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Crafting Bi/Homosexual Youth

Judith Reisman
2002
Reproduced with Permission

The press can both stimulate public opinion and miseducate it . . . . The press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive, and judiciary. One would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible.1 --Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

I. Introduction

Based on its free speech privileges, the American press is charged with providing a "window to the world" by which the polity may locate the source of a social malaise, evaluate and correct it. But, if establishment media - news and entertainment - broadcasts disinformation and conceals adverse information about a matter or malaise, then the Fourth Estate becomes an unelected fifth column directing law and public policy. Philip Kotler's classic work Marketing Management2 documents how controlled news is used to "both stimulate public opinion and miseducate" it.3 Rodgers and Kotler report that in a media campaign, two and one-half percent of our social leaders often sway roughly thirteen percent of the public early-on who later move another thirty-four percent, and so on until a majority accept and adapt to the proffered new product or idea.4

Media portrayal - positive or negative - can have a profound impact on public perception. For example, the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York are widely considered to have been a turning point for homosexuality. The riots are widely perceived to have been a response to police harassment of innocent homosexual patrons in a gay bar.5 However, the riots actually were the result of a police raid on a center for drug trafficking, boy prostitution, and pederasts.6 In that vein, this article will offer evidence of widespread media and academic censorship and misrepresentation, the end result of which is a controlled and distorted public debate about homosexuality, now called "gay" rights.

II. Cleaning Up the Gay Image

A. The Press' Complicity

The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) recently boasted that although homosexuals are less than two percent of the population, three-fourths of the people who decide the content of the front page of the New York Times are homosexual.7 The NLGJA website states that it "works from within the news industry to foster fair and accurate coverage of lesbian and gay issues. NLGJA opposes workplace bias against all minorities and provides professional development for its members."8 Much of the Fourth Estate currently discriminates by employing only bi/homosexuals to cover "sexual orientation" issues, further compromising the public's ability to obtain unbiased reports.9 On the evidence, what the NLGJA views as "fair" and "accurate" and what it views as "bias" evidences a serious conflict of interest.

Joseph Farah, editor-in-chief of WorldNetDaily, described the problem as follows: "There's an indelicate old newspaper saying that summarizes succinctly the way the industry traditionally viewed the issue of personal and journalistic conflicts of interest. The curmudgeonly city editor would say to his reporter, 'Hey, I don't care if you sleep with elephants, just don't cover the circus.'"10

That was the American journalistic standard for a long time, right up until the 1970s. Today people sleeping in the elephant tent, the hyena cage, the sheep exhibit, and the gerbil display are covering the circus. In the last quarter-decade, American journalism has transitioned from a profession of disinterested chroniclers to one more akin to a band of lobbyists using the press to support activist causes.

One of the most effective pressure groups in this brave new media world is the NLGJA. Farah reported:

Have you ever wondered why coverage of homosexuals and their cause is so universally positive? Now you know. The NLGJA's president works at the Dallas Morning News. One vice president works at CNN. Another works at Newsday. The treasurer works at the New York Times. The secretary works for USA Today. Looks like they've got most of the bases covered.

. . . .

Barbara Walters, Lesley Stahl, New York Times Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, all . . . have participated in previous NLGJA events.11

Moreover, on September 13, Farah reported on the NLGJA convention in San Francisco:

I told you this conference was important for one reason -- it's the best example of how our national press corps has become a band of activists, promoting political and cultural causes under the guise of objective news reporting.

While I have been chronicling the activities of [NLGJA] for several years, it wasn't until the 10th anniversary convention in San Francisco last weekend that the group truly came out of the closet with regard to its own activist agenda.

This is not, as the group has portrayed itself, a "professional organization" that promotes higher standards, or gives its members a chance to compare notes, or an outfit that plans good parties for homosexual journalists once a year. It is, instead, a group that has bent so far toward changing the newsroom culture that the big debate in San Francisco was whether journalists should even bother getting other points of view on homosexuals' issues and stories.

. . . .

CBS correspondent and NLJGA member Jeffrey Kofman made his thinking clear: "The argument (is): Why do we constantly see in coverage of gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues the homophobes and the fag-haters quoted in stories when, of course, we don't do that with Jews, blacks, et cetera?"

Paula Madison, vice president of diversity at NBC and news director for the NBC's New York City affiliate WNBC, added: "I agree with him. I don't see why we would seek out . . . the absurd, inane point of view just to get another point of view."

