How Gay is the West?

It has often been said that the West is gay. A lot of Westerners will agree, and a lot of non-westerners, particularly nonwhites and Russians will very enthusiastically agree and claim that this is one of the many reasons, nay, the chief reason why the West must be destroyed. Of course, these people may have their own reasons for wanting the West and its constituent white population to be destroyed, chief among them civilisational resentment, but it’s hard to disagree that the West is pretty gay. However, I’m going to go out on a limb and advance a theory, that although the West may indeed have a bad case of the gay, it is in all probability the least gay of the major civilisations. I will be operating under conditions of uncertainty in this article, so there will be some speculation here. I’ll also be focusing on male homosexuality because it appears to me that it is the only type of homosexuality of political consequence. 

To start with, I want to clarify my method of measuring gayness. Gayness is not one of those easily measurable things, mostly because we tend to think of it as binary on the personal level, as well as the macro level. So, if a man says he is gay, is in a relationship with another man (or other men, as is more often the case) and actively engages in homosexual contact, then yes, that man is gay. Contrariwise, there’s the man who says is heterosexual, is in a relationship with a woman and actively engages in heterosexual contact with women. This man is not gay. Now, the question arises, what of the man who says he’s not gay, but frequents bathhouses at night? Is he gay or not? Conventional Western thinking leans towards gay and we say that such men are in the closet. However, in many parts of the world, such a man is not considered gay, at least as long as he’s discreet about his nocturnal activities. 

However, at the societal level, things get a little fuzzier. How gay is a society, or a state, or a nation can be measured in any number of ways. We can look at the percentage of self-reported homosexuals in a country. We can also look at that country’s political and legal attitudes towards homosexuality. Finally, and this is the method that I will use, we can explore how much homosexual contact men experience in a given society, both in the sense of number of men who’ve experienced homosexual contact and number of times that homosexual contact has occurred. Of course, the last is difficult and perhaps impossible to measure, certainly when compared to the relatively easy task of polling the population with regard to their sexual orientation or looking at the relevant legislation, but to my mind, a man who has homosexual relations is gay regardless of what he says about it, and a country which has high rates of homosexual contact and high percentages of men who’ve experienced homosexual contact is gay, regardless of what its laws and statistics say. 

For a long time before my political awakening, I wondered why white gay men were considered to be in the closet, while black men were considered to “be on the down-low”. Initially, I just thought it a dialectical variation on the closet, but my explorations of white-black and white-rest of the world differences have led me to believe that there’s a fundamental difference between being in the closet and being on the down-low. The difference, as usual when it comes to differences between whites and blacks, come down to the inner opinions of the men in question. When interviewed, white gay men who’ve come out of the closet will usually claim that they’ve always been homosexuals and that they always knew they were homosexuals, but were merely lying to themselves and others about their true nature. They will often use the metaphor of wearing a mask to describe their situation. This has led to no small amount of gaywashing, as it is becoming known, of every work of art where the wearing of a mask is used as a metaphor. However, black men on the down-low do not think of themselves as “gay,” but rather consider themselves heterosexual men who are engaged in a shameful, and therefore necessarily secret activity. In this sense, they are no different from a heterosexual foot fetishist who considers his fetish shameful and conceals it. Of course, reading the wikipedia article on the phenomenon of down-low is an excellent way to understand all the ways in which white people, especially white liberals struggle to understand the nonwhite and in this specific case black mind. 

