The Lavender Menace

...Hilton Highway Despotism: A Libertariau Look at Traffic Cops The enforcement of AmerCcan traffic regulations is in some ways as despotic as life in the Soviet Union, In the unlikely event that the reader seeks a sample of life in a Communist society, let him consider his relations with the traffic cop...

...the sexual relations often appear more fecal than genital, reminiscent of the "sexuality" of an incontinent two-year-old...

...And the homosexual life, once kept shadowy and furtive for fear of discovery, is now so much in the open that it has become for some an Avocation: the "gay activist" of the '70s has replaced the civil rights leader of the '60s as a fixture on the trendy cocktails-and-talk-show circuit...

...Citing various studies that The Alternative: An American Spectator - December 1976 13 established the psychopathology of homosexuality, Irving Bieber said they "leave us with no doubt that homosexuality is not normal...

...Their excessive concentration on self-gratification reinforces the onanistic tendencies found in such journals of supposedly heterosexual chic as Playboy...

...John Rechy, appropriately named, in City of Night and Hubert Selby in Last Em't to Brooklyn, are recommended only to aspiring misanthropes...

...It is a view that the meaning of life ha, little to do with loveless couplings in decaying restrooms but that it has much--everything--to do with giving, sympathizing, and controlling, with the mystical complementariness of male and female...

...He must queue up for housing and many other goods and services that are provided on conditions of disequilibrium pricing...

...Precisely because the British attached great value to welfare programs, the nation has been a world leader in social policy...

...As in Soviet society, the authorities choose a goal and force us to accept it...

...Lest it be thought change is in the offing, it is worth recalling that one of Margaret Thatcher's major acts as Minister of Education was to call for a massive increase in public nursery school enrollment...

...the opposite sex is at best irrelevant and at worst a grievous annoyance to homosexuals...

...Yeats once said that "civilization is a great struggle to achieve self-control...

...the penalty there for homosexuality was to be sodomized by the righteously indignant jury and then castrated...

...We do need to distinguish, however, between behavior that should be prohibited and behavior that should be disapproved...

...Consider what one Lesbian indentifies as the "material basis for power in Amerlla [sic...

...The 55-mile-per-hour speed limit is widely looked upon as a foolish idea...

...In choosing a lifestyle so at variance with the mores and the laws of society, most homosexuals equate sexual gratification with danger the way a junkie associates happiness with a "fLX...

...the criteria for sexual worth betray the same kind of immaturity one finds in the girlie magazines...

...Or this from The Second Wave (another lesbian publication): "We do not want work glorifying men, marriage, traditional women's roles, etc...

...Homosexuals want to take this pathological aspect of our time and make it into a platform for a gay, new world...

...allows us to make, as the homosexuals might say, perfect asses of ourselves...

...Or if you don't accept the penis et~vy-castration theory of history, try out Nick Benton's thesis that "Sex between persons of the same sex is the cultural antithesis to the most fundamental presupposition of the whole Western capitalistic mentality, which is derived from one fundamental act--'missionary position' sexual intercourse...

...After this profundity, Dennison becomes almost diathyrambic, as he becomes the critical version of the one-man band: "What is the effect of our long confrontation with an T that is perpetually becoming...

...In the 1960s, the District of Columbia traffic authorities undertook a study of driver behavior and concluded that a typical driver violated a traffic rule every 30 seconds...

...We can laugh at "gay economics," but not at the movement's effect on other kinds of scholarship...

...Are you ready, ladies and gentlemen: It is "the penis...

...these kids know the score...

...All through history man and woman have played sharply defined roles in their societies...

...A perfect illustration of a peculiarly sloppy mental trait of our times: the willingness to grant value to almost any kind of behavior while denying (at least implicitly) the shared values that make communities possible...

...Karl Stern, another psychiatrist, says in The Flight From lVoman that the philosophical direction of our times is homosexual in its denigration of the traditional qualities associated with das ewig er/~sende Frauenzimmer--the ever-redeeming female, symbolic of intuition, receptivity, and compassion...

...In a homosexual world, there is absolutely no reason why women have to be a part of a man's life...

...Mostly homosexuality begets violence and mutual abasement...