. . . .

Up until now, lip service has been paid to the notion of balance in the press. Even though we all know it is a myth and that the corporate media are in bed with the very groups they claim to be covering objectively, there was a "pretense" toward fairness. That's gone. Hasta la vista. Bye-bye.12

The mainstream press has ignored recent studies confirming the historical professional view that homosexuality is correlated with disorder. In 1999, the Archives of General Psychiatry published two studies correlating homosexuality with significantly higher levels of mental illness than among the population at large.13 Yet a Westlaw search did not reveal a single newspaper story in the United States on either of the two studies. Even before those studies were published, George Rekers, the pioneering researcher in the study Gender Identity Disorder, said that "it would now appear logical that homosexuality per se be re-examined as a mental disorder."14 Yet the press rarely covers scientific research unfavorable to gay activists. Instead, politically incorrect researchers like Rekers are ignored. On the other hand, the press repeatedly cites studies as "fact" that allege homosexuality is biologically determined.15 Though the NLGJA has only recently become so blatant16 about its agenda, such blatancy is the product of a well considered and brilliantly executed strategy that began about the time the NGLJA was founded. Below is the diagram provided by homosexual activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen in After The Ball, addressing what they call their "conspiracy" (in their own words).17 Kirk's psychological background and Madsen's Madison Avenue commercial advertising background enabled the two Harvard graduates to market a new homosexual public face. Kirk and Madsen argued that the AIDS epidemic could conquer American resistance to Gays in the '90s.18 The Kirk and Madsen "conspiracy" urges the homosexual movement to cite the research of Alfred Kinsey (now discredited, especially his false claims of ten to thirty-seven percent male homosexuality).19 They also suggest covering up male homosexual promiscuity and predation toward youth and boys by claiming to be traditionalists and faultless victims of religious bigotry.20 Kirk and Madsen's "Portfolio of Pro-Gay Advertising"21 has been the national model for these pro-gay arguments. To change public attitudes toward homosexuals, Kirk and Madsen explain, activists must target an "unbigoted" audience, i.e. children.22 Instead of free and open debate, Kirk and Madsen advocate silencing critics, desensitizing mainstream America to bi/homosexuality, "jamming" any contrary information, and converting and mobilizing sympathetic political forces.23



Even now, purging or silencing critics from mainstream academic and media channels involves demonizing those they cannot "desensitize."24 Kirk and Madsen explain how to depict people who would declare bi/homosexuality as an unhealthy norm, tying them to murders like Adolph Hitler25 and the Klu Klux Klan:

[Following our techniques] propagandist advertisement can depict homophobic and homohating bigots as crude loudmouths and assholes - people who say not only 'faggot' but 'nigger,' 'kike,' and other shameful epithets - who are 'not Christian.' It can show them being criticized, hated, shunned. It can depict gays experiencing horrific suffering as the direct result of the homohatred - suffering of which even most bigots would be ashamed to be the cause. It can, in short, link homohating bigotry with all sorts of attributes the bigot would be ashamed to possess, and with social consequences he would find unpleasant and scary.26

The Kirk and Madsen model had some rather successful precursors. Alfred Kinsey - one of the founding fathers of what is now called the "sexual revolution" - applied these same undemocratic principles of silencing, desensitizing, jamming, converting, mobilizing, and demonizing in the 1950s, a time when academia, the press, and Americans generally were far less receptive to libertine sexuality.27

B. Forging the "Conspiracy with the power elite"

According to Kirk and Madsen, "AIDS gives us a chance, however brief, to establish ourselves as a victimized minority."28 Once victims, they explain, homosexuals could expect to receive "America's special protection and care."29 However, changing public attitudes toward homosexuals would necessitate covering up the population's sexually promiscuous conduct that even Kirk and Madsen thoroughly document. To alter public policies on bi/homosexuality that were built on hundreds of years of recorded observation and experience would require an effective media campaign. They explain:

The goal here has been to forge a little entente or conspiracy with the power elite, to jump ahead of public sentiment or ignore it altogether.
Sometimes the tactic works: many executive orders (which sidestep the democratic process) and ordinances passed by city councils . . . constitute political payoffs by elected officials whose candidacy the organized gay community has supported . . . .30
Generally speaking, the most effective propaganda for our cause must succeed in doing three things at once.

