Jonathan and Richard discuss the Homosexual Question. Topics include the history and biological nature of homosexuality as well as the rise of gay marriage to become one of the most important political shibboleths of the 21st century. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.
Thank you.
Here's your host, Richard Spencer.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Vanguard.
And welcome back as well, my weekly partner for these podcasts, Jonathan Bowden.
Yes, how are you doing?
I'm doing well.
How are you over in England?
Yes, spring has broken out here.
Everything's fine.
Is that true in February?
Well, it seems that the weather is extraordinarily mild, considering we had snow about 10 days ago.
Right.
Well, that's good.
We're being, at least in my neck of the woods, which I guess is literally a part of the woods.
It's pouring snow.
But anyway, today, let's get right to it.
Today we're going to talk about a very interesting, but certainly contentious and sometimes painful topic, and that is homosexuality.
We're going to talk about the homosexual question in general, but also the politics of homosexuality.
And, you know, I think when we take on an issue like this, We can indeed only scratch the surface.
But when we take on an issue like this, I think it's often best to find an entry point in the way that it's most relevant in contemporary times.
And I think that is probably this politics of homosexuality.
You know, as we were talking, Jonathan, off the air when we were thinking about doing a podcast on this subject, You mentioned that the homosexual question as a political issue was unthinkable 75 years ago.
It might have been thinkable or becoming thinkable amongst the vanguard of the left during the late 1960s and Cultural Revolution.
But now it's not only thinkable, it's become a kind of shibboleth in the sense of it is a decisive issue for...
Whether you think of yourself as on the left or the right.
And that is interesting.
Also, the gay movement is something that did not exist within recent memory, yet now, again, is something that's quite powerful and something that is decisive in terms of where you fall on the left-right spectrum.
So, Jonathan, why don't we talk a little bit about this, this gay movement in general and how it fits into the left.
And let me just, to begin that conversation, I'll just relate an amusing anecdote.
I used to live, actually, in a very...
A hip neighborhood in Brooklyn.
And it was one in which, on weekends, invariably, you would meet someone probably around 22, 23, usually a younger person, sometimes a cute girl, and they'd be out there trying to get you to sign a petition for this and that and probably collect your email address.
And there are a lot of environmental causes and so forth, some anti-war causes, but gay marriage was something that you'd see probably more than any of the rest.
I would say something kind of perverse like, no, I demand that we liberate gays from oppressive bourgeois marriages.
They'd probably tell that I was joking a little bit, but I don't think they'd really understand me.
And so, you know, again, I think this shows the kind of formless and ever-changing nature of the left that it can, at some point, view bourgeois marriage as something it needs to liberate people from, as something it wants to destroy.
Yes, it's sort of been a hundred-year story, really.
Way back in the beginning of the sort of last century, certainly the second decade of the last century, the 1920s.
The Bloomsbury Group in Britain was one of the few cultural sort of vanguard groups that were pushing for what would now be called an equality agenda on this issue and many others.
And they were as under pressure as politically incorrect social conservatives are today.
We've seen a total reversal in the sort of stormscape of the sky.
You know, everything has changed.
All of the landmarks have remained the same, and yet the atmosphere around them has changed utterly.
A hundred years back, people with these ideas were under deep cover.
They were frightened for their careers and their reputations.
If it was revealed, they had these sorts of ideas.
They used to have a sort of masonry in which they met, by which I don't mean anything conspiratorial.
I just mean that they had...
And they had extended circles and networking and contacts to keep their views separate from people who weren't as quote-unquote progressive or in their terms as up to the mark as they thought of themselves.
And it's quite interesting because, of course, some of the great espionage scandals of the 20th century involving the security services.
of both Britain and the United States of America are rooted in these sorts of cultural networks because the Bloomsbury Group was an open cultural network up to a point with closed features.
But the Apostles Group at Cambridge University and its equivalent of Oxford University and its equivalent in certain colleges at London University was more of a closed elitist cultural circle.
It was a communist circle, a general ultra-liberal ethos through which these circles floated.