...It's always new...

...Another gay theoretician rallies to the cause of both the leather set and lover-starved farm boys contemplating their father's sheep herd when he calls for a reconsideration of "so-called [sic] perverted sex--sado-masochism, sex with animals _9 ..we shouldn't be apologetic to straights about gay people whose lives we don't understand or share...

...This creates a chronic anxiety as to when the police are about to descend, a fear they'll do so when one hasn't committed any offense, and an ethic of simply doing whatever one thinks he can get away with on the basis of his best guess as to what the police are likely to find out...

...magazines...

...Libertinism undermines libertarianism by ignoring the rights of others...

...The contrary notion is a myth promulgated largely by the militant homosexuals_9 Alas, the "myth" is now promulgated also by Bieber's colleagues in the American Psychiatric Association, which proved itself all profile and no courage in the face of gay demonstrations and disruptions...

...Of all American groups homophiles are the most egregious youthworshippers...

...In general, everybody else observes our rights to the position in traffic we have established, and no one bashes into us intentionally...

...A good description of this is to be found in William Aaron's Straight, the autobiography of a homosexual who shook his habit to become husband and father: "In the gay world, promiscuity, voyeurism, incest, 'water sports' [urination games], and even coprophilia are, alas, far from rare...

...Much of the Gay Lib propaganda intensifies the hatred for the opposite sex found, for example, in Ms...

...Gay liberation is a strange mixture of the pathetic and the dangerous...

...One need not have friends of the opposite sex...

...Indeed, the word paiderastia, meaning literally "love of boys," was a part of the Platonic vocabulary and had by that time a generally pejorative sense...

...Not exactly, as Archie Bunker might observe, "your mainstream of Western civ...

...The Constitution surely Stephen R. Maloney has previously written articles for The Alternative on Penthouse and Ms...

...In much of its jargon, gay polemics has wed itself to lunatic economic mysticism...

...A new movement in literary criticism is to make the disgusting seem profound by inoculating it with existentialist' gobbledygook...

...Understandably, hard times make retrenchment difficult...

...If an aging eccentric solicits the services of a consenting adult, ties him (or her) up naked, and then rolls hard-boiled eggs at the hireling, all the while shouting "Bombs Away...

...Consider the following remarks addressed to potential contributors by Amazon Quarterly: "We accept no work from men, nor any work with a heterosexual theme...

...His behavior is circumscribed by rules which entail no presumption of an invisible hand...

...As quoted by Tom Burke in Esquire, one of the New Homosexuals--the generation that turns on with acid and the Rolling Stones in lieu of pink gin and Judy Garland--suggests that a volatile mixture of promiscuity and thrill-seeking may be bubbling ever more vigorously: "...gay kids in their twenties don't have the hang-ups that old queens had...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 15...

...The historical picture, in particular, must be brought back in focus...

...In addition, no substantial political force appears ready to take on the task...

...I would like to suggest that if the T is the becoming of an identity which is a legend, the 'you' must be conceived of in a similar way: 'ordinary morality' as a legend and a becoming...

...And if we want to establish a new basis for that order we know what will be the fate of the organ, don't we...

...First, it attempts tG marshal the widespread libertarian instincts of the American people in the service of barbaric principles...

...Thus, the idle fixe of Playboy on the frequency of orgasm, a concern it shares with the Gay Advocate...

...In The Doaorand the Sou/Frankl says sex with the chorus girls is characterized by impersonality...

...ButJiU can't play on Craig Schoonmaker's side of the street either: "We should create men's neighborhoods and women's neighborhoods...

...IVhat is more, its ambience is not especially gay...

...And the ascendancy of homosexuals is helping us on the way to such disintegration in our time--not by the nasty acts they perpetrate on one another in the restrooms of the local bus station but by the way their self-justifications fuel what St...

...Until more factory hands are seen to be at least as necessary as having extra playleaders, group workers, and program coordinators, no real trimming of the welfare state will occur...

...More pointedly, that is becoming the other of the 'you' it addresses...

...There is a kind of Wilhelm Reichianism gone mad at the heart of homosexuality...