In explaining how to produce idealistic gay advertisements, Kirk and Madsen state:

. . . [I]t makes no difference that the ads are lies; not to us, because we're using them to ethically good effect . . . .32
In the early stages of the campaign, the public should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure to homosexual behavior itself. Instead, the imagery of sex per se should be downplayed, and the issue of gay rights reduced, as far as possible, to an abstract social question.33

Kirk and Madsen earlier advised that "[s]traights will be desensitized. . . . [I]nundate them in a continuous flood of gay-related advertising, presented in the least offensive fashion possible. . . . [Then it is possible to] turn next to more difficult, but also more vigorous and rewarding, tactics."34

Repeating often the legitimacy of a "conspiracy" to "jump ahead of public sentiment" and to "sidestep the democratic process" by emotional appeals that displace logic and reality, Kirk and Madsen say to use humor and victimization.35 They also recommend that homosexuals try to "fit in," at least until it is too late to reverse cultural change.36 Kirk and Madsen note that many homosexual men meet in bathrooms for anonymous sexual encounters, propositioning - and often offending - total strangers.37 The authors condemn this, suggesting that the practice, along with its biological residue in bathroom stalls, creates a very negative image for homosexuals:

When you're very different . . . get your foot in the door, by being as similar as possible; then, and only then - when your one little difference is finally accepted - can you start dragging in your other peculiarities, one by one. You hammer in the wedge narrow end first. As the saying goes, allow the camel's nose beneath your tent, and his whole body will soon follow.38

The authors don't suggest that any of the practices they condemn are somehow inappropriate or wrong - only that they must be temporarily subordinated to the campaign for public acceptance of homosexuality.39

The success of this ongoing campaign and the concurrent schoolroom sexual "reeducation" (discussed hereinafter) is visible in the eight-year shift from youthful rejection to youthful acceptance and experimentation with homosexuality. A recent "teen poll" conducted by the establishment girls magazine Seventeen claimed that seventeen percent of teens polled in 1991, versus fifty-four percent polled in 1999, accept homosexuality as appropriate.40 Seventeen casually noted: "Teens today are likely to experiment: twenty-one percent . . . have fantasized about fooling around with someone of the same sex - and fifteen percent say they have actually done so."41

As in Seventeen, at the same time that establishment media carelessly announces juvenile homosexual experimentation, it suppresses data on the culture of male and female inter-gay violence - especially men battered and killed by pickups and prostitutes - although these cases are often reported by the homosexual press itself. Diligently hidden by both homosexual and establishment media are the data on homosexual violence against children and inter-gay "domestic" battery.

C. Hiding Dirty Laundry

The biases of the media are revealed as much by what is not reported as what is reported. Homosexual authors David Island and Patrick Letellier attempt to expose inter-gay violence in their book, Men Who Beat the Men Who Love Them, estimating that up to "650,000 gay men"42 are annually battered; "a gay man is abused . . . every 90 seconds."43 How many of these battered men die at the hands of other homosexuals? There were 3327 cases of gay-on-gay "domestic violence" reported by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs in 199744 - three times the number of "anti-gay" "intimidation" or assaults alleged upon homosexuals that same year.45 Island and Letellier document inter-gay battery as the primary homosexual health problem after 1) AIDS (males), Cancer (females) and 2) drug abuse. They write, "The Director of the Gay Men's Domestic Violence Project . . . in San Francisco stated that domestic violence may affect and poison as many as fifty percent of gay male couples."46 "We believe that far too many [heterosexual] husbands . . . are violent, but that their proportion is closer to twenty percent."47 "Domestic violence is acknowledged, talked about, and dealt with more in straight relationships than in gay male relationships."48

Approximately 21,000 Americans are murdered every year, an average of 58 each day,49 compared to two killings allegedly based on "sexual orientation" in 1996.50 These hard data find "gay" men to be at far greater risk of harm from other gay men and from outraged, often former boy abuse victims, than from homophobic rednecks. Yet Island and Letellier find establishment media and the homosexual media will not print the truth about inter-gay violence. Why?

