7
Victim or Villain?
In 1961, closeted British actor Dirk Bogarde starred in Victim, one of the first films to deal explicitly and sympathetically with homosexuality, directed by Basil Dearden. Bogarde starred as married barrister Melville Farr, whose picturesque life is upended when he’s blackmailed over his homosexual relationship with Jack “Boy” Barrett (portrayed by Peter McEnery), working-class trade who hangs himself to avoid his secret coming out. Farr avoids such a grim fate, only having his life ruined.
Before this film, most gay, or rather, queer-coded, characters were the villains. Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, Dracula’s daughter of that titular film, Waldo Lydecker and his acid tongue in Laura, Addison DeWitt and his acid tongue in All About Eve, the gays at the center of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, and perhaps the most famous example, Hitchcock’s Norman Bates from Psycho, which came out just a year before Victim. But those characters’ sexualities were never discussed. It was as if finally mentioning homosexuality elicited not sympathy, but some kind of pity. Pity for those poor gay bastards.
Most queer stories since have painted their characters as victims. Victims of society, of their own twisted psychology, victims of violence or murder. And, in reality, queer people have largely been victims, targets of hysteria, scapegoats of despots, among the most vulnerable of populations. When Trump was elected in 2016, he ushered in a new wave of attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, rolling back protections set in place by the Obama administration. Most of those protections had been made through executive order, as the forty-fourth president infamously lacked any congressional support in his second term, thus rendering them tenuous at best for future presidencies.
Queer people were afraid all over again, having found some semblance of safety amid the progress of the previous eight years. Aside from marriage equality, queer people could find comfort in knowing they had an ally in the White House. Obama appeared on the cover of Out in 2015, the first and only president to do so. Trump would receive no such invitation.
Trump and his cronies went after LGBTQ+ rights with clear-eyed focus—a focus notably lacking in nearly every other corner of his administration. He banned trans military service members from the armed forces; appointed a spate of anti-LGBTQ+ judges across the judicial system, from local courts to the Supreme Court; stripped Obama policies protecting trans and nonbinary workers against employment discrimination; and weaponized Title IX against trans students, among a series of other actions. In a harbinger of what his presidency would become, within hours of Trump being sworn in, information on LGBTQ+ rights on government websites was completely eliminated. Trump also sparked a revival of open white supremacy in this country, bringing khaki-and-polo-wearing fascists out into the daylight.
And into this powder keg Jussie Smollett threw a flaming match. In January 2019, I was working at Logo, the queer cable network that had originally given us RuPaul’s Drag Race when it was still produced on a shoestring budget with camera lenses swathed in Vaseline. I wrote for their news and pop culture website, NewNowNext, with some occasional crossover into the cable territory. Near the end of the month, Smollett made headlines as the victim, so he claimed, of an attack by MAGA extremists.
Smollett was an openly gay actor on Lee Daniels’s primetime soap opera, Empire, where he played openly gay musician Jamal Lyon. While loved unconditionally by his mother, Jamal frequently contended against his father’s and the music industry’s homophobia. The actor was also a member of the Smollett family of actors, including his younger, more talented sister Jurnee. Smollett claimed he had been approached late at night in Chicago by two men wearing masks, who asked him, “Aren’t you that faggot Empire nigger?” He said they then tied a noose around his neck, poured bleach on him, and yelled, “MAGA country!”
Looking back on it, the story does seem…far-fetched, embellished by trace notes of actorly melodrama. Smollett had previously claimed he had received a threatening letter in the mail with the words “You will die Black faggot” rendered in cutout letters. Like, who does that outside of the cartoonish villains in 1960s Batman TV episodes?
But this was, after all, MAGA country. Hate crimes under Trump increased by nearly 20 percent from the Obama years. White supremacists were marching the streets, unhooded, carrying tiki torches and yelling about how they wouldn’t be “replaced.” We were living in far-fetched times, and Smollett’s alleged attack seemed like just another logical step into the abyss of daily life that had marked the forty-fifth president’s chaotic tenure.
As I was the first writer to report on the Smollett news for NewNowNext, and as I was the only Black writer on staff, I was assigned the Jussie Smollett beat. I would follow and report on all the developments. At first, I accepted the beat out of some vague sense of duty, as the only Black writer on staff. It was my duty, I felt, as a queer person of color to report on this story for other queer people of color, as evidence of the very real dangers we faced.