Setting aside the phenomenon of blacks on the down-low, I find myself regularly flabbergasted by people, both western and non-western who proclaim that “the West is gay” yet somehow manage to claim that non-western cultures, in particular Arab/Muslim, Latino American and Russian cultures where homosexual contact is rampant are “anti-gay”, “stand against the degenerate (usually meaning gay) West” or “stand for traditional values.” Of particular note is the Russian practice of dedovschhina, which is a military hazing practice including aggravated homosexual assault of recruits and privates by senior enlisted men and officers, as well as forcing recruits and privates into homosexual prostitution for the enrichment of the commanding officer. When Russians are confronted with these disturbing facts, they do not deny them, but rather claim that this particular instance of men anally and orally penetrating other men, or forcing them to engage in homosexual contact as prostitutes is not “gay”, but rather a form of punishment or expressing dominance in a hierarchical organisation such as the army or a prison gang. When pressed on the issue, Russians will defend the practice by claiming that it is not gay in the Western sense because it doesn’t happen under a rainbow flag and it is not paraded on the streets, as it is in the West. And in these statements, coming from non-westerners engaged in dialectics with the West and its idea of gayness, do we find the reality of the global majority’s attitudes towards what “gay” is. While I’ve focused on Russia and the practice of dedovshchina, these practices and attitudes are widespread throughout the nonwestern world. Latin American gang leaders, for example, anally penetrate their subordinates in order to “show dominance”. Yes, that very frightening cholo with the face tattoos and the dead eye stare has taken it up the culo from el jefe. A significant number of Arab men seem to have the attitude that women are for reproduction, but boys, sometimes very young boys, are for pleasure. None of these people, however, consider themselves gay and all of them agree that a white western gay man, who is open about his homosexuality should be killed or otherwise punished by society. For a while, I believed that this is part of that old attitude that it’s only the penetrated party that is the homosexual or woman, while the penetrator is masculine and dominant, but this falls apart because in their lifetimes and as they move up through the hierarchy, non-western practitioners of homosexual contact will at various points be the penetrated and the penetrating party. The first year conscript who is being penetrated will in 9 months time have the privilege to himself penetrate newly arriving conscripts. The junior gangster of an El Salvadorian gang might be taking it from his boss today, but in a few years, he will be the boss and will be fucking subordinates of his own. Perhaps if he is a mid-ranking member of the gang, he gets penetrated by his boss on Tuesdays but penetrates his subordinates on Wednesdays. So, is he gay on Tuesdays but straight on Wednesdays? If a white western man tried to claim that, we’d laugh in his face, regardless of whether we approve or disapprove of homosexuality and yet very masculine-presenting cholo gangsters and Russian soldiers claim the exact same thing with conviction that can only be interpreted as honesty. 

This, of course, baffles my fundamentally Western* mind because I am used to thinking about men in the gay/straight binary. To me, men who’ve had sex with other men are gay and cannot be considered anything other than gay. Of course, the West has that clunky term “men who have sex with men”, which includes all men who have sex with men, but it is purely a term of convenience, and primarily used by doctors and other healthcare professionals who, like Queen Elizabeth’s religious police, could not look into a man’s heart to learn his true identity, but still have to deal with the medical consequences of male homosexual contact. It is essentially a necessary and face-saving convenience for closeted gays who cannot bring themselves to admit to being homosexual, but nevertheless have to deal with the medical consequences of homosexual contact. I am baffled, of course because the West stands alone among civilisations in having the category of gay. All civilisations are familiar with male homosexual behaviour, and most of them condemn it as shameful while tolerating its practice, sometimes at massive scale. But only the West has gays, men who’ll stand up and call themselves gay and incorporate as part of their identity the fact that they enjoy homosexual contact.

Scaling up to the societal level, we start dealing with some interesting numbers. While we cannot be sure what percentage of men in Latin American, Arab and African-American societies have experienced homosexual contact, we have a good idea of the rates in Russia, chiefly because the major enablers of homosexual contact in Russia are the armed forces and the prison systems, and these are institutions which, if anything else, would keep records of how many went in and out as conscripts/convicts. Theoretically, the entire able-bodied male population of Russia should serve in the armed forces, although draft dodging is common, chiefly due to the absolute importance of avoiding dedovshchina. A not insignificant percentage of the male Russian population also goes through the penal system, which is likewise a major locus of homosexual activity. Indeed, it is these two practices of dedovshchina and prison homosexual activity that are behind Russia’s high HIV infection rate. The specific numbers are easily available online, but even without looking at them, we can surmise that vast swathes of Russia’s male population has experienced homosexual contact. While we have no comparably good numbers, even estimations, from the rest of the non-western world, I expect them to be higher. Russia, for all its faults, is a partially Western state and should according to my model at least, have lower rates of male homosexual contact than the other cultures. 

Contrasting these large numbers of men who’ve experienced homosexual contact in the non-western world is the relatively small number of such men in the West. While the West is notoriously gay, has pride parades et cetera, there appears to be no male homosexual activity among western whites which is not done under the rainbow banner. If we then take the various figures of male homosexuals as a percentage of the population as the more or less definitive number of white western men who’ve experienced homosexual contact, then we’re left with comparatively low numbers. Between 1.5% and 2% of the western white population, or between 3% and 4% of men have experienced homosexual contact. Here we get to a controversial notion. It is the West’s unique invention of the gay identity, which does not exist in other cultures which has acted as a silo for such behaviour. In other cultures, engaging in homosexual contact for men might be condemned, punishable or tolerated, but it is only in the West that it is treated as a transformative act, through which the man either becomes, or discovers that he has always been a homosexual. Whichever we take to be the case, it is undoubtable that a man’s first homosexual experience becomes an initiation into a secret society and a transformation into a different sort of being - a gay, a homosexual. Faced with such momentous consequences, European man, who is always mindful of his identity and is primarily driven by moral considerations about “being a good person” will, most of the time, or more precisely, between 98.5% and 96% of the time choose not to engage in homosexual acts because this would mean that he’d become “a homosexual”, a transformation that will have major consequences for him. 

