RadixJournal - Bowden! - 10 - The Homosexual Question

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.

00:00:24.720 Here's your host, Richard Spencer.

00:00:27.380 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Vanguard, and welcome back as well, my weekly partner

00:00:34.220 for these podcasts, Jonathan Bowden.

00:00:36.780 Yes, how are you doing?

00:00:38.340 I'm doing well.

00:00:39.520 How are you over in England?

00:00:41.900 Yes, spring has broken out here.

00:00:44.120 Everything's fine.

00:00:45.340 Is that true in February?

00:00:47.780 Well, it seems that the weather's extraordinarily mild, considering we had snow about 10 days

00:00:53.040 ago.

00:00:53.320 Right.

00:00:54.420 Well, that's good.

00:00:55.160 We're being, at least in my neck of the woods, which I guess is literally a part of the woods.

00:01:00.680 It's pouring snow.

00:01:02.980 But anyway, today, let's get right to it.

00:01:05.180 Today, we're going to talk about a very interesting, but certainly contentious and sometimes painful

00:01:10.740 topic, and that is homosexuality.

00:01:14.140 We're going to talk about the homosexual question in general, but also the politics of homosexuality.

00:01:20.340 And, you know, I think when we take on an issue like this, and of course, we can't do it fully

00:01:26.680 justice.

00:01:27.240 We can indeed only scratch the surface.

00:01:29.600 But when we take on an issue like this, I think it's often best to find an entry point

00:01:34.280 in the way that it's most contemporary, relevant in contemporary times.

00:01:38.940 And I think that is probably this politics of homosexuality. 0.88

00:01:43.460 You know, as we were talking, Jonathan, off the air, when we were thinking about doing

00:01:47.960 a podcast on the subject, you mentioned that the homosexual question as a political issue

00:01:53.340 was unthinkable 75 years ago.

00:01:57.280 It might have been thinkable or becoming thinkable amongst the vanguard of the left during the

00:02:06.020 late 1960s and cultural revolution.

00:02:08.660 But now it's not only thinkable, it's become a kind of shibboleth.

00:02:13.940 And it's in the sense of it is a decisive issue for whether you think of yourself as on the

00:02:21.060 left or the right.

00:02:22.140 And that is interesting.

00:02:23.640 Uh, also the gay movement is something that did not exist within, uh, recent memory yet

00:02:31.780 now, again, is something that's quite powerful and something that is decisive, uh, in terms

00:02:37.200 of, uh, where you fall on the left, right spectrum.

00:02:40.900 Um, uh, so Jonathan, why don't we talk a little bit about this, this, this gay movement in general

00:02:48.040 and how it fits into the left.

00:02:50.280 And let me just, to, to begin that conversation, I'll just relate a amusing anecdote.

00:02:54.620 I, I would, uh, I used to live actually in a very, uh, hip neighborhood in Brooklyn and

00:03:00.920 it was one in which on weekends, invariably, uh, you would meet someone, uh, probably around

00:03:07.860 22, 23, usually a younger person, sometimes a cute girl, and they'd be out there trying

00:03:13.980 to get you to sign a petition for this and that and probably collect your email address.

00:03:17.540 And there, there are a lot of environmental causes and so on and so forth, some anti-war

00:03:22.000 causes, but gay marriage was something that you would see probably more than any of the

00:03:26.960 rest of them.

00:03:27.940 And, um, I, I would usually be a little bit provocative and when I, whenever they would

00:03:33.000 talk to me of, you know, do you want to sign this in support of marriage equality, which

00:03:37.380 is usually how they phrase it.

00:03:38.360 I would say something kind of perverse, like, uh, no, I demand that we liberate gays from 1.00

00:03:44.440 oppressive bourgeois marriages.

00:03:46.220 And they, they, they probably tell that I was joking a little bit, but I don't think

00:03:50.620 they'd really understand me.

00:03:52.080 And, um, so, you know, again, I, I think this shows the kind of, uh, formless and ever changing

00:03:58.600 nature of the left, um, that it can at some point, uh, view bourgeois marriage as something

00:04:05.820 it wants, that that's, it needs to liberate people from it as something it wants to destroy. 0.88

00:04:10.120 Um, and then in other ways, it wants to fight for marriage equality.

00:04:14.460 It's, you know, the left can always change like this, but Jonathan, why don't you talk

00:04:19.100 about the, the role homosexuality plays in politics in general and the way that it fits

00:04:26.840 in with the contemporary left?

00:04:30.620 Yes.

00:04:31.220 It's a sort of been a hundred year story really.

00:04:34.000 Um, way back in the beginning of the sort of last century, certainly the second decade

00:04:39.060 of the last century, the 1920s, the Bloomsbury group in Britain was one of the few, few cultural

00:04:45.140 sort of vanguard groups that were pushing for what would now be called an equality agenda

00:04:50.160 on this issue and many others.

00:04:53.520 And they were as under pressure as politically incorrect social conservatives are today.

