast majority of the population, in this case the wider straight community.

The reason why straight ‘cis-het’ folks are so easily lured into the 2SLGBTQIA+ honeytrap is that it promises an opportunity for low-risk, high return on social investment. It says that you can broadcast your social virtue by supporting a collective of marginalised and oppressed people who are unified in their battle for recognition and acceptance into broader society. This is a bald-faced lie, and it is time for opposite-sex attracted people, the so-called ‘allies,’ to be brought up to speed.

Here is the truth of the matter. The work of whistleblower Heather Barnes into the goings on at England’s Tavistock clinic in Hampstead, North London led to the disclosure that 80-90% of children referred to the clinic presenting with gender identity disorders were same-sex attracted. Compounding this, the four-year-long review commissioned by the outgoing UK government and conducted by world-renowned paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass revealed there to be scant medical evidence supporting the prescription of puberty blockers for prepubescent trans-identifying kids. In a nutshell, the English National Health Service was engaged in gay conversion therapy.

Pro-Palestine protesters intervene during Toronto’s Pride Parade, 30 June 2024. Image courtesy of The National Post.

Thinking these recent revelations to be a priority for discussion among the ‘thinking’ class, I approached my departmental chair at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Management & Innovation (IMI) querying why it was that at another recent awards ceremony—an event that you can well imagine involved a good deal of fatuous gladhanding and self-congratulatory but largely meaningless backslapping—that, owing to its coincidence with Pride Month, centred around an arch of celebratory balloons mimicking, no, not the Rainbow flag, but the newer highly divisive Pride Progress flag. There, pictured in photographs behind the jubilant honourees, were the chevron colours of black and brown and pink and white and baby blue. In that interview, I was clear about how such symbolism was aligning the department with an ideology that called for the shaming of same-sex people and the medical correction of gay teens. The response, rather amusingly, was, “The Institute does not have an ideological position.” That’s unfortunate, on any number of levels, most especially since IMI styles itself as championing innovation. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, an ideology is “a form of social or political philosophy, or a system of ideas, that aspires both to explain the world and to change it.” On IMI’s website the department claims its mission is “To constantly transform thinking to solve the hardest problems facing people, their communities, and societies globally.” It is hard to say, then, whether the messaging is purely mendacious, or merely incompetent.

But I am not pursuing a ‘gotcha’ moment. In a recent conversation with Professor Jordan Peterson on the subject, he urged me to consider the “margin of the margins” conundrum, namely that the goal of a previously marginal group—in this case, gays and lesbians—was acceptance and normalisation into society, and that their deserved success has left an ever thinner sliver of the population, a sub-population, languishing at the periphery. Today, these are the trans individuals; and if these people are dutifully enfolded into the centre, who, then, will be left to include? There are ever tinier minorities with even stranger interests. Some academics have advocated, for instance, for the destigmatisation of minor-attracted people (MAPs), which for all intents and purposes is the polite academic signifier for paedophiles. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of us in the 2SLGBTQIA+ collective have begun to twitch nervously at the prospect of appending even more letters to their already ungainly acronym and welcoming such newcomers aboard. MAPs have fervently argued that they aren’t engaged in paedophilia because they actively resist their inclinations, but let’s be frank here: how long will it be before a suicidally empathetic concession to this next layer of ‘inclusion’ provokes a catastrophic backlash?

We are in dangerous terrain. The curtain is about to raise on a new theatre in the culture war, one that is far too dangerous to ignore; and, although tearing off the bandages will hurt, the LGB will need to contemplate divorcing itself permanently and irrevocably from the TQIA2S+, as has already happened in Britain with LGB Alliance and The Gay Men’s Network. If we gays and lesbians and bisexual members of society do not heed this imperative, we risk the collective wrath of the majority of Canadians who are, like a sleeping dragon, being stirred into a fiery and retributive rage.