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In the Daily Caller's quest to become the the go-to conservative troll site, it's published an entertaining column with this premise: Gay people were much more fun when they had to risk being beaten, ostracized, were dying of AIDS, and discriminated against. "Gays have become totally boring," Patrick Howley wrote in his column — a piece that's tagged to the Senate's passage of the Employment Non Discrimination Act (ENDA), a measure that would prohibit employers from firing or not hiring someone based on their sexuality.
According to Howley, that anti-discrimination stuff is just one more layer of boringness on already boring gay people. The inevitable question then becomes, what does Howley not find boring? The answer is being a bottom (the receiving partner) in some projected gay man's fantasy:
I can’t even walk around DuPont Circle on early autumn evenings or interact with male bank tellers without getting eyed down like a side of ribs. It’s not even flattering. I know why it happens. I only get it because I’m skinny and I look like I’d be a bottom. It’s demeaning, really.
But that brings me to my point. At least creepy old gay dudes cowering in the corners of Metro stations are still keeping things interesting. Their weird, trembling, ballpoint ink stains-on-their-buttoned-down-shirts brand of gayness is in line with the hallmarks and the tenets of the gayness that I know and love.
Howley really put a lot of thought into the type of gay fantasy, down to the position, that he'd be a part of. But being a receiver of anal sex in septuagenarian gay fantasies isn't really the point that Howley says he's trying to make. Howley explains that the reason LGBT people have become boring is because they've been bottoms to a liberal agenda that's taken away the gay movement's beloved "back-alley glory holes," "leather costumes," and "poppers." "Gayness used to be pretty awesome, according to alternative literature from the period 1954-78," he says. But that's been lost:
And their sexual proclivities, unfettered by the Cloroxed asexuality of the progressive movement, reached glorious climaxes befitting what has always been, and must always remain, a fundamentally libertarian country.
The progressives hosed all of that activity down.
Howley ignores a plethora of things to make his theory work. One of those is technology, which has changed the way LGBT people meet. He also ignores places like D.C.'s Crew Club, a 24/7 "fitness and lounge facility" where you can probably find some combination of poppers, glory holes, and leather "costumes." Howley omits a large portion of gay culture that doesn't revolve around anonymous sex. He also forgets to give conservatives a little bit of credit.