We're now well into June, and although I
recently managed to escape rural Deep East Texas, there is,
thanks to the Interwebs, no escaping the moronic pontifications
of the ignoranti as Pride Month gets underway.
The righteously hetero he-men and she-women are everywhere, and
boy, do they ever come out in force in June.
Anti-Pride backlash has become such a thing that the
sanctimonious guv'ners of some of the reich-wing states have gone
so far as to obstinately declare that June is Nuclear Family Month
(or, in some cases, "Fidelity Month," whatever that's
supposed to mean to a political party that is firmly under the
the bruised and mottled thumb of someone who wouldn't know
fidelity of any kind if it sat on his fat orange face).
The guv'ner of Indiana even put out a splashy announcement about
the Hoosier State's "Take Back the Rainbow" campaign,
by way of a poster/meme stating in no uncertain terms that
"one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or
foster children" has been "God's design for the family
structure and the foundation of society since the beginning of
the world." So there, pervs.
And then of course we have the usual rank-and-file (emphasis on
the word "rank") culture warriors on social media, who
just can't stop foaming about how atrocious it is to dedicate an
entire month to "celebrating sin." To give but one of
scads of examples, a post featuring a pic of a homophobic
misinfographic popped up on my Facebook feed the other day (it's
the one on the left in the graphic at the head of this post). The
Texas fellow who shared the pic wrote:
Above all, Pride is a deadly sin. Thankfully, the month of June has been freed from this mental illness nonsense.
He does not specify just how the month of June
has been "freed," but it's possible he is referencing
the aforementioned nuke-fampaigns. His, of course, is far from
the only anti-Pride post on social media. I've seen nearly
identical rants from numerous other folks, including that very same misinfographic,
which appears on the "Take Back Canada" page, and more
than likely you have too. But this one happened to catch my eye
because the person is a member of a Facebook group I'm in that
was set up for residents of my city within a city. The screed was
on his personal page, but his profile is easy to access from the
group page. And he's been known to inject political commentary
into his posts on the group page as well.
The misinfographic in question replays, in glorious all-caps,
almost the entire homophobic talking points hit parade:
No Pride In Gay Life
THE FACTS
GAYS:
1 % OF THE POPULATION
33 % OF THE CHILD MOLESTERS
67% OF ALL AIDS CASES
78% HAVE SEXUAL DISEASE
HAVE LIFESPANS 20 YEARS SHORTER THAN NORMAL
28% OF GAY MEN HAVE HAD 200 PARTNERS OR MORE
22% OF CHILDREN WHO HAD LESBIAN MOTHERS HAVE BEEN SEXUALLY MOLESTED BY A PARENT OR OTHER ADULT
RAPE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT BEFORE AGE OF 16 ARE STRONGLY CORRELATED WITH HOMOSEXUAL BEHAVIOR
GAYS BELIEVE THE BODY’S WASTE DISPOSAL UNIT IS A SEX ORGAN
THIS IS WHY HOMOSEXUALITY THROUGHOUT WESTERN HISTORY HAS BEEN CLASSIFIED AS A MENTAL DISORDER AND A CRIMINAL OFFENCE TO PROTECT CHILDREN FROM THIS DANGEROUS BEHAVIOUR
SUICIDE LEVELS AMONG GAYS ARE SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER THAN HETEROSEXUALS
HOMOSEXUALITY IS THREE TIMES MORE FATAL THAN SMOKING OR OBESITYTHAT’S A LOT TO BE PROUD OF
This particular guy's post got more than 25 likes and nearly 50 shares, last time I looked. Only one person dissented, far more subtly than I would have, writing: "That's a lot of misinformation." But most of the respondents seemed to agree, and one of the poster's FB "friends" wrote this response:
I have always felt these pride celebrations are just for attention, we don’t have straight pride Asian pride black pride celebrations and why? Because we prefer to blend into society and not ask for attention.
To which the poster responded, "Amen, my
beautiful friend."
Actually, His Beautiful Friend, there have been Black
Pride celebrations and commemorations for... well, gosh...
decades now. And here's a well-kept secret (at least it's been
well-kept from you): there's even -- gasp -- an entire Black
History Month.
Naturally, MAGAts don't like those either, and they have been
whining about this issue nonstop for years and years, invariably
asking -- and not always rhetorically -- why there isn't a White
Pride month. Moreover, the Turd Reich to which they have sold
their souls has been laboring viciously, ever since Agolf Shitler
regained power, to rewrite American history in such a way as to
wipe out any mention of either Black achievements or America's
history of systemic racism.
So maybe, Beautiful Friend, you should sit this one out. (I
should also mention that a few years ago B.F. chose a closeup of
her mostly exposed and very generous cleavage as a profile pic...
so maybe she's not such a blender-inner who doesn't ask
for attention. Nevertheless, out of courtesy to her I will not
provide a link.)