...Aaron suggests the grim realitites of the gay bar as closing time approaches: "As the hour grows late, there is a steady stream of men swaggering, sneaking, stalling, and sidling in and out of the toilet...

...The be.wigged, rouged denizens of "wrinidesville" fred the land of the gay is no country for an old man...

...The second (and corollary) danger is the damage "Gay Liberation" is inflicting on the central institution of Western civilization: the family...

...they detail the "hustlers" (the British call them "rent boys") and the "rough trade" (married and unmarried sadists) who often provide beatings and mutilations as part of their ' 'service...

...The vulgar Marxism of our public discourse, with its chatter about collective identity, class struggle, and "liberation," has granted homosexuals new status as an embattled minority with as righteous a grievance against the hetero majority as that of downtrodden blacks in the Jim Crow South...

...Thomas Mann's brilliant novella, Disorder and Early Sorrow, written during the days of the Weimar Republic, shows the parallel disintegration of the family and of morality that prepared the way for Hitler...

...It doesn't do so, obviously, because there are countervailing benefits...

...One preference the gays disdain is the choice of fidelity within the framework of traditional marriage...

...The random element in law enforcement threatens him with the Gulag Archipelago, however, rather than a trip to the traffic court...

...senility, most of them seem to believe, sets in at age 30...

...Most of what we use as consumers belongs to us as a consequence of some market transaction, but not roads...

...Students snicker when they read the lines--so that's why Hamlet didn't kill the King...

...Augustine called the "burning cauldron of unholy lusts...

...Nata slaves, "one category of Chukchee shamans"--and "the top echelons of Nazi Germany...

...And now we must snicker when we hear "switch-hitter" (bisexual) or "pitch and catch," for homosexuals, though they mostly prefer frisbee to baseball, have even stolen from our national pastime...

...The rules are so numerous that inevitably they are violated continually...

...Truman Capote's new novel, Answered Prayers, a structureless potpourri of gossip and perversions, coupled with such tasteless wisecracks as, "Women are like rattlesnakes--the last thing that dies is their tail," is succeeding mainly because it feeds jaded literary tastes...

...George Dennison took on the culture-hero of the 1960s, the obese pederast-thief Jean Genet, and came up with such profundities as this one about Genet's "circuitous patterns of fetishism in the sense that for certain homosexuals the human male is a fetish standing for the human male...

...the memory of the inadequacy of social services during the Depression is still strong...

...Gordon Rattray-Taylor subtracts ancient Greece from the list of worthies: the common notion of the Athenian statesman, orating by day, feUating by night, is a myth...

...And I believe, indeed know, that they weren't unique, there were thousands of other such families in the neighborhoods in which we lived...

...The rhythms of the bars reflect constant movement in a parody of normal sexual tension and release...

...The Constitution, as Justice Goldberg said, is "not a suicide pact...

...For one's tendency, reading Genet, is not simply to accept the 'you' as oneself, but to move in and out of it pursuing one's own response to the otherness of the 'I.' " The moral: masturbation may not make you insane, but studying Genet produces glossolalia...

...the] preoccupation with breast development...

...One doubts this will happen soon...

...There is an unreality in this, a refusal to confront what John Crowe Ransom called "the world's body...

...An Assyrian tablet from the twelfth century B.C...

...Cornelia Wilbur points out the somatophilia of lesbians, the obsession with "beautiful faces or beautiful bodies...

...As Charles Soccarides, perhaps the greatest living expert on homosexual behavior, has said, we must recognize, if we "hope to survive," that mating with a member of the opposite sex is not only natural but also necessary...

...The policy was issued as an edict which most of us grudgingly accept as yet another aspect of the system over which we have no control...

...When the police do descend, there is none of Adam Smith's invisible hand...

...There is really a kind of blasphemy about all this, a hatred of the created universe, a detestation of diversity among these supposed devotees of individual preference...

...By a process of syllogistic leapfrogging, it tries to convert the widely accepted principle that consenting adults should be allowed to engage in sexual imbecilities into a broader acceptance of any sexual practice, consensual or otherwise...

...If our times deserve that epithet, however, it is a sign not of our social mirth, but rather of our swelling preoccupation with homosexuality...