And it was very much a homosexual circle, one of the key spies and MI6, MI5 traitors in the later decades in Britain, Anthony Blunt, who went on to be the surveyor of the He was part of a homosexual circle.
that overlapped with these other circles of ultra-liberalism and of politically correct non-conformism.
These were ideas which were totally at variance with the society in which they lived.
The society was a conservative, in British terms, News Chronicle Society, a sort of newspaper that's, Morning Chronicle Society rather, a paper that's long since defunct.
I don't know if you can think of a...
Pretty traditional, bourgeois, conservative newspaper in the United States?
Sure, maybe the New York Post Society, Wall Street Journal Society, I guess.
Imagine that 10 times to 50 times more conservative than it is now.
Those were the attitudes that prevailed then.
And these people were really up against it.
And this issue of all issues was a trigger issue.
Because it's an issue about which the majority of people who don't think about these issues at all have an instantaneous judgment, an intuitive judgment, a physiological judgment, a sort of naysaying by virtue of what they are.
Because despite the ideology that says that 20%, 40%, and more accurately, in terms of the ideology, 10%,...are inverted or homosexual in sexual orientation.
It might be as low as 1.5% to 2% for either gender, which is a very small number of people.
And yet the politics of getting them civic equity has been an enormous struggle.
And yet it's been conducted when, in some ways, there was no real need to do it in a strange way.
At times it's almost not been about homosexuals.
It's been about the effect you can have on society by promoting them and it.
Now, the so-called gay liberation movement has always existed amongst homosexuals themselves.
But its heterosexual supporters, because the bulk of the left that supported them, of course, didn't share their orientation, but shared their desire to change society, absolutely, in all sorts of stages and at all sorts of levels.
Traditional Marxism had very little to say about sexuality, about drugs, about the culture of bohemianism, and about decadence.
Marxist feminist regimes, of course, have been highly socially conservative.
And have been quite toxic about issues of decadence and retain the ultra-conservative trade union attitudes that often prevailed on the old left at the beginning of the 20th century.
Communism tends to do this when it's in opposition.
It advocates the maximum degree of breakdown and debility and what conservatives call decadence.
But when in power, it reverses that and has a very socially conservative mantra.
But to return to the movement itself, the movement didn't really become observable until the 1950s and 1960s, when it was part of the general current that reverberated within and beyond the 60s cultural revolutions that spread into the 1970s.
The term gay and its etymology is quite interesting, of course, because technically it's a 19th century word.
And it means a prostitute, or it means somebody who's louche.
And somebody who's decadent in their sexuality.
In Victorian England, the term gay meant essentially a woman who was easily available for sexual usage.
It's a famous punch cartoon from the 1840s, quite daring given what we're told about the Victorian attitudes towards these things, of two splatterns under a lamppost and one says to the other, if you're so gay, why do you look so miserable?
And the term gay meaning sexual outsider, mountebank, hustler, somebody who uses their sexuality in order to get on, somebody who is in some ways a sexual criminal, that was the original word because, of course, its counterpart is straight.
And in criminal jargon, those who are not criminals are straights.
They're the ones who obey the rules.
They're the nerds, you see, in this sort of quasi-criminal way of looking at things.
This sort of underground man way of looking at things.
The people who obey all the rules and stick to the lines and who work for a living and this sort of thing are regarded as straight or having gone straight or not deviated from a straight path.
And this idea that one is different and is transgressive.
And it's transgressive in the sexual area is where the term gay comes from.
It's got nothing to do with being happy and carefree, as most people believe.
So even the origin of the word is ideological, is deliberately ideological.
And the whole movement was ideological because they decided to invert national socialist motifs for the way in which homosexuals were treated.
So the pink triangle became a symbol of pride and the inversion of stereotypical prejudices against them became an object of correlative in relation to their own identity.
And that's what that particular movement picked up.
Right.
with homosexuals are not interested in militant, vanguard politics, as most people are not.
So they've softened over time.
They've changed their objectives over time.
On the issue of marriage, Traditionally, the gay movement was always opposed to marriage for homosexuals, believing that it was a bourgeois construct that heterosexuals engaged in, and the whole point of them was that they were different.
They were different people who had a different lifestyle, and that bourgeois marriage was not part of it.