As for why there's no Straight Pride month, it's really stupid
that anyone is still bringing up this issue at all, but for those
few who might genuinely be wondering, please allow me to quote
myself, from a post on this Whirled a year ago:
...marginalized groups such as LGBTQ+ have been systematically written out of history, excluded, and made invisible. The vast majority of people in the U.S. identify as heterosexual, and their norms are widely reflected in mainstream media. The majority don't need a special day or month; every month is already by default "their" month anyway.
I know I've made this comparison here several
times previously, but the constant boo-hooing from members of the
default demographics reminds me of a comic strip I saw decades
ago. A kid said to his mom, "There's Mother's Day and
Father's Day. How come there isn't a Children's Day?" Mom of
course said, "Every day is Children's Day!"
And in Trumpistan as in the world at large, every month is
Straight Cisgender Month. And for that matter, every month is
White Pride Month. And so forth. So let's move beyond that and
take a closer look some of the "facts" that the
Facebook poster I cited above so proudly shared.
Consider the source, of course,
of course
If you look closely at the top of the photo on the post, you can
read the name of a website, www.irishlightpaper.com. As it happens, The Irish Light is a far-right
conspiracy theory "newspaper" published in Ireland,
launched in 2021 and edited by two ultra-right loons named Gemma O'Doherty and John Waters (Waters in
particular seems to be a dedicated homophobe). It's the sister
publication to the UK-based paper The Light, which was
founded by a flat-earther (yes, he really does believe that)
named Darren Scott Nesbitt, aka
Darren Smith, in September 2020.
Both rags, according to an AI-generated summary on Google,
'frequently promote extremist content and disinformation'—which
is an extraordinarily polite way of saying they are devoted to
the same batshit crazy codswallop currently permeating modern
life. It’s a collective brain rot infecting everything from the
halls of Congress to your social media feeds, right down to your
Trumpy Drunkle Bob. You know the one: he loves to hold forth at
the Thanksgiving table until he loses consciousness mid-sentence
and faceplants into the yams, rendering his forehead almost as
orange as his Dear Leader.
As is the case with most reich-wing sources, the misinfo and
disinfo spewed by The Irish Light and its sister tabloid
would be merely snicker-worthy if not for the fact that they're
also potentially dangerous. They are packed with Covid-19
disinformation, hate speech and antisemitism, climate change
denial, and anti-vax propaganda.
And, of course, with outrageous lies about the LGBTQ+ community.
The message in the tabloid sheet pictured on the Facebook post is
a laundry list of long-debunked myths and fabricated data,
largely stemming from the widely discredited 1980s and 1990s work
of a single anti-LGBTQ+ activist: a frothing-at-the-mouth
homophobe named Paul
Cameron. Cameron is a disgraced
American psychologist who founded the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Family Research Institute. His
entire body of work has been aimed at misrepresenting gay,
lesbian, and bisexual populations.
Major medical and scientific organizations have consistently
refuted the statements in the screed. I won't take the time to go
down the list, claim by claim -- you can easily find this info
yourself -- but a closer look at just a couple of them should
provide an idea of the level of credibility of the whole
wackadoodle list. Consider it a starter pack, just in case your
Drunkle Bob sobers up enough to actually listen to a refutation
of some of his most cherished beliefs.
1. Take the declaration that 33 percent of child molesters
are gay people, a "fact" that's supposed to be
particularly shocking since according to the same misinfographic,
gays are only 1 percent of the population.
Setting aside the fact that even if true, this would indicate
that a whopping 67 percent of child molesters are
hetero, the 33 percent stat is a fabricated figure with zero
basis in legitimate science. It originates from Paul Cameron, who
pulled the molestation figure out of his ass during his 1980s
campaign to ban gay people from becoming teachers or foster
parents. The number was the end result of some deeply flawed
"convenience sampling," and of Cameron's intentional
conflation of homosexual orientation and pedophilia. He
weaponized several small, non-random surveys, some of which had
sample sizes as low as 17 people, and then threw in his own
personal interpretations of old newspaper clippings. Very
scientific, indeed.
As indicated above, mainstream medical, psychological, and law
enforcement orgs have wholeheartedly and aggressively rejected
Cameron's work for decades. The American Psychological
Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have issued
statements clarifying that a person's sexual orientation is
completely unrelated to a predisposition to abuse children. And
decades of peer-reviewed criminological data consistently show
that the vast majority of child sexual abuse is committed by
heterosexual men targeting young girls within their own families
or close social circles. (But I guess as long as it takes place
in a nuclear family setting, or better yet in a "Christian" church, it's okay.)
Nevertheless the lies about the LGBTQ+ community and sexual abuse
persist. And if you look at that shot of the tabloid page, you'll
see that the homophobic graphic was placed under the heading,
"Child Grooming."
