To comprehend America’s latest moral panic, it is necessary to recognize homophobia as not only a form of prejudice like any other but as a conspiracy theory. jkirchick writes
Across the country, Republican state legislators are proposing bills to prohibit discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms, purportedly to “protect” students from the perverted designs of predatory gay teachers. Prominent right-wing activists bandy about groomer as a term of opprobrium, accusing their political adversaries of trying to sexually exploit children while invoking hoary stereotypes of gay men being pedophiles.
During the 1952 election that would see them achieve control over both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time since the Great Depression, Republicans placed the problem of gays in the State Department — or, as McCarthy’s colleague Everett Dirksen colorfully called them, “the lavender lads” — at the front and center of their campaign. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, FBI director J.
The American penchant for associating sexual and gender nonconformity with political malice dates at least as far back as the election of 1800. Shortly after Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams for the presidency, a pamphleteer supporting the former accused the latter of possessing a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.
Much in the way QAnon has emboldened a new generation of far-right media outlets dedicated to exposing the depraved sexual peccadilloes of America’s corrupt ruling class, so did the Eulenburg affair mark a major moment in the ability of the mass media to instigate and shape populist passions.
The next gay man to solidify the apparent link between political and sexual corruption was Ernst Röhm. Founder of the Nazi paramilitary Sturmabteilung — or SA, also known as the “Brownshirts” — Röhm was unapologetic about his homosexuality. Though this made him the target of left-wing attacks, with one Social Democratic newspaper publishing his intimate correspondence with other men, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was willing to overlook his brutish lieutenant’s deviation from sexual norms.
The same week Kinsey’s report sparked a nationwide opening of closet doors, a young writer named Gore Vidal published his third novel, The City and the Pillar. Its title a reference to the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, the book was the first major work of American fiction to feature a gay protagonist sympathetically.
Like antisemitic conspiracy theories, which have blamed Jews for both communism and capitalism, for being both “rootless cosmopolitans” and national chauvinists, the concept of the Homintern offered its purveyors an ideologically adaptable frame for simplifying complex and disturbing events. In 1967, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison charged a gay businessman, Clay Shaw, as the ringleader of a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
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