I’ve never met Dale Peck, but I know him. That is to say, I’m familiar with the type, a generation of gay, downtown New York City artist I came to know well during my formative years in the city.
When I arrived about 15 years ago, New York’s transformation into a globalist monoculture was well under way. The counterculture was nouveau hipsterdom, the first youth movement defined by consumerism – trucker hats, PBR, silkscreening and iPods. Peck’s generation, these scrappy gay men, 20 years older than me, had lived through more interesting and dangerous times and I gravitated toward them. Many never had money but were rich in grit and bawdy tales and remained the same low-rent bon vivants they had been in the 1990s.
On Friday, Peck published a piece in the communist rag The New Republic titled ‘My Mayor Pete Problem.’ He repeated what I’ve been saying for months about Pete, that the base does not like this neoliberal Hillaryite from Indiana. The case is stronger with the gays who, like myself, see him as a late-blooming, pampered, middle-class sycophant launched onto the national stage because of the sexual preference he only recently became comfortable with. In this publication I called him a GINO, Gay In Name Only. Take all that combined with his zero support from black voters and media darling Pete never had a chance.
‘The only thing that distinguishes the mayor of South Bend from all those other well-educated reasonably intelligent white dude who wanna be president is what he does with his dick (and possibly his ass, although I get a definite top-by-default vibe from him, which is to say that I bet he thinks about getting fucked but he’s too uptight to do it.),’ Peck wrote. Funny enough, I said the exact thing to a friend the other day who called Pete ‘a bottom.’
Peck also repeated my take that Pete’s weird, recent coming out story speaks lowly of his character and that it leads me to believe he can’t be trusted. Peck expanded, calling the mayor a ‘gay teenager.’
‘We all know what happens when gay people don’t get a real adolescence because they spent theirs in the closet: they go through it after they come out… the last thing I want in the White House is a gay man staring down 40 who suddenly realizes he didn’t get to have all the fun his straight peers did when they were teenagers,’ he wrote, later identifying Pete with a ‘gay parody of heteronormative bourgeois domesticity.’
Peck was right and therefore he had to die. Outraged liberals bombarded the magazine with complaints and hours later the story was removed from the site, replaced by an editorial note calling the story ‘inappropriate and invasive’ and expressing ‘regret’ over its publication.
I can’t stop laughing. Some were even calling for the scalp of an editor, just to make sure they got the message. The worst kept secret in American politics is the party that once pretended to stand for free speech, liberty, and tolerance has absolutely no room for such things today. The young AOC-colytes are as keen to snuff out any freethinking gadabout in their ranks who remembers life before Will & Grace as they are to imprison Trump supporters.
What remains are gays like Yashar Ali, some sort of blogger famous for being turned on by cute elephant videos, who called the New Republic story a ‘disgrace’ and would have rather choked on his own butt plug than actually link to the unclean and blasphemous words of Mr Peck.
Of course, there’s nothing disgraceful about what Peck wrote. He’s a socialist gay writer, one who actually lived through the ACT UP years and probably saw many people die. He’s criticizing a gay presidential candidate’s inflated gay cred and that candidate’s commitment to Resistance dogma – emphasizing the far-left direction this writer clearly wants to see his party move towards. The only disgrace here is the left’s intolerance for outliers and the cruelty it bestows on such people.
And the other disgrace here is how we’ve let 25-year-old eunuchs and schoolmarms become the gatekeepers of gayness, as they happily toss their history and elders aside to embrace the trendy authoritarianism that gives such talentless social justice warriors purpose and comfort. I’d call them all a bunch of whiny bottoms but I’m not sure any of them actually have anuses.
Straight people killed gay culture by elevating these people into positions of power because, like Mayor Pete, they are insufferably safe, family-friendly psuedo-gays, who will tow the party line and have managed to achieve complete sexlessness. No one at the office is ever going to look at gay Daily News writer Alaric DeArment and speculate with morbid curiosity what depraved shit he got up to over weekend. Take one look at him and you know the answer: he probably admired his stamp collection for a few hours then watched Stranger Things alone with his cat before crying himself to sleep, just like every night. And that’s how neoliberals and the establishment want their gays, dutiful and nonthreatening. That’s why they will always sacrifice Peck for Pete.
Gays were once natural libertarians. They wanted nothing more than to be left alone by their neighbors and the government. That’s what the gay rights movement was about, it was socially libertarian. In fact, the oldest continually running gay group in the world is a Republican organization in Los Angeles. When lesbians and Marxists took over the movement that gay men built and perverted it into this grotesquery before us today, a tyranny of mediocrity led by people like Vox’s own prêt-à-porter lispy queer Carlos Maza and soyface Zack Ford of Think Progress came into being. I like my gays a little more fun and messy. Give me an angry, AIDSy cokehead communist who spent the Eighties huffing poppers on his knees in sex dungeons over these milquetoast crybullies any day. At least the commie has some good stories to tell and would punch back before he tattled to teacher.
Our great contribution to Western civilization has been our cultural utility, existing on the fringes of society where we were in the best position to hold a mirror up to it. That’s drag culture, or rather it was until Big Gay brought children into it and tiresome art school fags tried to make it avant garde. Drag wasn’t identity politics, it was commentary on sex and the two genders from the unique (and rather sharp) perspective of gay men watching from the sidelines. The best drag today still is that and the reason the art form has endured. Yet, in just over 100 years we’ve gone from Oscar Wilde to Ross Matthews.
Sad.
Peck wasn’t shy about praising feminism and rebuking capitalism in his essay. He’s a full-on socialist and deployed all the buzzwords worthy of high ridicule, yammering about ‘racist police,’ and ‘white male privilege.’ He and I couldn’t be further opposite in our political beliefs and, yet, as one writer from the left-wing magazine the Stranger put it when I spoke of the Peck dust up on social media, ‘We’ve entered a parallel universe where liberals call for the censorship of libertine homosexuals and conservatives defend them.’
