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.

In class, he received perfunctory attacks that, on reflection, were cult behavior. “To be righteous, it was her duty to call out the white guys who dared to speak about feminist issues in class”, he writes of a classmate who dismissed his “cis” opinion. “It was a religious act she must perform in order to prove her faith.” The callout culture of the Columbia classroom was a “universal priesthood”, and it was making the students anxious.

Rather than liberating anyone, “everyone in this new religion was required to take responsibility for the behavior of everyone around them. They were at the same time acolytes of the ideology, and its enforcers.” Columbia had pushed aside reason and the Enlightenment and let something sinister fill their place. “Ideology, like nature, abhors a vacuum. No matter the secular context, dogmatism rushes in to fill a void formerly occupied by religious faith.” People fall in line because “a sense of moral purpose, purity, and belonging are universal human needs.” We have to be part of something larger than ourselves. Appel was still haunted by the sudden loss of his childhood friends and community, so he understood the dilemma all too well.

It took time for Appel to realize that Columbia had been retooled to make the students fail, to make America fail, to make civilization fail. Being a decade older than most of the students on campus, Appel also had the maturity to recognize, to his disappointment, that the LGBT club was not the place for him. Rather than activists, some of the students there “literally wore pajamas” because they were so fragile and infantilized. Columbia professor Jack Halberstam, who is transgender, wrote the 2011 book The Queer Art of Failure. Halberstam teaches students that failing at life — “unemployment, slacking off, ignorance, stupidity, even self-cutting” — is an “expression of queerness”, while success in life is for squares, i.e. the boring old cisheteronormative patriarchy.

Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic is a memoir, but the core of the second half of the book is a brief on Michel Foucault and the academic queer theorists who set out to undermine western society through a systematic destruction of boundaries and categories (‘language’). Taboos — e.g. cross-dressing, group sex, but mainly and always pedophilia — are transformed into sanctimonious freedom projects through postmodernist sophistry (‘critical theory’). For “the point of critical theory isn’t to establish new truths and morals by which everyone must abide, but to disrupt current ideas about what is moral and true.”

This process, known as ‘queering’, is, and has always been, “a specific form of radical politics”, Appel explains. The political logic of ‘Queers for Palestine’ is that destroying Israel destroys capitalism, so it does not, or should not, matter to the radical gay man (‘the queer’) that Islamists routinely murder gay men (‘queers’) in Gaza. Living in the West, a ‘cis’ white gay man like Ben Appel has intersectional privilege anyway, according to the rationale, so he ought not to tell the Palestinians, who sit atop the AP Top 25 intersectional oppression hierarchy, what to do with their gays. It is none of his business. He should be busy smashing capitalism instead. He should be ‘queer’.

White twentysomething women hailing the election of Zohran Mamdani with “Sharia law starts now” do not think they are losing anything, they think they are smashing capitalism. So did the radical women of Tehran in 1979 when they took part in the Revolution. Iranians had Foucault’s approval because he mistakenly thought the Islamic Republic was destined to become a libertine’s paradise with socialist redistribution. During the 1980s, Ayatollah Khomeini instead systematically crushed the Iranian left, both on campus and across society, jailing those who were not simply killed. Leftists are always useful idiots for Islamist revolutionaries until they are its dispensable victims.

Still a good leftist himself, Appel arrived on campus in 2017, just in time for the controversial ‘Muslim ban’ by the newly-minted President Donald Trump. “In the weeks that followed, I became very attuned to what was the collective attitude toward Muslims on campus. It was as if they were shrouded in holiness”, he writes. “The hijab, rather than a consequence of patriarchal oppression, was now a symbol of resistance. What I understand today is that, in the ever-shifting hierarchy of oppression, Muslim students had claimed the top spot” (emphasis added).

American students meanwhile were “being taught about the West through the lens of its illiberal, authoritarian enemies.” Seven years later, Columbia became the epicenter of protests across the country that valorized Palestinian terrorists and made campuses unsafe for Jewish students and faculty. Dr. Halberstam was present at Columbia to approve the kids failing.

Told that they are privileged, and therefore wrong, and must devote themselves to liberating others, Columbia students — like students in woke campuses everywhere — adopt the superstitions that reduce the anxiety of privilege-consciousness. Self-harm is sanctified. “Cutting up their bodies is a liberating expression of ‘queerness,’ not unlike the suicide bomber who blows himself up”, Appel observes. “Isn’t it funny how many aspects of the moralistic woke left mirror those of religious fundamentalists?” he asks. Reconsidering the 2020 election after the woke turn of Joe Biden in office, he wonders: “Had I voted for a political party or a religious sect?”

As the university which hosted German leftist radical professor Herbert Marcuse during his Nazi-era sojourn in America, Columbia “soon became the fountainhead of an illiberal social justice ideology grounded in critical theory”, Appel writes. This was the ‘New Left’ from which the identitarian politics of the contemporary left have derived. He was at ground zero.