The invention of the homosexual is one of those invisible yet momentous achievements of Western civilisation. By creating this category of men, it has managed to isolate almost all homosexual activity to this small group, thus freeing every other man in society from this dangerous and demeaning practice. In my article on Russian military weakness, I neglected to mention dedovshchina and its devastating effect on unit cohesion, morale and troop effectiveness. Maybe this is my Western bias showing through, but I cannot for the life of me imagine that a soldier who’s been anally raped by a superior officer or senior soldier would be an effective fighter. In fact, I’d imagine that he’d be full of rage and resentment for the men who’d so violated him as well as the company, regiment, armed forces and ultimately the government and culture that’d allowed or even encouraged this to happen. Indeed, there is substantial evidence that Russian soldiers who find themselves on the receiving end of dedovshchina commit suicide, go on shooting sprees, desert or otherwise subvert the armed forces, in both peacetime and war. The invasion of Ukraine has given unprecedented chances for violated conscripts to frag their superiors, either through accidental discharges or by leaking their positions to the Ukrainians. Simply put, the notion that establishing dominance through the rape of subordinates is nonsensical - men who’ve been violated are destroyed and become ticking time bombs, killing either themselves because they cannot bear the humiliation and disgust, or enacting righteous revenge against their rapists and the system which enabled them. A culture which allows such abuse by superiors of subordinates will never be able to reach the sort of cohesion and fraternity which is the mother of victory in both war and peace.

In fact, this is a broader point about the West’s dominance in global terms - it is the only civilisation where superiors do not regularly abuse and mercilessly exploit subordinates, least of all in a sexual manner. Western kings did not accumulate massive harems or vast hoards of gold and thereby deprive their populations of mates and resources, but rather would distribute their own wealth to secure the loyalty of subordinates. Western societies are the only ones where it is safe and even profitable to be a beta male, to be a follower and to be a subordinate, the only ones where a man can be reasonably certain that he is not going to be sexually humiliated by a superior, whether indirectly through mate poaching or directly by means of homosexual rape. But that’s a story for another day.

The invention of the homosexual and the subsequent engendering of disgust at the notion of being transformed into one in the Western mind has shielded white western men from homosexual contact, whether it is forced hierarchical contact such as dedovshchina and hispanic gang practices or down-low and boy-seeking behaviours such as seen among American blacks and Arabs/Muslims. It has also had the salutary effect of sequestering away homosexuals in a medical sense, at least insofar as they are out of the closet, from the general population, thus insulating broader mass of white people from sexually transmitted disease characteristic of homosexuals. By allowing a small percentage of men to identify as homosexuals, the West has effectively used them as a sponge that has soaked up all the gayness of a society. Indeed, as the West becomes less Western, by which I mean less white, we’re going to see an erosion of this category of homosexual. As browns and blacks replace white people in Western society, we may see less acceptance of homosexuals as such, but more active homosexual practice, in the sense of percentage of men who’ve experienced homosexual contact. Or, the two cultures could synergise, and blacks and browns who’d have been heteronormative brothers on the down-low normally would internalise the Western identity of homosexual, but instead of recoiling from it like most Western men, start actively practicing it and fundamentally change the identity. It’d be the end of dressmaking and musical theatre as dull-minded browns demographically displace the old guard of white homosexuals and redefine homosexuality to mean driving a lowrider and smuggling marijuana while alternately raping your subordinates and taking it up the ass from the big cartel boss. 

This brings us to the juncture where we pass judgement. Is the West gay? To be frank, I am still not sure. While I’m convinced that the white West has fewer men who’ve experienced homosexual contact, let me draw an analogy. People call Japan an ethnostate because it is 99% Japanese, but in the strictly legal sense, Japan is not an ethnostate because it is not constitutionally defined as the state of the Japanese people. Contrariwise, Estonia is only 75% Estonian, but the Estonian constitution defines it as the state of the Estonian people, therefore it can be considered an ethnostate. In the same vein, while the West may have less buttsex and fewer people exposed to it, it does have cultural and legal recognition of the gay identity and appears to be the only civilisation to recognise gay as an identity. With that, I’ll wash my hands of the matter and leave you to make your own judgements on whether gayness consists in waving rainbow flags and proclaiming the gay identity or sexual contact between members of the same sex on a massive and civilisation-destroying scale. 

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* even though I am from southeastern Europe, which is a peripheral region of the West and have a degree of separation from the West, thus giving me an outsider perspective, I still have the same fundamental assumptions about the world as a Westerner.