Soon, the messages of support started flooding in from celebrities, including Daniels and Empire’s undeniable star, Taraji P. Henson, who portrayed Jamal’s fiercely loyal mother, Cookie Lyon. Smollett’s family released a statement on his behalf, affirming that his story had “never changed” and making sure to note that “these targeted hate crimes are happening to our sisters, brothers, and our gender non-conforming siblings” all across the country. Fox Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Television, Empire’s parent companies, pledged their love for Smollett, vowing to work with law enforcement to “bring these perpetrators to justice.”
The next day, I saddled up my high horse and wrote an essay on Smollett’s attack, “The Audacity to Be Young, Black, and Gay.” I started by referencing Montgomery, Alabama’s Equal Justice Initiative opening the first-ever museum and memorial honoring the 4,084 victims of what it terms “racist terror lynchings” in 2018.
Far from reparations, the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice represented one of the few times America had dared to grapple with its shameful history of racial terrorism. And yet, it seemed, here it was—still happening. Senator Cory Booker and future vice president Kamala Harris initially called the attack on Smollett “an attempted modern-day lynching.”
Jamal Lyon, Smollett’s character on Empire, was groundbreaking at the time, the bar for Black queer characters being relatively low. He was openly gay, had no angst about it, and had a good relationship with most of his family, save his homophobic father, Terrence Howard’s Lucious Lyon. Jamal was a beacon for Black queer representation, and Smollett became that, too.
“Like Jamal, Smollett has striven to be an outspoken advocate for the Black and queer communities and has lived his life publicly, openly, and without shame,” I wrote, continuing:
It’s 2019 and we still have to deal with unchecked racial hate, but far from being intimidated or broken, I am enraged. I can only hope that Jussie Smollett has the love and support he needs to continue living his life publicly, openly, and without shame—that he remains audaciously young, Black, and gay. What happened to him shouldn’t happen to anyone; that it happened to him, a famous person with means and a platform, is important to continue this discussion on a national level, but what of the Black men whose lives become a footnote in the seemingly endless collection of police shootings, or the Black trans women forced into victimhood by the sole merit of their existence?
I was so goddamn earnest. But this, I thought, was why I got into queer journalism in the first place. To be able to say something of substance that benefits my community. And I was inspired to do more. I brought an idea to my editor Matthew Breen, who had given me my first cover story when he was still running The Advocate, though had since moved on to Logo. With access to the latter’s production capabilities, I decided to go the extra step, to actually do something about my rage, and produce a roundtable discussion with Black queer activists, tackling the Smollett incident and the general threat of hate crimes afflicting our community.
With the help of the rest of the news team, I put together a panel that included Emil Wilbekin, the former editor in chief of Vibe magazine and founder of Native Son, an advocacy group for Black queer men. I had always looked up to Emil as an openly gay Black man and was familiar with him through his work at Vibe and as a talking head on VH1’s endless collection of pop culture retrospective shows. I finally got to meet him when I interviewed him about Native Son for Out. He was the first person I thought of to join this roundtable, and he accepted my invitation without hesitation.
I had never produced anything like this before, with real camera operators and sets and craft services. I was so pleased with myself. I could even win a GLAAD Award for this, I thought privately, and rather selfishly. I don’t do things for awards, but I still like them, and I have never won anything in my adult life. This was my chance to finally get acknowledged for my work by my community, as I had been working as a queer journalist for the better part of a decade and had never gotten so much as an honorable mention. A timely discussion on this shocking incident that galvanized so many issues currently at play in American life? Pass the envelope!
Our video went live on February 6, playing online and on the Logo channel. Ten days later, Smollett’s story started to unravel. There had already been rumors that the attack had been a hoax, a publicity stunt by Smollett over anxiety his Empire character was being written off the show. I dismissed those rumors. Who—who?! I ask you—would possibly stage an attack, preying on an already sensitive and precarious sociopolitical climate to further some personal agenda? I know we as a society love to diagnose sociopathy sans credentials with the ease of a flippant remark, but that sounded like true sociopathic behavior.
