Conservative gay activist Milo Yiannopoulos is surrounded by controversy yet again, first because he was invited by the conservative giant CPAC to keynote their next conference, then because he was dropped after critics posted several audio clips in which he apparently endorsed pedophilia, and now because of his statement strongly denouncing pedophilia, speaking as a child abuse victim himself. What are we to make of all this?

What to Make of Milo

First, it was an error for CPAC to invite Milo to keynote, despite his rhetorical brilliance and his ability to dismantle and expose today’s ridiculous PC extremes.

It’s one thing for Milo to speak on college campuses and other settings, where he can also be himself, including using his full range of profanity, vulgarity, and gay flaunting. It’s another thing for CPAC to celebrate an out and proud homosexual as one of its champions (after all, that’s part of being a keynote speaker at a conference of this kind; you are invited because of your leadership and your voice).

I gladly interviewed Milo on my radio show and would gladly do so again, but I would not invite him to be the graduation speaker at my organization’s school of ministry. And while CPAC is a political organization rather than a religious one, if it fails to hold the line on gay activism, it will cease to be truly conservative.

Second, while denouncing pedophilia (which is something every gay man I have ever talked to about this has done, without equivocation), Milo drew attention to the fact that many older gay men are involved with much younger gay men (commonly called “boys,” according to Milo), a practice defended in 2013 by the influential gay journalist Michelangelo Signorile, who noted that, “Historically, gay men have engaged in intergenerational sexual encounters, brief romances and long-term relationships — among consenting adults — probably much more than straight people have.”

And although Milo alleges that these aforementioned “boys” are all of the age of consent, it is no secret that gay activists have often been at the forefront of pushing for the lowering of the age of consent. (For a 2010 example from England, see here.) It is also no secret that gay literature through the centuries has celebrated the “love” of grown men and boys, and in these cases, there is no doubt that they were minors rather than young men.

8 Principal Arguments to Defend “Man-Boy Love”

As I demonstrated in painstaking detail in A Queer Thing Happened to America, the identical arguments that have been used by gay activists to defend homosexuality have also been used by advocates of so-called “man-boy love” (or, in its sanitized form, “intergenerational intimacy”).

The 8 principal arguments I listed were:

• Pedophilia is innate and immutable. (This is increasingly accepted by scientists, who now call for sympathy for the pedophile’s struggles, while continuing to denounce their actions. It is also becoming more common to classify pedophilia as a sexual orientation.)
• Pederasty is richly attested in many different cultures throughout history.
• The claim that adult-child sexual relationships cause harm is greatly overstated and often completely inaccurate.
• Consensual adult-child sex can actually be beneficial to the child.
• Pederasty should not be classified as a mental disorder, since it does not cause distress to the pederast to have these desires and since the pederast can function as a normal, contributing member of society.
• Many of the illustrious homosexuals of the past were actually pedophiles.
• People are against intergenerational intimacy because of antiquated social standards and puritanical sexual phobias.
• This is all about love and equality and liberation.

As I noted in 2011, “none of these arguments should surprise us. After all, the age of increasing sexual anarchy in which we live is a fruit of the sexual revolution of the 1960’s, and the seeds of sexual anarchy were sown already by Alfred Kinsey in the late 1940’s, as Prof. Judith Reisman has tirelessly documented. And it was Kinsey, after all, who relied on the research of pedophiles to document the sexual responses of infants and children.”

To repeat: Every gay man who has ever commented to me about pedophilia seemed as repulsed as I was to the thought of an adult sexually abusing a child, and I’m absolutely not equating homosexuality with pedophilia.

But I am saying that, whereas most heterosexual teens who lose their virginity do so with their peers (schoolmates and the like, perhaps just a few years older than them), there is a disproportionate amount of intergenerational sex among homosexuals, often involving older men and boys (by which I do mean boys).

In the aftermath of the arrest of child abuser Jerry Sandusky, I noted that the acclaimed gay journalist Randy Shilts stated that “at age 11, [gay icon Harvey] Milk began attending performances of the New York Metropolitan Opera where he met with ‘wandering hands’ and soon was engaged in ‘brief trysts [with grown men] after the performances.’ While still in junior high, he ‘dove headfirst into the newly discovered subculture,’ and by the age of 14, Milk was ‘leading an active homosexual life.’”

This led to the obvious question: Were the men who were sexually involved with Harvey Milk much better than Jerry Sandusky? And can an 11-year-old give truly informed consent to such acts?

Shilts also wrote that as Milk grew older, the pattern reversed itself to the point that, at age 33, he hooked up with a 16-year-old named Jack McKinley, one of a number of younger men with whom he was intimate. How common was Milk’s experience among gay men?

I suggest that Milo has provided a window into a disturbing aspect of gay culture, one in which gay men do not abduct children and abuse them but one in which they do engage in sexual and romantic relationships with minors — unless we are actually to believe that when gay men speak about having sex with “boys,” they mean, “but only those who are consenting adults!”

I think not.