“Poor self-esteem is strongly connected with cult behaviour and susceptibility to fascism”.
Eric Hoffer, philosopher and social scientist (1902-1983)

From perfect pecs to rainbow rallies, modern gay public life has become neurotically supremacist and hysterically conformist. Extreme view, or grain of truth?

'Fascism': A supremacist stance arising out of past inflicted inferiority, a euphoric born-again pledge of allegiance to a secular cause with minimal doctrine, a social code and symbols that demonstrate identity and loyalty, the fetishisation of fashion and idealisation of lifestyle, male dominance and cult of youth, vested interests - businesses, organisations, media - seize and maintain power, reinforcing and spreading the code, often with mass rallies.

Surveying such a list of traits which historians, psychologists and sociologists suggest part-identify a fascistic phenomenon makes uncomfortable reading for gay eyes: fascism, with a small 'f', needn’t always spell mass-genocide by little men in boots.

Consider the page-upon-page gay medium monotone of homogonous homo hulks - all white, able-bodied, body-beautiful, young professional middle-class males - seemingly caught in the throws of their own effortless perfection, the plethora of 'gay'-tagged lifestyle options - from grooming to plumbing - as we dutifully march in step down the Great Gay List, the fanatical cult of all things gay that unites and binds far beyond a mere common predilection for dick.

Consider the gay-is-good-is-happy mantra that suspends all critical thought, numbing all detraction, the unspoken aspersion that the hurtful oppressive heterosexist majority is, by comparison, ugly of body and soul, now justly banished from the glorious gay life it can only wistfully watch a-tip-toe over the gay ghetto wall, the assertion that any alternative or private 'self-loathing' queers who don’t conform must likewise be mere shadows.

Consider the gaudy gay-gay-gayness from dawn to dusk, desperately consuming the good life for all its 'cultural' worth, the pink businesses who mould and profit from 'community', re-branding citizens as consumers and promoting a lifestyle where we define ourselves in terms of what we buy, not who and what we are, that single bit of us that is our sexuality, projected into every possible aspect of life - from interior décor to holiday resort - and at a pink price.

And why not? Surely, coming out means coming home: to a better world of spandex and uniform bliss at a ten percent discount for the fully paid up. Prides bigger each year as gay hits vogue and the self-contained all-a-boy-could-need ghetto bulges at its sagging seems. Anointed and strangely disembodied, our bulks have at last broken free of the shackles of mere procreation to devote all our energies to the narcissistic fetishism of our own supreme masculinity and almost mystical, classical quest for botoxed youth.

It would all be so easy to satirise if mainstream media weren’t too scared of being labelled homophobic, and if the gay media themselves weren’t broadly in collusion. Indeed, in the gay world, it’s all gone beyond satire: the rainbow toilet plunger souvenir brought back from the Castro package tour held up for its iconic tee-hee expression of gay “culture” and sensibility.

Yet it’s both alarming and amusing to predict where this seemingly incessant and increasingly hysterical, senseless march will lead. Gays who had once been made to feel shit about their sexuality are now made to feel shit about their inadequate appearance and humdrum lifestyle. Buggered be the blacks, women, disabled, over forties and the poor! Glory be the rich, white, gorgeous boy-babe sons of Kylie, so lucky-lucky-lucky to be born so wonderfully gay!

Will it turn ugly and ever more segregate? Will it continue to mute ungrateful Great Gay Project detractors? Or will the Grand Plan run out of steam, caving in under a sugar-coated gloss which merely sweetens the bitter pill of underlying inadequacy?

And at the end of the day - beyond the rainbow - as we all peel off our stylish, discreetly-branded shirts to flex manly pecs in a sea of clones, do we - gays above all - really lack the sense of irony to see how unfree we are, a tribe in fetters now largely of our own making?

But - one may say - it can’t all be a fascistic, commercialised, communal response to having been made to feel crap about ourselves for centuries! If so, where the authoritarian, charismatic and unelected leadership? Where the fey Franco, homo Hitler or molly Mussolini?

True: no Great Gay Demagogue to bow down to. Rather: an imaginary Leviathan - a mental monster made up of all the faceless happy homo hunks on all the pages of all the mags, in all the bars on all the scenes, made up of all our little insecure aspiring selves. It’s an inner phallic totem, built upon poor self-esteem, which we all bow down to with as much vigour as if there really were some awesome booted homo hunk cracking a whip down Queer Street. We’re all privately submitting to little inner dictatorial demons of our own joint makings.

Whereas there was once a serious fight for gay rights and social, attitudinal change, now the maintenance and peddling of 'gay' has become the gay infrastructure’s very raison d’etre. “Gay” has become its own vested interest, the radical subverted into status quo.

Isn’t it time the gay world stopped feeling inferior, allowing itself to be traded upon to produce a cloned cult that consumes the gay life? Isn’t it time gay people got over their own inner oppressions? Isn’t it time queers stopped defining themselves almost exclusively in terms of their sexuality, broke out of the ghetto and got a life?

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