THE GAY QUESTION

Citizen of Geneva

The author is in a sense the relic of a bygone era, before mixed education (co-ed) was made universally mandatory. This fortunate happenstance arises from his birth into an ethnoreligious group in Europe that until very recently used to run its own sex-segregated boarding schools. (In the first of a number of disclaimers in this essay about belonging to a suspect group, I hasten to add that no, the author is not a crypto-Joo; this is another ethnoreligious sect, a Christian one with roots in the middle ages, but one which managed to achieve Ashki levels of insularity and inbreeding all the same: no mean achievement). What’s more, I also happened to attend college, before moving to America, in an institution that, although formally co-ed, was in practice over 90% male. Why do I preface this? It is because I came away from this now-extinct world with a very different understanding of male sexuality relative to what is now common among Westerners. All of you have come across the well-worn taunt about BAP being gay. It is the most common form of attaq, is it not? I would go further and state that the Gay Question is the most important roadblock in the way to the formation of the sort of new social groups we need, urgently, to deal with the Empire of Lies as we approach the edge of chaos—the crucial period of instability when the regime begins to lose its grip and a window of opportunity arises for men of good will to cleanse the world.

For this reason, I have decided to set aside certain scruples (you’ll see what I mean), and present to you the Final Solution to the GQ. You may think of me as a “voice from the past”; what follows used to be the common knowledge of mankind, but it has now been forgotten. It is the one and only way to end “LGBT” ideology, its death knell. All the arguments put forward to justify sodomy, gay marriage, and so on, crumble before my onslaught. The “poisoning of the well” of male friendship is ended. All these blessings I offer you. And yet, the paradox is that many of you will never accept what I have to say.

Of course, you may have heard already that “homosexual activity” was rife in old boys’ schools. Touching on this sensitive subject, BAP is fond of bringing up “The Confusions of Young Töerless”, a novel about the sadistic and anally-administered tortures visited on overly meek or girlish boys in such places. Now, I can testify that the brutality described in that book bears no resemblance to the goings-on in the school I attended. It is possible that the boys of Austria-Hungary circa 1900 were made of sterner stuff than those of (my country of birth) circa 2000. It is also conceivable that Musil’s school sourced its pupils from a different and slightly more feral social substrate. In my little schulpforta, students came from middle-class families, and academic admission standards ensured a slight but perceptible intellectual atmosphere. There was certainly bullying and the sporadic beating by senior students, but nothing nearly as wanton as in Musil’s narrative. The worst act of violence in the school’s history was probably my doing. In my first year (perhaps equivalent to an American 8th grade), a certain older boy of low birth but considerable physical bulk was threatening to become a regular tormentor. One fateful day, he was foolish enough to reopen hostilities while I was carrying an innocent-looking beanie full of silver coins. I was quite the little numismatist in those days, you see. With no hesitation but only a cold, contemptuous glint in my eyes as he was rearing to attack, I coshed him in the head with the full faith and credit of my country’s old royal government. It has well been said that precious metal coinage had a feel and heft to it that our fiat currency lacks. Its effects on the enemy’s skull were correspondingly pregnant: a trip to the emergency room for him, and the total (unfair) blame and fury of the school authorities for me. I was not expelled, in the end (being academically the best in my class, if not the entire school, helped my case), and he never bothered me again. If only Basini had put to better use the cash he’d stolen... Anyway, coasting closer to the subject at hand, it must be admitted that although sodomy was nowhere in evidence, very much indeed went on in the dormitories at night between chaps and their cock, and it was not unknown for this to turn into “a social rather than solitary activity”. Mere mechanical pleasures indulged in for as long as girls were unattainable, right? Indeed, that is true. What is more rarely acknowledged, however, is that in some cases, that was not all.

I’ll quote now from Christopher Hitchens’ autobiography (Why? Because his experience mirrors my own, and his memoir is a truthful and candid account, and by quoting him I am relieved of the jam of having to discuss personal matters without giving away too much personal info). So here it is:

“Mr. Chips’s feminist-socialist wife had phrased it in a no-nonsense way by saying that official disapproval of public-school homosexuality was the equivalent of condemning a boy for being there in the first place. She was chiefly right about the sheer physical aspect […], but actually it was my first exposure to love as well as to sex. The details aren’t very important, but until this moment I have doubted if I would ever be able to set them down. “He” was a sort of strawberry blond, very slightly bow-legged, with a wicked smile that seemed to promise both innocence and experience. He was in another “house”. He was my age. He was quite right-wing (which I swiftly decided to forgive) but also a “rebel” in the sense of being a cavalier elitist. His family had some connection with the louche Simon Raven […]. The marvelous boy was more urbane than I was, and much more knowing, if slightly less academic. His name was Guy, and I still sometimes twitch a little when I run into someone else who’s called that — even in America, where in a way it is every boy’s name.

Were poems exchanged? Were there white-hot and snatched kisses? Did we sometimes pine for the holidays to end, so that (unlike everybody else) we actually yearned to be back at school? Yes, yes, and yes. Did we sleep together? Well, dear reader, the “straight” answer is no, we didn’t. The heated yet chaste embrace was exactly what marked us off from the grim and turgid and randy manipulations in which the common herd partook.”

This excerpt, by the way, sets the tone for the rest of this essay. You are forewarned: No complaints to the editor!

Something I may or may not need to explain is the last sentence. Have you ever loved anyone? Let’s say, for the sake of convention, that boy meets girl. They come to know and enjoy each other. Her qualities—beauty, kindness, wisdom—strike him with admiration and amazement. When he approaches her, his heart brims over, and the cock too bestirs itself at the call of love. Lust, in other words, is only one possible route to physical intimacy. There is another one, affection, a hallmark of which is that sex may ensue but only rather as a side effect. The desire to possess a body, or to get off, is not at all the point. This is what the Christopher (whom Thomas777 in later years upbraided, perhaps too harshly, as “a fat effeminate limey”) was trying to convey above.

Now, it may surprise you to learn that young Hitchens and his Guy were not an anomaly. Later, in college, I could observe as a matter of fact that one quarter to one third of the overwhelmingly-male and homosocial student body was engaged in various intense dyadic friendships that at one point or another turned indeed “Platonic” in the original sense of the word. These young men were not “gay”. All of them, to my knowledge, went on to have girlfriends or wives, and some of them are now fathers. A certain form of attraction must exist to draw friends together. We are at pains (and rightly so) to distinguish it from the more familiar type one feels for a dishy female, but the truth is that this is a bona fide kind of attraction which can grow, in one’s youth, in circumstances nigh extinct in the modern world, to the full blaze that Hitchens memorialized. Otto Weininger came close to arguing in Sex and Character that this is the very foundation of all authentic male friendships—but he put it in a provocative and therefore easily misunderstood way:

“There is no friendship between men that has not an element of sexuality in it, however little accentuated it may be in the nature of the friendship, and however painful the idea of the sexual element would be. But it is enough to remember that there can be no friendship unless there has been some attraction to draw the men together.”

