After three long years of first drafts, rewrites and proofreading, my first book —Underdog: Confessions of a Right-Wing Gay Jewish Muckraker — will finally be on the shelves of major bookstores across Canada this week. I’ll leave readers to enjoy an excerpt from Chapter 9 — Loathing on the Left. With any luck, you’ll hanker to read more.

SAVE THE DATE:A special talk and book-signing at Hart House for Toronto Sun readers on Sept. 14 from 7-9:30 p.m. featuring my friend and mentor, the lovely Lorrie Goldstein, as the evening’s host/moderator.

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Within hours of my “Coming Out” column in the Toronto Sun on Pride Day 2007, my inbox filled up with e-mails of support.

One of the first came from then-Ontario Progressive Conservative leader and now Toronto Mayor John Tory, a good friend (until I dared to criticize his record as mayor). Written in the wee hours of that Sunday morning (when Mr. Tory is known to start his day), his words about my courage and my setting of an example were truly genuine and are ones I still remember. If I was the slightest bit shaky about what I’d done, that quickly disappeared over the next few days when the e-mails, calls, and words of encouragement from readers, Sun colleagues, right-wing politicians, bureaucrats from City Hall, and even gays still in the closet kept coming and coming. Nearly 99 per cent of the feedback was positive, heartfelt, and uplifting.

Readers who admitted to growing up in homophobic families wrote me tales of learning as adults that some of their dear friends were gay.

They thanked me for presenting a positive role model. Others, who had no clue I was a lesbian until I wrote that column, told me they didn’t care whether I was gay or straight, black or white — they just loved reading my tell-it-like-it-is columns.

I’d come out so publicly not only to set the record “straight” but to challenge stereotypes. I wanted to educate my readers that gay people can come from every walk of life.

They can even be outspoken Jewish, right-wing, fiscal conservatives. I wasn’t looking for praise or pity. I wanted to make the point that the left doesn’t own the gay agenda.

As the days went by, there was silence from left-wing councillors, and especially from Mayor David Miller. Not that I expected everyone to acknowledge my coming out, and obviously I understood that I was not the left’s cup of tea, but even council’s gay advocate, and my councillor at the time, Kyle Rae, acted like it never happened.

That silence was broken when in the City Hall cafeteria I ran into Paula Fletcher a few days after my column appeared. Taking in the stylish leather jacket I happened to be sporting that day, she asked me if I was dressed in my “dyke suit.”

By then, I’d watched Ms. Fletcher and her fellow leftist councillors long enough to know that what they lacked in class, they made up for in nastiness. Perhaps the behaviour was payback for my refusal to fawn over Mayor Miller — like the rest of the media — and for generally being a pain in the ass on behalf of my readers.

But I thought, I guess rather naively, that when it came to something so deeply personal, they’d put our political differences aside to embrace someone who might help further such an important cause. I remember calling the comment classless and Ms. Fletcher subsequently pretending it was simply a lighthearted joke.

She was hardly the only person from City Hall who mocked my very public coming out.

A few months later, I learned from a councillor that when he tried to suggest to Kyle Rae, the Grand Poobah of All That Is Gay, that it was great what I had done so very publicly, Mr. Rae apparently retorted that while I may be a lesbian, I’m a “bad” lesbian.

If being a bad lesbian constitutes calling the likes of Kyle Rae out on his expenditures as a councillor, or daring to ask him tough questions about whether he’s pushing through deals for developers that were well beyond city density and planning rules, then yes, I’m a bad lesbian.

To be a “good” lesbian in the eyes of Mr. Rae, I’m guessing one had to bend and scrape, fawn over him, be malleable, and turn a blind eye to his tight ties with developers.

Mr. Rae was the epit­ome of the “do as I say, not as I do” liberal thinker. I’d regularly see him heave himself out of his council seat to express mock hysteria at some alleged slight, or homophobic remark, by one or more of his supposedly intolerant council colleagues. He didn’t see the irony, or hypocrisy, in his puerile cheap shots and hissy fits at alleged “bad” lesbians, such as myself.

