Milo Yiannopoulos, the liberal-bashing, politically incorrect, crude, brash, homosexual provocateur, is in trouble. He lost everything from a keynote at CPAC to a position at Breitbart to a book contract with Simon & Schuster.
My focus in this piece is not so much Milo. Frankly, Milo isn’t a subject I know. I do, however, know about Harry Hay, given that Hay has long fell within my subject area of communism and cultural Marxism, and I’ve had to write about him, including in my WND Books book, “Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage.”
In short, Milo is being universally condemned – including by liberals who have at last found a “gay” man they can hate—for something Harry Hay advocated. And yet, Hay is upheld as an icon in the gay-rights movement.
Milo, it was discovered, had made previous recorded comments in which he talked about learning homosexual sex from an adult male when he was 14. In another instance, he appears to speak approvingly of a 13-year-old boy having intercourse with an older man. Milo disputes this vigorously on his Facebook page, where he writes: “I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim. I would like to restate my utter disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors. I am horrified by pedophilia, and I have devoted large portions of my career as a journalist to exposing child abusers.”
Liberals who usually do back flips to accommodate a “gay victim” this time have the knives out. Not a shred of sympathy.
My interest here is less Milo than the larger issue at hand. On that, Austin Ruse, an authority on the subject, writes this on Milo and the issue of pederasty:
In the current controversy, it is important to make a distinction that even Milo failed to make, a distinction that homosexuals and the media, including the conservative media, refuse to make, too. What Milo described was not pedophilia, which is sexual contact with pre-pubescent children. What he described was pederasty, which is an ancient and current practice among homosexuals where an older man will teach a young boy about the world and also sodomize him. Pedophila is always against the law. Pederasty is, too, but only when it involves a boy under the age of consent; 16 in the United States but, shockingly, 14 or 15 in most of the European Union.
The left wants you to know that what Milo describes was pedophilia because it lets them off the hook for what it is, pederasty. … In short, what Milo described and what he is being excoriated for is common in the homosexual world. …
Ruse proceeded to list data and a bunch of examples of pederasty. I’ll leave it to him to defend those. But I’d like to share an example that should be added to this discussion: Harry Hay.
Hay, who died in 2002, was a pioneering “gay communist,” dubbed by his biographer, Stuart Timmons, as the “founder of the modern gay movement,” and by Hay expert Will Roscoe as the “founder of gay liberation.” Roscoe underscores Hay’s mark in particular on the strange trinity of “Marxism, Native American revivalism and New Age spirituality,” all of which shaped Hay’s pivotal work to advance the gay and transgender movements.
As to the latter, one of Hay’s favorite groups was his Radical Faeries, which spearheaded a form of transgenderism called “two-spirit.” Don’t laugh it off. “Two-spirit” is now one of the 31 gender identity options approved by the New York City Council for New York City public employees. Yes, seriously.
Hay achieved a spectacular cultural coup via his brilliant tactical move of successfully portraying homosexuals as a legitimate “minority” class, a crucial step in getting the wider liberal left to protect them, accept them and advance them. “Without the idea of gays as a cultural minority,” writes Roscoe, “there would be no gay identity and no Lesbian/Gay movement today.” This “cultural minority thesis,” says Roscoe, has been Hay’s “most profound and lasting contribution.”
From an early age, Harry Hay was prodigious in the homosexual lifestyle. At a time when homosexuals were in the closet, Timmons says that Hay carried out “two or three affairs a day between 1932 and 1936.” This tallied up to nearly a thousand sexual encounters per year. The so-called “gay closet” didn’t seem to restrict Harry.
As for Hay’s devotion to communism, that occurred via his lover Will Geer, an actor who became a household face in the 1970s when he became “Grandpa Walton” on the TV show “The Waltons.” Hay said he was “madly in love with Bill,” who became an ideological-sexual mentor. Geer brought Hay from the homosexual orbit into the communist orbit, where Hay became a very vigorous member of Communist Party USA.
Much more could be said about Hay’s background, but let’s stay focused on the issue here: pederasty. Hay was an advocate.
Even the politically correct Wikipedia acknowledges this. In the entry there last summer, which remained for a long time but was recently changed, it stated (correctly): “Hay was a prominent American gay rights activist, communist, pro-pedophilia activist (NAMBLA), and … founder of the Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights group in the United States, as well as the Radical Faeries, a loosely-affiliated gay spiritual movement.” That opening paragraph has since been cleaned up. Still, the current Wikipedia entry notes several times Hay’s support of NAMBLA (until some open-minded liberal goes there and scrubs it).
For the record, NAMBLA is the infamous North American Man/Boy Love Association. It encourages adult men to find and “make love” to boys – to become wondrous “boy lovers.”
Hay’s biographers do not avoid this elephant in the living room. How could they? It’s unavoidable in any honest account of Hay’s life. His biographers claim that Hay was never a member of NAMBLA, but they don’t hesitate to concede that he was a vigorous defender of NAMBLA, as he made clear in word and actions. This was an extension of the fact that Harry himself had been a man-boy lover. His first homosexual experience came when he, as a young teen, was taken by an older man. Harry had been “jail-bait” to his man-lover.
Harry was very explicit about this first homosexual encounter, which one of his biographers detailed at length. It was a key moment that launched him into the lifestyle. And it was pederasty – a classic case. No question. And Harry hardly objected.
Quite the contrary, Hay raged at Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and other conservatives, not to mention various Democrats and liberals and anti-NAMBLA homosexuals, all of whom he believed were “selling NAMBLA down the river.” It pained an almost hysterical Harry to see his “LGBTQ” brothers and sisters denounce NAMBLA brethren as “child molesters.”
Thus, back to my earlier point: Liberals today are happily joining the mob in chasing down Milo Yiannopoulos with torches for his comments about pederasty. I certainly join them in their condemnation. But where’s their condemnation of favored ideological bedfellows like Harry Hay, an icon and pioneer to the “gay rights” movement?
Their selective memory and selective outrage is quite hypocritical.