Many enthusiastic admirers of Weininger’s genius in diagnosing Woman as either Mother or Whore are not nearly as keen to concede this point. And I can imagine the revolt under way among my own readers! The problem here is a failure of your imagination, warped by the modern gay freakshow. In other words, you misunderstand sexuality between men to mean sodomy, or worse (you have perused the Salo forum’s thread on AIDS, haven’t you?). But Weininger’s context and mine should have made you realize that this is not our drift. Here lies a crucial point, one that goes to the very heart of the question of what is wrong with modern gays. What is wrong with them? Have you ever asked yourselves this question? “They are fags”, you say. Yes, but that is not enough. We are enlightened men here, far from any irrational prejudice. Perhaps you think the problem is that they are voluptuaries driven by pleasure-seeking to the most debauched acts? Steve Sailer thinks so. He calls them, “irresponsible hedonists”. If you agree, you too are completely and utterly off the mark. The gay is not pleasure-seeking. The problem with him is precisely the opposite: he seeks out what is not pleasurable, but harmful and degrading. Sodomy, dear readers, is not pleasant. This is the sort of insights, I know, for which you come back faithfully every month to read this magazine. And it’s not just unpleasant to you, it’s unpleasant to everybody. This is not a matter of taste. “Oh, I like cilantro, you like a silo up your anal sphincter. Toe-mah-toe, toe-may-toe.” No. Why is there such rampant drug abuse among “gays”?  Again, the answer is not unhinged hedonism. It is because they need to drug themselves up to be able to endure the physical pain of anal sex. You can ask them; some will admit this. Everything about the “gay” subculture follows from this original attraction, not to “the same sex” or to pleasure, but to what is harmful and degrading. The diseases of the flesh for which they have become notorious are merely the manifestation of this disease of the soul, and we will come back to it later when we examine how modern “gays” really came about, beyond all the smoke and mirrors about “same-sex attraction”. Here I am just pointing out the obvious, viz that love for a friend cannot be expressed through an act of physical and mental degradation. Am I being incoherent then, first endorsing Weininger’s outrageous claim that an element of sexuality is implicit in a man’s attraction to his friends, and then denying that affection can be so expressed? Not at all. It is a matter, as I said, of faulty assumptions. If I look back on my bright college days, I can report that there was only ever one thing that ensued, quite spontaneously, in those moments of intimacy when one was in no mood to refuse anything to one’s friend. The name of it, I only learned several years after the surcease of the practice, but since you are curious, and this is an important point, here it is. That, ladies, is what “an element of sexuality” means.

Believe it or not, for those of us who didn’t grow up steeped 24/7 in co-ed pussy, that sort of thing was nothing more (and nothing less) than a joyous way of expressing our affection for a kindred spirit, a congenial fellow whose constant kindness and admirable virtues (the Greeks would have said kalokagathia) had blown the divine madness into ordinary friendship. Were we weird (or are you fishing for another word)? I submit that perhaps you are the odd ones, because this dynamic has existed since the dawn of time, has never been the mark of a “minority”, is the perfectly normal and healthy complement (not alternative) to heterosexual relations, and indeed a slight variation on it is exactly what the Greeks used to do in their so-called “pederastic relationships”, so misunderstood today. Weininger, who probably had the same experience, knew or in any case sensed this: that at least the potentiality of this sexual element is inherent in the attraction that brings friends together. Here is the most hysterically received banality in the world: sincere friendship springs from mutual attraction, is a pleasure that grows into affection, and yes, affection is a possible route, in certain circumstances, in one’s youth, to a non-degrading form of sex.

How does this make you feel? Will this cost you years of psychotherapy? “You can sue me”, ’cause it’s true.

Same-Sex Attraction and the Greeks

We come now upon the perfect opportunity to talk about what you have always wanted to know, and never managed to get a sane answer to even when you had the courage to ask: “LGBTQ+ relationships in Ancient Greece”!

Did you know that sodomy was a capital offense in most of Ancient Greece? You were executed in front of a hissing crowd of your fellow citizens if you tried any of that stuff. It’s no matter—gay activists in desperate search of self-validation continue to project their delusions onto the innocent Greeks, and Christian derangeoids lead on the fags by sputtering and hollering about the pagan world being a den of vice… The truth is that most of today’s Catholic priests or megachurch pastors would have been executed in Athens or Sparta along with the gay activists, and for the same infamies. The so-called “pederastic relationship” was simply a strong friendship between two young men, typically about ten years apart in age, with the younger one (the eromenos) a strapping 18- to 20-year-old military trainee. The “sexual element” you now know what it was. The underlying dynamic was not a peculiarity of the Greeks. As I said, it has always existed, being rooted in human nature, and only in very recent times the conditions for it to flourish have been stamped out (quite deliberately) in the West. What was unique about the Greeks is that they socially celebrated and ritualized these friendships, because they recognized in them an exceptionally powerful conduit for two related things: the contemplation of Absolute Beauty, and a man’s quest to overcome himself. They were therefore the perfect springboard for ascent to higher life, a sort of incubator to make solid and true the shadow of what is best in a man.

In the Phaedrus,Plato lyrically portrayed how this process worked and works, in his time as in ours. Each man has, in his words, “his own particular divinity”—meaning, his own talents or predispositions that can be fanned like a flame into greatness—, and longs to find a friend with a congenial nature… For example, maybe you are a free spirit who like to make outré jokes to inject the merry chaos and the flow of soul into staid proceedings; maybe while everyone else, especially the leaden schoolmarmy females, purses the lips and scowls, “he” plays along and deadpans in return, and the two of you end up amusing each other while everyone else stares in outrage. Such would be a kindred spirit for a Dionysian. But it could be anything. Maybe you play football, and he is especially majestic and brave in the gridiron; such nowadays for a follower of Ares…

What then? When a man finds this pal whose mind or will is one and the same with his own, “he devotes himself to personal imitation of his god”—meaning, to the struggle to become the best in whatever his calling is, the most magnificent specimen of his kind—, “and at the same time he attempts to spur and train his friend to the best of his power to walk in the ways of that god and to mold himself on him. […] His whole effort is concentrated on leading the object of his love into the closest possible conformity with himself and with the god he worships”, i.e., on driving his best friend likewise to become the best man he can be, or perhaps—better put—to become what he is.

And there is more! Plato himself tried to harness this powerful force in the service of his moralizing project, but the point he makes is a beautiful one, and can be generalized. Imagine, if you will, a man’s soul as an aerial chariot driven by a winged charioteer and pulled by two horses. One is a noble steed, impetuous but naturally striving towards the heights (this is your desire to win contests--your thumos--with all its potential for the cultivation of excellence); the other horse is of bad stock, unruly, always given to dragging the team down to earth (this is the low urges to do what is ignoble). The charioteer, dear reader, is you qua driver of your soul, tasked with governing the noble and base urges within yourself. Why the wings? The wings symbolize life in ascent, the power to turn your existence into the life of a god, resplendent with “beauty, wisdom, goodness, and every other excellence”. The wings must be nourished with these selfsame qualities, else they waste and perish. And so, friendship with a noble man—a kalos kagathos man—fosters the growth of wings in the soul…

Is this too abstract for you? Hitchens eventually found an approximation of such an ideal in Martin Amis, and both reached respectable heights in personal imitation of their gods, who would have to be Apollo and the Muses. A more world-historical example would be the duo Montaigne - La Boétie, also worshippers of the god of light, as well as Jupiterian statesmen in their lifetime, who attained great wisdom about the affairs of the polis…

And if little things with great we may compare, the appreciation never leaves me that friendship with my best friend spurred me on to become a better man than I would otherwise have been, had he remained a superficial acquaintance and had I wasted all my college years simping non-stop after omnipresent girls.