City’s Hall’s Lib-left didn’t evolve much in the two years between my public coming out and my marriage to Denise.

When my colleagues in the City Hall press gallery kindly threw me a party a few days before I left to get married, neither the mayor nor one left-of-centre councillor, except for Shelley Carroll, were gracious enough to come down from their second-floor offices to wish me well.

Even Mike Del Grande, who as a devout Catholic doesn’t condone same-sex marriage, made sure to drop by with a card and a gift. I also wrote a column to run the day Denise and I got married, lauding the NDP for fighting to give gay people in Canada the right to marry.

Again I received many wonderful e-mails — one of the most memorable coming from an Orthodox rabbi. He said that while same-sex marriage wasn’t recognized by reli­gious Jews like himself, he wanted us to know that he was thrilled that Denise and I were building a loving Jewish home together and that we weren’t missing out on being married by a rabbi under a chuppah.

In stark contrast, there was almost no reaction to that column from the left at City Hall or my left­ wing critics. I certainly did not lose any sleep over the left’s silence, and again, I’m not so presumptuous as to take real offence to it, but I was starting to feel like a Canadian version of Condoleezza Rice, whose appointment as the first black female secretary of state in U.S. history received almost no reaction from the left.

Truth be told, all of this is sadly predictable. It says a lot about the character, or lack thereof, of the liberals. It wasn’t just that they actually believed themselves well within their rights to behave with such small-mindedness because I’d been “mean” to them in print — to reiterate, I had held their feet to the fire — or had been an alleged “bad” lesbian for having the balls to do my job. It was also because I challenged their clearly narrow-minded view of the world.

Who said one cannot be a fiscal conservative or support a right-of-centre political stance and be openly gay? Well, in fact, it’s the narrow of mind, those who should be ashamed of themselves for trying to pigeonhole a group into a singular stereotype. I’ve actually had people on Twitter — which is dominated mostly by the Lib-left — claim that right-of­ centre gays are for the most part self-loathing. Really? A story told to me not too long ago by a friend of mine, Harvey Brownstone, who also happened to be the first openly gay man appointed to a judgeship in Toronto, proved how firmly held the stereotype can be.

The family court judge, who also presides at some criminal hearings, was having dinner with a group of Toronto lesbians, self-identifying leftists as it turns out, and he happened to mention that he and I had grown up together in Hamilton and had recently reconnected. He also mentioned, seemingly to their horror, that I was out and very public about it. They argued with him, saying I couldn’t be out and right-wing too. He invited them to read the columns in which I talk very publicly about being married to Denise. To this day, I’m guessing they have not taken a look at what I wrote about coming out or getting married, or at the very least would never admit they were wrong.

The point is that it’s as if the two ideas are mutually exclusive. But the bottom line is that I always have and always will agree that gays can be conservatives, or even Scientologists for that matter.

The Lib-leftists have convinced themselves they are toler­ant, inclusive champions of diversity, advocates for the down­ trodden and the poor, and paragons of open-mindedness. The truth is, at least in my experience, they are close-minded, intolerant, petulant, and prone to stereotyping. If they are challenged with facts, they will invariably go on the offence, often resorting to cheap, personal attacks.

All too many Lib­-leftists I’ve encountered and written about see absolutely no irony in the fact that while they purport to want to champion the downtrodden, and forever make a great show of supposedly doing so, leftist politicians, do-gooders, and assorted poverty industry activists are not only the first to line up at the public trough but have spent years sucking it dry.

They’re masters at recycling: if they do a terrible job, or get their hands caught in the cookie jar at one non-profit organization, they always seem to land unscathed at another. Keiko Nakamura, who allowed spending abuses to occur under her watch at Toronto Community Housing Corporation and was eventu­ally pushed out with a $320,000 severance for her incompetence, found a soft landing at Goodwill Industries, making initially $215,000 a year and then $230,000 in 2014. In early 2016, she managed to run that organization into the ground too. It defies logic. Yet most of them don’t like the idea of their comfortably thin view of the world being upset, and heaven forbid one should go after the entitlements of those working in the social housing and poverty industries or for non-profit organizations, or should try to untangle their stranglehold on our public sector institutions and agencies. I liken them to a bunch of cockroaches, as they have tremendous staying power.Far too many of the Lib-leftists are adept at organizing, bullying, and knifing anyone in the back or front who dares stand in their way.

