All Gay Men are Traumatized …

… and straight men, generally, have an Epstein problem

---

---

1. The Lie that Never Dies

I don’t know about the current crop of fledgling fags just learning to navigate the life-path littered with land mines that will be their lot, but decades ago, when I was a fledgling fag, one of the whispered toxic tropes I had to endure in silence was that gay men were de facto child abusers.

This wasn’t stated explicitly. It was a conclusion I cobbled together out of concerned adult whispers, rude playground epithets like “queer” and, yes, “fag”—words which, defused, I now exploit decoratively, for those much-vaunted pops of color —and gossip about certain of our small-town “confirmed bachelors”, usually in suspect professions such as church organist or hairdresser. “He’s one of those.”

Nothing was fully voiced or overtly expressed; being gay, “homosexual” in the ersatz medical terminology of the time, was literally unspeakable. But someone, after all, had to play the organ in church, someone had to do your hair. Just don’t let them near your kids!

I was only eight years old myself, and obviously innocent of any charges. I also had inklings that I was different, peculiar, a wrongly-wired fuck-up who liked hanging with the girls and reading, liked playing the piano; a solitary, overly-sensitive, painfully shy mistake; the boy about whom my teachers would remark, “Why does he talk like that? Did he have elocution lessons?“

I was the boy who chose for his prize at the Whitby carnival not the plastic gun, but the sequined Kewpie doll with the feather boa that made my eyes glisten with excitement.

All of my choices were disasters, all my instincts perverse. I wasn’t a real boy. Family, also complete strangers, took this as a personal disappointment. I saw it in my father’s face when I wouldn’t play sports; I saw it in the face of the carnie who handed me the Kewpie doll with a look of disgust, as though I’d just betrayed not only him but the entire worldwide brotherhood of men.

And though I didn’t have any unnatural urges about my fellow eight-year-olds, I still felt perpetually anxious. Maybe the urges came at puberty, when manhood flooded your balls, then your brain, with testosterone, or after you’d attended your first Broadway musical. Maybe for queers it was— just a matter of time.

This is extremely painful to remember and to convey to you, reawakening as it does feelings of shocked injustice at the false accusation, followed by naked vulnerability; chronic, free-floating shame at my existence and, even as a child, a wish for my existence to end; the terror of nightmares in which I was demoted to a hell where nothing could ever be sunlit or undefiled, ever again; the illogical yet inescapable conviction from my earliest years that my very skin crawled with evil intent.

Is it any wonder gay men left their small towns as soon as they could turn enough tricks for a bus ticket, to reinvent themselves in the glam anonymity of the biggest stand-in for Sodom they could find?

(The small hometown I left was Whitby, Ontario; my pseudo-Sodom, Toronto, historically dubbed “City of Churches.” But this was not my escape. My mother was also planning her close-up, Mr DeMille; her Salome dance into the spotlight, Hudson’s Bay charge card and Spectator pumps spring-loaded and ready. Her first-born had already flown, the middle sister was destined for nursing college in the big city; and I was dreading my imminent fate as a sacrificial lamb chop on the altar of high school. Time, thought Margaret, to carpe that diem.

(And she knew; I’m certain of it. I suspect she was thinking, “Gay son? OK, then, if that’s the way it’s going to be—personal shopper for life!” My mother had lived through the Depression; she was all about making ends meet.)

Swirls of suspicion, a miasma of mistrust; a whiff of something nasty but unacknowledged in my character: daily accoutrements; my underarm deodorant, my after-shave, my breath mint. Like a medieval Catholic stocking up on indulgences, I became proactively apologetic. I’ve apologized about the weather. If you were to tell me that there was drought in California, I’d strap dry ice onto my back and launch myself off the Sierra Nevada, just to make up for my egregious carelessness.

(Note the overlap with Canadian niceness, which is actually not niceness but simply a kind of barely-controlled biding our time until we finally snap and take all your liquor off the shelves, permanently. Dude, we wrestle polar bears up here.)

That’s why QAnon’s strategy was diabolically clever: they were counting on gay men’s instinct for invisibility and our fear that denying the slur would only reify it. I’m on the record theorizing that QAnon was disseminated primarily to ensure a future terrorizing of gay men.

I’m proved right by the new autocratic insistence on what Judith Butler calls the “phantasm” of gender: the fascist “othering” of all queer and non-conforming people, a moral panic cooked up by right-wing leaders in which the global queer community, having clandestinely met in some black-leather-lined boardroom to sing a kinky Kum-ba-ya, have launched our final, diabolical take-down of All That is Good.

This is nonsense, of course; anyone with gay friends will have noticed we can’t even decide what we want for brunch, let alone work out the best wallpaper, bed linens and Satanic agenda for an evil, woke millennium.

The closest we ever got to solidarity was the Great Orange Juice Boycott targeting Anita Bryant, in the seventies; some day I will explain to you why alcoholic gay men think that not drinking screwdrivers for a week is like a suffragette throwing herself under a horse.