As for the second aspect, the Greeks maintained that same-sex attraction is superior to opposite-sex attraction as a fast-lane to the contemplation of Absolute Beauty, with all that that entails in terms of capacity for great art and high civilization. Why? Because same-sex attraction is inherently farther removed from lust, from carnality, from the need to just get one’s nuts off. Recall in your mind the last time you met a beautiful young woman. Her beauty forms an aura around her. You are happy to gaze at her, be near her. Her very being radiates into everything that surrounds her: even the furniture and the walls seem to be indued with a special attribute. Now, you may think of this as admiration, but there is always a sensual pleasure mixed in. You can imagine having sex with her almost immediately on seeing her. However, crucially, the same is not true about a handsome man. His beauty affects you just as powerfully, albeit in a different way, as does the beauty of a woman. If you deny this, please consider the following: what happens when you start working out, and begin the transformation into a HandsomeThursday specimen? Who did you expect to attract before, and who do you find is actually attracted to you afterwards? The “strange phenomenon” is so well-known that there are internet memes about it.  

This magnetism, or same-sex attraction, (which emanates not only because of physical beauty, but also because of manly virtues such as courage) is likewise interpreted as admiration or something vaguer, but there is indeed a crucial difference with the female case: The Weiningerian “element” alluded to in the previous section, is something that can manifest itself (if at all) not immediately, not out of lust, but only as intimacy is established between two friends, long after they have got used to each other. And so the Greeks thought that same-sex attraction made it easier to contemplate what Beauty itself is, without pollution from low drives.[i]

In fact, love for a beautiful girl can play the exact same role, but only if the woman is inaccessible: This distances opposite-sex attraction enough from lust, you see, to purify it. This is the hidden message of Mishima’s beautiful short story, The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love, which should be read as a striking riff on the Phaedrus.

Before moving on, I want to rub it in (does this expression upset you???): the “sexual element” in the Greek relationships has rightly been called an exaggeration, not because it necessarily didn’t exist, but because it was in any case unimportant. When you lament the “sexualization” of ancient friendships, you share in the guilt. Sex is not a metaphysically unique test of your “identity”: it is an activity, like any other, noble or ignoble according to the specifics of the case (i.e. what exactly is being done, and why). While unimportant in the great scheme of things, do not think of it as an embarrassing idiosyncrasy either. The Greeks pointed out that friends who have shared in these moments of intimacy “will regard themselves as having exchanged mutual pledges so sacred that they can never break them and become enemies.” Maybe this was worth having, at a time when the loyalty of your friends meant the difference between life and death.

Gays Are Not Distinguished by Same-Sex Attraction

So, what do we make of “sexual orientation”, “gay men”, and the rest of this bag of 20th century vaporing? Simple: it is all made up. A disparate group of people is today called “gay”, with little in common with each other. The core, that which gives the “gay community” its character and ways, is made up of totally feminized men—men that behave like women. These are not “homosexuals”: they are the only real transexuals, i.e. the only real “women in men’s bodies”. These beings are not distinguished by same-sex attraction. When you recognize one, you don’t do so on the basis of sexual behavior or “attraction”. You do so on the basis of feminine everyday mannerisms. What they feel for men is not same-sex attraction; it is lust for the opposite sex, such as females experience. It is only when they get intimate with women (which happens all the time) that they indeed act on same-sex attraction and discover the affection route to sex.

I’m not playing word games here, you must understand. These “real trans people” have always existed, see for example the character Cleisthenes from Attic comedy. But what distinguished them at a time when most men had friendships that openly showcased the Weiningerian “element of sexuality”? What distinguished them was their true difference: their total lack of andreia, or virility, which exposed them to the just derision of their fellow citizens. It was only in the late Victorian era, and even more so in the 1950s, when society had softened up to the point that manly virtues had passed out of fashion, that the moraline-soaked windbags of the time fixated on sexual behavior. You could fag out as much as you liked: be a coward, bitch like a woman, fail utterly in every test of character that makes a man worthy of esteem—your fellow citizens could overlook all that, because they had themselves given up to a large extent on bravery and honor. In most European countries, certainly in Britain and France, the ethos of the military nobility of the past had faded. Soft, fat bankers and journalists held sway, having replaced the warriors. Christian Pharisaism was all those people had left, thus they latched onto sex as the only thing they really couldn’t get over. In reaction, the “real trans people”—excluded from friendship with men, and ignorant of its mysteries—eventually built a newfangled “identity” out of a tangential aspect of their nature, which they moreover misrepresented as “same-sex attraction”, to the discredit of the real thing. Our whole society now dreams as such suffering beings dreamt–Why everyone else went along with this nonsense, found it plausible, I will say later.

Today the “real trans” make up, in my opinion, only a minority of the “gay” population, which has ballooned enormously since the fad began in the 1960s. The bulk of them comes about quite differently and is a novel and more disturbing phenomenon. These are men that suffered, in adolescence, from some kind of (often physical) inferiority. You can read many of their lachrymose self-pitying recollections online. They always remark that at puberty they were underdeveloped and easily put upon. Rejected by their peers, they become friendless freaks. At this point their unsatisfied longing for friends—their same-sex attraction—becomes fetishized and gradually turns into a paraphilia. You can identify precise stages of this process in some of their testimonies: for instance, early adolescent fantasies of acceptance and camaraderie, often in the company of superheroes (our times’ version of hero-worship; and what are heroes but men supremely worthy of friendship?). The next and fateful step is their encounter with gay porn. Porn in general is treacherous, because it acts as a tremendously powerful mechanism for behavioral conditioning. There is a great flood of dopamine in the brain at orgasm, the greatest amount that can be released by physiological means (you can get more only by zapping certain brain areas with implanted electrodes). The repeated association of dopamine release with a neutral or even harmful stimulus re-wires the brain to experience the latter with desire (you may have heard of Pavlovian associations). This is why porn is such a great fountainhead of paraphilias. The boys whose experience of sex in adolescence resolves itself with gay porn learn to associate same-sex attraction with sodomy, and sodomy with sexual reward. This is, ironically, a process of turning same-sex attraction into something acted out in the same way as opposite-sex attraction. (That’s right: gays are too heterosexual—you have heard it here first.) But as equality can only be anti-nature, so the eroticizing of the anus, which is not a sexual organ but an organ of excretion, of filth, leads to everything for which the gay freakshow has become notorious: the diseases, the drugs, the compulsion towards what is degrading, the self-destruction. You ask them (as I have done) why they need to have anal sex, of all things, and when they even understand the question, they always reply that they learned it from watching porn. Now imagine if during adolescence you had been a completely alienated freak, with no friends and no relationships, but only BDSM lesbian porn as your sentimental education. Would you have turned out well? (This aberrant conditioning can happen by other means than gay porn, e.g. by molestation. Almost half of self-identified “gays” report being molested in early life, while only 7% of “straights” do.)