And it's become rather uneasily, actually, the liberal left and the bourgeois left has claimed this space for itself.
And the idea that a small proportion of them who wish to marry should have the right to do so outside church in civic ceremonies that go beyond civil partnerships.
It's largely an initiative of the bourgeois left.
It's not really an initiative of the far left.
It appears far left to people on the other side.
But they, on the whole, are relatively indifferent about it.
They'll tick the box for it.
Well, no, there's a serious split in the gay movement between the Andrew Sullivan type, and I'm referring to the journalist and blogger, Actually,
Justin Raimondo, who's an excellent anti-war...
He certainly despises Andrew Sullivan for his views on foreign policy, at least ostensibly.
There's also something underneath it, which was that he was part of a more radical, vanguardist gay movement in California that would...
you know, loathes someone like Andrew Sullivan as a sellout or gay traitor or something like that.
Although they have morphed over the years because the group that's advising the British government on homosexual marriage legislation, something that's being brought in tacitly by a conservative-dominated government, don't forget, What's the motivation for that?
I mean, I was just thinking through these things.
I mean, one could say that the motivation is a far left motivation.
They truly want to just subvert and destroy the basic family structure with gay marriage.
I'm not so sure about that.
I don't think a lot of the wishy-washy liberals who support gay marriage and think it's nice, I'm not sure they have such...
I think it's something else.
I mean, is it simply a case that a lot of these people have a kind of gay friend and they think that this is something good?
Or what do you think the motivation?
I mean, why has this become a shibboleth in the way that other things happen?
I mean, you know, legalization of drugs is not a shibboleth.
It's not that important at all.
But the gay movement really is.
What do you think the motivation is amongst heterosexuals?
I think it's become a tokenistic thing to prove how moderately right on and progressive one is.
The reason for its adoption by the British Conservative government is purely political positioning involving the present leader, Cameron.
He's always come from the centre of the party in British terms, but has liked to posture as a Liberal Conservative who's not...
Right-wing or reactionary on social issues.
One of the ways he could run against his own party and prove his independence and the fact that he wasn't really right-wing but was a conservative of an allegedly modern character, a sort of civic neoconservative without the foreign policy accretions, if you like, was to champion homosexual marriage in the teeth of his party's southern opposition to it, because the Tory party doesn't like it at all, and it's going to be a large-scale rebellion which may scupper his project.
It's also considered to be a meaningless sort of gesture as well.
Because hardly any of them want to get married.
And there'll be very little of it.
And so what it is, it's a chattering classes issue.
If you had a vote on it, The vote will be quite close because the issue is being forced onto the agenda to such a degree that liberal attitudes towards it are much more prevalent than they used to be.
There would be a majority against a marriage because they've got civil partnerships anyway, and most people would say that's enough.
And there's a strong lobby that's opposed to marriage, particularly a Christian lobby, which involves the ex-archbishop of Canterbury and other people.
So it probably won't happen under a Tory government, actually, but it will happen under a Labour government at some time in the future.
It's become a shibbolist because heterosexuals wish to support tokenistic gestures that make them feel good.
Right.
I think it is as simple as that.
Let's talk a little more broadly about this issue.
You know, I, for one, I find the homosexual movement to be absolute poison, something that is a part of...
A larger movement that I think is bringing about the death of the West.
That said, I don't think that your average homosexual is someone who is, say, totally morally suspect.
And indeed, I don't think that they can be changed.
I think they were born that way, and I think it's a physical attribute, if not necessarily a genetic one.
So I guess someone might...
View my position on this as laissez-faire and tolerant, or maybe I'm kind of like an older reactionary who just would like gays to be quiet about it and not have a gay movement, but I don't really want to go save them or investigate them or jail them or anything like that.
But, you know, one of the reasons why I hold this view is that homosexuality is not new.
It was not something that was invented in the 1960s.
It's something that has always been marginal, although it's always been with us.
And actually, I hesitate a little bit in even suggesting it was marginal.
It's worth pointing out that when you read some of these great platonic dialogues, like the Symposium...
Which is on the nature of love.
Those people are debating the nature of love of a young boy.
And that's something that's shocking and disturbing, certainly for me.
I imagine it's for every other reader.
