"They’re overwhelmingly white and tend to have a certain kind of look. Close cropped haircuts. Windowpane suits. Golf shorts."

"They’re not the type to be telling anyone their pronouns or using the word 'queer.' And they aren’t the least bit offended that the leader of their party continues to stoke a moral panic about transgender people. They’re gay. But they’re still Republicans...."

Writes Shawn McCreesh, in "Donald Trump’s Big Gay Government/On the town with the A-Gays of Washington, who have never been happier to be out, proud and Republican" (NYT)(free-access link).

"In 2015, back when the Republican establishment was still trying to thwart Mr. Trump, [Department of Energy official Charles] Moran said that he and some other gay Republicans he knew became intrigued by the brash New Yorker’s history of saying nice things about gay rights....

"I was a registered Democrat for 45 years. But two years ago, I registered as independent because of the Democratic Party’s embrace of what I see as a misogynistic, homophobic view of gender..."

"... that has contributed to the loss of lesbian-only and women-only spaces from dating sites, to shelters, to sports — in short, erasing our right to free speech and free association. I am a soft butch lesbian. I came out in 1978 at 18 years old. I was always a tomboy and if I were a teenager today, I would likely be medically transitioned. I strongly believe society must stop medicalizing gender nonconforming youths. As a lawyer in this recent Supreme Court case acknowledged, there is no evidence 'that this treatment reduces completed suicide.' And a major scientific review of this field of medicine described it as 'an area of remarkably weak evidence.' In fact, some research suggests that gender nonconforming youths grow up to be happy lesbian or gay adults. In these cases, medical transition would be a kind of conversion therapy. Further, there is no current way to determine which youths will detransition in the future. We know there are risks associated with puberty blockers and transitioning. One child harmed is one too many. The U.S. v. Skrmetti decision is correct, and it will safeguard children like the teenager I once was."

Says a letter to the editor in The Washington Post. The letter responds to the article "Tennessee can ban gender transition care for minors, Supreme Court says/The court’s decision allows the law in Tennessee and has implications for the 23 other states that have banned similar treatments in recent years."

There is no current way to determine which youths will detransition in the future and there is also no way to count the gay and lesbian Americans, living today, who would have transitioned if they'd faced puberty in the 2020s. 

AND: If we knew who they were, we could ask them if they're happy they did not live the life their teenage self would have chosen for them.

"As Kavanaugh continues, my mind starts to wander to 'The Simpsons,' with its Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and several episodes depicting..."

"... creative ways the plant has disposed of its nuclear waste. This won’t be the only time I think about 'The Simpsons' this morning, but I’ll come back to that...."

Writes Mark Walsh, in "Watching environmental law get eclipsed by Skrmetti" (SCOTUSblog).

Later, getting back to that:

"I think most men are gay in DC — either out or closeted depending on whether they’re Democrats or Republicans."

"I want to marry someone who allows me to protect feminine energy in a world that is forcing me to be a girl boss because they keep sending Steve to prison. Perhaps I have…"

Said Natalie Winters, quoted by Katy Balls in The London Times, "My night out with Trump’s young Maga crowd in Washington."

"Steve" = Steve Bannon. Winters works as a White House correspondent for Steve Bannon’s "War Room."

"What is the social scene like in Maga term two? '‘I think there is more of a diversity of ways that groups enter this movement, so you get a broader… For instance, Maha — it’s more the trad wife, pro-natalist people who are really into that. It all mixes. It’s a bigger tent,' says Winters. There is also a bunch of tech bros in town, but to the disappointment of some in the Maga coalition and some of the young Republicans looking for husbands, they rarely come out...."

Are women today thinking about themselves in terms of "feminine energy"?

"A new straight-studies course treats male-female partnerships as the real deviance."

Subheadline for a New York Magazine article titled, "If Hetero Relationships Are So Bad, Why Do Women Go Back for More?" The teaser title on the front page is "Do Straight Women Really Exist?" The author of the article is Jessica Bennett.

