The Kamikaze Gays

When a generation of gay men are hoodwinked into a political Zeitgeist that inevitably calls for their own erasure from society. This story contains obscure Dungeons & Dragons fantasy references.

My lesbian friends are amongst the most sober, intelligent commentators when it comes to the state of today’s same-sex-attracted community. Once the preserve of those infrequent, supposedly perfidious souls that were historically ostracised by society for their aberrant romantic interest in members of the same gender, this community—and I use that word very loosely—has swelled unbidden to assimilate and enshrine an ever expanding nexus of obscure and peculiar cult-like groups: the transgender people, the queers, the asexuals (they are lying to you), the intersex, the polyamorous, perhaps even the minor-attracted persons. This, a ‘runaway’ mutation—recognised as a bona fide phenomenon in genetics—from a time when gender was once merely a synonym for biological sex.

As we spill over into June here in sunny, breezy Toronto, Pride Month—that’s right: an entire phase of the moon emblazoned with rainbow colours—is set to commence amid a flurry of flags and non-binary bumper stickers, and the remark that lingers in my mind after cocktails at a favourite haunt of mine in Yorkville are the words of our beloved lesbian bartender, “Wow! There’s just so much stuff going on out there on the street! The community has really changed out of all recognition.” Or words to that effect. Forgive me, but that last Brandy Alexander was almost the death of me.

The street she is referring to is Church Street, the once-and-only prince of gaydom in the city of Toronto, the environs of Flash, the famous all-male strip bar, and of Woody’s, the quintessential old-school hang-out where hookups could, believe it or not, be secured in the era before Grindr made that in-person practice all but obsolete. There, too, stand venerable establishments like Steamworks, everyone’s favourite daddy-den, spilling over with tawdry, towelled septuagenarians ready and waiting to engage in lewd transactions with lithe twenty-somethings.

But the strange things that are happening in these ever stranger days, the ones that our cosmopolitan mixologist is concerned about, reflect the growing incongruence between the collective, publicly acceptable political beliefs of the vast majority of gays and the stark, unvarnished reality that those self-same beliefs embody a suicidal tendency, a penchant for self-destruction—borne in some cases, I speculate, out of a deep-seated self-loathing—that risks the repeal of liberties that the GLB movement during the Stonewall era managed so decisively to secure. Jordan Peterson, prescient as ever, has alluded to this in a recent interview; and The Guardian newspaper lately reported on the plummeting support for 2SLGBTQIA+ rights. This is not a good thing.

Now, all of this sounds—at least on first inspection—to be counterintuitive, but it is far, far from it. In the wake of vast gains made by gays on the sociopolitical battlefield during the Sixties and Seventies, many leading advocacy groups have since flailed around aimlessly, suffering from a terminal case of St. George in retirement syndrome. The English patron saint—once lauded for his gallant exploits—the self-same plate-armoured knight who wielded Ascalon, his mighty lance, and slew Tiamat the dragon, soon tired of his well-earned sojourn and sought out new foes to defeat; eventually, in his rapture, to be found swinging his sword wildly at phantasmal enemies. Much in the same manner, the ‘trans’ issue, which had largely lain dormant and ignored by the vast majority of gays seeking sexual liberation on their own, broader terms, was all of a sudden endorsed as the next cause célèbre and championed with lightning speed. The acronym grew ever longer and more unwieldy in an increasingly inept effort to conceal what was, in reality, political and ideological conflation and migration.

St. George and the Dragon by Paolo Uccello. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

But here lies the rub. Gay men are notoriously superficial and narcissistic. Take it from me, because I know, and I have lived it; and, as we all know—irrespective of our many and various disputes—the lived experience trumps all other epistemologies, especially those nasty, untrustworthy objective varieties that are the well-spring of modern scientific discourse.

Speaking of science, we gay men have, let’s face it, very little prospect of biological offspring—those surrogacies are so unbearably pricey—and we spend our lives in hedonistic pursuits, chasing handsome paramours, preening ourselves, and applying every conceivable skincare cream to fend off our inexorable journey towards a lonely death, abandoned by all to our very own private Idaho—an inevitable interview with Beelzebub.