So in some ways, homosexuality has always been there.
It's never been...
The mainstream of society, but it's had a larger and smaller role to play.
I guess someone might actually object here and say that that's homosexuality, which is something different than a gay identity, and that's certainly true.
But what do you think about this?
Looking back over the great thrust of Western history, what kind of role do you think homosexuality has played in this?
As I said before, it's always been there, and yet it's sometimes suppressed, sometimes ignored, sometimes it actually was an activity that had a...
Yes, I think it's a physical manifestation, and it's always been there.
It's always been important in one sense because it's played to elites.
The elites of Western society have often been segregated along gender lines early in life.
Segregated by schooling, segregated before marriage.
Marriage is often semi-arranged, not in accordance with romantic love ideas anyway.
Aristocratic prerequisite, whereby your nanny and sisters and your mother, aunts and female relatives were really the only women that many young men met until they were 20, at least.
Even then, universities were segregated, at least at colleges, although you did get to meet the opposite sex at that time.
So this hothouse atmosphere at upper-class and upper-class schools, particularly in Western Europe, especially in Britain, is the stuff of folklore.
And the issue of the dandy and people who stand outside by virtue of style and the importance in the arts, where this minority has been extremely...
I mean, in excess of their representation in the arts can be 15%, 20%, 35%, more.
More.
Oh, for, you know, if you go look at contemporary Broadway musicals or something, and it's 75%.
Or if you look at art history, when I was a graduate student, art history departments were 100% either female or gay male.
And they're probably 75% gay male.
And yet the percentage in the society may be actually proportionately very small, except when they all group together, in particular locales, which is one of the tactics that's used.
But then again, people wish to live with their own kind.
I mean, that's a normative gesture.
So yes, it's always existed.
It's fluctuated.
One of the biggest tensions holding it back in Western society is Christianity, which Christianity has always been quite biblically literal about inversion and homosexuality and has always condemned it.
This is not to say that there's always been Christians who've had a liberal view about it.
There always have been.
And the bark was largely worse than the bite if people were discreet.
But at the end of the day, Christianity is one of the major sanctions upon it.
And as secular Westerners struggle to get these civic equality measures onto the statute book, it's the evangelical Christianity.
With a certain element of reactionary Catholic Christianity added in, conducting the last stand, as it were, really, because this is a major issue for them, because it's literally condemned in the Bible.
And although Catholics don't literally believe in the Bible because the Church interprets for you what the Bible means, Protestants of any radicalism have to believe literally in the Bible because they don't have any overarching Church structure to give their faith coherence.
So for them, it's a cardinal matter.
It's very important indeed for all three religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
It's actually a central issue, which is why they tend to debate it so much, because it's a totemic issue.
It's a touchstone issue.
For the broader society, it's not really an issue.
The bulk of heterosexuals would rather not think about it.
That's their attitude, actually.
Yeah, I agree.
Let's talk a little bit about this in closing.
Of just your views on the physical nature of homosexuality.
I know we were talking off air and you think that this earlier view, which might seem rather intuitive or mystical or something, that a gay man has a woman's mind or maybe even a woman's brain and vice versa for lesbians, that this might actually be...
Correct.
And, you know, I'll just mention my view.
I actually have a short three-fourths written blog article on this, which I need to finish up.
I'll try to publish it coinciding with this podcast.
But there's actually a lot of evidence that, and this was actually done by an East German researcher, and I find it rather cogent, and that is that there's a lot of evidence that homosexuality is not a genetic Manifestation,
but it is a physical manifestation, and it involves that when a child's in a womb, they're subjected to a series of just to...
You know, speak rather colloquially, testosterone baths.
And in a sense, one of them will determine the sex of the fetus.
Another will determine, let's say, the object of desire of the fetus.
That way it will kind of gender it of you want to be with women.
And then another bath will determine the kind of...
Let's say gender behavior.
You know, do you act like a man?
So on and so forth.
And that sometimes in stress and sometimes just simply randomly, that the fetus is not subjected to these individual baths of testosterone.
And so you'll have a lot of situations where, you know, oftentimes you will have the stereotypical feminine man who's gay.
You know, he acts like a woman.