...In the November 1970 Harper's Paul Goodman--littlrateur, pedagogue, pederast-indignantly denied that "any" sexual practice could be harmful to a child...

...the other love~ beauty...

...The one is an involuntary sickness [my emphasis], the other a sought enthusiasm...

...Indeed, most of the proposed reductions amount to postponing projects still on the drawing board or not filling positions in the civil service as the become vacant...

...Not very imaginative in their fetishes, I would say...

...For the first time in history, perhaps, a disease was cured by political meansma reversal of the Khrushchevian pattern of"curing" political dissent by psychiatric methods_9 Literary critics have fared even worse than the psychiatrists when faced with homosexuality...

...Because it continues to do so, Britain will remain less prosperous as well...

...It is not uncommon, Aaron points out, for a frequenter of the "baths," fetid with urine, sweat, and other effluvia, to "make love" [sic] with a dozen men in one night--and never, in the gloom, to see their faces...

...I sympathize with the discreet homosexuals who must endure governmental incursion into their most intimate affairs...

...But the stated goal of our traffic policy--which is usually to minimize deaths in traffic accidents-simply doesn't stand scrutiny...

...it was preceded by "gay girl," a nineteenth-century term with connotations of commonness, even of prostitution...

...Stephen R. Maloney The Laveuder Menace Though many homosextals are harmless and even goodly, the "gay liberation" raovement is tawdry, libertine, and barbaric...

...Danger is groovy...

...Like other outlaw bands, the so-called "gays" have developed their own jargon and are expropriating some of the best words in our language...

...There does come a time in certain social issues when tolerance becomes spiritual laziness...

...Howe's vision is clear...

...Stern goes on to say, "In such men the ambivalence towards the mother is so deep and the homosexual tie is so strong that they cannot commit themselves to a woman other than by an ambivalent and sadistic relationship...

...Adding such a nonprice restriction to the rise in the pump price of gasoline reduces the elasticity of demand for gasoline, and helps to stabilize the oil cartel...

...Many people are thus, like William Aaron, drawn in two directions, and Gay Lib rhetoric functions like a siren song, asking young people to smash their lives on the rocks of perversion and despair...

...Under the circumstances, there is inevitably a considerable random element in law enforcement: the typical driver gets arrested for what he does all the time and what he sees his fellow drivers doing continually...

...Very few lands have openly tolerated homosexuality...

...Rather, roads are owned communally, and though the government charges us for using them, it is a flat excise on gasoline so small relative to the total cost of running an automobile that we act essentially as if roads were free...

...That time has not yet come with Gay Lib, I believe, but it may...

...further, "where the quality of love [suggesting an enduring relationship] is lacking, the lack must be compensated by quantity of sexual pleasure...

...we do not need to call out the SWAT squad and the National Guard lest these United States go the way of Heliogabalus' Rome...

...I have visited gay bars in many 'of the world's great cities," says William Aaron, "but I have never seen one which was truly gay in the best sense of the word...

...In his remarks on Don Juanism, Stern metaphorically puts the Playboy philosopher and the Gay theoreticians in the same intellectual bed: Don Juan is "the man who is fascinated by conquest but unable to love...

...Viktor Frank], survivor of Auschwitz, psychiatrist, and originator of logotherapy, sees a direct link between the "Bunny" girl--being old-fashioned, he calls her the "chorus girl"--and homosexuality...

...There is little self-control (or self-knowledge) in most homosexual literature and activity and a corresponding unconcern for the survival of civilization...

...The Supreme Court's recent ruling upholding Virginia's sodomy laws, and permitting the enforcement of such laws by raids on private residences, left me with mixed feelings...

...The tawdriness of "homosexual liberation"--and of its brothers under the skin on the magazine rack--can blind us to the true gaiety of the nuptial relationship of man and woman which has endured throughout so many millennia of poverty and sorrow, of affluence and joy...

...Was she a "sexual object...

...In fact, promiscuity is the norm in homosexuality...

...The Dutch expert on homosexuality, Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, says of childhood in our time that "the possibility for normal development has diminished...

...Gay" replaced "homophile" which replaced "homosexual"--in much the same manner that the "dole" begat "welfare" which begat "public assistance," both examples reflecting our never-ending struggle to neutralize the odious...