But again, we were living in far-fetched times. And if Smollett’s attack story was far-fetched, what actually happened, insofar as we know what actually happened, was just plain bonkers. Days after the attack, Smollett reemerged, phoenixlike, to perform at a previously scheduled concert in West Hollywood. “The most important thing that I can say is to keep it simple and say thank you and I’m okay,” Smollett told the cheering, sold-out crowd, which included Empire co-creator Lee Daniels and Congresswoman Maxine “Reclaiming My Time” Waters. “I’m not fully healed yet, but I’m going to, and I’m going to stand strong with you all.”
I had friends who went to that show in support of Smollett. “I had to be here tonight,” the actor continued. “I couldn’t let those motherfuckers win!”
There had already been some issues with the inconsistencies of his story, but Smollett brushed them aside to the adoring crowd. We ran the story with a photo of Smollett, backlit, appearing Christlike in a white shirt, reaching out his benevolent hand to an audience member. “During times of trauma, grief, and pain, there is still a responsibility to lead with love,” he had said two days earlier in his first official statement. “It’s all I know. And that can’t be kicked out of me.”
Now, addressing his adoring crowd, he told them that the most important thing was that he “fought the fuck back!,” eliciting cheers from the audience. “I’m the gay Tupac!” he added, I thought (and hoped) at the time, jokingly. But I should’ve known this nigga was on one as soon as he said that.
Two weeks later, Smollett’s alleged attackers were released from custody without being charged. They were identified as two jacked Nigerian brothers, who, it seemed, had known Smollett before the attack. The day before, Smollett’s first televised interview aired on Good Morning America. He “broke his silence” with Robin Roberts, sticking by his story, which was sounding more and more implausible. But the deeper he got into it all, the more he dug his heels in, delivering a teary performance defending his dwindling credibility.
“I’m an advocate,” he told Roberts. “I respect too much the people—who I am now one of those people—who have been attacked in any way. You do such a disservice when you lie about things like this.”
But then the police called Smollett’s bluff. With the release of his alleged attackers, the Chicago Police Department suggested that Smollett had orchestrated the attack. Smollett had hired one of the brothers as his personal trainer and followed them both on Instagram. One of them had even appeared as an extra on Empire. Once the lies started adding up, the brothers sang like canaries. By this point I wanted nothing to do with the Smollett beat. But I didn’t have much choice in the matter.
I called the next essay I wrote on Smollett the very direct “What the Actual F*ck Is Going on Here?” This whole shit show made me so nervous for a number of reasons. There was the fear of the MAGA acolytes being vindicated as the victims they saw themselves as, despite their actions having created a climate in which an attack like the one Smollett had devised could plausibly happen. There was the fear of liberals being wrong in their righteous indignation, which was all they clung to in the dark ages of Trump. And there was the fear of how these shenanigans might affect future victims of assault.
“I can’t help but feel…not betrayed, that’s not the word,” I wrote. “Maybe naïve…and more than a little disillusioned. Not by Smollett himself, but the circumstances surrounding him.” In time, “betrayed” would be the word. Betrayed by Jussie Smollett, mostly. The actor was charged with a felony count of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report.
The Chicago PD claimed Smollett faked a threatening letter, then a week later paid the two brothers $3,500 to stage an attack because he was “dissatisfied with his salary” on Empire. They said they even had the check Smollett used in the transaction.
A check?!
Not even a Cash App? A Venmo? A Zelle? Just plain cash? No, instead he uses the most traceable form of payment. All those years of acting and he never learned you don’t leave a fucking paper trail? That’s literally how every villain gets caught. But Jussie Smollett didn’t think of himself as the villain. He was the victim here. He continued to maintain his innocence, even when all evidence pointed to the contrary.
It wasn’t long before Smollett became an official object of national ridicule and resentment, when Saturday Night Live parodied him shortly after he was charged. Cast member Chris Redd played Smollett in a Shark Tank parody, Shark Tank: Legal Edition, in which the sharks are embattled lawyers. When Smollett is asked why he’s there, he simply responds, “I broke humanity.”
That felt about right. This was outrageous! This was some shit that would’ve happened on Empire, where ridiculous people did ridiculous things all the time. Perhaps Smollett got reality and television confused, sort of like A Double Life but super dumb. In that 1947 film directed by the great and gay George Cukor, Ronald Colman starred as an actor who gets lost in his character, Shakespeare’s Othello, as the lines between the play and his real life gradually disappear altogether.
