It was a warm night on Susan’s front porch. She was an organizer for the National Organization for Women and probably a lesbian, though I never asked. My parents were inside hobnobbing with the other adults. I was with the kids, which is to say I was the youngest at 15, with the other people on that porch being cigarette smokers of various ages. I was not smoking a cigarette though. I was watching Byron smoke cigarettes and hold his own court.
Ronald Reagan was president. The party had gathered to create a membership chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. That storied civil society organization seemed more necessary than ever, even in a small southern town.
Byron owned the comic book store. He was an artist by education, and in later years, I would imagine him as Ignatius J. Reilly while I read John Kennedy O’Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. Byron never quite fit the world. He was too well-read, too enlightened, too sissy, too fat. He loved his family but could never have their approval as an openly gay man, so as far as I know, Byron died a virgin.
Byron was exactly the sort of person the ACLU existed to uplift in 1987. I was proud to be there, that night. I joined the ACLU when I became an adult and, in answer to the George H.W. Bush critique of Michael Dukakis as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU,” I made sure to carry that ACLU card in my wallet, even while serving in the Army.
Clinton was president then. Two young men in my basic training platoon told a drill sergeant they were gay during the first week and got excused from training immediately, discharged by the end of the second week. A close friend in my unit chafed in the closet during his entire enlistment, so good at the job that they kept promoting him and asking him to stay.
My membership lapsed a long time ago. I think I gave the ACLU a few bucks after Trump was elected, when there was that sense of emergency once again. The feeling is gone now. Whereas the ACLU had once been a vital part of the movement apparatus which had made marriage equality possible, seeming to win the very fight which had brought me to the ACLU in the first place, and made me such a defender for so long, now the organization is a homophobic hate group.
Now I would not spit on the ACLU if it was on fire. In fact, where are the metaphorical matches?
In 2021, a Mr. Brandon Boulware sat before the Missouri legislature and begged them to let boys cheat at sports if they claim to have invisible genderbeings, like Lia Thomas does. Media outlets slobbered over Boulware’s “moving” and “passionate” speech, which included this self-damning admission to his embarrassment that before he sterilized his son, people had asked “why my child did not look and act like a boy.”
Homophobia has changed its face. It is now “woke,” punishing girlish boys with chemical castration and surgical sterilization. The ACLU says that objections to this are “hate,” while normal human puberty is “conversion therapy.” Josef Mengele could not come up with a better false flag for gay sterilization.
As I watched a video of Boulware’s incredible testimony on the website of the American Civil Liberties Union, I paused it to take screenshots. Sexism and homophobia have been re-branded and re-packaged as an identity. The ACLU is peddling a patent medicine cult that targets LGB kids, and worse, they are using their credibility as a civil rights organization to make it acceptable.
Until the invention of the “trans child,” gender dysphoria had always been understood as temporary in most cases, with most boys simply being gay as adults.
According to former homosexual staff of the Tavistock clinic interviewed by Hanna Barnes, heterosexual colleagues did not seem to understand that lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth often display extreme gender nonconformity. Discussions of sexuality were actively discouraged. For too many families, puberty blockers and sex change were “conversion therapy for gay kids.” Staff witnessed daily homophobia from parents who preferred a “trans girl” to a gay boy or a “trans boy” to a lesbian girl. Children had internalized these attitudes. GIDS was “institutionally homophobic,” in the words of one witness.
So is the ACLU.
According to research that has been available since the 1980s, LGB children are “impacted by gender dysphoria at a much much higher rate” than other children, Barnes notes, with some 90 percent of trans-identified females being same-sex attracted or bisexual, and 80.8 percent of males. Of the 33 females involved in the original “Dutch study,” for example, all were lesbian or bisexual, and only one of the males was heterosexual.
American whistleblower Jamie Reed says it is absolutely certain that the clinicians at the transgender center where she worked have been “transing away the gay.” Homophobia is the elephant in the room. (Reed is a lesbian married to a “trans man.”) “I think part of the trans epidemic is that kids do not feel like it is okay to be gay,” she argues, noting that “a lot of the spaces and support I had as a kid has disappeared.”
As one example, Reed mentions the lesbian bar, virtually extinct, with countless “lesbian bars” now being places where men gather, call themselves “sapphics,” and pester real lesbians for sex. A similar story has begun to unfold in gay spaces. “Same-sex” attraction has been deprecated for “same-gender” attraction. This outcome was predictable, and predicted many years ago by critics of “gender identity” gibberish (“transphobes”).
No test exists to know which children will persist in a cross-sex identity and which ones will abandon it. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other “gender nonconforming” children are being sucked into a cult of sex change before they are even old enough to have sex. The clinicians themselves admit this horror show leaves children infertile, and often unable to ever experience orgasm.
They will die as virgins, like Byron. Their families will ensure this outcome, as happened to Byron. The difference is that now they will die as virgins because the ACLU said this genocidal cult was okay. They made it okay. Goddamn them. I will never forgive them for it.