“In this class, we’re going to flip the script,” [said sociologist Jane Ward to her students on the first day of class]. “It’s going to be a place where we worry about straight people. Where we feel sympathy for straight people. We are going to be allies to straight people.”...

Flipping the script is a good approach to studying the topic, and the topic is worthy of study. However, I don't like being directed to "worry" or "feel sympathy" or "be allies." I'd look at the subject head on. But neutrality is cruel, and women want to present as empathetic. 

The online world seems to get weirder and more retrograde about heterosexuality every day. Idealized masculinity has become more aggressive, more jacked up, and also more high maintenance... while femininity gets ever “softer,” more nurturing and domestic, and somehow still more sexy....

An "SNL" sketch that surprisingly spoofs the idea that you're not allowed to ask where that baby came from.

"The Village People song, a Trump rally staple, has become a symbol of the vexing incongruities of MAGA."

"While liberals have attempted to point out the irony of Trump’s use of what is historically considered a gay anthem... [but] the men in this room observed no such irony in the first place. To them Trump is not only pro-gay but a gay icon unto himself, a champion of masculinity in both its traditional and campy forms, as lovable for his flamboyant excess as for his red-meat invective against the left. 'The makeup, the hair, the sharp tongue, the cattiness,' [said Adam Ewer, copresident of the New York City chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans]. 'He’s the gayest president we’ve ever had.'... A gay publicist who only agreed to speak to me anonymously suggested that one reason some gays are drawn to the right wing is that it’s simply more fun. Democrats are the 'most killjoy people on earth,' he said, whereas there’s something 'actually quite gay' about MAGA. 'It’s masculine, but it’s also campy and bitchy.' And in its embrace of trash entertainment and penchant for offense it may have more in common with gay culture than the liberal mainstream, which in the publicist’s view has become 'painfully' middle-class. 'I’ve always liked opera and Jerry Springer, and I feel like Trump—that’s kind of his taste. It’s very high-low.'"

From "My Afternoon With the ‘Normal Gay Guys’ Who Voted for Trump/Gay MAGA is hypermasculine and anti-woke—and it wants a break from the LGBTQ+ movement" by Daniel Lefferts (GQ).

"If they ever invent a pill where they could say, 'OK, your social skills will be normal, but your ability to concentrate would also be normal,' I wouldn’t take the pill."

"Maybe I am forgetting how painful it was, but I needed my neuro diversity to write that software; I could do all that stuff in my head. That takes a lot of concentration."

Said Bill Gates, quoted in "Bill Gates: 'I would be diagnosed with autism if I were a kid today'" (Yahoo News).

Just because there's a treatment doesn't mean you need to take it. There's a balance between eradicating symptoms and unleashing side effects, and we should be careful not to pathologize human behavior.

Where the treatment doesn't yet exist — like Gates's anti-autism pill — it's easier to decide I wouldn't want it anyway. The unreachable grapes looked sour to the fox in the old fable. It's harder to think critically when the pill is right there — the pill or the surgery. Is effeminacy in a young boy a condition that ought to be treated, or can we embrace human diversity and discourage medical treatment? There might be something parallel to "I needed my neuro diversity to write that software." I needed my effeminate maleness to.... What? What is lost in the pathologizing? What sort of highly valuable person are we medicalizing out of existence?

This made me think of that classic of Critical Race Theory, "The Michael Jackson Pill: Equality, Race, and Culture" by Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr. (Michigan Law Review, 1994). I tried to get Grok to talk about it, and it engaged in blatant censorship: "There is no well-known or credible critical race theory article that discusses or imagines a pill to turn black people white...."

Bill Maher asks about the "fact" that 84% of "gays" "stuck with the Democrats," and Andrew Sullivan doesn't agree with the assertion of fact.

