Dark MAGA The brief saga of Madison Cawthorn has come to an end (for now) with his defeat in the North Carolina primary. His meteoric rise to the U.S. Congress made him its youngest member upon his election in 2020. Cawthorn is a Trump Republican who looks like a matinee idol from the ’50s and gets around in a wheelchair. He spews homophobic rhetoric with the best of them but lives with a staff member named Stephen Smith who’s clearly his lover. Reportedly there’s a ton of incriminating evidence in the form of photos, videos, and screenshots of intimate scenes. This and other revelations—including complaints of sexual harassment by other staffers—caused a panicky Cawthorn to marry his girlfriend before the 2020 election. But guess who accompanied them on their honeymoon to Dubai: Stephen Smith! After Cawthorn took office, the panic shifted to Congressional Republicans, who launched an investigation into his “inappropriate relationship.” His next move was to tell the media that Republicans in Congress had invited him to sex orgies and offered him cocaine—which is when his Party support collapsed altogether. In defeat, the never charming Cawthorn vowed revenge on his enemies, declaring that “It’s time for dark MAGA to take command.” That sounds scary, but it’s something we should probably know about.
The End of Sex A prominent white nationalist, Nick Fuentes is telling his male supporters that having sex with women is gay. He makes this astonishing assertion thus: “Having sex in itself is gay. … Think about it this way: What’s gayer than being like ‘I need cuddles. I need kisses. I need to spend time with a woman.’ That’s very sus[pect].” In other words, the sex act is a girly thing, so by abstaining totally, Fuentes boasts: “That makes me really more heterosexual than anyone.” A leader of the right-wing “Groyper Army,” a violently racist, anti-Semitic group that participated in the Jan. 6th uprising, Fuentes has admitted that he once kissed a girl in high school, but after that he never wanted to kiss a girl again. At some point he starts to sound like General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, whose disgust over spilling his “essence” with a woman leads him to start a nuclear war. It’s tempting to see Fuentes’ views as bizarre and unprecedented, but really it’s an old obsession he has stumbled upon, a rejection of (heterosexual) sex because of its association with women and the values they represent (love, nurturance, compassion). From the Puritans to the Nazis to today’s white nationalists, it’s baked into authoritarian movements past and present.
Now It’s Official To be covered in The New York Times can be newsworthy in itself, even when the item being reported on isn’t newsworthy at all. Two cases in point:
1. A retrospective on Ed Koch, New York’s mayor from 1978 to ’89, addressed what has been an open secret for decades: the mayor was gay. Since Koch never came out publicly, The Times’ story had the effect of making it official by—well, by being The Times. While presenting the ample evidence for Koch’s gayness, the paper didn’t address its own reticence on the topic. Some would call it complicity in Koch’s closetedness when he was mayor, which coincided with the height of the AIDS crisis in New York. His desire to protect his secret may well have played a role in his slow and inadequate response to the plague.
2. On a less sinister note, The Times ran a lengthy piece on the fact that many lesbians like to read romance novels, treating it as a hot new trend. Ahem, this very magazine ran feature articles on lesbians’ love of romance fiction in 1995 and 2006. What The Times article did, yet again, was to make this phenom official for the general public. So be it. Summer is here, and anyone walking along Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown on a sunny day can discover it for themselves.