He might even be obsessed with more interest in womanly things.
We know the stereotype.
But there are actually a lot of other different gay people.
Actually, when I lived in New York City, I remember walking around Chelsea.
It was late at night, and there were clearly a band of people who were openly homosexual, but they were quite masculine.
They looked like they had been working out in the gym all day long.
They were kind of prowling streets.
Not exactly the most reputable people or anyone I'd want to hang around with.
But anyway, they were clearly not wimps or ladymen or girlymen or whatever.
They were quite masculine.
I think this way of thinking about it really can explain it.
And it can also lead us to, you know, at least have my view on the subject, which is that this is a physical component of their lives.
It's not really something that can be changed.
And it might have some...
Functionally speaking, it might be a bit immoral in the sense that it's not supportive of the family and it can be, quite frankly, dangerous.
In terms of disease and so on and so forth.
But it doesn't really come from a moral failing of the homosexual himself.
It comes from a, let's just say, physical failing.
It's a kind of subnormal, not exactly desirable.
And of course, when I say this, this will make me extremely unpopular with two groups.
That is the homosexual movement, but also the anti-homosexual movement, which is mainly Christian, because the latter wants to believe that it is simply immoral failing, and therefore we can pray with them or save them or so on and so forth.
I unfortunately don't think they can be saved.
At the same time, if we had a different kind of society, one that had a more eugenic principle, then I think we could make sure that...
These fetuses did receive proper testosterone baths and that the percentage of the population of homosexuals perhaps went from, say, 2%, what it is today, or maybe 1.5%, to zero.
That we could actually cure this.
In a way.
And I think in some ways the gay movement wants to think of themselves as born that way.
They don't want to think of themselves as a choice.
It's an identity.
But once you start talking about, you know, fixing them or finding a way around them, I don't think they would actually like that at all.
So in many ways, I guess my view is completely unpopular.
But I actually think it's a...
It's a sane one.
It's a alienated boat can.
Right.
But I think it is a sane and rational one, so while I'm sticking to it.
But what is your view, Jonathan?
Obviously, neither of us are scientists, so we're simply speculating, but what is your view on the biologic research?
Yes.
Do you know when they happened?
Was it in the 1970s?
Yeah, it was in the late 70s and 60s and 70s when this East German researcher was doing this work.
And it's interesting because he theorized that when you're doing scientific reasoning, you want predictability and also you want disprovability, so to speak, that you could prove that this is incorrect, the theory.
Unlike, say, Freudianism, you could never really prove that Freudianism is incorrect because...
You would always say, oh, the reason why you think it's incorrect is because you have an edible complex and you're resisting it or something.
Karl Popper, a very important philosopher, talked about this.
Science needs to be disproved.
Anyway, this person who did this research, he actually looked at women who were in Dresden during the horrible bombing in the Second World War of that city, and you actually had a higher percentage of gay children.
I theorized that this was due to the terrible stress that they were under while they were pregnant and that their fetuses were not getting the proper testosterone treatment, so to speak.
And so it actually is a theory that has some predictability, and you could disprove it.
So I think it actually is quite cogent in that way.
But yeah, so there is some evidence for that.
But what do you think about that in terms of, do you think that the older view, which is a bit mystical or intuitive, that a gay man has a woman's mind?
Do you think that that's true in a way?
Do you think it's a kind of mindedness that that's what homosexuality is about?
Yeah, so I think in relation to these East German experiments, just to begin with them, they were quite notorious because, of course, these were conducted by a communist state for communistic reasons.
And many of the experiments were relatively benign, but some were not, because most of them were conducted under the aegis of the Stasi.
And they were conducted because Honecker and the elite of the East German vanguard wondered why homosexuality existed so much in East Germany.
And they were particularly thinking around the Brechtian theatre that existed in East Germany that was world famous, and a lot of money had been put into the Berlin Ensemble theatre, which still exists in a differentiated way, but not financed by German taxpayers in the same way.
Now, they thought that homosexuality was a virtual perversion.
And they believed that state socialism had been achieved in Eastern Germany, and communism, the perfection of it, was well on the way, indeed was being achieved, actively so.
So why did it still exist?