Of course, there is nothing inevitable about this descent, this is not an “inborn and immutable condition”. Mishima is a famous example of a boy who started out in early youth as this degenerative type but managed to find the upward path, the way to “beauty, wisdom, goodness, and every other excellence”. As the origin of the problem is often the body, an essentially physical inferiority, the beginning of its resolution also lies with the body:

“The balance and harmony of the body constantly draw one back to the point at which there is no longer any room to doubt “one’s identity with others”. […] If the body could achieve perfect, non-individual harmony, then it would be possible to shut individuality up for ever in close confinement.”

There are tortuous ways by which the truth of this statement can prove itself, and you must not stop at the surface. This is no medical argument I’m making. I only allude to the workings of the world. Things fall into place of their own accord, and the will of the gods manifests itself. It is at the end of this journey that this type of man will appreciate, more dramatically than anyone else I can think of, what we mean when we say that real freedom consists in conforming to the order of nature…

Now let us examine, by contrast, LGBT ideology. This view of human nature, at every step, makes these people’s predicament infinitely worse. It preaches alienation from “heterosexual society”, it lies to these boys that their social problems stem from same-sex attraction (when in fact they stem from everything else about them that makes them unworthy). It tells them that the only way they can fulfill their desires is by assimilation into a deviant subculture, which only encourages the worst tendencies in their nature. The lie of the ideology also creates its own reality, by investing trifles with existential significance and consequently with hysteria. You enjoy a friend too much? You are gay!—more, you have always been gay, since before birth! Then people complain male friendships have deteriorated. And it enables the most disgusting and aberrant behavior by shifting attention to made-up “inborn essences”. You were born to fist strangers in bathhouses, you see; love is love! We have established that you are familiar with the Salo forum thread on AIDS. Well, the source of that thread is a book on the early history of the disease, which I have read so you don’t have to. It is a very interesting book, a medical detective mystery. It tells of how HIV spread at first among European sailors having sex with female prostitutes in Africa, thenceforth reaching the Western Hemisphere as early perhaps as 1950. It circulated there feebly, locally, but could not ignite a pandemic until much later, in the 1970s. Why? Because HIV can only spread efficiently by sodomy, and there was no sodomy going on in the United States, except sporadic aberrations, until the invention of the gay lifestyle in the late 1960s. The author of that book (a San Francisco “gay” journalist) makes it a point to state that, even among the “real trans” of the 1950s, folks who went for anal sex were considered mentally-ill freaks and mocked as “brown queens”(sic) (I’m not making any of this up; feel free to check the book). All of which goes to show that the gay lifestyle, far from reflecting an inborn and immutable condition, is in fact a recent invention, manufactured in the late 1960s and ‘70s by pornographers and ideologues hellbent on opening a new front in their war against traditional culture. It is no different in this respect from “antiracism” and postwar feminism. The gospel of wretchedness cultivates what is worst in man, and then adds some. It can’t be any different. A leftist movement that uplifted its members would die out, as the left is at heart an engine to turn the festering hatred of whatever is or has become “sick, misshapen, suffering from itself” into political power for the faction who can manipulate, incite, and direct this hatred. We have seen this before. The white working class ceased to be a viable tool for the left as soon as workers got decent jobs and fulfilling lives. The call for the great slave rising needs slaves. Ergo only leftist movements that stunt life will be selected for and spread. This evolutionary process has yielded “gays”, among other pawns in the new “coalition of the fringes”, but it is not self-limiting: ever more malign ideologies will evolve under the cloak of social justice, and, if not forcibly suppressed, will reach their natural terminus in the universal third-world latrine, inhabited by botched and dysfunctional wretches, the lowest order of the spirit finally realized. This is how the cult of Equality reveals its true demonic face in the life-history of a people. The only apt analogy is Munchausen by proxy: a malevolent borderline-personality stepmother who tortures her ward under the guise of seeking to cure him.

“The Cult of Equality—let anyone dare to speak to me of its “humanitarian blessings”! Its deepest necessity ranges it against any effort to abolish suffering: It lives by suffering; It creates suffering to make itself immortal. […] This Fraud, this Pretext… The most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of—against health, beauty, well-being…”

This process, now that the left has achieved hegemony in all culture-producing organs, is accompanied by systematic falsification of history and re-writing of the past, to spin narratives of oppression, fan resentment against the old order, and cozen the victims of “Progress” to look on their torturer as savior. Wikipedia pages and history books are edited to remake the Sacred Band of Thebes into a legion of “gay lovers”, and anti-sodomy laws from the Christian centuries (but curiously not the Classical ones) are turned into holocausts of “gay people”…

Taking all of this together, you now understand why no culture has ever had words for “gay” or “straight”. If they referred to real inborn conditions, all languages would have counterparts as universal as the terms for “man” and “woman”. But they don’t. Even the English words had to be hijacked. Nobody had heard of any of this until the last century. You can also finally understand why nobody has ever been able to produce a “gay gene” (or the equally elusive “gay germ”). And why exclusive homosexuality has never been observed in any animal species in the wild, including humanity before ~1900—or actually not even now, since the vast majority of teens who identify as LGBT change their sexual orientation within 13 years, thus exposing “sexual orientation” itself (the concept, the “immutable essence”) as a steaming pile of baloney.

The Real Meaning of Aristophanes’ Speech: Two Types of Men

Enough with the modern “gays”. Now that we understand what same-sex attraction really is, we can reveal that there is in fact a population distribution for it. This again has nothing to do with the imaginary gay-straight dichotomy but is a very real distinction rooted in biology, which you can learn to recognize in your daily life if you train your eye for it, to your great benefit and delight.

Among men (normal men, men who lust for women) we find that there are two very different types:

1. About 40% have no capacity for same-sex attraction. For them, everything I talk about in this essay will be completely and forever incomprehensible. There is nothing that can be done about it. These men have no desire for friendships with other males, except maybe as a pastime to fend off ennui during spells of pussylessness. But the bond is always tenuous at best. The most self-perceptive among them will even come out with statements such as “friends do not really exist”. This is true for them. These men have only one totalizing, single-minded concern: pussy, pussy, pussy, and more pussy! They do not want pussy simply to fuck (like everybody else); they want it for “friendship” (companions) too, and sometimes they crave it so much that they anatomically get one for themselves: This is the demographic pool the autogynephilic troons come out of, in extreme cases. We call these the gynocentric males (gyno-men, for short). They tend to be selfish assholes, frankly—their associations with other men being mostly opportunistic in their pursuit for women. They also have a bad tendency to universalize their condition. Learning here that they are a minority will be a surprise to them.

