Because I'm chronically unlucky in love, I've had the involuntary privilege of meeting a diverse lot of gay people during the course of my dating life. Over coffee or dinner, one topic that seems to continuously come up is a deep-seeded dislike and disinterest for what today passes as mainstream gay culture. I'm not talking about the grand, gothic "marginalization" that motivated those Black Lives Matter folks at the Toronto Pride parade, but rather a more generic attitude of revulsion and apathy. Gays have even evolved their own vocabulary with which to express this common distaste; they talk about being not into "the scene" or "the drama" and even brag about being "straight acting" — a phrase which might read as a borderline hate crime of internalized homophobia to some, but articulates a sense of exasperation immediately recognizable to others.
The reasons for this distaste are always the same. Mainstream "gay culture," as offered by the parade/club-industrial complex, is often gross, loud, boring, and stupid. A lot of homosexuals don't find it particularly interesting, entertaining, or pleasant.
Homosexuality may be biological, but all it does is give you a preference for sleeping with people of the same sex. It does not make you automatically enjoy watching grown men slathered with cheap cosmetics prance around squawking off-key Madonna songs, or going to sweaty bars and downing $20 cocktails under the hungry watch of old men in rubber pants, or listening to George Takei rant on Facebook about his least favorite Supreme Court justice. A lot of us simply don't care.
It's why it was so disheartening to see Tory leader Rona Ambrose march pompously in the Toronto gay pride parade last week, arm-in-arm with the rest of her party's inner circle. What they no doubt imagined to be a breathtaking display of public tolerance actually registered to gay conservatives like me as a blaring signal they still don't get it.
One of the most brilliant pieces of Conservative advertising I ever saw was a postcard circulated by the Young Tory club on my college campus. It featured a photo of a guy that looked a lot like me — ie; a skinny dork with stupid hair — beside a quote saying something to the effect of, "I follow the rules, I like low taxes, I don't think my professors are right about everything… OMG, I'm a Conservative!" It was a genius ad because it showed Conservatives understood the student community contained a diverse array of youth, not all of whom fit the tired, "campus radical" stereotype. The Conservatives were not attempting to get their message heard by showing up at a tuition protest organized by the Canadian Federation of Students, they were reaching out to students of a naturally conservative disposition in a naturally conservative way.
It was, in short the exact opposite of the Pride strategy of Ambrose et al.
I will make a sweeping generalization here — gays who care about Pride are probably not the sort of gays who are in play for Conservative votes. Pride is a spectacle of sexual exhibitionism, promiscuity, vulgar humor, and progressive political posturing — not to mention the ample consumption of alcohol and drugs. It is not a scene naturally compelling to gays who value things like self-control, humility, dignity, and privacy, or distrust things which are revolutionary, anarchistic, or otherwise hostile to tried-and-tested cultural norms — conservatives, in other words. You may as well go shopping for Tory votes at David Suzuki's birthday party.
Some gays are indeed "natural conservatives," but they're the ones with careers and families; the ones who reject the lifestyle of perpetual adolescence and souless sexcapades offered by the gay cultural establishment. They're the ones who actually get married, adopt children, or serve in the military in addition to fighting for the right to do so — rights, I will note, that many of the Pride types never cared much about in the first place, since fitting into bourgeois society has never been of much interest to them.
Mr. Cameron, the now-former British PM, once quipped it was because he was a conservative that he supported same-sex marriage — he understood the importance of marriage as a conservative social institution and wanted to extend its reach. Canada's Conservatives by contrast, bring no intellectual depth to their pandering and appear to view gays exactly as the left does — a monocultural blob who will dash like a bull to a red cape towards any moron waving the rainbow flag.
Written by J.J McCullough