00:04:59.720 We've seen the total reversal in the sort of, uh, storm scape of the sky.

00:05:04.500 You know, everything has changed.

00:05:05.840 All of the landmarks have remained the same and yet the atmosphere around them has changed

00:05:10.240 utterly.

00:05:11.140 A hundred years back, people with these ideas were, you know, under deep carbon.

00:05:15.820 They were frightened for their careers and their reputations.

00:05:18.680 If it was revealed, they had these sorts of ideas.

00:05:21.620 They used to have a sort of masonry in which, in which they met by which I don't mean anything

00:05:26.640 conspiratorial.

00:05:27.520 I just mean that they had not funny handshakes when they met, but they had ways of recognizing

00:05:32.200 each other's views and they had extended circles and networking and contacts to keep their

00:05:38.560 views separate from people who weren't as quote unquote progressive or in their terms as up

00:05:43.940 to the mark as they thought of themselves.

00:05:46.520 And, uh, it's quite interesting because, of course, some of the great espionage scandals

00:05:50.820 of the 20th century involving the security services of both Britain and the United States

00:05:56.000 of America are rooted in these sorts of cultural networks because the Bloomsbury Group was a

00:06:01.960 an open cultural network up to a point with closed features.

00:06:07.340 But the Apostles Group at Cambridge University and its equivalent of Oxford University and

00:06:12.400 its equivalent in certain colleges at London University was more of a closed elitist cultural

00:06:17.760 circle.

00:06:18.340 And it was a communist circle, a general ultra-liberal ethos through which these circles floated.

00:06:24.800 And it was very much a homosexual circle, one of the key spies and MI6, MI5 traitors in 0.99

00:06:32.680 the later decades in Britain, Anthony Blunt, who went on to be the surveyor of the Queen's

00:06:37.380 pictures, believe it or not, and was sort of pardoned and yet not pardoned and later revealed

00:06:42.780 as a spy by Margaret Thatcher and stripped of all his various establishment honours.

00:06:47.060 He was part of a homosexual circle that overlapped with these other circles of ultra-liberalism 0.79

00:06:54.440 and of politically correct non-conformism.

00:06:58.520 These were ideas which were totally at variance with the society in which they lived.

00:07:02.820 The society was a conservative, in British terms, News Chronicle Society, where a sort

00:07:09.620 of newspaper that's, Morning Chronicle Society rather, a paper that's long since defunct.

00:07:14.360 I don't know if you can think of a pretty traditional, bourgeois, conservative newspaper in the United

00:07:22.220 States.

00:07:24.840 Sure.

00:07:25.660 Maybe the New York Post Society, Wall Street Journal Society, I guess.

00:07:31.180 Imagine that 10 times to 50 times more conservative than it is now.

00:07:37.580 Those were the attitudes that prevailed then.

00:07:40.620 And these people were really up against it.

00:07:44.320 And this issue of all issues was a trigger issue, because it's an issue about which the

00:07:49.620 majority of people who don't think about these issues at all have an instantaneous judgment,

00:07:54.340 an intuitive judgment, a physiological judgment, a sort of naysaying by virtue of what they

00:08:00.320 are, because despite the ideology that says that 20%, 40%, and more accurately in terms of

00:08:07.580 the ideology, 10% are inverted or homosexual in sexual orientation, it might be as low as

00:08:15.460 1.5% to 2% for either gender, which is a very small number of people.

00:08:21.080 And yet, the politics of getting them civic equity has been an enormous struggle.

00:08:28.940 And yet it's been inconducted when, in some ways, there was no real need to do it, in a

00:08:33.820 strange way.

00:08:34.840 At times, it's almost not been about homosexuals.

00:08:37.720 It's been about the effect you can have on society by promoting them and it.

00:08:42.720 Now, the so-called gay liberation movement has always existed amongst homosexuals themselves,

00:08:48.980 but its heterosexual supporters, because the bulk of the left that supported them, of course,

00:08:52.920 didn't share their orientation, but shared their desire to change society, absolutely,

00:08:59.040 in all sorts of stages and at all sorts of levels.

00:09:03.220 Traditional Marxism had very little to say about sexuality, about drugs, about the culture

00:09:09.580 of bohemianism, and about decadence.

00:09:13.940 Marxist-Felanist regimes, of course, have been highly socially conservative and have been

00:09:18.680 quite toxic about issues of decadence, and retained the ultra-conservative trade union

00:09:25.100 attitudes that often prevailed on the old left at the beginning of the 20th century.

00:09:31.640 Communism tends to do this.

00:09:32.940 When it's in opposition, it advocates the maximum degree of breakdown and debility, and

00:09:38.160 what conservatives call decadence.

00:09:40.100 But when in power, it reverses that and has a very socially conservative mantra.

