From Drag to Dimes Square: The Return of the Homofascist

A guest post by Stephen Adubato

Stephen Adubato and I have been cross-blogging on our respective Substacks/platforms. I was honored to write a piece for his spaces exploring the seemingly parallel yet contradictory trends of a new ex-gay movement (under the name of reintegrative therapy) and increased pansexual identification among GenZers. Now it’s Stephen’s turn. And he has not disappointed:

Most people take it for granted that gay men are political progressives. Given the roles of left-wing activist groups that championed the cause of gay rights, the Democratic politicians who pushed to legalize same sex marriages, and the traditional moral values held and legally backed by many right-wingers, gay men who publicly admit that they lean conservative tend to raise eyebrows.

While it is a known fact that there is a considerable faction of gay Republicans (take the Log Cabin Republicans and Gays for Trump), the existence of so-called “homofascists” is truly shocking to many. Yet surprisingly enough, the peculiar phenomenon—once celebrated by historic figures like the Nazi Ernst Röhm and the Japanese nationalist Yukio Mishima—has resurfaced once again, especially in alt-right internet chat rooms and seedy hangout spots in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

What exactly is homofascism, why has it enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in our current cultural moment, and what are Christians to make of it?

The origins of homofascism

Though the usage of the term “homofascism” only appeared within the last 15 years, the talk about gays drawn to fascist, nationalist, and far-right politics has been around since as early as the post-war era. There are numerous books and films that cover the connection between homosexuals and 20th century fascist regimes like those by Scott Lively, Kevin Abrams, Susan Sontag, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconto, and Jonathan Littell. Most search results on homofascism will yield stories about Ernst Röhm, a high-ranking Nazi who was not exactly quiet about his homosexual liaisons.

Several recent think pieces draw a direct correlation between Röhm and the popular alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos—who is known for flamboyantly bragging about being a “dangerous f*aggot” (sometimes while in drag) and fawning over Donald Trump (whom he insists on calling “Daddy”). And within the last five years, books like the Bronze Age Mindset—popular within the dissident right-wing “Dimes Square” scene in New York City—have taken up the homofascist torch, taking its cues from ancient Greek paganism, Nietzsche’s glorification of “strong-man” values, and Yukio Mishima’s love of beautiful, muscular men.

As much as the cause of gay rights aligns better with left-wing politics, I’d argue that these gay men’s attraction to fascistic aesthetics and politics is not exactly a “deviation” from their identity as gay men. Put simply, it is a feature, and not a bug, of their particular experience of their gayness. In the words of Yiannopoulos himself, gay men are “natural-born conservatives.” How does this all add up?

Needless to say, many gay men have an affinity for aesthetic beauty. I’m sure we know plenty of gays involved in the arts, fashion…who will tell you how they honestly think you look in that dress and—in the least—can talk your head off about pop culture. According to the art and literary critic Camille Paglia, this is in part due to gay men’s keen attention to the small details of human interaction and especially to culture. This sharp, nearly “shamanistic” sensibility is born from existing “on the outside” of the “normal world”; occupying the side lines of mainstream society enables gay men to observe social dynamics from a bird’s eye view.

Of course gay men’s marginalization is in part the result of social stigmatization, but Paglia suggests that there’s a deeper reason to this—something that keeps them on the margins regardless of efforts to increase toleration and normalization of gay folk. The real reason lies in Nature, the ontological ordering of the cosmos: Homosexual sex runs contrary to God’s design for creation. This is NOT to say that “gayness” constitutes a distinct ontological category. Rather, it is to say that those who [are inclined to] engage in homosexual sex (men especially, given the heightened conflict posed by penetrative sex) are caught in a “state of conflict” with Nature, with “the norm”—and thus tend to have a sharpened attention to the beauty, ugliness, and overall drama of culture and the human experience. The gay man’s drive to “create culture,” Paglia says, is more of a sign of his virile masculinity than of his effeminacy—his lack of sexual interaction with women fans the flame of his manly drive to build, to construct, to transgress against conventions and innovate.

This all adds up in a certain light. Consider the numerous homoerotically-inclined men throughout history who have created great works of art and literature, and who have channelled their sense of being marginalized and their impulse to create into noble spiritual pursuits. All that being said, where does the draw to fascism come into the picture? To understand this, we need to look at the historical and cultural shifts toward the turn of the century, which is perhaps best encapsulated in Friedrich Nietzsche’s challenges to liberal Enlightenment humanism.

“The Sickness of the Century”

Nietzsche claimed that the Enlightenment put too much trust in highly-developed, well-functioning systems, and looked down upon both tradition and “raw” human nature. The writer Stanley Bast posits those who are fed up with the modern “enlightened” values like rationalism, equality, and “respectable” bourgeois morals find that Nietzsche’s philosophy offers them an alternative.