2. Then there's the claim that the lifespan of gays on
average is 20 years shorter than that of heterosexuals.
That has its origin in another flawed 1990s study by Cameron, who
invented the statistic by gathering a couple thousand obituaries
from old LGBTQ+ community newspapers printed during the height of
the 1980s and early 1990s AIDS crisis. Then he calculated the
average age of the people in those obituaries and declared that
to be the "average lifespan" of all gay
people. Demographers jeered at the study because it totally
ignored how a generational epidemic -- AIDS -- artificially
skewed death ages in the 1980s. Moreover it was based on a time
when young people were far more likely to be out and active in
urban gay communities than elderly people.
Times have changed, though. Drastically. Although LGBTQ life expectancy is a subject of ongoing research, legitimate modern census and actuarial data show that
the actual gap in life expectancy between gay individuals and
heterosexual individuals is roughly one year. (That's 19 less
than 20, for math-impaired MAGAts.) And the consensus among
public health researchers is that even this minor gap is almost
entirely driven by "minority stress," which includes
higher rates of mental health struggles, suicide, and lack of
healthcare access caused by societal homophobia and
discrimination. Nice work, MAGAts. You're helping to kill a bunch
of people who have done nothing to harm you or society. Jeezus
would be so proud. No, not really. But Hitler sure would.
Because his "research" relied on fabricated data,
misrepresentations of valid science, and serious methodological
bias, Paul Cameron was formally expelled from the American
Psychological Association in 1983 for violating their code of
ethics. He was subsequently condemned by the American
Sociological Association, the Canadian Psychological Association,
and the Nebraska Psychological Association.
The fact that Cameron's exact sorry statistics are still being
printed in The Irish Light in 2026, and shared by
presumably educated adults on their social media feeds, shows
that modern far-right anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda is deeply dependent
upon the recycling of thoroughly debunked, decades-old hate
literature.
Random musings on dicks of
various kinds
I was particularly amused by one statement on the Irish Light
rant:
GAYS BELIEVE THE BODY’S WASTE DISPOSAL UNIT IS A SEX ORGAN
This is apparently a reference to anal
intercourse. I get it. The 'phobes think it's disgusting to use
the poop chute as a playground. For me, though, this just raises
a question: isn't urine waste too? And don't people with penises,
regardless of their sexual orientation, pee and ejaculate out of
the very same organ, which technically is a sex organ? I mean,
sure, the ejaculate and the urine originate in separate tubes,
but they both come out of the urethra to get to their ultimate
destinations.
By the definition implied in the screed in The Irish Light,
anyone who uses the same organ to dispose of waste and to have
sex is a pervert. So if you have a penis, and you use it both to
pee and to have sex, even if that sex is with your
lawfully wedded person who has a vagina, shame on you. If you
want to get right with God, you gotta give up either peeing or
sexing.
And speaking of dicks, can we talk about Trump for a moment? Our
righteous Facebook poster reminded us that above all, pride is a
deadly sin. This is a guy who praises Trump on his personal
profile and has shared posts accusing anyone who criticizes Trump
of having a "sheep brain" or suffering from Trump
Derangement Syndrome. I'm thinking, though, that perhaps our
Trumpster needs to take a closer look at the fact that his Orange
Overlord is the fat festering embodiment not only of pride, but
also of the six other deadly sins:
greed (avarice), lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.
And while we're on the subject, let's not rule out the
possibility that Trump himself might possibly be a little bit on
the gay-ish side himself (not that there's anything wrong with
that!). There's no denying that he is constantly obsessing over muscly,
manly-looking men.
Here is a lovely montage of clips of Cantaloupe Caligula paying homage to male
beauty.
And who can forget that time on the 2024 campaign trail when Trump riffed about a dead golfer's schlong?
Just saying.
* * * * *
All righty then, enough of that. It's time to get out there and celebrate Pride Month, whether you are LGBTQ+ or merely a proud ally. Love is love; embrace and rejoice in it. Fly your rainbow colors proudly. Play your Randy Rainbow reels loudly. Make those MAGAts clutch their pearls and their crosses and their Trump bibles closer to their hollow breasts as it finally dawns on them there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop the love that, after centuries of suppression, finally dares not just to speak its name, but to shout it to the stars.
Related on this Whirled:
June 2025: Celebrate Pride Month: No Kings, but bring on the queens! Last year's offering, ahead of the first No Kings march, which took place on June 14, Caligula's birthday. Good news: there's gonna be another No Kings affiliated event this June 14: Rise Up, Sing Out!.
June 2015: Love wins, but hate is still throwing tantrums over there in the corner: A celebration of the June 26, 2015 decision by SCOTUS to legalize same-sex marriage across the country. Clearly it's a right that couldn't be taken for granted back then, and is in danger now from the GOP.