Like most sex realists, “I certainly never expected to spend much of my autumn years being outraged on behalf of lesbians and fuming about men trashing women’s basic rights to privacy or fairness in sport,” Gareth Roberts writes. “I didn’t anticipate the gay rights movement transmogrifying into a cross between the Church of Scientology, Heathers: The Musical and Act 4 of The Crucible.”
Roberts did not set out to leave a mark with this book, either. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than this book becoming a curio, a museum piece of a strange and vanished era,” he writes. “I would like it to date very, very quickly.” He will not get what he wants, however, because this is a genuinely funny and engaging book about a deeply serious topic, namely the role of Gay Shame, per the title, in The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia, per the subtitle. Historians will want to read it.
As a gay man who is old enough to remember the gay culture and homophobia of the past, Roberts is well-qualified to explain the “unexamined” elements “in the background of the gay male world before the rise of genderism” which “are now even more unexamined, thrown into greater confusion and obscurity” by the ideology of gender identity.
For example, gay men share a “dirty little secret: a tendency (not universal, but pretty pronounced) to sexism, rooted in sexual jealousy and male entitlement.” It is one of the reasons why so many gay men have “lapsed into embracing the comfort of those old stereotypes” to embrace the new homophobia that sends gay and lesbian youth into the gender clinics to become ‘straight’.
Roberts does not engage in self-flagellation. He is “suspicious both of men who say ‘I’m not a sexist’ and men who apologetically confess to it,” so he refrains from either extreme. Instead, Roberts explains that gay men are still men, just like ‘trans women’ are men, and it is always a bad idea to sanctify any group of men. “All men are equal, and must be viewed with equal compassion, equal understanding and, unfortunately, equal suspicion,” he writes.
The core of the problem, Roberts says, is “a certain lack of meaning in the modern gay identity,” the “God-shaped hole” made worse by the 21st century destruction of music culture (“We might call that the Goth-shaped hole,” he quips). Having won their long fight for free association, contemporary gay men “seem to claim all the privilege of being both exactly the same as straight people, and different.” In the vacuum of meaning, any “grand theory, no matter how crackpot, is attractive to the rudderless and the confused, giving a sense of purpose and history.”
Gay ‘identity’ has thus become “driftwood for a sinking person to cling on to, and thus to duck the more profound realities (and problems) of being an individual human being, with more profound qualities” than their sexuality. ‘Trans identity’ expands on this “dynamic of ‘self-realisation’ and ‘being the real you’, and ends up lapsing into gross caricatures of the two sexes.”
Homosexuality has become a media trope that embraces unrealistic stereotypes instead of escaping them. Gay characters are “wheeled on and off [the set] on castors to make the TV posh classes feel even more pleased with themselves,” which “makes you feel like a prop in their virtue cupboard.”
With the meaning of gayness thus paucified, Judith Butler can get away with telling “mostly white heterosexuals, often from conspicuously affluent backgrounds” that they can “identify into that most sacred of modern castes, The Oppressed” by adopting a ‘queer identity.’ “Congratulations, you’re non-binary! The great thing is, you don’t even have to be gay or do any icky homosexual stuff.”
Roberts validates the feminist critique that gay men supporting gender identity are very often animated by a lingering, subliminal urge for revenge on the straights. “Almost every gay man I’ve ever met could tell you of how he fell in love with another boy in his early teens, and that this unrequited object was heterosexual,” he says.
The usual pangs, rejections and thwartings of adolescence come with an added side of unfairness and despair. Meanwhile, to the blocked gay male teen it seems that the girls in his peer group are blasé or even — to him, incredibly — perturbed by male sexual attention. The world is certainly not made for him.
Roberts observes in RuPaul’s Drag Race “a desire to humiliate, to mock, to usurp, to make women bend to your will. The ‘yuck’ factor lens through which gay men sometimes view women’s bodies.” This postmodern kind of drag act is “unpleasant,” for it does not “portray women as anything like they actually are.”
Rather, the “dark secret” of contemporary drag is “the jealousy of gay men for the sexual power of women.” This is very different from previous generations of campy drag performance, which “only works — in fact, the sole reason for its existence and its effectiveness is — because there are two sexes.”
Thus the old drag was never intended for children. “An education in the accepted norms of sexed behaviour is necessary before you can subvert them,” Roberts argues. “Expecting children to understand this, when they have barely begun — and can barely be expected — to have grasped the cultural essentials, is silly at best.”
Drag is the most visible example of how the alphabetical rainbow brigades have elevated the “low culture” of the homosexual and re-written gay history. Roberts is an accomplished fiction writer with four episodes of Dr Who to his credit, not an historian, but he has written a cultural history nevertheless.
Gay Shame: The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia is filled with television, film, and musical references. Some of these are comic, others are serious waypoints on the timeline which prove his case. “The false witness of gay history” has “acted as a major contributing factor to the rise of genderism,” and Gareth Roberts is correcting the record.
For example, he reveals a personal nostalgia for the days of Section 28, the infamous British anti-gay law enacted under Margaret Thatcher, and notes how rich the gay music scene was in Britain at the time. Contrary to the fevered predictions of gay rights activists in 1988, as well as the historical revisionism of the LGBTQAlphabet now, “nobody was imprisoned or arrested” under that law.
No councils or individuals were prosecuted. No clubs were closed. Life, and gay life, just carried on. In the sixteen years that Section 28 was on the statute books, it was never used. Not once.
Contrast this with the disappearance of the lesbian bar, which has taken place in the era of supposed freedom from homophobic laws. When “sex becomes not a simple, observed fact but a cultural identity, which it is granted to each human to decide for themselves,” it becomes impossible for lesbians, and increasingly gay men as well, to have any sexual boundaries.
Roberts reminds the reader that the British ‘gay rights’ community was deeply unpopular at the time of Section 28 because of its embrace of pedophilia, as well as calls to destroy the family unit, during the 1970s amd 80s. Under the pressure of Section 28, however, gay rights organizing “became sane and effective, campaigned cross-party, and shut out the leftist lunatic element” that had held it back.
“It was a movement for truth, against lies,” Roberts writes. “The more the public found out about lesbian and gay rights, the more they approved. The reverse is true of genderism.” He predicts that sex realism will win, but also sees “a growing and terrible air of a death cult about genderist activism” that threatens to make the process ugly. “The whiff of Waco or Jonestown is in the breeze,” he worries, because the elite embrace of genderism “is revenge, not policy.”
Gareth Roberts deserves praise for the courage to write this book. While it made this reader laugh out loud several times, Gay Shame illuminates a history that most gay men have never known. Roberts confirms truths that the lobbying organizations which purport to represent the interests of gay men would prefer to deny. He acknowledges the responsibility of gay men (“Queerleaders”) for promoting genderism “without even noticing it, or thinking about it.” Historians will want these matters explained by a person who witnessed the history unfold. They will have a primary source in this book.