New York Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill has formally apologized for the raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Manhattan, 50 years ago. The proclamation came as the city’s Department of Tourism gears up to host World Pride, making it the official epicenter of Pride Month activities around the globe. Think of it as the Olympics for meth, alcoholism, public fornication, corporate pandering, and hairy asses shoved in the faces of children.
The Stonewall raid of June 28, 1969 sparked riots in New York, and is recognized as the moment the gay rights movement began. Unfortunately, Commissioner O’Neill may have apologized for the wrong reasons. The man in the strippergram uniform should have said:
‘We’re sorry. We were only doing our jobs. We couldn’t have known that a routine check on an illegal business five decades ago would unleash the horror of Pride parades onto the world for the next 50 years.’
Stonewall is a legend, and the mythology keeps evolving. Back then, all the gay bars in New York were owned by the Mafia. In 1966, ‘Fat Tony’ Lauria of the Genovese crime family purchased Stonewall, then an unassuming family-friendly restaurant, and converted it into a festering dump for gays. The toilets constantly overflowed. There were no fire exits and no soap to wash the glasses. The liquor was watered down and stolen. Employees trafficked prostitutes, and dabbled in blackmailing patrons with threats to ‘out’ them. The cops constantly raided Stonewall and other mob-owned businesses in the area but, because the mob paid off the police, the cops usually gave warnings or came in the middle of the afternoon when no one was there. It’s unknown whether on that fateful night in 1969 the cops were cracking down on the mob, or on corruption in their own ranks, or if the owners of Stonewall simply didn’t get the tip-off in time. What is clear is that Stonewall was not targeted simply because gays hung out there.
Rather than today’s trendy Evil Cop vs. Angelic Minority narrative, historians say the Stonewall riots were as much about gays being fed up living under the heel of the mob as about protesting the laws that criminalized homosexuality. It’s a wonderful thing those laws don’t exist anymore and we owe a lot to the gays of that era. I’ve met some of the men who rioted outside Stonewall. No-nonsense, grisly old fags, they rightfully look with disdain at today’s generation of whiners and crybabies.
But when it comes to historical revisionism, gays are the worst offenders. Most Americans still believe Matthew Shepard, the world’s favorite ‘hate crime’ victim, was killed because he was gay. In fact, it had nothing to do with his sexuality. He was killed during a robbery and drug deal gone terribly wrong, and he was even friends with one of his killers, a gay-for-pay prostitute. Even the bar that President Obama declared a national historic landmark isn’t the location of the original Stonewall, which is an abandoned nail salon next door.
Today, lesbians and Marxists have commandeered the gay rights movement and built up the vast LGBT Industrial Complex. They’re now attempting their most brazen lie yet, that the Stonewall uprising was actually led by ‘trans women of color’. They want everyone to believe gay liberation is owed exclusively to a scrappy band of black drag queens ripping parking meters out of the cement with their teeth to fend off the invaders. This is a lie, but it’s working.
To canonize this falsehood and to posthumously baptize into the cult of transgenderism, which wasn’t even a word in 1969, Marxist powerbrokers have dug up Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two self-identified transvestites — men who dress in women’s clothing, as opposed to men who think they are women. This year, historical revisionists successfully lobbied the city of New York to install a statue of these two crossdressers outside Stonewall. The problem, historians theorize, is that Rivera was blacked out on heroin 30 blocks north in Bryant Park as the riots unfolded, and Johnson admitted in interviews he wasn’t there when it started. If you believe Johnson chucked the first Molotov cocktail outside Stonewall and started a global revolution, Jussie Smollett is waiting to show you MAGA country.
The gay rights movement was founded by gay men who were almost entirely white. But the taxpayer-funded advertisements for World Pride 2019, plastered on subway cars, streetlights, and billboards in New York City, and in magazines and websites, intentionally feature no images of white people and very few men. It’s mostly obese, sassy black lesbians. And the Pride 50th Anniversary banner a block away from Stonewall features the image of a Muslim woman in a hijab.
This Pride month, let’s acknowledge what gay people can teach us about the virtues of shame. Let their movement be cautionary and instructive. Let us use this month to reflect on how we may be more humble and palatable to our fellow man. Let’s appreciate all the wonderful things that shame has brought to our lives.
Few gay men are proud to have surrendered their movement to a hostile takeover by Democrats, corporations, Marxists, and racial identitarians. There’s also nothing to be proud of when the powerful LGBT lobby thinks so lowly of its own people that all its political gains have been based on lies and misinformation, and all its public figures are scrubbed and sanitized.
The only sense of ‘pride’ I ever felt at being gay came from knowing my forefathers included cultural icons like Oscar Wilde, Quentin Crisp, and Freddie Mercury. Today we’re left with sexless 3D printout Pete Buttigieg, drag-queen story-time in elementary schools, chemically castrated ‘transgender children,’ and an entire generation of privileged little brats addicted to fantasy oppression porn, boycotting chicken sandwiches, and hauling elderly bakers into the Supreme Court. Time to put it away, guys. That’s nothing to be proud of.
As you watch naked, leathery old men with nipple rings waddle down the street, testicles knocking at their knees, or third-rate drag monsters expose their buttholes to crowds of children, just remember that this is not the behavior of an honorable — or even rebellious — people. Everyone knows it, but no one is allowed to say it. It’s hardly even Pride in the Biblical sense. In Christianity, Pride is the first sin, and the most deadly. Pride got Satan expelled from Heaven and Adam and Eve cast out of Paradise. Today’s gay Pride is just corny and mildly uncomfortable.
Of course, the great irony is, come Monday morning after World Pride, millions of gay people will experience some of the deepest, darkest shame of their lives as they wake in a seedy apartment in a mysterious zip code, Cher’s Farewell Tour blaring from the television, a mountain of cocaine on the table, with a sore backside and limbs of indiscriminate origin flung about them. We’ve all been there; it’s part of the Pride experience.
And they should feel ashamed. In psychology, modern affect theory asserts that shame is not learned. It is in our genes, and acts as a kind of emotional circuit-breaker. In his 1872 survey of human emotions, Charles Darwin concluded that shame is universal across human cultures and expressed in exactly the same way by all people. Pop sociologist Brené Brown calls it our most powerful ‘master emotion’, a force that steers us to do good.
As psychologist Joseph Burgo said, American culture over the last 100 years has been at rebellion against shame, particularly related to sex. This revolt has reached fever-pitch in many areas. The more people have given in to abandon, the less happy they have become. They feel they’re entitled to live shame-free lives. But they aren’t. We fail to acknowledge the benefits of healthy, productive shame — constructive criticism, as it is sometimes called — as opposed to the crippling, nuclearized shame of early Puritanical movements and contemporary Islam.
Perhaps if someone told this to Big Gay during those tacky Pride orgies that intend more to shock and offend than to celebrate, then huge swaths of mankind might actually grow to appreciate the gay community, in the way that I once did, rather than merely tolerate it. Maybe, also, many of us would be happier, more stable people.