Nonetheless, we queer folx, who are essentially politically powerless, who barely achieved marriage equality in three decades (and soon may lose even that sop) somehow wield unfathomable power to unglue society, strip normal hets of their female or male identities, “groom” children, and destroy Motherhood and The Family.

(And excuse me for reminding you, but—the nuclear family, with its claustrophobia and neurotically focused energies, by supplanting the extended family, with its emotional safety valves, generational wisdom, and diverse role models, already destroyed The Family. Remember? Queers are just way too late for that project.)

Ever noticed how the unhinged accusations of the conservative far-right (i.e., the current mainstream political party in the U.S.) create a smokescreen by attributing to others their own unacceptable behaviors?

That’s why we have Project 2025, that 900-page Malleus Maleficarum in which the Republican Party, unlike “the gays”, actually have worked out an actual agenda for an actual complete restructuring of American society.

The extended temper tantrum of Kim Davis, that Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2015, and, ten years later, is litigating right up to the Supreme Court, is another cutting from that cankerous shrub: once again it’s implied that the queer community has been given “too much equality”, resulting in a slippery slope where, you guessed it, Adam and Eve becomes Adam and Steve, then Adam and Steve plus his sister, Wendy, and Rover, the Great Dane. I mean, seriously.

Right-wing nut jobs, even just regular nut-jobs, get all geeky and insist on hours of “research” and acres of fake documentation before they’ll refuse the moon landing or insist 9/11 was a set-up, yet without so much as an “Oh, c’mon!” they’ll have gay men shtupping puppies and woke lefty kindergarten teachers ensuring their schools are supplied with enough kitty litter boxes to make the “cat-identified” feel included (a hoax, by the way, that emerged from Canada’s very own province of Prince Edward Island. Yes, we grow nut-jobs up here, too. Anne of Green Gables sends her regards.)

From the moment I started high school, I was out queer. Not through any brave stance on my part, au contraire, everyone just— knew. Trying to “pass” seemed a waste of time; my gayness, ostensibly a classified document, had been leaked, unredacted. And over the next four years, instead of melting into the woodwork, I learned to measure and fill my allotted space, quietly at first, then noisily insistent. I’d learned to weather the pain of secrecy, which, it turned out, was no secrecy at all. How could this be worse?

I blossomed, a human camellia in a societal onion patch, and thank gawd for waterproof mascara. In Grade 10, cross my heart, I wrote a several-page love letter to my social sciences teacher, a mumbling Rob Reiner type in desert boots and corduroy pants. I’m sure the principal saw my lyrical ode to hairy forearms and Old Spice, I’m sure there were consultations and discussions, maybe even knowing laughter—but there was no blowback and no scandal. That lapse of judgment simply… faded away…

In senior year my best friends were Bob (who came out ten years later) and Eileen (who soon after graduation realized she was a dyke).

“Aren’t the Grade Nines small this term!” we marveled.

---

2. Gay Men are Traumatized

I’m here to tell you that all gay men my age, (possibly all gay men, possibly all queers, but I’ll just speak for my Boomer tribe) are traumatized. We have active-combat-level PTSD. I’m quite serious.

When you imbibe the nerve gas of queerphobia daily— well, life can get a bit dramatic.

Drama. Gay men are supposed to be full of drama, and here’s a little sidebar, can I tell you how I realized that “bisexual” men enjoy the advantages and privileges of straight men?

When a bisexual ex called me dramatic.

That’s when I realized that, if you claim to be a mix of gay and straight, society latches onto the “straight”, so that you become a straight man, with all the attendant privileges, who just dabbles on the downlow. Even more annoying, after this ex and I separated, he fathered a child on his Lesbian best friend, then abandoned partner and child to reassert his faggotry.

Choreographer, Buddhist monk, playboy in a Jaguar, and naught to be seen but up-turned shirt collars, insouciantly styled with cashmere cardigans, from the Gatineau to Hanlan’s Point. And yet, courtesy of neglected daughter spawned in that non-traditional ménage, my bi-but-that-really-means-straight ex still claimed the privilege, upon our getting reacquainted forty years later, of calling me “dramatic“.

Queers aren’t dramatic. We’re traumatized. What you call drama is hypervigilance, the startled and terrified over-reaction of people who have been so on guard for their safety, we sense that a whisper could kill.

Beatings and murders, sure, obviously, but gay men who survive the physical threats are then nullified: in my youth by the total taboo on discussing sexuality. Sidebar: There was a nasty bit of propaganda, created by the USSR, that AIDS was a deliberate unleashing of a virus by the U.S. against its own citizens. This was intended to lower the prestige of the U.S. in the eyes of the world; it was completely false, but, goal achieved when the U.S. deliberately ignored the crisis, refused funding; nurtured only the silence which was death.

(This, by the way, is why Dr Anthony Fauci is a hero of public health, for he alone created the NIH and secured the funding necessary for research, leading to treatment. He is America’s unsung hero, and may everlasting shame and infamy be on the heads of everyone who insulted, threatened, vilified him during COVID. May they lie sleepless every night of their lives, visited by the vengeful wraiths of the men murdered by America’s contempt and inaction, and I hope they’re all singing show tunes.)