...Far from it: roads are allocated on a first-come firstserved basis like foul balls in a ball park...

...The rest are mainly restrictions on one' s use of the space in the flow of vehicles: speed limits, requirements for use of turn signals, permitted characteristics of the vehicle, and so on...

...All of the foregoing squares with the Soviet citizen's evaluation of the legal framework facing him...

...Among their gay brothers, the size of one's sexual organ is the key to happiness...

...The parallel dosn't end with that...

...so that they start making out much earlier, and "get bored sooner with sex in pairs...

...I never would have thought to ask, but now, in the shadow of decades, I should like to think that at least sometimes she was...

...If the services themselves become more productive, further improvement might follow...

...I f the government were trying to minimize deaths, it would simply prohibit automotive transportation...

...But as anthropologist Marvin K. Opler shows, that just isn't so...

...Was my mother a drudge in subordination to the "master group" ? No more a drudge than my father who used to come home with hands and feet blistered from his job as a presser...

...The traffic cop makes no presumption that one was using the road in the public interest...

...In both cases the situation produces a feeling of powerlessness...

...infidelity is also of the essence of the relationship...

...So too, we spot a space in a flow of moving vehicles and try to beat other drivers to it...

...The one is virile, the other effeminate...

...One doesn't have to be a Freudian m note the childishness of most homosexual behavior...

...This method of allocation, however, entails split-second decision-making which must inevitably be erroneous on many occasions...

...Psychiatrist Evelyn Hooker supports the view that "the most standardized and characteristic pattern...in the 'gay' world is the 'one-night stand.' " The gay bar is the center of activist homosexual life...

...William Aaron rightfully points out that "Freedom means options," and that there is a submission to obsessions in homosexuality that denies freedom...

...In William Butler Yeats' beautiful "Lapis Lazuli," we read the words, "for Hamlet and Lear are gay...

...As the night wears on, those uglies who have not made a connection become agitated with sexual energy...

...Just as we know that a "liberation" group is invariably composed of a collection of tyrants connected with liberty only in that they shun it, so the word-"gay" inevitably refers to the human equivalent of a chamber of horrors, a person whose self-hatred is only matched by his loathing for the "straight" world that provides him with an excuse for his own failures...

...Most drivers face this, and make no effort to fight conviction...

...Hilton, professor of economics at UCLA, is an expert on transportation policy...

...Opler lists the ancient Greeks, the beraches (search me...

...And they are mysteriously compelled to go through this act of conquest and flight in an eternally repetitive experience...

...But the basioproblem is one of choice...

...With a firm hand in the Treasury, North Sea oil, and good luck, Britain's economy may pick up again, thereby making social spending nearly as manageable as it was even a decade ago...

...In Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation there are to be no "Jacks...

...The homosexuals' stress on self.gratification indicates very little of the concern for the rights of others, very little interest in "consent...

...There is nothing in the framework of traffic policy which encourages anybody to seek an optimum between costs and beneGeorge IV...

...The late Arnold Gingrich, generally a superb editor, provides an exemplum of how far artistic tastes have declined when he gushes about Answered Prayers, "you walked in the wide-open door to wallow in the delicious dirt dished up by almost anybody about nearly everybody you've ever heard of...

...Non-coital] love rends to the good of the beloved, the other to the ruin of both...

...George Irl...

...it is utterly humorless, like any pink-blooded American "liberation" movement, and it presents us with two major dangers...

...occasionally a couple drops outside for a quickie, to return a few moments later, looking for "fresh meat...

...In the happy days before the turn of the twentieth century, Americans called their decade "Gay...

...An Elmer Wayne Henley (the Houston pederast-murderer) may be as rare among homosexuals as a Richard Speck is among heteros, but there is a sadistic tone to much Gay Lib propaganda that is disturbing...

...Spectators dash for a foul ball, jumping over seats or diving down aisles until somebody takes a firm grasp on the ball, after which the other participants in the chase usually, though not invariably, observe his property right to it...

...The strongest enforcers of laws regulating consensual, adult sexual activity, it seems to me, are the same legal pecksniffs that recently tried to proscribe mother-daughter and father-son school functions...

