Conservatism: The Gayest Science

There's a midnight Mass at St. Malachy's that all the show people go to . . .

Reihan Salam managed to get through an entire post about the conservative wing of the gay rights movement without using the term homocon, but I don't have his powers of restraint. Blame James Poulos; when they write "The Ballad of Twenty-First Century Conservatism," they're gonna need something that rhymes with "pomocon."

Reihan's point, which Freddie disputes, is that the overlap between gay liberation and libertarianism should be self-evident:

Faced with ferociously hostile police and the constant threat of public disgrace, it makes perfect sense that lesbians and gay men in the 1950s and 1960s would have been instinctive libertarians, leery of further empowering an already overweening, overly intrusive state.

I can't fault Reihan for coming to such an intuitive conclusion, but it ignores a fact of history: for the last century or so, the gay Right has belonged not to libertarians but to old-fashioned conservatives.

You can blame the snobs if you want. There's no denying that any gay man in the market for a public persona both socially acceptable and acceptably queer will find the Fey Aristocrat archetype close at hand, which may explain why Noel Coward said things like this:

I am becoming almight sick of the Welfare State, sick of general "commonness," sick of ugly voices, sick of bad manners and teenagers and debased values.

But it can hardly explain his patriotism:

The reason that I didn't come back to America was that in this moment of crisis [World War Two] I wanted to be here experiencing what all the people I know and all the millions of people I don't know are experiencing. This is because I happen to be English and Scots and I happen to believe and know that, if I ran away and refused to have anything to do with the War and lived comfortably in Hollywood, as so many of my actor friends have done, I should be ashamed to the end of my days.

Things look a bit thinner on the Sapphic side—the men, at least, have the original Brideshead set (Evelyn Waugh, Brian Howard, and Harold Acton, bohemian reactionaries all) and the Catholic Decadents (John Gray, André Raffalovich, and Oscar Wilde, ditto)—but ur-lesbian Radclyffe Hall was so Tory that she nearly went straight for Mussolini and Gertrude Stein loved gender roles almost as much as she hated Franklin Roosevelt. And, of course, there's always Florence King:

Girltalk is thought to be rambling and repetitive, but it pales beside the speech code concocted by Donna Shalala when she was chancellor of the University of Wisconsin. Sounding like a Roget rolling brakeless downhill, she barred insensitive speech about "race, color, nationality, origin, ancestry, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, disability, and age." She forgot "personal appearance," but then she's such a humanitarian that she never thinks of herself.

I've omitted Andrew Sullivan from this list because the sort of gay conservative I'm interested in opposes assimilationism, or, better yet, damns it to Hell—my own GBFF (a conservative) never stops saying, in crowded places,"To Hell with the assimiliationists!" He can't understand why a gay man would want a white picket fence; leave that bourgeois stuff to the breeders! There's something a little too cavalier about his line, but it squares very nicely with the aristocratic strain in the gay tradition. ("Gay men have an instinct for hierarchy unparalleled in contemporary culture, outside of Roman Catholicism.") My other notable omission, Allan Bloom, is left out for having been closeted.

None of this is to say that gay men and women should be conservatives, only that many of them have been (more than have been politically libertarian), which means that aspiring gay reactionaries have a long tradition upon which to draw.

And if you don't know what a friend of Dorothy is, ask a policeman—or one in five Tory MP's . . .