I suppose that before starting it must be said again. It's not the bias as much. It's that the bias
is not admitted.
That mantra from conservative critics of the liberals media is recited religiously, but it's
imperative to keep it in mind when one reads the endless cover story in the new Time magazine about
America's "Gay Teens." It is the usual stew of pc agenda-advancing and conservative-bashing in the
guise of straight (so to speak) journalism.
I know this because the article's author is John Cloud. Cloud is a gay man -- a very liberal and
dangerously promiscuous one, if a graphic article he once wrote about visiting an anonymous gay sex
club is any indication. Indeed, Cloud's older piece subverts a main point of his Time dissertation -
i.e., that the notion of gay men as promiscuous and reckless is a dangerous stereotype.
Again -- and here is where I may get in trouble with my fellow religious conservatives -- I don't
care that in 1997 Cloud -- who at the time had a boyfriend -- visited a house in Washington, D.C.,
and paid $8 to watch men having group sex and watch gay porno. I mean, sure, as a Catholic I think
it's bad for his soul. But I don't lose sleep over it. What concerns me is that Cloud is a liberal
with an agenda to make homosexuality mainstream -- and that that bias is not addressed or admitted
in his massive article.
If Time asked me to do a profile of the Pope, as early in the piece as possible I would announce
that I am an orthodox Catholic -- then I would proceed to give the other side a fair shake. Cloud
doesn't admit the bias, and his disdain for those who disagree is not well hidden.
Bias runs through the Time piece, and its germ is found in the gay bathhouse story he wrote in 1997.
The latter appeared in the Washington City Paper, a tiresome hispter weekly published in DC. In
"The Naked City," Cloud ventures to a house in the Adams Morgan section of the city and, after
paying $8, is admitted into the house. Cloud's intention was clear: "I had always assumed (and,
admittedly, hoped), that while one of the activities might well be massage, other activities were
even more...well, hands on. I got a couple of friends to admit that they had attended, and one of
them described the parties this way: 'It's sort of like a bathhouse without the baths."
Indeed. There's no need to go into the details of what Cloud saw, which is sickening. Some of it was
hard even for Cloud himself to take -- well, kind of. "Feeling equal measures of pity, disgust, and
horniness," he writes after seeing something out of latter-day Rome, "I skulk back into the hallway
and then into the 'smoking room.'" Cloud gets "groped here and there" before escaping Hell House,
but not before making this observation: "Though I'm not sure, I imagine most of the guests to be
closeted, and a fair number married. With their conservative styling [!], I can also imagine most of
them in K street law firms or federal office buildings or Northern Virginia computer companies.
Strangely, I can't imagine them at a sex party, even as I watch them have orgasms."
Cloud also wrote a guide to DC gay bathhouses for the City Paper. No need for details, you get the
idea.
Cut to the present. Cloud, now ensconced at Time, offers a gigantic cover story on gay teens.
According to Cloud, "Kids are disclosing their homosexuality with unprecedented regularity -- and
they are doing it much younger." Moreover, even conservatives are getting on board. "When their kids
come out," Cloud writes, "many conservatives -- just ask the Vice President -- start to seem
uncomfortable with traditionalist, rigid views on gays." The kids these days are entering a brave
new world: "Until recently, growing up gay meant awaiting a lifetime of secrecy -- furtive
encounters, darkened bar windows, crushing deracination." Sounds like a memory from his days in DC.
The Time piece is nothing so much as a position paper for the Human Rights Campaign, America's
largest gay lobby. These days gay teens "no longer need endure the baleful combination of loneliness
and longing that characterized the childhood of so many gay adults" (not to mention the adulthood of
certain journalists). Books, networks, movies and big business all cater to gays. These days, "at
many schools it is now profoundly uncool to be seen as anti-gay." Furthermore, "it's important to
note that nearly all mental-health professionals agree that trying to reject one's homosexual
impulses will usually be fruitless and depressing."
Even the Christians are getting involved -- although, of course, this is not good news to Cloud. "In
a jarring bit of rhetorical mimicry," Cloud writes, "many Christians who work with gay kids have
adopted the same pc tributes to 'tolerance' and 'diversity' employed [by gay activist groups]."
They've even had the gall to publish a book -- it boasts, in Cloud's phrase, "the near parodic title
Loving Homosexuals As Jesus Would." I don't suppose it would do much good at this point to
speculate that to most Americans there is nothing at all parodic about that title. Or to once again
note that the decent thrust behind much political correctness, the desire to respect the personhood
of others, actually came from Christianity itself. Of course, the left has taken that very
Christian, very Western idea and turn it into a totalitarian system of groupthink and racism. But I
digress. The point is that gay sex and Democratic groupthink is good, and conservatism and
Christianity bad. But Cloud outs it much better: "A lot of Exodus youths seem captives of their
Christianity, caught in a hermetic loop of lust and gay sex (or masturbation), followed by
confession and grim determination." And gay activist Michael Glatze is worried that gay kids, unlike
their parents' generation, won't be obsessed with sex: "I don't think the gay movement understands
the extent to which the next generation just wants to be normal kids. The people who are getting
that are the Christian right."
Well, that is cause for concern. According to some of the kids co-opted by the Christian right, the
gay lifestyle has a certain "superficiality" about it, and an obsession with dangerous anonymous sex
with multiple partners. In the summation of his piece, Cloud tries to debunk the "stereotype" of gay
men being pathological sexual predators who -- well, who visit anonymous sex houses. Perhaps he
should read his own clip file.