No matter. The political sensibilities of the ‘WiFi password’ collective have largely been ignored by gay men in particular, and almost universally regarded as essential but unexamined tenets of faith that are merely expedient in the ongoing, ever more vigorous search for man-on-man perfection. We want simple answers to what we perceive to be dull questions, and a minimum of distraction from our perpetual, repetitive mating ritual. We acquiesce and nod dumbly when faced with the prospect of acknowledging other groups’ oppressions, but we know in our hearts that such allegiance is purely performative, since the entirety of most gay men’s lives pivots instead on that inescapable hierarchy of physical youth and beauty—the as yet unplumbed repository of countless slights and painful rejections that, after one dismissal too many, paves a path to dark and desperate encounters in nightclub alleyways.

By middle age, still conscious of our addiction to the thrill of the chase, we begin to recognise that this is no way for a gay man to live a satisfying life. But giving up is no easy matter; and as we look furtively elsewhere for fulfilment, it might just dawn on us precisely what path we have laid for ourselves. The political hydra that was once the draconian foe of St. George, so soundly defeated in distant days, has now sprouted new and far more monstrous heads in the shape of the transgender activism that has today usurped control over the movement that once fought for our sexual liberation. In its wake, this monstrosity has dragged us down into a doomed political whirlpool. The fight for trans rights is not our fight, especially when a man who is attracted to another man because he owns a set of male genitals is now reviled by the trans community as a bigot, a fetishist no less. This is, as author and commentator Andrew Doyle has spoken of so extensively, the new homophobia.

Worse still, the outlandish and deranged advocacy springing from among our ranks that has sought to medicalise confused children—the majority of whom are merely wrestling with the hormonal roller-coaster that is the onset of puberty and will more often than not emerge as young gay teens—has awoken a very different dragon. Straight society—yes, let’s get real here: these are the more than 19 out of every 20 people you come across in everyday life, or perhaps 18 out of 20 if you live in Toronto—is now alert to the immorality that has begun to assail their offspring, in the shape of elementary school teachers preaching fantasy gender ideology, and drag queens reading kids’ stories about non-binary teddy bears. Gay men know about fantasies; and they know about bears. It is true that much of this blather we greet with insouciance, but let’s be clear: This is adult entertainment rather than an innocent children’s extracurricular activity.

Anyone who is a paid-up member of the ‘community’ and has taken more than a moment to contemplate the trajectory of the political agenda that that group now embraces will instantly see the dangers. Hard-won victories, such as gay marriage, will be imperilled by the unchecked and self-evidently absurd progressivism that now saturates the Church Street set. Or should that be sect? When the childhood bogyman is vindicated as a truth-sayer in the gospel of social justice, when the paedophile is lauded as a victim of societal misinterpretation—especially by white colonialist patriarchs—then we gays have, in fact, signed our own death warrant. Like Marat, we can but wait to be dispatched in the bath by the keen knife of a middle-class ideologue.

Well-known photo of a Japanese Navy pilot, said to be Hideo Oishi, tying a rising-sun ceremonial headband known as a hachimaki. Image taken from Facebook.

But I have digressed. My overarching analogy was to Japanese, not French Revolutionary culture. Courtesy of my brother, I am married by blood into a Japanese family, and I have paid close attention to the tales from their storied past. Kamikaze has the meaning of the divine wind, a supernatural power for the preservation of Japan in the face of the thirteenth century invasion by Kublai Khan. In the Twentieth Century rendition of this mythology, young Japanese men were encouraged to make the ultimate sacrifice in a last-ditch effort to defend the Empire that had prompted the wrath of the U.S. at Pearl Harbour. But in modern-day North America, in this century, it is the ‘kamikaze gays’ who have suited up. They wear the bandanas emblazoned with the blood-red sun across their foreheads; and they are ready and waiting to board their doomed, flight-of-a-lifetime aircraft. We look in each other’s eyes and some of us cannot conceal our anxiety. The enemy vessel is in sight, and we must sink it before it is too late, so say our taskmasters. Will we break rank? During World War II, the slavish adherence to personal honour and an unquestioning commitment to the Japanese Emperor was a cultish narrative popularised in the West, but in the post-War era such views have been tempered by stories of coercion and peer pressure among those pilots. What strikes me so viscerally in today’s culture war, is the heartless deployment of clueless gay men in suicidal sorties on an enemy—a straight enemy that, as yet bears no enmity to the concept of accepting same-sex attraction—an enemy that vastly outnumbers them, both in resources and intelligence. When will we shake off this political soporific and look to our own well-being? Or will we, rather, reap the whirlwind?