Sullivan: "We don't really know how gays vote.... That's how GLBTQIA+ people vote.... The vast majority — 40% of that — are bisexual women, many of whom are in relationships with straight guys. So we don't know. I'm sure it was a big majority. I'm not sure including a big bunch of of of young women in that will distort it somewhat. I wish we could have polling of gay men and lesbians. Why can't we? Why are we now forced into this bleh?"

I'm using the letters b-l-e-h to represent a Sullivan vocalization that seemed to express the opinion that the GLBTQIA+ grouping is annoyingly large and indistinct. He seems to think gay men and lesbians should be polled as a distinct group and that their opinion is more meaningful than the amorphous grouping that sweeps in the many young woman who call themselves bisexual and may very well be living the most privileged sort of life. Of course these women tend to vote Democratic, but did gay men continue to vote Democratic? Sullivan groups gay men and lesbians together, but why not demand separate polling there too. There is an important difference in the voting of men and women, and why wouldn't that difference also show up among gay people?

ADDED: Tim Dillon says that trans people ought to identify as Republicans:

JD Vance and the concept of "the normal gay guy."

Perhaps you've heard this part of the Joe Rogan podcast with JD Vance:

Vance: I think that frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote. Because again, they just wanted to be left the hell alone. And now you have all this crazy stuff on top of it that they're like, no, no, no, no, we didn't. We didn't want to give pharmaceutical products to nine year olds who are transitioning their genders. We just wanted to be left the hell alone.

Rogan: Well, a lot of gay guys feel like the whole movement is homophobic. Which is ironic. 'cause they think there's, they think that there's, people think there's something wrong with being gay. So what you really are is a girl. And they think that a lot of this is being given, these thoughts are being given to gay kids. These kids will just grow up to be gay men. And instead you're getting them to convert their gender.

Vance: It's pharmaceutical conversion therapy. Right?

When you're actually being persecuted, your reaction is: Leave me alone. But that doesn't make you a permanent libertarian, stuck in the position of just wanting to be left alone. Once the persecution and formal discrimination stops, you might be satisfied and want nothing more for your group and adopt a libertarian philosophy going forward, but that doesn't make you any more "normal" than the other members of your group who think that having come this far, they want something more. They go in a left-wing direction.

I'd say it's "normal" for a "gay guy" to find his way right, left, or center, like anyone else. JD Vance may be accurate in saying "they just wanted to be left the hell alone" — speaking in the past tense — but that doesn't mean that now, as he seeks their vote, they still want nothing more than to be left alone. But it's a separate question what the "normal gay guy" wants if he wants more than only to be left alone. Some do, some don't.

But Vance is making an additional argument: the "normal gay guy" would not embrace the transgender ideology because it the equivalent of conversion therapy. Even a "gay guy" who wants more than just to be left alone might agree with that, though I suspect that he would find it socially very hard to say that out loud these days.

Scrolling through TikTok yesterday, I saw a trend of men who said they were gay and agreed with Vance, and I wanted to collect a few of these here:

"The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man."

I took these photos of the movie "A Special Day," which is playing on The Criterion Channel (in its current tribute to Marcello Mastroianni). Begin around 53:23 to view just this segment, which has Mastroianni's character poking around inside the apartment of Sophia Loren's character and finding her fascism scrapbook. (It's 1938, in Rome.)

"Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause..."

"... transgender rights. Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach—seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress—they have taken hard-line left-wing positions. LGBTQ groups repeat the mantra 'the science is settled' on the extremely complex and fraught subject of youth gender medicine and insist that anyone who questions the provision of puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children is transphobic.... Meanwhile, LGBTQ organizations have slowly been erasing the people whose interests they were established to advance. Less and less do they even use the words gay and lesbian to describe their ostensible constituencies; more and more, they use queer, a historically pejorative term reclaimed by left-wing ideologues...."

Writes James Kirchick, in "How the Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way/What should activist groups such as GLAAD do after they fulfill their goals?" (The Atlantic).

ADDED: This makes me think of something Bob Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his 1964 album "Another Side":

"The concern of gay men with how our bodies look often gets labeled a fixation, an obsession or, most glibly, an expression of narcissism."