...When William Aaron in his gay days confronted a particularly libidinous pederast who hired seven- and eight-year-old slum dwellers to assuage his lusts, the man tossed aside Aaron's criticisms with the comment, "Let's face it...

...Gay sexuality in fact is almost wedded to lavatories...

...The social reforms of Disraeli give British Conservatives as good a claim to the patrimony of the welfare state as Labour has...

...If Dennison is right (whatever he means), than homosexuality is much worse than we have thought...

...Andrew Lyric has suggested that dictatorships cannot grow or thrive in a society where there is a strong family system...

...In our modern Babylons, one of the most striking features of Gay propaganda is its similarity to the ostensibly macho, " i f it feel~ good, do it" Playboyism marketed by Hefner, Guccione, and other journalistic flesh-merchants...

...As a conservative--and indeed a closet libertarian--I am not one to begrudge homosexuals their civil liberties or their privacy...

...It will be the thesis of this short polemic that traffic law enforcement produces most of what is most repellent in Soviet society because of a common bond--the absence of property rights...

...reveals more about that cruel land's justice than the lawmakers might have known...

...the adult male-young boy relationship so often confused with modern pederasty was 12 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 anathema to the Greeks...

...Ruitenbeek goes on, "For the growing boy...the contemporary family provides neither refuge nor models...

...In a 14 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 brilliant Harper's review of (bisexual) Kate MiUett's feminist screed, Sexual Politics, Irving Howe talks about his own family: I recall my mother and father sharing their years in trouble and affection, meeting together the bitterness of sudden poverty during the Depression, both of them working for wretched wages in the stinking garment center, helping one another, in the shop, on the subways, at home, through dreadful years...

...Rather, he presumes that one was using the road for some illicit purpose, and he looks for evidence of a stolen car, violation of liquor or narcotics statutes, flight from prosecution, or other crimes, Traffic courts have a nominal presumption of innocence, but the justice is mainly on a level of if-you-were-arrested-you-did-it...

...Just as revisionist historians have claimed to discover that Harry Truman started the Cold War in order to make the world safe for Smith and Wesson, so "Gay" revisionists would have us believe that history is a veritable procession of fuchsia chariots, emperors in drag, poets pining for the lad next door, and the boys in the band composing unforgettable symphonies...

...Just as the Heath Government's efforts yielded almost invisible results, so too, one would predict, will the muchheralded "austerity" plan of the current administration...

...In case even these measures prove too restrictive, the Labour Government is committed to modify them "as the general course of the economy and the most important needs of the community require...

...Plato identifies the true nature of the adult-youth relationship as, well, Platonic: "the one love [pederasty] is made for pleasure...

...Gay boy" comes from Australia, c. 1925...

...me eyebeams go from face to face...

...His property rights are limited to a bare set of personal possessions...

...contempt for those who find some gratification in family life," we can offer models that manifest a true gaiety of act and vision...

...Stern refuses to call these men "lovers," because they lack "the lasting commkment" necessary to love...

...indeed, the postwar history has largely been one of Socialists expanding programs while in office, and Tories preserving or improving them...

...We don't lay out a fee for the use of any given thoroughfare...

...Because the system involves queuing, as most forms of nonprice allocation do, many of the rules are directives for queuing behavior: observance of red lights, stop signs, and the like...

...i think it is more important that we revivify the family than that we expend our energy seeing that "homosexual rights" are strictly observed...

...the shared judgment among thoughtful people in all vital and humane civilizations has been that sexuality finds its highest fulfillment in the connubial union of man and woman and that society builds its achievements on the foundation of the family...

...the types that found an all-male elementary school choir inflagrante delicto, that is, singing without female accompaniment...

...The rare consummation of such affairs was designated "vile behavior" and was punishable by death...

...Because of the risks involved, the process of allocation is circumscribed by a vast lmmber of rules for dealing with the resource...

...Over against the hatred of the normal, what one observer has called "contempt for ordinary life, contempt for ordinary people...

...Auden's "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love" is the only homosexual poem in this century to convey with artistic grace a romantic feeling toward a person of the same sex...