2. The remaining 60% of men can experience same-sex attraction to a varying degree. If you ask them if they “like” men or women, they will answer perfectly truthfully that they like (=lust after) women and only women. They are for the most part unaware today of the Weiningerian “element”, but these are the men for whom the following statements are true: “Among your instincts, you will find the longing for strong friendships, that the modern evil tries to snuff out […].” “Friendship is a social relation of a kind that is beyond ethics; and if you ever think of it in terms of ethics, you misunderstand it. It is a great pleasure between two men, very different from the sexual pleasure between man and woman, but of the same species, in that it is pleasant.”  This is superbly put, but again true for only this subset of men, whom we will call full men. I think the designation is apt because these are the best of men, those who most closely fit our image of what a man should be. They tend to be generous and gregarious, possessed of manly virtue. Despite the high thumos that can make some of them hard to deal with, they are, in the end, more pleasant to be around than the others (if you are a man, that is; but in truth I suspect this holds even if you are a woman)—think of it as the difference between Achilles and Paris.

Now, the fascinating angle is that you can learn to recognize these two types in real life, and this is an invaluable skill, rarely possessed in the modern world. The difference was blatant in the single-sex environments of my youth, and shows up in the way the two types interact with other men in social contexts. For some time after moving to America I wondered if the full type existed only among those brought up in single-sex schools, because I could not see it as clearly on campus. Then I discovered that the behavioral differences re-emerge whenever men are among themselves, e.g. at frat parties and such, whenever women are absent, even if only from a room for some sustained period of time. You have to train yourself to observe. It is subtle, but once you learn to recognize what you’re looking for, it becomes unmistakable. It is as real an ontological divide as the species difference between Darwin’s finches. On the other hand, the presence of girls absolutely erases the differential dynamic, as everything degenerates into the usual uniform jockeying and clowning for female attention.

The difference between these two types—and this is yet another esoteric teaching you’ll find nowhere else—is the true meaning of Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium. You surely know about it: Aristophanes recounts a myth about primeval humans being made up of essentially two beings sharing one soul and having their bodies fused together in a sort of eternal embrace. Some of them were fully male, and some androgynous (the fusion of a man and a woman). So powerful were these beings that they launched an attack on Olympus, nearly succeeding in toppling the immortal gods. To prevent further rebellions Zeus fissioned them, each half into a separate individual. The forlorn atomized man however continues to share his soul with the other half who used to make up the primigenial whole. And so, here’s how the two types of men came about: a gyno-male is cleaved from an original androgynous being, and a full man from an originally fully male being.



Now, virtually all academics today (who are idiots) make this out to be the Greeks’ origin myth for “sexual orientation”, another example of the falsification of the past that we spoke of. To repeat, most men had friendships with an overt sexual element, sodomy got you executed, and the rare “true transexual” type that makes up the “gay core” today was then a literal laughingstock for use in comedies, later shunted off to castration cults such the Galli priests of Cybele. So Aristophanes could not have been talking about gays and straights. Indeed, he is adamant in his speech that the men derived from the fully male original being are more manly than those split from the male-female beings. Does that sound like the gays to you? Some modern readers try to solve the riddle by claiming that the whole speech is a joke (Aristophanes being a comedy writer). In fact, although there is a grotesque element in the myth (the original four-legged, four-armed fused beings, reminiscent of John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing)[ii] the pith of the story is dead-on serious, and the imagery more fitting than anything else I can think of: The gyno-men ARE spiritually halfway between male and female—in their incapacity for male friendship, which makes them politically useless; in their totalizing interest in mating; and above all in their untrustworthiness (as they readily betray their comrades to get access to women, very much like the treacherous tendencies of the hypergamous female). There are political consequences to these two types, who really are two spiritual orientations.

The gyno-men would be perfectly happy to get a trad wife redistributed to them by the state and to spend the rest of their life worshipping her as the living image of the Earth Goddess in some squash-growing homestead in Idaho. You can find some in the Right today, but only because they are driven off by the left (for being white and/or Christian). One hundred years ago, they would have been happy “Christian socialists” or even straight-up communists. The longhouse is no problem at all for them. So long as they get pussy, they’ll be fine with anything.

Contrast this with the full men. In the modern world, they are the most badly affected by the gay neurosis, in that they suffer, whether they realize it or not, from the difficulty to forge intimate friendships without arousing suspicions. They tend to gravitate toward team sports and in general wherever male camaraderie can still be enjoyed. It is an empirically observable fact that, when they succeed in living according to their nature, they become braver and more “classically manly” than others. Why? Because masculinity can only be honed in osmotic association with other men, your peers, and also because if you really love a friend, you don’t want to show yourself up in front of him. You are forced to be braver, to become the best you can be, lest he lose esteem for you. This is infinitely more serious and more consistent than the clownish swagger men put on to impress females. The breakdown of this dynamic in the face of the gay neurosis is the deep reason why most men today behave like fags.

What is the political expression of this type of man? It will look very much like what you find in Bronze Age Mindset. Bands of adventurers, bound by supreme loyalty to one another, deciding to quit beautiful trad-wifey to go and conquer Fiume or Sarawak, enjoying the busty war-brides they take as spoils along the way, for sure, but even more so each other’s heroic company and exploits. 

Would you forsake your beautiful GF to go off with the boys to conquer Fiume???

Mishima’s novel The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea can be seen, in essence, as the story of a man who attempts to “transition” from the full- to the gyno- type, and meets with the condign punishment for this sacrilege against the very spirit of life.

This reality, perceived by modern academics (who are idiots) through the lens of their own degenerate natures, explains why so much ink has been wasted on “homofascism”. This is why almost EVERY SINGLE figure within the current of the Futurist Right has been accused at one time or another of gayness: Nietzsche, George, Klages, Blüher, D’Annunzio, Evola, Hitler, Mishima, BAP, …

To my knowledge, only Mussolini and perhaps Ezra Pound have not yet faced the allegation. But I understand that Moldbug is writing a piece of speech-parsing software to demonstrate scientifically that Mussolini too was a fag. When the commando led by Skorzeny arrived to whisk him away from captivity in the Gran Sasso, he is reputed to have exclaimed (referring to Hitler), “I knew that my friend would not abandon me!” –which to Moldbug, in-between ballbusting sessions with his BDSM-mistress/wife, sounds pretty gay. Oh, well.

Final words: the distinction between gyno-men and full men makes perfect evolutionary sense: you can imagine two strategies to secure your progeny: one is to pursue the pussy non-stop individualistically, the other is to bond with other men in warbands to take over new territories and all the female spoils to be found therein. It would be fascinating to conduct an anthropological study to see if the proportion of the two types varies among different races. Is it possible that the full men are more prevalent among Europeans, descendants of the koryos-forming Aryans? Can high-level civilizational differences be explained by this, as the two types vary in attraction to Absolute Beauty, and in defiance to gynocracy?