"What’s less frequently acknowledged are the forces of insecurity and anxiety driving that obsession. For gay men of all ages, types, statuses and lifestyles, body image remains such a fraught, weird, private, painful subject that, even among friends who talk about everything, it’s often off limits for discussion. Officially, we’re all supposed to look fantastic while not caring. Get caught peering in the mirror too closely and you’ll be called vain; fail to look closely enough and you risk an even harsher judgment.... For decades, the body image that gay men craved, although it morphed as tastes evolved, was predicated on monitoring straight male culture, identifying whatever the heterosexual world had decided was masculine or sexy at that moment and then tailoring, editing and selectively italicizing it.... Turning your appearance into a calculatedly self-aware physical performance of straight masculinity, with a flourish or two of ironic detailing, gave gay men some autonomy and subverted straight culture by reinventing it as something gay, a look one could wear as a costume that might be visible only to the like-minded...."

Writes Mark Harris, in "Gay Men Have Long Been Obsessed With Their Muscles. Now Everyone Is. In Hollywood, on Instagram and beyond, the male-on-male gaze still decides what’s hot and what’s not" (NYT)(full access link, because this is a long and surprisingly substantial article (with a nice "a collection of gay-coded photographs of male physiques over the years")).

"Despite their courage and great sacrifice, thousands of LGBTQI+ service members were forced out of the military because of their sexual orientation or gender identity."

"Many of these patriotic Americans were subject to a court-martial. While my Administration has taken meaningful action to remedy these problems, the impact of that historical injustice remains. As Commander in Chief, I am committed to maintaining the finest fighting force in the world. That means making sure that every member of our military feels safe and respected. Accordingly, acting pursuant to the grant of authority in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution of the United States, I, Joseph R. Biden Jr., do hereby grant a full, complete, and unconditional pardon to persons convicted of unaggravated offenses based on consensual, private conduct with persons age 18 and older under former Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), as previously codified at 10 U.S.C. 925, as well as attempts, conspiracies, and solicitations to commit such acts under Articles 80, 81, and 82, UCMJ, 10 U.S.C. 880, 881, 882...."

From "A Proclamation on Granting Pardon for Certain Violations of Article 125 Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice" (whitehouse.gov).

You can't make an event out of feeling good about anything anymore. How dare you celebrate?

"She acknowledges being the beneficiary of a previous generation’s progressivism... It’s the crazy activism she’s against — you know, the 'fringe' stuff."

"By fringe, she means trans. She’s peeved that some trans women are trying to redefine feminism in ways that seem to her to be anti-woman, resents that lesbians risk being erased by trendy all-purpose queerness and fears that as a married lesbian mother she will have her own rights swept away by anti-trans backlash.... I was, of course, eager to read good gossip about The Times. The best nugget: After Bowles started dating... Bari Weiss... she says an editor [exclaimed]... 'She’s a Nazi.'... Her most serious charge is that the editor thought her story ideas weren’t as good after that. The obvious question is whether her heterodox turn has conferred much benefit when it comes to ideas. The ones on display here seem pretty shopworn. I recall admiring a sharp-elbowed profile of the psychologist and anti-identity politics commentator Jordan Peterson that Bowles wrote early in her Times tenure. Nothing in this book hits that level.... [T]he book’s central fallacy is that idiocy on the left requires moving to the right. It doesn’t...."

Writes Laura Kipnis, in The New York Times. She's reviewing the new book by Nellie Bowles, "Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History" (commission earned).

Should I read this book? It's 7 hours by audiobook. I'll try. Kipnis warns me that Bowles is trying to be the new Tom Wolfe, but she's not as good as Wolfe (and neither is Kipnis): "where Wolfe was a precision-guided stiletto, Bowles is more of a dull blade, ridiculing her former colleagues by saddling them with laughably vacuous thoughts and dreams — their 'beautiful vision of the role of journalism for such a beautiful time,' for instance."