00:09:45.240 But to return to the movement itself, the movement didn't really become observable until

00:09:48.960 the 1950s and 1960s, when it was part of the general current that reverberated within and

00:09:56.720 beyond the 60s cultural revolutions that spread into the 1970s, the term gay and its etymology

00:10:03.800 is quite interesting, of course, because technically it's a 19th century word, and it means a

00:10:09.360 prostitute, or it means somebody who's louche and somebody who's decadent in their sexuality. 0.97

00:10:15.320 In Victorian England, the term gay meant essentially a woman who was easily available for sexual usage. 0.94

00:10:25.480 It's a famous punch cartoon from the 1840s, quite daring, given what we're told about the

00:10:31.000 Victorian attitudes towards these things, of two slattons under a lamppost, and one says 0.97

00:10:36.480 to the other, if you're so gay, why do you look so miserable? 0.99

00:10:39.880 And the term gay meaning sexual outsider, mountebank, hustler, somebody who uses their sexuality in 0.99

00:10:50.880 order to get on, somebody who is in some ways a sexual criminal, that was the original word, 0.55

00:10:56.720 because of course its counterpart is straight, and in criminal jargon, those who are not criminals

00:11:02.480 are straight, they're the ones who obey the rules, they're the nerds, you see, in this

00:11:08.380 sort of quasi-criminal way of looking at things, this sort of underground man way of looking

00:11:13.700 at things, the people who obey all the rules and stick to the lines, and who work for a

00:11:19.160 living, and this sort of thing, are regarded as straight, or having gone straight, or not

00:11:23.840 deviated from a straight path.

00:11:25.480 And this idea that one is different, and is transgressive, and is transgressive in the

00:11:33.940 sexual area, is where the term gay comes from.

00:11:37.220 It's got nothing to do with being happy and carefree, as most people believe.

00:11:41.700 So even the origin of the word is ideological, is deliberately ideological, and the whole movement

00:11:47.880 was ideological because they decided to invert national socialist motifs for the way in

00:11:54.280 which homosexuals were treated. 0.75

00:11:56.780 So the pink triangle became a symbol of pride, and the inversion of stereotypical prejudices

00:12:05.600 against them became an object of correlative in relation to their own identity, and that's

00:12:11.580 what that particular movement picked up.

00:12:13.920 The movement began in a very militant and vanguard way, and it softened over time because the

00:12:18.880 bulk of homosexuals are not interested in militant vanguard politics.

00:12:23.020 Right. 0.99

00:12:23.460 As most people are not.

00:12:25.280 So they've softened over time.

00:12:26.860 They've changed their objectives over time.

00:12:28.500 On the issue of marriage, traditionally, the gay movement was always opposed to marriage

00:12:32.900 for homosexuals, believing that it was a bourgeois construct that heterosexuals engaged in,

00:12:40.340 and the whole point of them was that they were different.

00:12:42.740 They were different people who had a different lifestyle, and that bourgeois marriage was not

00:12:47.040 part of it, and it's become rather uneasily, actually, the liberal left and the bourgeois left

00:12:56.280 has claimed this space for itself, and the idea that a small proportion of them who wish

00:13:01.560 to marry should have the right to do so outside church in civic ceremonies that go beyond civil

00:13:07.680 partnerships.

00:13:08.440 It's largely an initiative of the bourgeois left.

00:13:13.040 It's not really an initiative of the far left.

00:13:15.500 It appears far left to people on the other side, but they, on the whole, are relatively indifferent about it.

00:13:20.740 They'll tick the box for it, but it's not something that they cheerlead particularly.

00:13:25.560 Well, no, there's a serious split in the gay movement between the Andrew Sullivan type,

00:13:31.960 and I'm referring to the journalist and blogger, the kind of neoconservative, neoliberal kind

00:13:36.500 of guy, used to edit the New Republic, who's been out in front with gay marriage.

00:13:41.700 I mean, he's kind of the conservative wing of, we just want to be bourgeois kind of thing,

00:13:46.900 and there's obviously another militant wing of the gay movement that can't stand someone

00:13:54.040 like Andrew Sullivan.

00:13:55.740 Actually, Justin Raimondo, who's an excellent anti-war blogger, he certainly despises Andrew

00:14:03.800 Sullivan for his views on foreign policy, at least ostensibly.

00:14:08.800 But there's also something underneath it, which was that he was part of a more radical,

00:14:14.680 vanguardist gay movement in California that would loathe someone like Andrew Sullivan as 0.97

00:14:21.100 a sellout or gay traitor or something like that. 0.90

00:14:25.100 Although they have morphed over the years because the group that's advising the British 0.98

00:14:28.500 government on homosexual marriage legislation, something that's being brought in tacitly

00:14:34.940 by a conservative-dominated government.

00:14:36.800 Don't forget, we have a conservative-liberal hybrid coalition here.

00:14:42.500 What's the motivation for that?

00:14:44.260 Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking through these things.

00:14:47.920 I mean, one could say that the motivation is a far-left motivation.

00:14:51.420 They truly want to just subvert and destroy the basic family structure with gay marriage. 1.00

00:14:57.880 Although I'm not so sure about that.