And with the literal-mindedness that communists always have, they took groups of homosexuals and asked them to write out their life histories.
Stars was incredibly interested in documenting everything and crossing every T and dotting every I. And then they let many of them go.
Others, they actually did experiments on by showing them heterosexual pornography and some which presumably had to be smuggled in from the West and seeing what their response to it would be and tying them to electrode machines and to lie detector tests and so on.
And a proportion of them, this was the stars you don't forget, a proportion of them that were left.
They went into a much more direct action, which was illegal, but was given state sanction, in that some of these individuals were shot, and scientists operated on their brains.
And they discovered something which has become normative in Western medicine in the last 20 years, that heterosexual women have the same brains as homosexual men, because men and women have different brains.
And homosexual women and heterosexual men have the same brains.
So this leads to the theory that you have the brain of a man in the body of a woman and you have the brain of a woman in the body of a man.
And this is one of the later scientific theories which seems to be justified by fact.
There's been a definite silence about this theory or this expostulate, as you could call it, in scientific terms.
It's often the liberation movement concerned never wants to discuss their own case.
They want to discuss a dynamic agenda whereby they're given more and more civic equality in the social space.
Yes.
You know, I didn't know this backstory, and I'm glad to hear it.
Yes, the backstory about the East German research into...
Yeah, I mean, again, this is, as we were saying, you can really alienate both sides when you take this position, because, you know, I think, you know, a lot of that research might have actually been productive.
I, of course, don't, you know, needless to say, I don't support, you know, shooting people.
Well, what happened is the West has replicated these experiments, but in a consensual way, by using the tissue samples and the brains of people who left their bodies to science in the normal process of evaluation.
Right.
Well, yeah, that's certainly a lot better.
But I think, in general, you will get to this point that homosexuals want to be born that way To quote this Lady Gaga song of the past year, they want to be born that way in the sense that it is an identity.
It's not just a choice.
It's something much more meaningful.
It's how they define themselves.
Maybe even the primary way that they define themselves.
But at the same time, they don't want to ever think...
I don't think homosexuality is genetically based, but if it were, if someone wanted to do gene therapy or if women wanted to select, they could have select children, maybe abort a child if they could do genetic testing and determine that he would likely be...
Needless to say, once you go down that road, I think the gay movement would be completely horrified.
Much like the women's rights and the kind of abortion movement.
I've noticed that all of these women, abortion is a shivoleth, as we were saying before.
You must support that as unquestionable.
When they hear about abortions occurring in India, where they're basically doing...
Gender selection abortions.
If they're having a female, they'll most likely abort it.
They want a man.
They obviously want to outlaw that.
They're quite pro-life when it comes to that.
you know, a lot of these things is not so much the issue itself, but how the issue is articulated in the left-right political spectrum.
And I think that's true, both for that, the abortion case that I mentioned, but also the homosexual issue.
Well, Jonathan, I think we've just scratched the surface, but do you have any other lingering Yes, only one, and that's the extraordinary example that these experiments were done in East Germany.
Which was a communist regime supported by the Stasi secret police who used to finance and arm the Red Army faction in West Germany to spread chaos and mayhem.
And yet, here we have the most illiberal, dysgenic-type experiments being conducted, all in the name of socialism, which would literally horrify the whole liberal left.
All those people that you met in Brooklyn out with their clipboards, getting people to sign up for civic equality in marriage.
Think what they think about those communist experiments in East Germany.
And yet it's part of the same continuum that they're on.
Yes, it is.
I mean, it's something we...
We've come back to this in so many of our broadcasts, which is the malleable, Promethean nature of the left.
It's able to move and rethink itself and contradict itself in all these ways in which it becomes… I think, you know, one of the major problems conservatives face is that they're simply always reacting to the latest left mutation.
And unlike the left, we aren't visionary.
We're not, you know, again, we're...
We're trying to hold a line and not trying to push something forward.
And I think in many ways it's something we're trying to change with alt-right and similar websites and these broadcasts.
But, Jonathan, thank you for being back on the program.
My pleasure.
Again, we're only able to scratch the surface of these issues, so I think we probably should take up the homosexual question again in the foreseeable future.