What about in that "sharp-elbowed profile" of Peterson? Was she closer to Wolfe back then? I blogged it at the time — here, in 2018. Bowles wrote:

"So we embarked on a new era — no longer Papa and Daddy but now Mommy and Daddy."

Writes Richard Just, in "Our daughter wanted a mommy, so she picked one of her dads/Are women really the only people who can be maternal?" (WaPo).

At first, I thought it might turn out to be a quickly forgotten phase, but our daughter... made it clear she was digging in: Any time I slipped up and referred to him as Papa, she swiftly corrected me. Pretty soon, she began to police my husband’s pronouns as well. Initially, I had tried to pair his new Mommy title with the male pronouns that he uses — a small concession to reality, I guess — but it wasn’t long before our daughter began to insist that he be referred to as she and her....  “She!” she would gruffly instruct me, as I unthinkingly mis-mis-gendered the man I had been married to for 10 years. “Why do you say ‘he’?”...

The daughter is 3 1/2. 

In the end, I’ve come to believe our daughter has been telling us something beautiful and profound: that she has everything she needs — including those attributes that society has normally treated as the provenance of mothers — right here in her two-dad family....

Mother wants to share her ridiculous dream with her gay son.

I laughed out loud at this letter to the New York Times advice columnist:

My gay son and his partner are getting married. They plan to wear themed outfits. I support their union and their choices. They identify as male and wear traditional male garb. But secretly, I’ve dreamed that one of them, preferably my son, would wear the traditional white wedding gown that I wore. Its elegance contrasts sharply with their planned outfits. Should I share my desire?

The way she framed the question — "Should I share my desire?" — makes it sound creepily Oedipal. The fact that it's her old wedding dress makes it sound like she's inserting herself as the bride. The fact that she thinks gay men want to be — or seem like — women is presumptuous (and stupid). The idea that someone else's wedding is a place to act out your dreams is mundane but lamentable.

And why are we not told the theme of the "themed outfits"? We're told her old dress, by its elegance, is a sharp contrast, so what could this "theme" be? Is it just "traditional male garb"? Maybe this lady has drunk so deeply of the current cultural brew, that she thinks everything is a gender performance and so when 2 gay men go to their wedding they are only going "as" 2 men. They are 2 men in the guise of guys. And they might alternatively go as a man and a woman or a man and a man in drag.

Or maybe the lady is really, underneath it all, quite old fashioned, and her dream betrays the traditionalist's belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.

If not for homophobia, we could have had Utopia... through LSD.

I'm reading "Could LSD Have Achieved World Peace? Ask Margaret Mead. In 'Tripping on Utopia,' Benjamin Breen chronicles the legendary anthropologist’s doomed effort to save the world through hallucinogens" (NYT).

Here's the book: "TRIPPING ON UTOPIA: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" (commission earned).

The the reviewer, Charlotte Shane, writes:

"The New York Times is under fire for publishing a piece speculating on Taylor Swift’s sexuality."

"In a 5,000-word opinion piece titled Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do, editor Anna Marks listed references to the LGBTQ+ community overt or perceived in Swift’s music and theorized that the singer was sending coded messages that she was secretly a member of the community.... 'This was the least defensible op-ed I can remember ever seeing the NYT run, made all the worst by the fact that it was written by a staffer, who specializes in these speculations,' Chris Wilman, the chief music critic at Variety, wrote on Twitter. (In 2022, Marks wrote a guest op-ed essay for the Times speculating on Harry Styles’s sexuality, as well.)... Marks argued that since early in her career, Swift has been trying to secretly signal that she identifies as queer.... 'Every time an artist signals queerness and that transmission falls on deaf ears, that signal dies. Recognizing the possibility of queerness – while being conscious of the difference between possibility and certainty – keeps that signal alive.'"

Writes Adrian Horton, in The Guardian.

I clicked over to read the Marks essay. It's really long. Excerpt: