The Gaying of America
It hasn’t always been easy being a homosexual in America.
It hasn’t always been easy being a homosexual in America. For one thing, there used to be laws against sodomy. For another, you couldn’t openly serve in the military. You also couldn’t get security clearance to serve in the government because it was felt that a foreign enemy could too easily blackmail you into becoming a spy or a double agent.
It wasn’t that long ago that the psychiatric community listed homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder, a form of lunacy.
There was also a time when if a boy or young man showed the slightest bit of femininity, he could expect to be taunted and bullied until suicide seemed to be the only escape. The play and movie “Tea and Sympathy” dealt with just such a situation.
For many years, Hollywood dealt with homosexual characters with a wink and a nod, casting the most obvious gays as arch butlers and villains, occasionally as non-threatening best friends. People like Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton, Grady Sutton, Billy De Wolf, Charles Nelson Reilly, Alan Sues, Nathan Lane, Michael Jeter and Franklin Pangborn, built entire careers out of playing sissies, as they used to be called.
Some only portrayed straight men: George Grizzard, James Daly, Tom Hulce, Albert Dekker, William Eythe, Dick Sargent, Robert Reed, Roscoe Lee Browne and George Takei.
Then there were those who might have left you wondering, but highly suspicious, such as John Dall, Joel Grey, Kevin Spacey, John Glover, Clifton Webb, Victor Buono and Sal Mineo.
There were even a bunch who played romantic leads, including Rock Hudson, Van Johnson, Tab Hunter, Richard Chamberlain, Tom Tryon, Keith Andes, Tyrone Power, Caesar Romero and Montgomery Clift.
There was even a TV show, “Frasier,” on which every male actor, along with the creator-producers of the show, were gay, except for Kelsey Grammer. They would be David Hyde Pierce, John Mahoney, Dan Butler and Edward Hibbert.
If you added in the Brits and the lesbian contingents, you could fill a phone book.
There is no question that a lot of homosexuals are talented, just as there’s no question that a lot of them have been mistreated in the past.
The question is why the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction. If a homosexual character appears in a movie or on a TV series these days, he is certain to be portrayed as nicer, wittier and kinder than anybody else on the scene.
Having spent decades working in Hollywood, I can assure you that gays are no better or worse than any of the other people I have dealt with. But if no worse, they certainly aren’t any better. I have known a few I regarded as friends, others who were catty, backstabbing bastards.
That all brings me to the fact that the Boy Scouts of America has just declared bankruptcy because they have had so many sexual abuse lawsuits filed against them. And if anything was ever inevitable, it’s these lawsuits. How could it be otherwise once the BSA decided to be all-inclusive and permit homosexuals to be scout masters?
When homosexuals insist that not every gay man is a pedophile or a pederast, they’re right. But when it comes to abusers of male children and teenagers, it is the exclusive domain of homosexuals, whether they’re wearing Scout uniforms or clerical collars.
It was the fact that as the president of the BSA, Rex Tillerson promoted the idea of opening the doors to gay scout leaders that made me question President Trump’s decision to name Tillerson his Secretary of State. And we all saw how well that turned out.
The other day, I received an email from Wesley Forgue: “I asked some of my liberal friends whether they agreed that having homosexuals serving as scout leaders was a good idea. They all said it was. I then asked them whether they would send their own sons on camping trips with a homosexual scout leader and they all said no.”
“Well,” I replied, “like most liberals, your friends are hypocrites. But at least they’re honest hypocrites.”
How I long for the good old days when the very wealthy all made headlines by getting drunk and carrying on with showgirls. These days, they all seem to want to use their money to reincarnate the Soviet Union in the United States.
Between them, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Charles Koch and Michael Bloomberg, control more than half a trillion dollars. Among their goals are to bankrupt this country in a pathetic attempt to control the weather; to gut the Second Amendment and confiscate the guns of law-abiding citizens; to throw open the border to an unlimited number of illegal aliens; to corrupt the legal system so that it protects criminals and not their potential victims; and to turn over control of the nation to bureaucrats at the UN and, of course, to themselves.
Speaking of Michael Bloomberg, his plans to buy the nomination might be stymied by the number of sound bites that have accumulated over the years. It should probably not come as a surprise that a man who has declared himself a Democrat, a Republican and an Independent on various occasions, depending on the political climate at the time, has made some of the most embarrassing comments of anyone not named Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.
For instance, Bloomberg is probably the only person, aside from China’s despotic Xi Jinping who has ever said “Xi Jinping is not a dictator. He has constituents.”
President Trump has constituents. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has constituents. Xi Jinping has slaves and prisoners.
Explaining why Bloomberg News never reports anything bad about China, the mini-mayor explained: “In China, they have rules. We follow those rules. If you don’t follow those rules, you’re out of that country.”
One might reasonably ask why a news organization would wish to have a presence in a country where it can only report propaganda.
But I suppose in his defense, Bloomberg could say “Well, CNN did it first.”
And so they did. As you might recall, during Desert Storm, CNN explained that they had never dared report the truth about Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime because it would have meant closing their Bagdad bureau.
They never got around to explaining the point of having a bureau whose sole purpose was to put lipstick on the pig known as Saddam Hussein.
Joe Biden apparently has decided that so long as he has so little chance of getting past both Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg, he might as well squander his few remaining shreds of dignity in a last ditch effort to win over Latinos by saying: “When it came to dealing with illegal aliens, I think it just took us (he and Obama) too long to get it right. We shouldn’t have been deporting them. Without illegal aliens, this nation would collapse. Illegal aliens are a gift.”
Based on my own experience in raising a son, I shouldn’t be offering advice to anyone else. But it occurs to me that in the past, when parents wanted to get the kids out of the way because they were making dinner or reading the newspaper, they would plunk them down in front of the TV and let them watch cartoons.
These days, the babysitter in most homes is some electronic device that is filling their little brains with God knows what drivel. It’s certainly not making the tykes nicer, smarter, kinder, funnier or more polite.
It does seem to be slicing and dicing their attention spans, making them angrier, more envious and either asocial or anti-social.
On the other hand, the worst things to be said about the cartoons was that the kids might come to believe they could be blown up by TNT and still recover in five seconds, be good as new and get back to chasing the Road Runner.