00:15:01.040 I don't think a lot of the wishy-washy liberals who support gay marriage and think it's nice,

00:15:08.420 I'm not sure they have such totally negative motivations.

00:15:14.820 I think it's something else.

00:15:16.380 I mean, it's simply a case that a lot of these people have a kind of gay friend and they think

00:15:21.860 that this is something good.

00:15:24.180 Or what do you think the motivation?

00:15:25.600 I mean, why has this become a shibboleth in the way that other things happen?

00:15:29.620 I mean, legalization of drugs is not a shibboleth.

00:15:33.960 It's not that important at all.

00:15:37.640 But the gay movement really is.

00:15:41.260 What do you think the motivation is amongst heterosexuals?

00:15:44.760 I think it's become a tokenistic thing to prove how moderately right on and progressive one is.

00:15:50.700 The reason for its adoption by the British conservative government is purely political positioning

00:15:55.020 involving the present leader, Cameron.

00:15:57.640 He's always come from the center of the party in British terms.

00:16:01.360 But it's like to posture as a liberal conservative who's not right-wing or reactionary on social issues.

00:16:08.320 One of the ways he could run against his own party and prove his independence and the fact that he wasn't really right-wing

00:16:14.500 but was a conservative of an allegedly modern character, a sort of civic neoconservative without the foreign policy accretions, if you like,

00:16:24.140 was to champion homosexual marriage in the teeth of his party's sullen opposition to it because the Tory party doesn't like it at all

00:16:34.540 and it's going to be a large-scale rebellion which may scupper his project.

00:16:38.400 It's also considered to be a meaningless sort of gesture as well because hardly any of them want to get married.

00:16:43.720 And there will be very little of it.

00:16:47.300 And so what it is, it's a chattering classes issue.

00:16:50.560 If you had a vote on it, the vote would be quite close because the issue is being forced onto the agenda to such a degree

00:16:57.740 that liberal attitudes towards it are much more prevalent than they used to be.

00:17:01.420 There would be a majority against a marriage because they've got civil partnerships anyway. 0.51

00:17:06.280 And most people would say that's enough.

00:17:09.220 And there's a strong lobby that's opposed to marriage, particularly a Christian lobby,

00:17:13.240 which involves the ex-archbishop of Canterbury and other people.

00:17:16.880 So it probably won't happen under a Tory government, actually,

00:17:20.660 but it will happen under a Labour government at some time in the future.

00:17:24.140 It's become a shibbolist because heterosexuals wish to support tokenistic gestures that make them feel good. 0.60

00:17:30.740 Right. I think it is as simple as that.

00:17:32.400 But let's talk a little more broadly about this issue. 0.99

00:17:37.140 You know, I, for one, I find the homosexual movement to be absolute poison, 1.00

00:17:43.020 something that is a part of a larger movement that I think is bringing about the death of the West. 0.91

00:17:51.160 That said, I don't think that your average homosexual is someone who is, say, totally morally suspect.

00:18:00.240 And indeed, I don't think that they can be changed.

00:18:03.500 I think they were born that way.

00:18:04.980 And I think it's a physical attribute, if not necessarily a genetic one.

00:18:09.540 So I guess someone might view my position on this as laissez-faire and tolerant,

00:18:16.540 or maybe I'm kind of like an older reactionary who just would like gays to be quiet about it and not have a gay movement.

00:18:24.760 But I don't really want to go save them or investigate them or jail them or anything like that.

00:18:30.880 But, you know, one of the reasons why I hold this view is that homosexuality is not new. 0.56

00:18:37.220 It was not something that was invented in the 1960s.

00:18:41.900 It's something that has always been marginal, although it's always been with us.

00:18:47.500 And actually, I hesitate a little bit in even suggesting it was marginal.

00:18:50.880 It's worth pointing out that when you read some of these great platonic dialogues,

00:18:57.360 like the symposium, which is on the nature of love,

00:19:01.160 those people are debating the nature of love of a young boy.

00:19:06.420 And that's something that's shocking and a bit disturbing, certainly for me.

00:19:11.300 I'm certainly, I imagine it's for every other reader.

00:19:15.060 So, you know, in some ways, homosexuality has always been there. 0.94

00:19:17.640 It's never been the, say, the mainstream of society.

00:19:22.840 But it's had a larger and smaller role to play.

00:19:27.120 I guess one might, someone might actually object here and say that that's homosexuality,

00:19:32.400 which is something different than a gay identity, and that's certainly true. 1.00

00:19:35.920 But what do you think about this?

00:19:37.460 Looking back over the great thrust of Western history,

00:19:43.540 what kind of role do you think homosexuality has played in this?

00:19:49.420 You know, as I said before, it's always been there,

00:19:51.520 and yet it's, you know, sometimes suppressed, sometimes ignored.

00:19:56.860 Sometimes it actually was an activity that had a part in society.

00:20:02.200 There was actually even an elite society, such as we see with the ancient Greeks.

00:20:06.320 What do you think about this whole issue?