We are living in an age, we are told, in which real beauty doesn’t exist, it’s merely in the eye of the beholder; everyone and everything is equal, which is to say, the same, neutral, meaningless; strength and power—particularly in its masculine forms—are “toxic,” and is better off left in the hands of impersonal “experts” and bureaucrats. Nietzsche directly responded to those who yearned for a raw, unfiltered beauty, inspiring them to seek it out and worship it in it “pure,” most perfect forms.

It is this devotion to “pure” and virile beauty, strength, and power that drew many—not in the least gay men—to authoritarian political ideologies that transgressed against liberal conventions. Nietzsche’s esteem for the pagan ethos in ancient Greece that created idols out of “ideal forms”—of strength and aesthetic perfection—spoke directly to gay men’s attraction to the bodily beauty and virility of the male form (as witnessed by the normalcy of same sex pederasty in ancient Greece).

Bast mentions the turn-of-the-century British and French decadent writers like Oscar Wilde¹ and J.K. Huysmans as precursors to the homofascist trend. They saw classical Greek paganism—namely in their fixation with aesthetic beauty and the practice of pederasty—as a solution to the mal du siecle, (“sickness of the century”), the feeling of being tired of modern society’s unimaginative, secularized, “respectable” norms. Their taste for decadence, amorality, and flouting of the rules—and their distaste for the lowly, common, and unfashionable—was fueled by an attraction to so-called “aristocratic principles,” which Julius Evola would later draw upon to undergird his vision for Italian fascism. From this light, these dandies’ decadence was less a sign of their effeminacy and more one of their fetishization of masculinity—which they also testified to in their persistent belittling of “feminine weakness.”

Bast also cites Yukio Mishima as the prototypical homofascist, drawing a direct correlation between his obsession with men with perfect musculature and worship of strongman authoritarian leaders. It’s this same impulse that led Röhm to push the Nazis to embrace homosexuality not only as acceptable, but—in the words of Daniel Penny—as a “necessary component of the Männerbund” (an all-male military culture). It would seem that the co-existence of this pro-gay sentiment with deeply homophobic animus (and policy—countless gays were killed in the concentration camps) poses us with a perplexing contradiction.

But Susan Sontag claims that this homophobic sentiment only fanned the flames of gay Nazis’ desire—in a masochistic sense: The “preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort…exalt two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.” Put bluntly, the more aggressive the persecution they faced from masculine men, the more gay Nazis were turned on. Anyone involved in the gay leather scene will recognize the resonance.

The more recent proponents of homofascism similarly find pagan Greek and Nietzschean values to be a response to what they consider the excesses of liberalism in today’s society: DEI, feminism, body positivity, bureaucratic bloat, and the mainstream LGBT movement. Though the Bronze Age Pervert is explicit about his neopaganism and his disavowal of Christianity, others like Yiannopoulos and the denizens of Dimes Square insist that they are Christians—“trad Catholics” (or labelled by some as “ironic Catholics”), to be specific—who reject Pope Francis’s embrace of “liberal” causes like immigration, economic equality, interreligious dialogue, and LGBT inclusiveness.

Recovering homoeroticism’s metaphysical charge

It goes without saying that anything that whiffs of fascism or pagan idolatry should not sit well with devout, “unironic” Christians. For one, authoritarian political leaders tend to conceive of themselves as demi-gods who are not subject to the moral law established by the one true God. Both paganism and fascism’s lack of regard for moral rules enabled them to feel comfortable using corrupt means to accomplish “noble” end results. And the amorality of homofascists is directly tied to their idolatry of masculinity and celebration of gay sex. And their eschewal of women and “feminine” values like mercy, patience, and fertility negates God’s complementary design for men and women. Their valorization of pleasure and strength for its own sake turns masculine virility into a value in itself, rather than a tool to be put to the service of self-gift, defense of the vulnerable, and the generation of new life.

Further, true beauty for Christians is not the aesthetic perfection of the flawless body—embodied by gods like Adonis or Apollo, but rather the beauty of charity, of self-sacrificial love—embodied by the less-than-perfect, wounded, and even ugly bodies of emaciated ascetics of the desert like Mary of Egypt, mangled martyrs like Sebastian and, ultimately, by Christ bleeding to death on the cross.

All that being said, Christians should be cautious not to throw the baby of the resurgence of homofascism out with the bathwater. We’d be wise to look for some insights—even if only miniscule—within the homofascist sensibility. Perhaps the greatest insight of the homofascists is their understanding that gayness is not a neutral “identity category” which is in no way different from other ones, and that gay sex is not just another form of love on par with heterosexual sex. Homosexuality is distinct: biologically, psychologically, and—most importantly—metaphysically. The homoerotic impulse possesses a particular cosmic charge that can lead one toward pagan decadence and idolizing aesthetic beauty, strength, and power, as much as it can lead one to worship God and living out Christian virtues.

