I can understand why Milo Yiannopoulos’s words about pederasty strike readers as loathsome. They’ve already cost him an invitation to CPAC and apparently even his big book deal. It is indeed shocking for someone to state (falsely) that a 13-year-old boy of exceptional maturity may be prepared for sex and might benefit from a relationship with a much older man, even though the age difference guarantees that such interaction would be unequal and probably exploitative. But — and this is a big but: what he said is quite common in gay subculture, almost banal, though both left and right tend to downplay or hide it when they discuss policy matters.

I take seriously his joke about being sexually abused, which certainly fits in with his overall pattern of behavior. Many boys abused by older gay men are told this litany of rationalizations: This is who you are, you must be true to yourself, keep breathing and it will stop hurting, you will learn to like this, why fight this, it was you who wanted this, don’t you remember, you asked me to show you, nobody will believe you now that you’ve done it already so just settle in with the gay community for the long haul. Once the molester has conquered you he will likely throw you away, but the gay community will protect its own at all costs, and will crush you ruthlessly if you tell the truth to the world at large.

In a society soaked in porn where sexual orientation is discussed openly in front of small children, there will certainly be 12- and 13-year-olds who think they want sex and think they are ready for it. When we discuss “gay identity” with 6th graders, which is very common, what are we discussing? We are talking about sexual acts. Perhaps people need to stand up and resist the Human Rights Campaign’s recent push to force such curricula on elementary and middle schools.

The gay adults who often oversee such youth clubs like to project their own highly edited memories of growing up on young people (remember the “It Gets Better” series?). It is naive to think that you can encourage a 7th grader to identify as gay and then be shocked when he has sex with a man. Given the shortage of gay-identified boys within his age range, he will probably be initiated by an older man and then fall in with increasingly older men until he’s now 15 and sleeping with 45-year-olds.

Coddling the LGBT Lobby

Does this sound ghastly and unthinkable? Everything that society has done, nodding along with the preposterous notions of the LGBT lobby out of timidity or out of gullibility, has created this horror. If you say people are “born gay,” you imply that people have sexual desires from birth and a destiny that demands they initiate themselves into sex. The actual mechanics of sodomy are traumatic — painful, unhygienic, even humiliatingly awkward — but society refuses to speak honestly about it even as they want kids to know about homosexuality. So the boy’s most reliable source for knowledge about how to navigate this activity will be the older men who are sodomizing him.

In the case of Rutger’s student Tyler Clementi, you had a cause célèbre of a pubescent-looking man committing suicide after having been entangled with very shady older men, men with much more sexual experience. The response from society was to blame homophobia rather than to examine the social fallout of boys being available for suggestive interactions with older gay men who want, simultaneously, pleasure and a chance to create a younger mirror for themselves.

And while Milo may shock, there are countless cases in the last four years of people not being shocked by similar statements in different contexts. Didn’t Dustin Lance Black make an acclaimed film about pederast Harvey Milk and then seduce the teenager Tom Daley, who was barely legal and had just lost his father and was less than half Black’s age? Michelangelo Signorile trumpeted this as “intergenerational intimacy” in The Huffington Post and was not condemned for it.

I was condemned by GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign for pointing out that intergenerational intimacy, if accepted, will eventually make age of consent laws irrelevant. Where was all the outrage during the gay marriage debate, when BN Klein, Dawn Stefanowicz, Moira Greyland, and I all talked about the rapid sexualization of children within gay parenting homes? Did they think that the five-year-olds dragged to gay pride parades and the Michigan Women’s Festival, seeing nakedness and leather sadomasochism scenes, would not begin to awaken sexually within six to seven years?

When there was a debate about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, I warned people in my articles about the likely spike in male-male rape once you open the door to explicit discussions of homosexuality in cramped and pressurized billets. I warned, also, that DADT was largely used by gay men who’d been outed and needed a way out for their safety. After the repeal, both the suicide rate and the rape rate went up sharply. But nobody wanted to talk about this. Nobody wanted to talk about Terry Bean, or the LGBT activists who fought against the crackdown on underage online prostitution, or the cases like Caleb Laieski where awareness and outreach programs led to child molestation.

Quite apart from the political brinksmanship, Milo Yiannopoulos needs help. I can relate to his dilemma because I remember when I was sent around by conservatives to speak confessionally about growing up in a gay home, and then after a few years they forgot about me. And then I ended up leaving my tenured position because of the backlash from angry pro-gay leftists. To the extent that people invite Milo to speak, they need to ask him to deal honestly and directly with the gay issue, so that we can confront the issues he has raised rather than constantly tiptoe around them.

Finally, the LGBT movement has been born, grown up, and turned rotten. Forget homophobia. It is time to call them out on it. I was targeted and slammed by the gay movement for speaking honestly about “intergenerational sex” and how harmful it is to children. They want to pretend this isn’t happening or it’s just like what happens in the straight world. But it isn’t so. So much of youth happens in sex-segregated spaces like locker rooms, boys’ clubs, summer camp, and the Boy Scouts. The opportunity for male mentors to get into boys’ intimate spaces without triggering alarms is infinitely higher. Plus, the gay community’s history is much more entangled with pederasty than is the straight world. So this is a gay issue that needs to be dealt with as such, and that means revisiting many of the claims of the LGBT movement with skepticism.