00:20:09.960 Yes, I think it's a physical manifestation, and it's always been there.

00:20:14.000 It's always been important in one sense because it's played to elites.

00:20:18.220 The elites of Western society have often been segregated along gender lines early in life,

00:20:26.000 segregated by schooling, segregated before marriage.

00:20:29.400 Marriage is often semi-arranged, not in accordance with romantic love ideas anyway.

00:20:36.140 Aristocratic prerequisite, whereby your nanny and sisters and your mother, 0.98

00:20:42.720 aunts and female relatives were really the only women that many young men met until they were 20.

00:20:48.220 At least.

00:20:49.320 Even then, universities were segregated, at least at colleges,

00:20:53.120 although you did get to meet the opposite sex at that time.

00:20:55.960 So this hothouse atmosphere at upper class and upper class schools,

00:21:01.600 particularly in Western Europe, especially in Britain,

00:21:04.220 is the stuff of folklore.

00:21:06.220 And the issue of the dandy and people who stand outside by virtue of style

00:21:14.020 and the importance in the arts, where this minority has been extremely radically represented,

00:21:23.220 if not overrepresented, but in relation to far.

00:21:27.160 I mean, in excess of the representation in the arts can be 15, 20 percent, 35 percent, more.

00:21:37.360 Oh, you know, if you go look at contemporary Broadway musicals or something,

00:21:42.420 and it's 75 percent.

00:21:44.380 Or if you look at art history, when I was a graduate student,

00:21:47.760 art history departments were 100 percent either female or gay male,

00:21:52.220 and they were probably 75 percent gay male.

00:21:55.820 So, yeah, I mean, it's tremendous in those areas.

00:21:58.260 It's quite intense.

00:21:59.880 And yet, the percentage in the society may be actually proportionately very small.

00:22:04.680 Right.

00:22:05.240 Except when they all group together, in particular locales,

00:22:08.660 which is one of the tactics that's used.

00:22:11.280 But then again, people wish to live with their own kind. 1.00

00:22:13.880 I mean, that's a normative gesture.

00:22:15.280 So, yeah, it's always existed.

00:22:19.000 It's fluctuated.

00:22:19.980 One of the biggest tensions holding it back in Western society is Christianity, 1.00

00:22:25.480 which Christianity has always been quite biblically literal about inversion and homosexuality,

00:22:31.000 and has always condemned it.

00:22:32.840 This is not to say that there's always been Christians who've had a liberal view about it.

00:22:37.180 There always have been.

00:22:39.100 And the bark was largely worse than the bite if people were discreet.

00:22:43.200 But at the end of the day, Christianity is one of the major sanctions upon it. 0.98

00:22:50.340 And as secular Westerners struggle to get these civic equality measures onto the statute book,

00:22:57.320 it's evangelical Christianity with a certain element of reactionary Catholic Christianity added in

00:23:04.940 that's conducting the last stand, as it were, really,

00:23:09.140 because this is a major issue for them,

00:23:10.960 because it's literally condemned in the Bible.

00:23:13.780 And although Catholics don't literally believe in the Bible because the church interprets for you what the Bible means,

00:23:19.180 Protestants of any radicalism have to believe literally in the Bible

00:23:21.960 because they don't have any overarching church structure to give their faith coherence.

00:23:26.260 So for them, it's a cardinal matter.

00:23:28.980 It's very important, indeed, for all three religions of the book,

00:23:32.100 Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

00:23:33.520 It's actually a central issue, which is why they tend to debate it so much,

00:23:38.980 because it's a totemic issue.

00:23:40.560 It's a touchstone issue.

00:23:42.280 For the broader society, it's not really an issue.

00:23:45.520 The bulk of heterosexuals would rather not think about it.

00:23:48.560 That's their attitude, actually.

00:23:49.880 Yeah, I agree.

00:23:52.300 Let's talk a little bit about this in closing of just your views on the physical nature of homosexuality.

00:24:00.540 I know we were talking off air, and you think that this earlier view,

00:24:06.060 which might seem rather intuitive or mystical or something, 0.92

00:24:10.500 that a gay man has a woman's mind, or maybe even a woman's brain, 0.90

00:24:15.600 and vice versa for lesbians, that this might actually be correct. 1.00

00:24:24.420 And, you know, I'll just mention my view.

00:24:26.180 I actually have a short three-fourths written blog article on this,

00:24:32.160 which I need to finish up.

00:24:33.620 I'll try to publish it coinciding with this podcast.

00:24:36.840 But there's actually a lot of evidence that,

00:24:41.060 and this was actually done by an East German researcher,

00:24:44.880 and I find it rather cogent,

00:24:47.340 and that is that there's a lot of evidence that homosexuality is not a genetic manifestation,

00:24:55.660 but it is a physical manifestation.

00:24:58.960 And it involves that when a child is in a womb,

00:25:02.520 they're subjected to a series of, just to speak rather colloquially,

00:25:10.360 testosterone baths.

