Extinction Level Event Act II
Gays And Lesbians, Mostly Lesbians, Face A New Kind Of Homophobia From Trans Rights Activists
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it started but when it was detected it would end up claiming the lives of millions and continues to claim lives unabated today.
In June of 1981 doctors were baffled and blindsided by a disease with a mysterious vector in which five previously healthy gay men in the Los Angeles area would be diagnosed with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, or PCP.
What makes PCP so rare is that it’s considered by medical science to be an opportunistic infection, usually contracted by patients who have otherwise compromised immune systems stemming from such diseases as lymphocytic leukemia, or suffering from protein malnutrition or as a side effect to receiving corticosteroid therapy - but none of these men had cancer, were starving or receiving any corticosteroid therapy.
A month later in the same year, 26 gay men in New York presented with a rare form of cancer that strikes all of 2 people out of a million called Kaposi’s sarcoma, or KS. While KS had been previously detected in June it was an ominous portend of things to come as this was quickly becoming what virologists describe as a “cluster” - a previously undetected and virtually unheard of disease that was now becoming prevalent in a geographic area, specifically in New York and California.
By years end 337 cases were reported with 130 confirmed deaths and it would be over a year since the initial cases were cataloged that medical science in September of 1982 would finally put a name to this disease: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, commonly known as AIDS and it wouldn’t be until 1984 that the virus Human Immunodeficiency (HIV) would be discovered as the root cause.
By 1983, 1000 cases of AIDS had been reported with a nearly equal amount of deaths. The response from the rest of the country had been tepid at best and at worst outright hostile as AIDS patients found themselves being vilified having experienced evictions, branded as junkies and societal rejects. Even the very doctors who treated them were themselves ostracized.
This would be a time of mass hysteria with nearly zero information and the message was clear: cancel the Pride Parades, steer clear of the gay community.
Gay acceptance at this time was virtually non-existent as overwhelmingly 87% of the American population objected to homosexuality on various grounds, usually moral and religious. It simply wasn’t okay to be gay in the 1980s especially as the AIDS epidemic raged on however, as the decade progressed, the tide had started to turn beginning in 1985 with the positive HIV/AIDS diagnosis of a man named Roy Harold Scherer, better known to the world as celebrated movie actor and leading man Rock Hudson.
While Hudson’s homosexuality was an open secret to just about everybody in film production the public remained largely unaware of it and when it was announced by his publicist in France that he did indeed have AIDS the announcement nearly brought the world to a halt.
The perception of Rock Hudson was at odds with the truth: he was the dashing leading man, chiseled good looks, women wanted him and men wanted to be him. I confess, though being 16 at the time, I was a fan of Rock Hudson having seen nearly all his films and even at one point tried to emulate his on-screen persona and I, like the rest of the world, was absolutely stunned to learn he was gay.
At first I was in denial: no way in hell was Rock Hudson gay but eventually I came to accept there were two people: Rock Hudson the actor who, in my opinion, was the epitome of manliness and Roy Scherer, the man whom I - and the public - never knew.
In the ensuing wake that was Hudson’s AIDS diagnosis it was the first time a human face, indeed a famous one, was put on the epidemic. Rock Hudson, though unhappy that he was dying from this disease as he wrote in a 1985 telegram to a Hollywood AIDS benefit which he was too ill to attend, had come to realize he had helped millions.
After his death on October 2, 1985, $1.8 million dollars was raised - over twice as much the previous year - for AIDS research. Congress was so moved five days after Hudson’s death to put aside $220 million to find a cure and while this was all well and good what Hudson’s diagnosis didn’t do was dispel the stigma that comes with AIDS.
President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy remained publicly silent about Hudson’s condition even though they were friends of his though President Reagan privately phoned Hudson while he was being treated in Paris and did release a statement of condolences after his death.
There was also a controversy surrounding a long and repeated on-screen kiss on the television show Dynasty between Hudson and his co-star Linda Evans. While Hudson was aware of his diagnosis, he never told Evans about it. Some felt that it was his duty, his obligation, to have informed her of this. The CDC at the time believed that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, could be present in small quantities in saliva (it later turned out it can’t be transmitted that way at all). Ed Asner, then President of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), made comments that caused a panic in Hollywood by saying he was aware that kissing scenes were being written out of movie and television scripts. Later that year SAG issued guidance that all actors be informed if any among them working on television shows or movies are infected and that others not infected could refuse to do any kissing scenes without penalty.
While this may seem at odds with HIPAA rules these rules didn’t exist in 1985 and that a person with AIDS could be identified within an organization as having the disease, their status shared with those around them and, as such, opened a person with AIDS to all manner of ostracization and persecution, but this wouldn’t last long - the tide was about to change.
Throughout the latter half of the eighties, all through the nineties and for nearly twenty years of the 21st century gays and lesbians have made incredible strides in the arena of the rights of homosexuals once seemed impossible.
To wit: same-sex marriage is now legal now legal in all 50 states as of 2015. Gays and lesbians can now openly serve in the military whereas before being gay or lesbian was grounds for discharge from the service.
Over thirty years ago 57% of Americans believed that consensual sex between gays and lesbians should be illegal whereas today 70% of Americans now believe that homosexuality can and should be accepted.
Sodomy laws, laws that pretty much made homosexuality a crime in the United States, have been repealed.
An openly gay man once campaigned to be President of the United States and is now serving as the Secretary of Transportation whereas over twenty years ago this would have been unthinkable.
