Not-Gay Milo

 

Milo Yiannopoulos has come out as straight.

Of course this is heresy. We are supposed to believe that homosexuality is a permanent part of a person. Gender may be fluid, but for some reason, not sexual preference.

I know at least one former gay personally who has gone straight. Kathy Shaidle claimed that every homosexual she knew back in high school later went straight. Perhaps your experience is similar. But, as in so many things these days, we must remain silent and deny our doubts. Public people keep telling us that, after living most of their lives as “straight,” they have decided they are really gay. It is absurd to think the transformation can only work one way.

No previous generation supposed there was such a thing as a “homosexual.” There were only urges for homosexual sex, perhaps indulgence, and perhaps addiction to it. Some prefer redheads. 

Were our ancestors, who did not suppose homosexuality was an inborn thing, all fools and idiots? What is the statistical probability of that? 

How does innate homosexuality survive the mechanism of Darwinian evolution? Wouldn’t a genetic condition that prevents reproduction be promptly bred out?

The ancient Greeks assumed that men would practice homosexual sex, at least until marriage. So were all Greeks “born that way”?

Yiannopoulis speaks of it now as an addiction: like alcohol. I think this is exactly right. 

I had always presumed it comes from some early sexual experience with an older homosexual. Yiannopoulis has suggested this was true for him in the past. But in a recent interview with LifeSite News, he gives a possible second factor:

“When I used to kid that I only became gay to torment my mother, I wasn’t entirely joking.”

Perhaps some young men are attracted to homosexual sex because they are repulsed by heterosexual sex. And they may be repulsed because they have suffered sexual abuse.

Allen Ginsberg rather hints as much in his case, remembering his mother in his poem “Kaddish”:

Serving me meanwhile, a plate of cold fish—chopped raw cabbage dript with tapwater—smelly tomatoes—week-old health food—grated beets & carrots with leaky juice, warm—more and more disconsolate food—I can’t eat it for nausea sometimes—the Charity of her hands stinking with Manhattan, madness, desire to please me, cold undercooked fish—pale red near the bones. Her smells—and oft naked in the room, so that I stare ahead, or turn a book ignoring her.

       One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover.

I have another acquaintance who became a lesbian seemingly because she was sexually abused by her father.

Yiannopoulis now plans to advocate for “conversion therapy”—officially now illegal in Canada.

It works, he maintains, so long as it has a religious basis.

“Secular attempts at recovery from sin are either temporary or completely ineffective. Salvation can only be achieved through devotion to Christ and the works of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

He surely goes too far in saying this is possible only through Catholicism; but Alcoholics Anonymous too maintains that overcoming addiction is only possible through appealing to a “higher power.”

This is why psychiatry and psychology cannot cure mental illness. All they can do is drug down the symptoms. In former days, mental illnesses were regularly cured. They still are in less developed countries, where they still resort to religious methods.

This is not to say that mental illness is caused by personal sin, or by anything justly referred to as addiction—in most cases. But, like addictions, it involves settled habits of thought.