00:25:11.880 And in a sense, one of them will determine the sex of the fetus.

00:25:19.240 Another will determine, let's say, the object of desire of the fetus,

00:25:23.340 that will kind of gender it of, you want to be with women. 1.00

00:25:27.920 And then another bath will determine the kind of, let's say, gender behavior. 1.00

00:25:33.340 You know, do you act like a man?

00:25:34.660 And so on and so forth.

00:25:36.340 And that sometimes in stress, and sometimes just simply randomly,

00:25:41.120 that the fetus is not subjected to these individual baths of testosterone.

00:25:48.040 And so you'll have a lot of situations where, you know, 0.66

00:25:50.820 oftentimes you will have the stereotypical feminine man who's gay. 0.93

00:25:55.980 You know, he acts like a woman. 0.99

00:25:57.180 He might even be obsessed with more interest in womanly things like fashion or so on and so forth.

00:26:05.040 You know, we know the stereotype.

00:26:07.240 But there are actually a lot of other different gay people.

00:26:09.440 Actually, when I lived in New York City, I remember walking around Chelsea.

00:26:14.960 It was late at night.

00:26:16.340 And there were some of these, clearly a band of people who were openly homosexual,

00:26:21.300 but they were quite masculine.

00:26:23.620 They looked like they had been working out in the gym all day long.

00:26:27.660 They were, you know, they were kind of prowling streets.

00:26:30.380 Not exactly the most reputable people or anyone I'd want to hang around with.

00:26:35.180 But anyway, they were clearly not wimps or, you know, lady men or girly men or whatever.

00:26:43.080 They were quite masculine, but they clearly had their object of desire was a man.

00:26:48.960 And so this basically, I think this way of thinking about it really can explain it.

00:26:54.480 And it can also lead us to, you know, at least have my view on the subject,

00:26:58.700 which is that this is a physical component of their lives.

00:27:03.680 It's not really something that can be changed.

00:27:07.180 And it might have some, functionally speaking,

00:27:10.100 it might be a bit immoral in the sense that it's not supportive of the family.

00:27:14.640 And it can be, quite frankly, dangerous in terms of, you know, disease and so on and so forth.

00:27:21.340 But it doesn't really come from a moral failing of the homosexual himself.

00:27:27.060 Or it comes from a, you know, let's just say physical failing.

00:27:30.340 It's a kind of subnormal, not exactly desirable.

00:27:34.540 And of course, when I say this, this will make me extremely unpopular with two groups.

00:27:38.640 Um, that is the homosexual movement, but also, uh, the anti-homosexual, uh, movement,

00:27:45.300 which is mainly Christian, uh, because they, the, the, the latter wants to believe that it is simply

00:27:50.600 a moral failing and therefore we can pray with them or save them or so on and so forth.

00:27:55.220 I unfortunately don't think they can be saved.

00:27:56.820 At the same time, if we had a different kind of society, um, one that had a, a more eugenic

00:28:03.800 principle, um, then I think we could make sure that these fetuses did receive proper testosterone 0.99

00:28:11.300 baths and that the percentage of the population of homosexuals perhaps went from say 2%, what

00:28:18.140 it is today, or maybe one and a half, uh, to zero.

00:28:20.620 Um, that we could actually, um, cure this, um, in a way.

00:28:26.620 And I, I think in some ways the, the gay movement wants to think of themselves as born that way.

00:28:31.460 They don't want to think of themselves as a choice.

00:28:33.080 It's an identity.

00:28:33.800 Uh, but the, but once you start talking about, um, you know, uh, fixing them or, or, or finding

00:28:39.760 a way around them, I don't think they would actually like that at all.

00:28:42.860 So in many ways, I guess my view is completely unpopular, uh, but, but I actually think it's

00:28:48.780 a, it's a, it's a, but it's, uh, but I think it is a sane and rational one, but, uh, so while

00:28:56.320 I'm sticking to it, uh, but what is your view, Jonathan, obviously we're, neither of us are

00:29:01.280 scientists, so we're, we're simply speculating, uh, but, but what is your view on the, the biological

00:29:06.960 basis?

00:29:07.820 Yeah.

00:29:08.240 If there is one.

00:29:08.920 Do you know when they happened?

00:29:11.520 Was it in the 1970s?

00:29:13.720 These, yeah, it was in the late seventies and sixties, seventies when this East German, 0.99

00:29:18.340 um, researcher was doing this work.

00:29:20.480 And it's interesting because he theorized that, um, you know, in, when you're doing scientific

00:29:25.560 reasoning, you want predictability and also you, you want disprove ability, so to speak,

00:29:31.120 um, that you could prove that this is incorrect.

00:29:34.400 The theory, you know, unlike say Freudianism, you can never really prove that Freudianism is

00:29:38.900 incorrect because, um, you would always say, oh, the reason why you think it's incorrect

00:29:44.060 is because you're, you have an edible complex and you're resisting it or something, which

00:29:47.980 is, you know, this Karl Popper, um, you know, very important philosopher talked about this.