Every day seems to bring welcome examples on American’s attitudes toward sexual orientation. For example, what used to be a torturous process of coming out as homosexual is now seen as a formality. Identifying as gay or bisexual is - in certain circles - a mark of sophistication. A recent poll of Gen Z’s ages 13-21 concluded that less than 50% of them identified as exclusively heterosexual.
The sea change that has occurred with respect to America’s newly enlightened attitude towards gays and lesbians is astonishing when you consider a man my age (I’m 52) is old enough to remember when George W. Bush once campaigned on an amendment to the Constitution banning same-sex marriage in 2004.
One would think that the future looks bright for gays and lesbians in the United States after having reigned victorious over the struggle for their rights they have agitated for since the Stonewall riots of 1969 but as of this writing it seems we now find ourselves in full reverse - gays and lesbians are experiencing a new kind of homophobia, this time coming from Trans Rights Activists.
Gays and lesbians find themselves under increasing attack by Trans Rights Activists who state that if you are gay or lesbian and you have an attraction to someone of the same sex who shares your type of genitalia then you are “transphobic”.
Words have meaning. The purpose of words is to accurately convey and describe a material reality we call “facts”. Laws and social order rely on these facts to ensure both protection and enforcement and to distort facts is to render the whole of law and society meaningless.
In other words, if you can’t precisely define it you can’t protect it.
Trans Rights Activists take issue with the words “man” and “woman”, especially the latter and won’t (presumably can’t) offer any alternatives and the only "fact” they recognize is their own feelings and are what they say they are. The problem with these “feelings” is that if the words “male” and “female” have no meaning when it comes to defining what humans are and if humans can’t be defined in this manner then sexual orientation loses all meaning.
When anyone can just define themselves by a feeling the law that protects groups of people is rendered moot because - as Trans Rights Activists engage in this illogical discourse - we’re free to identify our way out of our oppression.
For example, Trans Rights Activists would argue that the repression of women in Afghanistan by the Taliban is resolved if the women of Afghanistan identify as men. They would also argue that the women in Central Mexico who are suffering at the hands of human traffickers could end their being trafficked simply by identifying as men.
None of this is true, of course, because if there’s one thing men are good at it’s identifying what a woman is especially when it comes time for sex, procreation and who it is they’re going to oppress when it comes to human rights.
Shannon Keating in her Buzzfeed article “Can Lesbian Identity Survive The Gender Revolution?” with the by-line “Maybe the future can be female. That depends on how we define it.” is off to a roaring, illogical start on this when she suggests the word “lesbian” should be eliminated altogether in order to spare some transgendered any hurt feelings.
“Against the increasingly colorful backdrop of gender diversity, a binary label like ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ starts to feel somewhat stale and stodgy. When there are so many genders out there, is it closed-minded — or worse, harmful and exclusionary — if you identify with a label that implies you’re only attracted to one?”
Shannon says that sexual preferences are harmful and exclusionary. What Shannon willfully obfuscates in this article (because I refuse to believe she’s this obtuse by accident and if she is it’s a lack of self-awareness I’ve never seen before) is that sexuality is, by its very nature and definition, exclusionary.
While Trans Rights Activists are shaming both gays and lesbians for their genital preferences, lesbians are getting the worst of it. Lesbians are being told by these activists that they are “vagina fetishists” and “bigots” and that they should suck “ladydick” (which is, to say, they’re being told to have sex with men).
Riley J. Dennis, a YouTuber and self-proclaimed “trans lesbian” (otherwise known as a heterosexual male) tells lesbians their “genital preferences are discriminatory” since they’ll only sleep with other women and that “some women have penises”.
Uh, no Riley…they don’t. The fact you even say this with a straight face is not only ridiculous but dangerous - dangerous to young and impressionable boys and girls who you’re coercing into having sex out of fear of being “transphobic” and also telling them their sexual orientation is a discriminatory preference.
This is straight up old-school conversion therapy: the belief that you can cure someone of being gay or lesbian, a pseudoscience that most of the country rightly rejects as torture and is outlawed in 18 states plus the District of Columbia.
In the 1980s there were 200 lesbian bars in the United States. Today there are fewer than 20. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that lesbian bars are niche as they cater to a small slice of the overall demographic while some of it can be attributed to far more sinister and ominous reasons.
It’s not just lesbian bars that are disappearing, it’s the lesbians themselves.
When the last lesbian bar in Portland, Oregon closed in 2010 there were attempts to host lesbian specific theme nights at other venues but quickly realized that anything L-word related would draw the ire of Trans Rights Activists. One event in particular called the Temporary Lesbian Bar had to apologize to the Trans Rights Activists for their use of a labrys, a double-headed ax that symbolizes female strength and has long been a part of lesbian iconography in their logo after activists accused them of “trans extermination” (if this is even a word) and while Portland is a parody of Political Correctness, it’s the rule and not the exception.
In the early 2000s the word “lesbian” was already being supplanted by the word “queer” and continues apace to this day and it wasn’t too long ago that lesbians would be stigmatized by the Christian right; today, it’s from people who call themselves queer.
If a lesbian today goes online in her city she will find there’s not a whole lot of activities and support groups for lesbians but there’s plenty for transgender and queer folks and if a lesbian support group or activity is started it will be protested until it is shut down and its creators deplatformed.
How does a lesbian cope in this hostile environment? Well, one self-defense mechanism some lesbians employ to cope with the onslaught brought by either or both Queer and Trans Rights Activists is the old adage that You Can’t Fight City Hall and If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em - so they declare themselves either transmen or non-binary, a phenomenon that has seen a 4,400% increase amongst young women in less than a decade.
Some even go as far as to start testosterone therapy and have double mastectomies for no valid medical reason whatsoever.
Or, as we all like it to call it - mutilation.