Those on the Lib-left are very selectively tolerant, selective in their inclusiveness, and, as I discovered when I came out, selective about those toward whom they direct any generosity of spirit. People who march to their political drum beat — muttering all the phony rhetoric they expect to hear — are tolerated, even set on a pedestal, despite their obvious flaws and very public blunders. Openly gay former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister George Smitherman is a perfect example of someone who has constantly received special treatment by the media and his fellow politicians. After allowing the eHealth nightmare to unfold under his watch, turning a blind eye to the spending abuses by the CEO of Ornge, appearing to mock seniors who suffer from incon­tinence by proposing a photo opportunity in adult diapers, and selling Ontario’s energy future down the road by secretly inking a deal with Samsung (to create a multi-billion-dollar wind turbine facility), Mr. Smitherman actually thought he had what it took to be mayor of Toronto in 2010. And why not? The Lib-left sheep, led by their mouthpiece the Toronto Star, saw nothing wrong with the fact that he was a bad politician, had a whole closet full of baggage, and, in my estimation, was not known for being a particularly kind human being. In fact, he earned himself the nickname “Furious George.”

I can only imagine, if I’d called him a “bad” gay man or pressed the case that Mr. Smitherman had been addicted to party drugs before running for politics — in the same way the media obsessed about Rob Ford’s drinking and crack cocaine use — how his apologists would have squealed in self­ righteous indignation. True, he has shown the courage to be true to himself by being out. But let’s face it, like far too many politicians, Mr. Smitherman is a narcissist. He had already proven during his time at Queen’s Park that he didn’t give a hoot about providing services to those truly in need. If he had, he wouldn’t have allowed billions of dollars that could have been used on health care for an aging demographic to be squandered on eHealth and other government fiascos, with­ out giving it a second thought. If Mr. Smitherman had had the slightest bit of remorse over his failings as a provincial politician, he would have never thought himself worthy of running for Toronto mayor, or more accurately, worthy of rescuing Toronto from the fiscal morass left behind by David Miller, another narcissist.

But without the slightest bit of guilt and more than a touch of brazenness, this guy thought he was the man to put Toronto back on a solid footing.

That fact alone was disturbing enough to me and many others. It was even more shocking to me how throughout 2010 the Lib-leftists and even a gaggle of Red Tories circled the wagons. Reinventing history, they painted this guy as a saint, as someone who was open­ minded, had a heart, and should be given nothing short of a medal for his desire to turn the city around post-Mr. Miller.

What about all the money he’d squandered in his succession of cabinet posts, helping to leave Ontario mired in debt, and the fact that he was part of a Liberal government that saw no issue with nickeling and diming seniors and the vulner­able to cut costs?

These “minor details” were conveniently swept under the rug.

Rob Ford, as sweaty and socially awk­ward as he was, truly wanted to get the city’s debt under control so there would be more services for the people who most needed them.

Unlike Mr. Smitherman, he walked the talk, never taking trips at the taxpayer’s expense or using his office budget, and he made it his mission to get Toronto back on a solid financial footing while still finding ways to save tax money. Though Mr. Ford came across as bumbling, inar­ticulate, and extremely rough around the edges, his heart was in the right place. He wanted to undo the fiscal damage foisted on taxpayers by his predecessor, who seemed to care only about the image he saw in the mirror.

Joining forces in a desperate attempt to fend off Rob Ford’s growing popularity in the polls and to win at all costs in 2010, the Lib-left were persistent about painting Mr. Smitherman’s opponent as homophobic, inarticulate, heartless, mean-spirited, and just plain bad for the city.

And that was on a good day.

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Excerpted from Underdog: Confessions of a Right-Wing Gay Jewish Muckraker. Copyright © 2016 Sue-Ann Levy. Published by Signal, an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.