00:29:52.400 You want to, science needs to be disproved.

00:29:54.860 Well, anyway, um, this person who did this research, he actually looked at women who were

00:30:00.760 in Dresden, uh, during the horrible bombing, uh, in the second world war of that city.

00:30:06.860 And you actually had a higher percentage of gay children.

00:30:09.840 And he theorized that this was due to the terrible stress that they were under, um, while they

00:30:15.820 were pregnant and that their fetuses were not, you know, uh, getting the proper testosterone

00:30:21.680 treatment, so to speak.

00:30:23.340 Um, and so it, it actually is a sign, it is a theory that has some predictability and,

00:30:28.960 and you could disprove it.

00:30:30.540 Um, so I, I think it actually is a quite cogent in that way.

00:30:34.460 And, uh, uh, but yeah, so there is some evidence for that, but, but what do you think about that

00:30:39.180 in terms of, um, do you, do you think that old, the older view, which, which is a bit, let's

00:30:46.340 mystical or intuitive that, you know, a gay man has a woman's mind? 1.00

00:30:50.820 Uh, do you think that that's true in a way? 0.71

00:30:53.700 Do you, do you think it's a kind of mindedness that that's what, um, that's what homosexuality 1.00

00:30:58.480 is about?

00:30:59.960 Yeah.

00:31:00.440 So I think it's, um, in relation to these East German experiments, just to begin with

00:31:03.920 them, um, they were quite notorious because of course these were conducted by a communist 0.71

00:31:07.880 state, uh, for communistic reasons.

00:31:10.680 Right.

00:31:11.260 And, uh, many of the experiments were relatively benign, but some were not because most of them

00:31:16.280 were conducted under the aegis of the Stasi.

00:31:18.180 And they were conducted because Honecker and the elite of the East German vanguard wondered

00:31:24.560 why homosexuality existed so much in East Germany. 0.96

00:31:28.020 And they were particularly thinking around the, um, the Brechtian theater that existed

00:31:32.780 in East Germany that was world famous.

00:31:34.880 And a lot of money had been put into the Berlin Ensemble theater, which still exists in a

00:31:40.900 differentiated way.

00:31:42.100 Um, but not financed by German taxpayers in the same way.

00:31:47.480 Now they, they thought that homosexuality was a virtual perversion and they believed that

00:31:53.240 state socialism had been achieved in Eastern Germany and communism, the perfection of it 0.89

00:31:58.260 was well on the way, indeed was being achieved actively.

00:32:00.940 So, so why did it still exist?

00:32:03.060 Hmm. 0.83

00:32:04.060 And with the literal mindedness that communists always have, they took groups of homosexuals

00:32:08.640 and asked them to write out their life histories.

00:32:10.980 The Stasi was incredibly interested in documenting everything and crossing every, uh, T and dotting 0.92

00:32:16.340 every I.

00:32:17.560 And then they let many of them go.

00:32:20.020 Um, others, they actually did experiments on by showing them heterosexual pornography and

00:32:26.020 some, which presumably had to be smuggled in from the West.

00:32:28.460 Uh, and seeing what their response to it would be and tying them to electrode machines and,

00:32:34.360 uh, to lie detector tests and so on.

00:32:38.460 And a proportion of them, they, this was the Stasi, don't forget, a proportion of them 1.00

00:32:43.220 that were left, they went into a much more direct action, which was illegal, but was given

00:32:48.840 state sanction in that some of these individuals were shot and they, scientists operated on their

00:32:54.140 brains and they discovered, uh, something which has become normative in Western medicine in

00:33:01.380 the last 20 years, that heterosexual women and have the same brains as homosexual men, 0.67

00:33:09.160 because men and women have different brains and homosexual women and heterosexual men have 0.90

00:33:15.320 the same brains.

00:33:16.320 So this leads to the theory that you have the brain of a man in the body of a woman and

00:33:22.060 you have the brain of a woman in the body of a man. 0.99

00:33:25.440 And this is one of the later scientific theories, which seems to be justified by fact.

00:33:31.820 There's been a definite silence about this, uh, theory or this expostulate, as you could

00:33:37.620 call it in scientific terms.

00:33:39.220 Uh, it's often the, uh, the liberation movement concerned never wants to discuss their own

00:33:45.440 case.

00:33:46.560 They want to discuss the dynamic agenda whereby they're given more and more civic and quality

00:33:51.820 in the social space.

00:33:56.120 Yes.

00:33:56.640 Uh, you know, I didn't know this backstory and I, I'm glad to hear it.

00:34:01.280 Um, I, I, uh, yes, the, the backstory about the, these German research into, uh, homosexuality,

00:34:09.000 um, but yeah, I mean, again, this, this is, um, as we were saying, you can, you can really

00:34:16.220 alienate both sides when you take this position because, um, you know, I, I think, you know,

00:34:21.640 a lot of that research might've actually been productive.

