The Scrupulosity Of The Woke Campus Radical

A review of ‘Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic’ by Ben Appel

Every cult presents itself as a positive solution to the world’s problems. Every cult wants its children to carry on the cult into a new generation. As a result, Ben Appel writes in his new memoir, “life inside a cult is pretty great” at first, especially if you are a child, as he was. “Often, the real trouble doesn’t come until after you leave — and have to figure out how to think for yourself.” Deprogramming yourself takes time and struggle, even with help, and Ben had none. He was horribly alone.

Raised in the Lamb of God, Appel’s mother had left the group on the cusp of his adolescence. The timing could not have devastated him more. Appel was in a new school, a sissy gay boy who struggled against bullying — until he found peer acceptance as a party animal. Substance abuse became his coping mechanism. “I was no longer ‘Ben-Gay’”, he writes of their cruel nickname. “But now, I was ‘Ben the alcoholic.’”

Drugs and booze merely numbed him to the pain, which intensified. His innocent love of Jesus was now pitted against his burgeoning sexuality. Conditioned to think of himself as a hell-bound sinner by spiritual abuse, which he likens to sexual abuse, Appel learned only years later that he “had developed a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder called scrupulosity” as a result of the inner conflict. He would pray silently in class and then try to sneak the word “amen” out loud as a cough, or rush to the restroom to fall on his knees in a stall.

Scrupulosity is mental self-torture. “I was mistaken to believe that the prayer, if I could just say it correctly or repeat it enough times, would eventually ease my shame”, Appel laments. “Praying only made it more potent.” His constant urge to pray became so debilitating that the only cure was to stop praying altogether. Sobriety took a decade — and the realization that cults exist everywhere, even within ‘twelve step’ programs.

When his life was finally stable and happy, Appel decided to return to college and focus on his writing. Accepted into Columbia, however, he discovered he had accidentally joined yet another cult. In this new cult, being homosexual was not radical enough. Appel was white, and ‘cis’, not “properly queer”, and at Columbia, that made him the oppressor. He was treated as the oppressor the entire time, for his struggle meant nothing to the cult of social justice.

The ‘liberationist’ teachings he now received from certified Marxists were “a remarkably familiar reprise of the close-minded, intolerant orthodoxy of the Christian cult from which I had escaped at age twelve.” For “the group I had longed to unite with, dedicated to social justice and equality, would be more conformist and intolerant than the fundamentalist religious leaders of my childhood … and even crueler than my middle school bullies.” A married gay man, Appel went to Columbia to write about HIV, gay men, and social justice. He left Columbia as a heretic.