Of course such a study is no longer possible, as the real distinction is effaced by the spread of the LGBT delusion…

How the Gay Delusion Conquered the West

The only thing left to explain is: Why have we forgotten what same-sex attraction really is, and why do we find the gay-straight dichotomy so convincing and natural? Because of this:



This is a plot of an integrated measure of how hard it is for young men to find all-male spaces. Most men are naturally homo-social, meaning they prefer to deal with other men. A society can encourage this by providing all-male spaces as the default condition while males grow up, or make this impossible—forcing boys into mixed-sex environments all the time—, or anything in between. So I have dug up data on the proportion of co-ed schools and colleges, membership in all-male fraternal societies (e.g. Freemasons), military and paramilitary organization, youth groups like the Boy Scouts, and weighted and integrated them to produce a unified index of forced heterosociality (FHS)(black curve in the plot). FHS=0 means all-male environments are the default in men’s youth. FHS=100 means that all-male spaces have been made impossible. The historical course looks like this: in the second half of the 19th century, there was a gradual increase in FHS, driven by fanatical protestants drunk on egalitarianism (“There is no Jew or Gentile, male or female, for you are all one in Christ”) who launched headlong into an unprecedented experiment with mixed-sex education. Protestant countries integrated lower grades (up to high school) while compulsory schooling was being rolled out. They also pushed co-ed at the university level, to the point that half of all colleges in the United States were co-ed by 1900. There remained however some physical segregation (in terms of dorms, etc.), so male-only spaces were not completely banned—and there was also a pushback from men. Men deprived of natural homosocial environments reacted by founding and joining fraternal and youth organizations in record numbers. Between 1914 and 1945, as education was being more and more feminized, there was also a great surge of military and paramilitary activity, which further contained the rise of FHS. It was only in the aftermath of WWII that all these social defenses were overrun: in the 1960s in particular, physical sex segregation in colleges was abolished, and almost all remaining institutions (notably Catholic ones) became co-ed; then the “bowling alone” effect of ethnic diversity led to the decline of fraternal societies. FHS maxed out finally with the recent ideological campaign to stuff females in every single remaining male space (military, police, Boy Scouts, college fraternities, even men’s college sports). I am certain that the people spearheading this, the usual pinko-commie sallow-faced fanged ghouls, have been doing so deliberately, not because of any great passion for “gender equality” (all-female spaces have never come under attack), but because at some level they understood: their goal was domestication, and they knew how to go about it whether or not they’d ever heard the word Maennerbund. Nowadays you can’t find male spaces even if you join special forces in the military. There will always be one or two “lesbian” crackheads or the odd chick-with-dick or even the occasional stray hormonal straight-up femoid.

Now, a striking thing happens if you plot the proportion of youth who identify as “LGBT” in a given school year (red curve, right axis) over the FHS graph: the %LGBT curve follows the exact same shape as the FHS curve, but with a lag of approximately one generation. What means? What means is that the effect is likely not direct: in other words, constant steeping in females while growing up does not directly cause boys to become “gay”. No, the effect is mediated by the green dashed line. What is that? That is the normalized Google N-gram of the terms “homosexuals” and “gays” (plural; capturing the semantic shift from thinking of homosexuality as behavior to thinking of it as people). In simple terms, forced heterosociality prevents boys from understanding same-sex attraction. You, dear readers, were deprived of the experiences I recounted at the beginning of this highly personal essay. You are unaware that such things can and do happen to you if you aren’t immersed 24/7 in swarms of females. This made the “gay-straight model” of sexual behavior plausible to you in a way that was not plausible to those that were brought up like me.

The great father of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson, who tried to restore a biological approach to social research in academia against the smothering clout of the Boasians, dealt with many subjects in his seminal work On Human Nature. One of these is homosexuality. Now, Wilson is a very old man; he grew up at a time when forced heterosociality was low. Did he deal with homosexuality as a personal condition? No, he thought of it as an aspect of affiliative behavior. For him, the truth was self-evident: Same-sex attraction is an entirely different domain from opposite-sex attraction, not alternative but orthogonal to it; it underpins a different biological function (affiliation vs reproduction); it is not about possessing another person’s body (although it may be about possessing another person’s mind, recognized as the same as one’s own); it is not expressed by penetrative sex. [iii]

But this way of thinking has become so alien that I wonder if you will really understand it, or will you confuse what I’ve been saying with allegations of universal bisexuality such as what “queer theorists” make? Men who lust after men indifferently as they do after women do not exist, obviously. The confusion only stems from our modern perversity of seeking to treat different things equally…

Forced heterosociality made the gay delusion possible. Now it is also self-sustained, like a runaway nuclear reaction, by dint of the sheer filth of the “gay community”. The mass-scale analist gays have tainted same-sex attraction to the extent that normal men are terrified of experiencing it. This is what has really “poisoned the well of male friendship”. Many men now eschew affection with their friends both because they are afraid of being seenas gay, and because they are scared they might like that intimacy too much. This is what I call the gay neurosis. The gay neurosis (alongside old-fashioned intrasexual competition) lies behind the hysterical reactions of some men to BAP’s posts of magnificent male physiques. No such rage was in evidence among the Greeks, who worked out and held athletic contests in the nude. No such hysteria was anywhere to be seen as recently as the 1930s, when the Nazis (and the Soviets) produced propaganda posters and colossal statues of powerful half-naked men. Much more seriously, the gay neurosis is fatal to male bonding at a more-than-superficial level, because this is precisely what same-sex attraction is for—this is its biological function. If you take the trouble of perusing private correspondence between friends up to the 19th century, you’ll find that it reads like love letters. What we describe today as “bromance” is on the tepid side in comparison. Gay activists have seized on this fact, not as a clue that their view of human nature is warped and has twisted the whole of modern society—no, they take this as proof that most men born before the year 1900 were secretly gay! Entire popular books and a diarrheal effluence of academic papers have come out to demonstrate the clandestine gayness of Hamilton, Lincoln, Washington…

Social and Political Effects of the Gay Neurosis

The gay neurosis leads to many a bizarre phenomenon. One is the strange fascination of many straight guys for the tomboy, AKA the proto-bulldyke. Now, whether you are same-sex-attracted to someone or opposite-sex-attracted has really nothing to do with the loved one’s anatomical sex. For instance, you can lust after an extremely epicene ladyboy, and that would be opposite-sex attraction. The femininity attracts you. It’s clear then that the fascination for the tomboy (young masculinized female) is very curious. My take is that today’s straight guys allow themselves to relax and experience same-sex attraction only if the object of it is a formal female. In a world free of gay neurosis these guys would adopt that attitude toward congenial dudes, their real kindred spirits (which a bulldyke can never be). In this small way, we begin to see that the gay-straight dichotomy, far from being natural, is a procrustean bed forcing men into all sorts of unnatural compromises, thwarting the development of their full potential. You think you’re fine with it? you’re happy with fucking women? Yeah, let’s see how happy you are.



Firstly, friendship is going extinct. The percentage of men who say they have at least 6 close friends has halved since 1990 (itself a late date, when most damage had already been done). Among single men, almost 1 in 5 say they have no close friends whatever. The quality of the surviving relationships is also but a pale shadow of what it used to be before 1950. Besides the ill-effect on one’s personal health, this has had a particularly destructive social effect: men’s complete and utter psychological subjection to women.

