A.J.P. Taylor, a Labour man and historian, predicted that in the post-war world the abolition of private boarding schools by Labour would wipe out English homosexuality—a vice created by the habits of the decadent upper classes, so he thought. Around the same time, the Marxist theoretician Theodor Adorno, visiting Oxford, was horrified by the presence of “hearty” and “camp” male pairings on the campus; he saw in the erotic connection between the twinks and the studs the genesis for a future fascism. In this he echoed the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, who, writing in the 1930s, claimed that the extermination of the homosexuals would mark the end of fascism.
Indeed, militaristic societies canalise sexual energy—restricting masturbation and relations with women—and then release that sexual energy as violence. Women, by extension the left, are seen as a filthy red tide of pollution and slackness; they must be resisted by the statue-like men of the right. The Grecian wrestler is a homoerotic figure, there is a certain tension between two males struggling to overcome each other; and the classical world itself, of which fascism was an emulation, was centred on a—so to speak—bromance, The Iliad.
Historical views on homosexuality varied; except that being the passive partner was usually shameful and unmanly. The most long-lived societies—the Jews and the Spartans—prohibited homosexuality. The Athenians locked up their women and venerated young men; they mocked the Spartans, prepared to train women in the arts of war, for being unmanly and under the female thumb. The Athenians were lenient regarding homosexuality, but they expected everyone to be married with children; even Socrates, appraising the lovely boys, was married—albeit to a harridan. But, generally, homosexuality was to be grown out of; and the actual sex acts included rubbing the penis between the legs so as to avoid sodomy.
The current conceptualisation of homosexuality in the West, represented by the LGBT movement and gay liberation, is a development of an idea created by Stalin. Stalin birthed national liberation: the Communists would support the nationalist aspirations of the peoples conquered by the West so as to weaken the imperial centre. Once separated from the West the nationalists would be extinguished by the Communists embedded in their ranks; the moment of nationalism was only a dialectical move—just as the Leninists used a certain perspective on nationalism to attack the capitalist centre, so leftists in America used a certain perspective on sexuality to attack legitimate authority at home.
What was different about this from historical homosexuality was its use to attack the family, since the family is, all iterations of the left agree, the root of inequality. The Athenians, fond of boys as they were, would find this incomprehensible; for them family—the continuation of the family line—was everything. To encourage people to engage in hedonistic sex that would end the line would seem deeply perverse, even to the long-suffering Socrates.
As is often the case, the cringe-inducing slogans of the elders are true: being gay is an ideology, as they used to say in the 1990s. I remember as a teenager in the early 2000s that the girls from single-sex schools—especially the homely girls—went through a lesbian period; for girls, this kind of play-act does not carry the same penalties as for boys. Lesbianism is, as they say, so much more light-hearted than sodomy. But these girls could could only identify as such thanks to the slogans provided via the media. So we find that the concepts of “queer”, “ally”, “gay”, and so on continue to proliferate because the movement is not about a genuine understanding of sexuality—such scientific research is forbidden in the West—it is about using a conceptualisation of victimhood, accessible to anyone, regardless of where they stick it, prepared to adopt the slogans to attack the centre. When this function is over, the left will adopt a new rhetorical mode; just as they abandoned the national liberation struggle before.