The taboo has penetrated the Oval Office: queers are now officially being nullified by executive order: all mention of trans people, queer people, all reference to our existence, is to be extirpated. We are persona non grata.

The pressure on the trans community is unimaginable; they are the new, captive avant-garde in the fight for justice. They require empathetic attention, to assess the harm done and how best to support them; instead they have only as much rabid, hateful attention as is necessary to color them as unworthy of attention.

Trans kids are made invisible by executive order, then they are outed against their will, at school, made involuntarily visible in a way that endangers them.

“No way am I gonna let some teacher make my boy into a girl!” This is how conservatives crack open their skulls to reveal the void within. By analogy, you might as well say, as Maclean’s magazine said, a while back, “The market will provide affordable housing!”

It’s the same level of blinkered, obdurate stupidity, which can only elicit a cry of, “When, tell me, when has that ever happened, you ignorant waste of skin?”

This is the proof that capitalism and dumb-as-rock conservatives, not forgetting fundamentalist Christian nationalists, were just made for each other.

---

3. An Epstein Observation (and a detour)

I invite you to contemplate this AI-generated image and ask yourself just exactly how unsettling you find it.

I came across it on Facebook. Its creator, who seems to be an instructor in the program used for its creation, shared that “he wanted to create an angel-woman” and was pretty happy with the results.

Because never does a rabbit hole appear but that I must begin burrowing down it, I commented: “Most angels I know are genderless or at least have breasts smaller than their heads.”

I was bewildered, you see, by the cultural cognitive dissonance.

“Don’t date children!” we rightly advise.

But then we advise women: “Dress your adult body like a child, though, because men need that hot virginal fantasy”.

This image, the product of a male mind not regularly engaged in self-examination, isn’t, at least to me, an angel. Nor is she an angel-woman. She is a sexualized child.

So my question: Why are we rightly abhorring the behavior of Jeffrey Epstein and his coterie, (like, the President) yet giving this a pass?

We might start to think: Maybe it’s not gay men that society should be wary of.

You know?

Maybe it’s straight men, with their Imax-sized sense of entitlement, who are the real sexual predators, the potential child abusers, only missing the wealth, and maybe an island, to put their fantasies into practice.

Maybe the nudge, nudge wink, wink, of “just boys being boys”, naughty school uniforms, pigtails and innocence as she sits on daddy’s knee, is just the warm-up.

Maybe the almost universal straight male interest in the virginal and available is good enough proof that the hetero branding of gay men with the revolting lie I have lived with for nearly seventy years was just a smokescreen. A projection, in fact.

Maybe… we shouldn’t take any chances, be so trusting. What, after all, have straight guys done to earn our trust by their treatment of girls and women? Makes ya think, eh?

Maybe there’s a case for keeping straight men under lock and key, just letting them out for procreation.

Or even simpler—once we’ve harvested, freeze-dried, then catalogued their seed, we find a nice desert island for them, so they can kick tires, knock back some beer and bond without anyone getting harmed. All that camaraderie—it’s all just a homoerotic performance for the benefit of other men, anyway!

I invite you to ponder this suggestion. But not for too long: Turkey basters are currently twenty percent off at Wayfair!

A brief detour about school shootings.

The right-wing is going approximately crazy at the revelation that the latest school shooter was trans. But this is completely irrelevant: trans people exist, they are, as I have said, “ordinary Americans” and I would assume for sake of argument that they have around the same probability as any ordinary American of evolving into a school shooter.

For that matter, if the right wing insists that a trans woman “is really a man”, then the whole argument is moot.

What is relevant is the availability and ubiquity of firearms, and the American attitude of entitlement to a firearm from birth (Second Amendment-ism).

Yes, I’m going there. Compare gun death stats from Canada, where guns are more strictly regulated (but still widely used for sport, hunting and self-defense) and US stats:

Country	Total Gun Deaths (2024) thetrace+1	Gun Homicides (2024) statista+1	Population (2024) commonwealthfund	Death Rate per 100,000 thetrace+1
Canada	~1,000	289	40 million	~2.5
United States	16,576	16,576 (excl. suicides)	333 million	~5

Ron DeSantis, on the other hand, seeks to protect children by restricting access to drag queen readings and Toni Morrison novels. Data is not yet available on how homicide rates have improved.

end of detour

#MeToo elicited howls of guilty anger from entitled men, and now the Klieg lights illuminating the Epstein affair—and this week’s school shooting—must provoke men into ruthless self-examination. Mustn’t it?

Can the war on children, the real war on children—which comes from entitled, right-wing straight men, NOT the 2SLGBTQI+ community or the educators or the librarians or the drag queens reading books—can this go on indefinitely? Is that your birthright?

Straight men fan the phallic fantasies, then feign outrage at the inevitable results.

You tell the world you want to protect children while you secretly entertain a desire for their defilement. And rather than revise an old piece of parchment you choose to stand by and watch your children murdered with the firearms you’ve provided.

Stop scapegoating gay men when it’s you who wages, and has always waged, the real war on children.

֎