00:34:24.280 I, of course, don't, uh, you know, Neil has to say, I don't support, you know, shooting

00:34:28.700 people and operating on them and looking at their brain.

00:34:32.920 Well, what, what happened is the West has replicated these experiments, but in a consensual

00:34:36.780 way by using the tissue samples and the brains of people who left their bodies to science

00:34:42.360 in the normal process of, uh, evaluation.

00:34:45.300 Right.

00:34:46.060 Well, that, that, yeah, that, that's certainly a lot better, but I, I think in general, you,

00:34:49.740 you will get to this point that, um, homosexuals want to be born that way, uh, to quote the, 0.92

00:34:57.840 this, you know, Lady Gaga song of the past year.

00:35:00.940 They want to be born that way in the sense that it is an identity.

00:35:03.680 It's not just a choice.

00:35:05.140 It's something much more meaningful.

00:35:06.440 It's how they define themselves, uh, maybe even the primary way that they define themselves.

00:35:11.420 Um, but at the same time, they don't want to ever think if you, I don't think homosexuality

00:35:16.220 is genetically based, but if, if it were, if someone started wanting to do gene therapy or

00:35:21.100 if you, you know, women wanted to select, um, if they, they, they could, you know, have a 0.61

00:35:26.120 select children, uh, maybe abort a child if they could do genetic testing and determine

00:35:30.860 that he would likely be homosexual. 0.92

00:35:32.900 Uh, needless to say, once you go down that road, uh, I, I think the, uh, the gay movement 1.00

00:35:38.380 would be completely horrified, much like the, um, uh, the, the women's, uh, rights and the 0.98

00:35:44.620 kind of abortion movement.

00:35:45.800 I've noticed that, you know, all, all of these women, you know, abortion is a, uh, you know, 1.00

00:35:50.420 a, a shivolous, as we were saying before, it's an unquestion, you know, you must support 1.00

00:35:54.340 that as unquestionable when they hear about abortions occurring in India, where, uh, they're

00:35:59.620 basically doing, uh, gender selection abortions.

00:36:02.820 You know, if they're having a child, they'll, they'll most likely having a female, the most 0.99

00:36:06.480 likely board it.

00:36:07.560 They want a man. 0.97

00:36:08.340 Uh, they obviously want to outlaw that they're quite pro-life when it comes to that.

00:36:12.960 So I, you know, a lot of these things is, is not so much the issue itself, but how the

00:36:18.240 issue is articulated, um, in the left, right political spectrum.

00:36:23.200 Um, and, uh, I, I think that's true, but both of that, the abortion case that I mentioned,

00:36:28.140 but, uh, but also the, uh, the homosexual issue.

00:36:31.280 Well, Jonathan, I think we've just scratched the surface, but, um, uh, do you have any other,

00:36:35.540 uh, lingering thoughts on the matter before we, uh, bring this conversation to a close?

00:36:40.360 Yes, only one.

00:36:41.420 And that's the extraordinary example that these experiments were done in East Germany, which

00:36:46.360 was a communist regime that supported by the Stasi secret police who used to finance and

00:36:51.960 arm the Red Army faction in the West Germany to spread chaos and mayhem. 0.83

00:36:57.140 And yet here we have the most illiberal, dysgenic type experiments being conducted, all in the 0.56

00:37:03.980 name of socialism, which would literally horrify the whole liberal left, all those people that

00:37:10.440 you met in, uh, Brooklyn out with their clipboards, getting people to, um, sign up for civic equality

00:37:17.140 in marriage.

00:37:17.820 Think what they'd think about those communist experiments in East Germany.

00:37:21.680 And yet it's part of the same continuum that they're on.

00:37:25.840 Yes, it is.

00:37:26.520 I mean, it's, it's something we, we've come back to this and in so many of our broadcasts,

00:37:30.900 which is the, the, the, the malleable Promethean nature of the left.

00:37:37.400 It's able to move and rethink itself and contradict itself and all of these ways in which it becomes

00:37:44.260 quite dynamic.

00:37:44.900 I think, you know, one of the major problems conservatives faces face is that they're simply

00:37:50.660 always reacting to the latest left mutation.

00:37:55.080 Um, and unlike the left, we aren't visionary.

00:37:58.600 We're not, uh, we're, you know, again, we're, um, we're, we're trying to hold a line and

00:38:03.720 not try to, trying to push something forward.

00:38:05.800 And I think in many ways, it's something we're trying to change with alt-right and, and similar

00:38:10.960 websites and, uh, and these broadcasts.

00:38:13.540 But Jonathan, thank you for being back on the program.

00:38:17.100 And, uh, it's, again, this is, we're only able to scratch the surface of these issues.

00:38:21.260 So I think we probably should take up the homosexual question again, um, in the foreseeable 0.98

00:38:27.220 future.

00:38:27.600 All the best.

00:38:28.620 Bye for now.

00:38:29.380 Cheerio.

RadixJournal - January 06, 2018

Bowden! - 10 - The Homosexual Question

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