If your need for affection can no longer be safely fulfilled with men, you will seek satisfaction from the female of the species, who already has a separate inalienable monopoly on sexual fulfilment. Is it surprising that the vampiric female should have taken advantage of her newfound power, after you heaped monopoly upon monopoly on her?

This is no benevolent tyranny! Women are not only inherently untrustworthy beings (you will find this out on your own if you still harbor illusions about this); but by their very nature they act as the opposite force to the dyadic friends of Antiquity who helped each other become the best men they could be. Women drain the life out of men, and are thus biologically foreclosed from playing the role intended by nature for men’s friends.



Female cartoonist hectors her husband. He has no comrades among men, but considers her his best friend...

To state it plainly: women cannot love men in the way men want to be loved. Whereas men love men (their friends) as extensions of themselves, women love men as means to an end. These are the facts. Just as “gays” only find self-destruction in their doomed attempt to get from men what can only be got from women, so today’s “straights” only find self-destruction in their doomed attempt to get from women what can only be got from men.

50% of marriages now end in divorce, almost always initiated by the wife. Women enjoy court-enforced supremacy in all matters of property, alimony, and child custody. If she became pregnant by another man while you were married to her, you will be forced by the courts, no matter who filed for divorce, to pay her for the other man’s child. Then good luck starting from scratch finding friends—you will have retained none from your youth because all your early-life friendships were either with mentally-ill females, or mere afterthoughts to poon-hounding. You think this is a joke? You will be a broken man, miserable and alone. Society will mock you. In your abject loneliness, you will turn to alcohol or become a fentanyl addict, and you will die, after years or decades of this living-dead existence, with increasing frequency by your own hand. Moreover, even if your marriage survives, you will always have the vision of this empty abyss in your mind, as a reminder of your fetters.



Congratulations on not being gay. (Of course “gays” have no such problems in late life, as they mostly die off of exotic diseases; the equality of the grave being the only achievable one.)

If this were all there was to it, we might not care that much. What if men make themselves needlessly miserable? But something still much worse lurks which calls for our attention. This is about men’s political instincts. If you too had had the singular experience of living in a virtually all-male college in your late teens and early 20s, and of later working in a female-dominated campus, you would have noticed a glaring difference in men’s behavior. Granted, we boys were no giants. There were among us the small-souled bugman and even rare cases of the American-type fecal-lib. But something must be acknowledged: I have never again encountered an environment where obtains the same intensity of intellectual combat, of scheming, of philosophizing, of proto-political ferment. Perhaps these were all manifestations of the same longing for the sun of something higher than the ordinary, the domestic, everyday life. Nothing of the sort certainly exists in the American campus, where everything outside studying for one’s very expensive degree ultimately resolves itself, directly or indirectly, in the jostling and clowning to give females the attention they seek.

And so men never develop the ability to rally and organize with other men. The ability to form gangs, to hone one’s manly virtues (boldness, daring, virtù)... On the world-historical stage, this manifests itself as the end to grand politics. We have lived for decades now as if in suspended animation, with fake leaders and fake history. Nothing any longer happens, and what little happens does so by incompetence, accident, or inertia (cf. dissolution of USSR), because the only possible subject of history, leagues of men, are no longer being born.

This author is the lowbrow scion of a long line of poor artisans; he subscribes to uncouth theories of history, specifically the “great man” idea, the notion that history is driven forward not (always) by irresistible systemic processes that overwhelm any possibility of individual action, but (also) by the will of great men. What happened to great men?



The vertical lines here mark the birth dates of great men of the past (shift them all 15-20 years ahead to see when they came of age). There is no pretension of scientific proof, but it seems indisputable to me that no great man has been born in the West since the 1960s. No doubt potentially great men are out there, but they have so far failed to become what they are.

In Von Salomon’s The Outlaws, the 17-year old protagonist strikes up the decisive friendship that will lead to Organisation Consul, with all the history-making that will spring from it, by approaching in the streets another man (Kern) a few years his senior, who will become his bosom buddy and Freikorp comrade. He compliments him (“Hey, that was fine!”) for beating to a pulp a rioting communist mutant. I wonder: would a young man today allow himself to do the same? Would the anxiety of befriending an unrelated male (!!!) in an unsupervised and unapproved environment (!!!!!!) prevent him? Would the chap today seek to allay his burgeoning neuroses by reaching instead for his smartphone and swiping frantically on Tinder so that obese corn-syrup-guzzling girls could reject him for being under 6’4”? Would he then hop on to Twatter to complain about feminism having ruined the West? These are not frivolous questions. How many O.C.s have failed to be born because of this?

What Is to Be Done?

Our society is set up to smother virtù in the cradle. I have given you my account of why I believe that is, and that brings us finally to the question, What is to be done?

The melancholy answer is that there is no easy solution. I’m under no illusion: what I have articulated in this essay is a view of human nature so alien as to be probably incomprehensible and certainly incredible to many of my readers. Many others will understand, but the gay-straight dichotomy has become so ingrained that there might not be any shift in public perception even if everyone in the West were exposed to the truth. The real insidiousness of the “LGBT worldview” lies in the fact that the revolting behavior it has enabled provides a powerful incentive to accept its premise: you want gays to be a different type of human, a different species even. You want to distance yourself as much as possible from them. Failure to do so immediately invites suspicion. And why risk that? Why be so foolhardy as to argue, as I do, that “the gay” is a degenerated version of something present in most men? And yet, this risky argument is the only way to shatter the ideology behind “LGBT rights”, from the legalization of sodomy to “gay marriage”. If you accept the alternative I have presented here, you could restore tomorrow the ancient Greek (or modern Iranian) penalty for “LGBT activity” and shut down the whole freakshow forever (thus bringing real happiness to everyone involved—oh, yes, we too must love mankind).

But do you want to? If not, the only possible way forward would be to undo the social changes that have led us here, specifically rolling back forced heterosociality. That is of course beyond my power. So my hopes rest with the upcoming Muslim majority in Europe. If the Islamists win and impose sharia (which entails the double cure of sex-segregated schools and sodomy ban), there is no doubt in my mind that Europe will start again producing men, and those men will have no great difficulty in restoring freedom and glory to their race, no matter what desperate straits we shall find ourselves in. Is this how the Leviathan abolishes itself? Let us pray.

In the meanwhile, I want to conclude by giving private advice to the few intelligent young men who may be reading this. Most of you will naturally be morons, but even if only one or two “sensitive and intelligent youths” should straggle here and be helped by these notes of mine, it will have been well worth my time and effort. Sometimes I wish I had had a mentor ten or fifteen years ago at the time of my induction into green and callow adulthood. If someone had told me the truth about women back then, for instance, it would have saved me a lot of trouble. About the topic at hand, I will say therefore the following (this is a good way to recap before saying farewell).