It "would be just plain bad press for gays and . . . all bad news needs to be suppressed. . . . [G]ay men truly . . . . have a proportionate share of violent individuals in their midst who bash other gay men [and boys] in startlingly high numbers."51 "The gay community needs to recognize that wealthy, white, educated, 'politically correct' gay men batter their lovers."52

The Advocate, the premier magazine for homosexual readers, reports that a minimum of seventy-five percent of its readers admit to engaging in violent sex; twenty percent engaged in sadistic "bondage and discipline"; and fifty-five percent engaged in other sex acts using painful objects.53

Compared to heterosexual distrust or dislike, the rare assault inflicted on someone at a bar and the singular, although horrible, aberrant murder, it is fair to say that the on-going, most significant "hate crimes" against homosexuals are, as Kirk and Madsen noted, inflicted by homosexuals.54 In 1987, "the San Francisco police responded to no fewer than 100 calls per month for gay and lesbian domestic violence. . . . [T]here are thousands upon thousands of victims of gay men's domestic violence in the United States each month."55

In 1981, the homosexual press reported that about ten percent of San Francisco's homicides resulted from homosexual sadomasochistic abuse,56 a finding that would be in keeping with the Reisman & Johnson data (discussed hereinafter), and that of several homophile researchers who cited self-confessed sadism among upscale homosexual Advocate readers.57

D. The Facts vs. Media Coverage

Perhaps one of the most memorable media events of 1998 was the murder of Matthew Shepard, a freshman at the University of Wyoming. The Shepard murder is a case study in media bias and the politicization strategies outlined by Kirk and Madsen. Shepard was lured from a bar, robbed, beaten mercilessly, and left unconscious; he later died in a hospital. The press and gay activists quickly turned Shepard's death into a cause celebre even though family members asked that his death not be politicized, assigning blame for a "climate of anti-gay hate" and "Trickle-Down Hate," culture on conservative Christians.58

The Media Research Center documented how establishment media, including NBC Today, Time, and Newsweek, tried to smear Christians and conservatives by blaming them for an "anti-gay climate" that resulted in the death of Matthew Shepard. In an October 12, 1998, interview with Wyoming Governor Jim Geringer, NBC Today co-host Katie Couric offered her polemical opinion in the form of a question:

Some gay rights activists have said that some conservative political organizations like the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family are contributing to this anti- homosexual atmosphere by having an ad campaign saying if you are a homosexual you can change your orientation. That prompts people to say, "if I meet someone who's homosexual, I'm going to take action to try to convince them or try to harm them." Do you believe that such groups are contributing to this climate?59

NBC reporter David Gregory later repeated gay activists' charges that Shepard's death was the result of "a new cultural war against gays and lesbians[, a] war declared this summer . . . by a coalition of religious-right groups, including the Christian Coalition, which funded advertisements in major newspapers and commercials on TV promoting a campaign to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality."60 In his weekly column, L. Brent Bozell, director of the Media Research Center, derided the smear campaign:

In the last five years the news media have forwarded liberal accusations that Gingrich and Bob Dole were somehow responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing; that pro-life activists somehow encouraged the killing of abortionists; and now once again, a "climate" of conservative speech is endangering the safety of average Americans. Any media outlet that claims to be a forum for fair, high-minded debate should reject these outrageous smears. Instead, the press simply promotes the demands of the liberal "climate" cops that conservatives shut up before they kill again.61

In a later press release, Bozell noted that mainstream environmentalists were not blamed for creating a hostile climate when the Earth Liberation Front set a Colorado ski resort ablaze, yet Christians and social conservatives were smeared for the deaths of Shepard and an abortion doctor.62

Whether intended or not, the media's portrayal of Shepard's murder followed the precise strategy advocated by Kirk and Madsen - silence those who disagree with the agenda by associating them with murderers.63 None of the conservative/Christian groups smeared by gay activists and the press had ever condoned mistreatment or persecution of homosexuals - they had, in fact, condemned it. And one should consider the psychopathology of gay-on-gay violence as far more prevalent than "hate crime" attacks by heterosexuals.64 The press dutifully ignores that information. Moreover, Wyoming police concluded that while Shepard's homosexuality factored into the killers' decision, robbery was the main motive for Shepard's murder.65

On the other hand, the press ignored the nearly simultaneous rape- murder of a 13-year-old Arkansas boy, Jesse Dirkhising (found "bound, gagged . . . repeatedly raped in a sado-masochistic ritual") by two trusted homosexual "partners" - friends of the child's mother.66 Likewise, the press ignored the 1997 rape/murder of Jeffrey Curley, age 10, by two homosexual "partners" until the parents filed a $200 million lawsuit against the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).67

Next Page: E. The Hidden Private Face of the Gay Lifestyle
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