Mick Hartley

Gareth Roberts in the Telegraph – Why does the Left think it owns gay people?

Recent polling shows something quietly seismic is afoot. According to More in Common, Reform UK now enjoys the support of 25 per cent of gay and bisexual men, putting Nigel Farage’s party out in front before both the Greens and Labour in the community. In France, Marine le Pen’s National Rally has seen similar figures.

For a group long assumed to be a locked-in progressive voting bloc, this is a noticeable shift, and one that’s leaving certain corners of the LGBTQ+ commentariat spluttering.

Drag queens have refused to take part in a Pride event run by a newly elected (gay) Reform councillor. A writer in the obscure magazine Gay45 recently wailed about gays “voting against themselves” – which you’d imagine might be better targeted at the small but arcane group known as “Queers For Palestine” (a slogan so irrational it borders on performance art)….

This is the vital distinction between what we might call the LGBTQ+ political complex, and gay men as individuals. There is the rainbow tip – all drag acts, glitter, wigs, and officially sanctioned bunting – versus the enormous iceberg of ordinariness beneath.

Most gay men live lives that look remarkably similar to everyone else’s: mortgages, Monday mornings, arguments about whose turn is it to do the bins. This gap between the screeching activist class and ordinary reality is maintained with impressive discipline by the LGBTQ+ establishment, in much the same way that the Stasi once worked to convince everybody in East Germany that their neighbours were all cock-a-hoop for communism.

The elephant in the room – the one that the LGBTQ+ establishment has to pretend isn’t trumpeting loudly in the corner – is increasing sectarianism, and the rising influence of political Islam in British (and European) politics. This is a growing shadow over sexual freedom of all varieties. Gay men, being neither stupid nor blind, have noticed this….

This doesn’t mean gay men are becoming social conservatives en masse. It means that many are rejecting the idea that their sexuality should compel them to support open borders, unchecked mass immigration from culturally incompatible societies, economic incompetence, or the erosion of women’s single-sex protections. They’re looking at crime statistics, grooming gang scandals, polling on attitudes towards gay people in certain communities, and drawing the obvious conclusions that material reality demands.

The Left’s long monopoly on gay votes was always something of a historical accident, a product of a particular era when the Right was socially illiberal and they offered liberation as the alternative. Those days are long, long gone.

Many gay men, like their neighbours, want to live in a prosperous and stable country which doesn’t treat their safety as collateral damage in someone else’s ideological experiment. Turns out we are, in fact, just like everybody else. Shocking, I know.

There’s also that tendency in artistic and literary circles to cling to “queer” – a term now shunned by many if not most gay people. “Queer” still has that transgressive edge which is such an easy shorthand for subversive and taboo-breaking, which is no doubt why it still persists long after Gay Lib won all its battles, and most gays retreated happily into lives of suburban normality.