Well then, there is no such thing as gay or straight people. There are only noble or ignoble acts. Understanding this is the only way to end the hysteria. If you are like most men, desiring to find a friend “after your own heart”, to love as a kindred spirit, is perfectly normal and healthy. Do not treat men, therefore, as surplus biological material in your hunt for women. Any one of them could be the lost half of your soul. Go and talk to him!

Allow yourself to experience and show affection for such a friend (with hugs and such), if you are lucky enough to find him.

“Same-sex attraction” is a non-issue: It is the way nature made friendship possible, and the best conduit perhaps to rising above everydayness, to the contemplation of Absolute Beauty, and finally to becoming what you are.

Always you must care about, not ineffable essences, but concrete actions and individuals. Is what you do noble or vile, beautiful or ugly? Is this fellow you are dealing with a worthy and admirable one, and is your association with him making the two of you better men, fostering what is noble in your nature?

“For fate, which has ordained that there shall be no friendship among bad men, has also ordained that there shall ever be friendship among the good.”

Courage, loyalty, aversion to craftiness, will to truth, ability to rise above pettiness (plus the specific qualities “in your particular style of divinity”). Is this what your friendship is bestowing on the two of you? Yes or no? This is all that matters. The challenge, if there is one, is to understand that these are not mere words, empty talk. This is what you should hold dear in life. The issue of sex, which so agitates contemporaries, is decided on the basis of these same criteria. The “element” we’ve been coyly referring to does sometimes manifest itself as a side effect of affection, in one’s youth at least. It has done so since the dawn of time. It is always the same spontaneous act—neither degrading nor unhealthy. It doesn’t transmute your “identity”. It won’t lead to generational trauma. If it happens to you, you’ll be alright. Most of the time, it doesn’t even happen.

Now you may say: “This is all moot, because intimate friendships are no longer possible; even if I rid myself of what you call the gay neurosis, there is always the problem of how others will perceive me. I don’t want my friends, nor especially women, to think I am gay”. This is a real problem. Only private workarounds are possible, given the state of the society we live in. Firstly, I believe that the will can create its own reality. If your intentions are indeed pure, and you act accordingly without self-doubt or awkwardness, it is perhaps not too naïve to expect that this will come across. Secondly, if you have already found someone who you think could be your best friend, and you want a relationship with him in the old style (viz, as men used to have as late as the 19th century), you could try to let him find this essay. I have alluded to these matters in real life, and the responses have always been the same: utter bafflement from about half the audience, and a tacit glimmer of comprehension from the rest. This reflects the division between the two types of men I explained before. I have never had negative reactions, and in one instance I have good reason to believe I was responsible for restoring the spirit of Antiquity where it was needed. That said, you must exercise your own phronesis to decide whether to share this with your friend. The responsibility is yours. It is important to make clear that you’re not after sex, of any type (and you really should not be: the whole point is that the hysteria around sex causes a lot of babies to be thrown out with very little bathwater). Finally, be discreet about all this. Be kind and affectionate in private with whoever you decide deserves it, and never air the matter in public, most especially not in front of women and gyno-men. Gays do not exist, but the accusation of gayness is a low-effort tool of social manipulation reached for by losers and lowlifes. And private life should rightly be kept private: there is your holy of holies.

Now, since this is the internet and you never know who may read this, I add a final warning. I have been focusing here on the lighter side of life, but this only comes about on an undercurrent of constant struggle. One should never forget that there are more base men than noble ones. The possibility always exists that some perverted freakazoid may seek to take advantage of you under the guise of friendship. What helps here is another timeless example from Antiquity. Valerius Maximus tells of a legionary in the Roman army who wound up on the receiving end of perverted attentions from a centurion (his superior officer), who happened to be the son of the legion’s legate (the highest military officer). What to do about this? The legionary simply bludgeoned the centurion to death. Discipline in the Roman army entailed crucifixion for such an offense, but as the circumstances became known not only was the legionary spared punishment: the legate personally shook his hands and commended him for killing his own unworthy son. Now, if you recall the anecdote from my adolescence opening this long essay, you know that I’m a big fan of bludgeoning jerks. I don’t advise anybody to bludgeon anybody else to death (unless your own life is in danger), but a good beating can teach valuable lessons.

There, there, this is really all there is to say about this thorny and angst-ridden subject. For those of you, if any, who are not “on the right side”, let this essay open up a new vista: there exists a whole alternative view of the world and of life to the gospel of wretchedness that gave us “LGBT”. It is not a gospel of oppression, as the left would have you believe, but a gospel of nobility, based on the struggle for the elevation of the type “man”, and on true justice, which preaches: “Never make the unequal equal”. This is the alternative path to the future.
 
I guess I should end by asking myself, Have I been understood? This too, you know, is a skirmish in the great war between Dionysus and the crucified one. As we grow up, we learn what sterling creatures our fellow humans are, so I’m sure nobody will ever twist what has here been said. Be it as it may, my final lesson to you in mentorship-mode is that there is no greater pleasure in life than going against the herd, single-handedly if needs be. In the worst case, you will always be left with the only person in the world that you really need: yourself.

Let us not concern ourselves with dark things then but end instead with light: a dedication.

Hitchens and Amis, Montaigne and La Boétie, Alexander and Hephaistion, Achilles and Patroclus (you now understand about them all!)— Friends “who will regard themselves as having exchanged mutual pledges so sacred that they can never be broken”… For my friend and me too, the promise of the Phaedrus has held true, for close to 13 years now, and across the world-spanning distances that our careers have put between us. A great seducer of women in the past, he has for a long time now been in a successful marriage with a non-Western lady. I was there with him to celebrate the arrival of his second son, rather movingly named after me. . As we are now in our 30s, our communion has long settled into the “purely spiritual” realm, it must be said, but not because of any fundamental change. On the contrary, I’m quite happy to confess that I still could not refuse him anything.

Our friendship—if I can borrow a phrase—has always been a perfectly cloudless sky, a love whose month is ever May. That so many men today should deprive themselves of the most meaningful relationship in life because of the hallucinations and real filth put out by a sick society is reason enough, even if everything else were fine, to wish to see this world destroyed. And I only hope to live long enough to have the opportunity to see this desire fulfilled in action.
 

Semper Nostra Manet Amicitia

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[i] Those of you who compare the Greek custom to the bacha bazi of the modern Afghans completely miss the point. The eromenos was not a stand-in for a girl. It’s true that in Athens (upper-class) females were inaccessible like in Islamic societies, but that was not the case in other poleis like Sparta where girls were freely available (as they were, incidentally, in the town where my college is set). There are simply different rules for different things.

[ii] This is already a long essay, so I can make it even longer by complaining about the depictions of Aristophanes’ beings. They are always shown as globular two-headed, four-armed, four-legged creatures, which is okay. What is wrong is that their bellies are drawn on the outside of the creatures. They are depicted as just two people sitting back-to-back. But the story makes clear that the backs should be on the outside, not the bellies. You have to imagine it as if you loved a kindred spirit so much that you embrace him/her forever, head pressing against head, genitals against genitals, until they both fuse and come out, as it were, “on the other side”. And imagine this as a single soul being reunited, not as two different people. Yet I’ve never seen this drawn correctly. Why?