Columbia, Appel discovered, is so devoted to their principles of restorative justice and atonement for past racial sins that none of the dozens of alerts sent out by the campus notification system ever mentioned crimes taking place in the adjacent Morningside Park. After all, the neighborhoods surrounding Columbia are mostly inhabited by minorities, so it would be racist to warn students that they might be robbed and stabbed to death, as Tessa Majors was in 2019. Even before the Summer of Floyd, Columbia was already delivering human sacrifices to their gods of diversity, equity, and inclusion. “One must distrust what they can see with their own eyes” at Columbia. “One must let down their guard and allow others to transgress their boundaries. One must prioritize social justice ideology over one’s own personal safety.” Otherwise the racists win.

Columbia disappointed Appel when he tried to pursue his interest in gay history. One professor skipped past “any details about the widespread objection among various scholars and writers to queer theory’s absorption of the field of lesbian and gay studies in general.” Instead, “I would have to discover these thinkers on my own”, for his own category of gay man was no longer considered worthy of study at Columbia.

On the contrary, Appel repeatedly found that “cis white gays” were not even worthy of consideration, anymore, because Columbia professors now teach that homosexuality did not exist until the 19th century. This is of course false: same-sex attraction has existed universally as far as the literary-historical eye can see. Not only was Ben Appel discounted, and his experience invalidated, he had been erased from history by people chasing a utopian future.

His time as a student journalist and an intern at GLAAD revealed the depth of the depravity in which he found himself. Appel found that nonprofits which had once supported gay men “were concerned with trans people who evangelized trans identification as a sort of postcolonial project, a rebellion against the established order, against Enlightenment ideals, ‘whiteness,’ liberalism, capitalism, and the ‘bogus’ notion of the sex binary.” The woke religion at Columbia had also taken over the Human Rights Campaign.

Every LGBT organization became an extension of a university Gender Studies department, whose purpose was not to produce new knowledge but to interrogate — or queer — the knowledge we had achieved through the hard sciences, since all of that knowledge was tainted by whiteness, colonialism, and the Western patriarchy. GLAAD and HRC would so badly lose their way that they would soon begin advocating for so-called sex changes for children and adolescents — kids who are a lot like the girly little boy I once was.

“Socially and medically transitioning kids who will likely grow up to be gay is the real conversion therapy,” Appel writes. Had he been subjected to the gender cult in adolescence, he likely would have succumbed. Meeting gay men from Iran forced into transition by the regime — for the alternative is the death penalty — Appel finds that some are happy, but most are miserable. Meeting gay American men who detransitioned, Appel sees himself in their experiences. “Their stories, which go entirely ignored by LGBT organizations, sound remarkably similar to the stories I learned of gay men in Iran.”

“This is not progressive. This is regressive, illiberal, and antigay”, he writes. One gay student told Appel he had “trained” himself to be exclusively attracted to nonwhite men. Appel found the statement horrific. “This idea of retraining or ‘reprogramming’ one’s sexuality — considered a moral anathema when cis white Christians proposed it for gays — would soon become commonplace among the trans and queer crowd.” After all, if ‘trans men are men’, then the ‘queer’ thing to do — the revolutionary sex act — is otherwise-heterosexual acts with a woman who says she is a man. He is supposed to give up his human nature to the political project.

Exhausted from speaking and acting “correctly”, Appel recalls his earlier, adolescent exhaustion from the work to “defeminize myself”: his clothes, his mannerisms, his walk, his music. “Every moment of every day, I scanned myself for signs of femininity, which I immediately expunged.” There was no safe space to think until he was alone, and then Appel would be tortured by his thoughts. He was doing it all again now, afraid to voice the thoughts that occupied his mind when he was alone.

“Activism is a collective fight for a better future, but often it is also a personal vendetta against the past”, Ben Appel writes. “Critical social justice ideology wrought nothing but shame and resentment”, so his memoir offers grace and mercy to the past instead. The woke cult on the other hand demands scrupulous, endless work for a repentance that will never actually be possible.

“Hence the reason we see droves of young people scrambling to put transgender flag emojis and obscure health disorders in their social media profiles”, Appel says. “Their trans identities and their disabilities are their redemptive lamb’s blood.” They have escaped intersectional hell, found salvation from their original sin of privilege. It is a a religion taking form, led by a spiritual elite that hates the world-as-it-is and wants to tear everything down on the supposition that a global utopia will just naturally grow from the ashes of western civilization.

Ben Appel went to Columbia because he thought it was a Mecca for people like himself. Instead, it was the Mecca for the cult of nihilism that has infected the American academy, turning universities into medieval monasteries of superstition. America was made possible by Henry VIII of England abolishing his country’s monasteries. It is quite possible that America will not survive the 21st century unless its academic ivory towers are demolished to make way for a more common kind of sense. Taxpayers should not be required to subsidize a new religion no matter how self-important its priesthood is.