Glenn Greenwald, Gays, and Fabulous Lies

Context: This is a short essay I wrote on Twitter. It was prompted by the recent sex tape scandal depicting journalist Glenn Greenwald. I will summarize that issue for those of you who don’t know, and who don’t wish to look it up:

-Glenn Greenwald appears to have, himself, retweeted a post from a prostitute that Greenwald hired. That post contained a 3-minute sex video.

-Many people are claiming Greenwald was hacked, or that Israel or someone else, hacked his phone and is blackmailing him. I do not believe this is likely. These commentators are ignoring the photo evidence that Greenwald retweeted this himself. Yes, evidence can be faked. No, it’s not a reasonable suspicion of fakery that’s driving the denials. It’s not wanting to consider the possibility that Greenwald did this to himself and ignoring the obvious in favor of an abstruse blackmail conspiracy.

-The video features Greenwald in a school girl miniskirt and some kind of bra-let. He is kneeling to his “dominant” prostitute, licking his feet, licking his spit off the floor, etc. If you are heretofore unaware of this phenomenon, this is a sadomasochistic setup to service a sexual humiliation fetish. This is not uncommon among gay men.

-It seems very plausible to me that Greenwald released this himself as part of his fetish. I cannot prove this, and I am willing to be shown to be wrong. But I do not buy the claims that it’s more likely that he was hacked and being blackmailed. How would that work? There’s nothing left to use for blackmail. It’s out there. And with even prominent conservatives defending Greenwald, how can such a thing even be used for blackmail?

-This is the most important part of the entire scandal: Glenn Greenwald has two adopted Brazilian boys. Few people at all are remarking on whether these qualities have anything to do with Greenwald’s fitness as father:

-hires male prostitutes
-has methamphetamine pipe on camera while servicing the prostitute
-makes sissy fetish humiliation tape with prostitute

How do his children feel now that this is front of everyone’s eyes around the world? What do we think about the parenting decisions that happened in a household headed by the man who did the things above? Few are asking.

None of these conservatives defending Greenwald even made a symbolic gesture about caring about the welfare of these children.

-People are lying, claiming that objections to Greenwald, and questions about his fitness as a parent, are prompted by “homophobia.” Yes, this is how people are consciously distracting from the danger to his children.

That is the context that prompted me to write what you see below.

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A lot of you good people are getting some hard lessons lately. It's coming as a shock to you, I know. But I'm glad you're seeing it, because you need to know the truth.

The chances of a gay man having a personality disorder, mental illness, or extreme addiction to drugs or risky behavior is very high. Much higher than the background population.

This has always been the case. It's always been true. It has always been known. The only reason you're feeling angry right now as you read this (some of you are) is because you've been lied to. You were told that all that research was "homophobic."

It was not. It was true.

It's also easy to write me off as a "self-hating gay man." That's the cheap, easy, and emotionally comfortable excuse you can use to not listen to homosexuals who tell the truth. After all, few of us do, so it’s easy to pretend we don’t exist and allow the lie to keep going.

What you saw in the Greenwald tape is not "just a small minority." Gay male sexuality is, in my view, usually a trauma response to childhood abuse.

Yes. I am saying that I believe that most homosexuality is a result of abusive or neglectful childhoods. I do NOT mean "only direct sexual molestation." I was not sexually molested as a child, and many gays were not (though of course many were).

No, I am not saying this is the case for every gay. Yes, I know gay men who come from loving families. Please do not personalize this. I will not react nicely to any commenter who falsely claims I’ve “smeared him.” I have not.

But here's what did happen to me as a child, and this is also a very common pattern in gay men. No, not "just a small number of them."

-Never met my father

-My mother was a narcissist and a borderline (personality disorder). She married a man who turned out to be a pedophile, a child beater, a wife beater, and a man who tried to murder her while her three children watched.

-My mother emotionally suffocated me, turned me into a surrogate husband, told me sexual secrets about her life when I was still a minor

-Cast your mind back to the movie Mommie Dearest, imagine that happening in a trailer park, and you have my childhood.

As a young man, I lived the libertine, lascivious, drug-taking life that's now called "fabulous." It left me emotionally broken and an alcoholic. Because of my own unwise, self-destructive choices, I’ve been raped at least once after being roofied, have a lost week on a road trip as a teen I can’t remember because I was drugged the entire time by older men, and I’ve been strangled by a male prostitute I didn't know was a prostitute.

My story isn't even that extreme compared to others.

I don't hate myself as much anymore as I used to. Yes, I have still have emotional problems, but they're better than when I was young. Instead, I see myself, my past, and people like me, more accurately than I could tolerate as a young man.

Gay men are a "trauma population." Being traumatized in childhood is the common life history for gay men, not the outlier. This leaves predictable destruction in our personalities, impulse control, and self-image.

No, it's not all. Yes, I know, random commenter, it's not you.

Straight America—you have been lied to. Gay America—you have been lied to. The gay life is not about rainbows and self-actualization. It's about the repetition compulsion of trauma. We have put a "glow up" on personal tragedy, and it breaks my heart.

Sure, some gay men have largely avoided these outcomes and have built stable lives. I am very glad for them. But their existence does not negate the statistical reality about gay men in general.

No, I don't "hate" other gay men who still live this way. I was them. I was so lost, and so lonely. I'm still lonely. But I was killing the good parts of myself, and I might have killed myself off entirely if I hadn't put all of this down.

My way isn't everyone's way, but I decided to remain celibate and single about seven years ago. This was after decades of promiscuity; I lost count of how many men I slept with.

I see things now very differently than I did when I was actively promiscuous and drinking. The past cannot be changed, and it’s always best to learn what you can from it, but yes, I have regret and remorse.

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