The construal of homosexuality as a neutral identity category—the product of secular humanism—sucks the metaphysical charge out of the experience of gayness, rendering it empty and, well, boring. The loss of the sense of homosexuality’s symbolic significance inclines many to reduce gay folk to their victim status. And as much as many gay people are indeed victimized and treated as less than human, there is much, much more to gayness than this. As the homofascists correctly intuit, gay men have an inner strength and intelligence that makes them much more than mere victims.

It is my fear that too many Christians have appropriated this secular, disenchanted, Enlightenment framing of homosexuality. This is not limited to Christians who do not hold to the traditional Christian view of sexual morality. On the one hand are Christians who tend to overemphasize the identitarian framing of homosexuality at the cost of losing sight of the unique set of experiences and sensibilities that comes with having same sex attractions. I’d point to figures in the Catholic Church like Father James Martin and Pope Francis himself (both of whom I deeply respect) for promoting this type of framing. Their point of departure when talking about homosexuality is the “identity” of the gay person, rather than homosexual sex itself. This is part of the reason I argued that Pope Benedict XVI’s willingness to speak directly about the nature of gay sex enables him to appreciate the “genius” of gay culture better, thus making him more of a “gay-friendly” pope.

But even those who do not use the identitarian framing (and who speak little about inclusiveness and condemning homophobia) and who loudly condemn homosexual behavior often fallback on a disenchanted, “bourgeois” framing of homosexuality. Those whose way of speaking about homosexuality focuses in on the sinfulness of certain actions without any reference to their deeper metaphysical significance risk sounding more like Enlightenment ethicists like Kant whose method of moral deliberation is more caught up with what we ought to do than with what is. Theirs is a flat fixation with moral rules devoid of a sense of the deeper, more complex spiritual implications of our actions. Those whose attitude toward homosexuality is one of merely deciding whether it’s “ok” or not, ignores what Paglia calls the “complexities and mysteries of eroticism”—which both paganism and Christian theology have much to say about, falling back on the “clumsy, outmoded social-welfare ideology” that is characteristic of secular humanism. And ultimately, such a flat, moralistic position ignores the potential gifts that same sex attracted folk have to offer.

Toward a more enchanted future

Christians need to respond to homofascism not with hollow liberal platitudes, but with a serious engagement with the deeper spiritual and cultural symbolism of same sex desire, recognizing the moral dangers it poses, as well as the unique virtues it can dispose a person to, like self-sacrifice, renunciation of self for the Kingdom, and identifying with and entering into the suffering of the wounded Christ and the poor, marginalized, and forgotten in our society. The Catholic writer Eve Tushnet offers several ideas for how this might be lived out, often drawing on the numerous turn-of-the century figures who eventually turned fully toward God and sublimated their decadence and campy sensibilities into holy pursuits.

Perhaps it’s time to resurrect the the books by Wilde, Huysmans, and Evelyn Waugh, the stories of Marc-Andre Raffalovich, Father John Gray (the alleged inspiration behind The Picture of Dorian Gray), and Dustan Thompson, whose unironic turn toward God—without rejecting the complexity of their sexuality and the unique sensitivities it carries with it—can speak to those disillusioned with the excesses of our secular age.

1. In her 1990 book Sexual Personae, Paglia writes about the correlation between Wilde’s homosexuality, aristocratic tendencies, and misogyny:

Even today, as camp has faded, part of the male-homosexual world still follows a vanished aristocratic code: class consciousness, racial stratification, amoral veneration of youth, beauty, and glamour, love of scandal and gossip, and use of the stinging bon mot and theatrical persona of the androgyne of manners. Thus Wilde’s English epicene has secretly transmitted British hierarchism to other lands and other times...

Language in Wilde aspires to an Apollonian hierarchism. His epigrams turn language from the Dionysian “Many” into the Apollonian “One,” for as aphorism and conversation-stopper the epigram thwarts real dialogue. Cutting itself off from a past and future in its immediate social context, it glories in self-created aristocratic solitude. The epigram is the language of the Apollonian lawgiver, arbitrarily imposing form, proportion, and measure on life’s fluidity. A character in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband declares, “Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.” The iron rod of classification is thrust before us—even if it does not fall where expected! In form and content, the Wildean epigram is a triumph of rhetorical self-containment.

Wilde was torn between his instinctive hierarchism as an Apollonian idealist and the liberalism toward which he was impelled by the miseries of being homosexual in a Christian society ...Wilde demonstrates the congruities between high society and the male-homosexual world... The male homosexual, by his Wildean self-conceptualization, carries on the work of western imagination...This is the pagan voice of the Hellenophile Wilde. Complete self-realization: was this not sought by Nero? Attila the Hun? Hitler? Late Romanticism’s extremism remains uncomfortably avant-garde. Wilde was incapable of sympathy or collective emotion because of his Apollonian opposition to the Dionysian, the mode of the “Many” and of what I call the empathic.