It’s definitely giving too much credit to Smollett’s acting chops that he would go so deep into Jamal Lyon to come out thinking a scheme of soap-operatic proportions would actually work. Aside from the obvious paper trail, there were so many lazy missteps and miscalculations. He had staged the attack hoping it would get caught on a security camera, but the camera was pointing the wrong way and missed all the action. Actors always wanna be directors, but some of them can’t quite cut the mustard.
The assailants Smollett had paid to attack him were caught on camera, however—buying the gloves, ski masks, and red hat that they used in the attack. Also, those two dudes were Black as night. African Black. Smollett couldn’t find some dumb white guys to pull this off, to at least give the attack some semblance of verisimilitude?
I love heist movies. It’s fantastic when a plan comes together and the criminals walk away with all the goods. And you root for the criminals; they’re the heroes in this situation. But it’s also equally entertaining when the plan goes terribly awry and the criminals are hoisted by their own petards. And Smollett’s petard was hoisted all over the place. Though the initial charges against him were dropped in March 2019, in exchange for community service and a $10,000 bond, the following month the city of Chicago sued Smollett for the $130,000 it had wasted on the investigation, no doubt utilizing resources that could have gone to a legitimate hate crime. Months later, in November, Smollett had the gall, the unmitigated cheek, to countersue the city, alleging he was the victim of “mass public ridicule and harm.”
But whose fault was that, sis? For minority groups in America, victimhood is a natural state, one in which you feel you are constantly under attack by the white majority and the apparatuses they use to remain in power: the government, law enforcement, etc., etc. The white majority, in turn, loves to blame victims for their own victimhood, rather than empathizing with the conditions that continue to marginalize groups. And under Trump, white people were free to play the victims, too. Whiteness was under attack, and it was the right of every white person in America to defend themselves against this attack, by any means necessary.
What a crock of shit. Apparently by 2045, white people will cease to be the majority in America. That’s not because they’re under attack; it’s because the world is changing. Races intermarry, immigration persists at a steady clip, and white folks just aren’t popping out babies like they used to. Whiteness is not the victim here. But then you have someone like Jussie Smollett who gives credence to fragile white arguments.
The legal case against Smollett dragged on for years. In 2022, he was sentenced to 150 days in prison, and during his hearing, he turned the courtroom into a one-man show, repeatedly shouting that he was “not suicidal,” on the off chance he somehow ended up dead in his cell. Okay, Epstein. The presiding judge repeatedly called Smollett “narcissistic, selfish, and arrogant.” He ended up serving six days of his sentence. His Empire character, however, was, in a deliciously ironic twist, written off the show, the fate he had allegedly been trying to avoid. Empire was canceled the following season, mostly due to low ratings, but the Smollett controversy didn’t help matters. Or those ratings.
Smollett continued to deny being the absolute worst, though his demeanor through this whole ordeal certainly precluded that. In a podcast interview a month after he was released from prison, he said he would never have concocted a hate crime hoax because that would “mean that I stuck my fist in the pain of Black Americans in this country for over four hundred years” and “stuck my fist in the fears of the LGBTQ community all over the world. I’m not that motherfucker—never have been, don’t need to be.”
Just because someone is Black doesn’t mean they can’t intentionally harm the Black community. Clarence Thomas has made a career of it. That Uncle Tom in judicial robes. And so has conservative pundit Candace Owens. And Kanye West, for that matter. They use their own pretzel logic, like Smollett has done, to defend their actions, but Black folks don’t buy their shit and they’re never invited to the cookout. Smollett’s pass, too, has permanently been revoked. And as seen with the Gays for Trump, gay people aren’t above selling out their own people either.
The 2021 film Judas and the Black Messiah highlighted one of modern history’s great Black betrayers, FBI informant William O’Neal, who insinuated himself into the inner circle of Chicago’s Black Panther Party, leading to the assassination of the charismatic leader Fred Hampton. Hampton galvanized support among Chicago’s disenfranchised communities, across races, forming the Rainbow Coalition to include the Panthers, the poor whites of the Young Patriots, and the Hispanics of the Young Lords. Like Huey Newton, Hampton understood the need to unite the masses against a threat that affected them all. And so, like Huey Newton, he had to be eliminated.
After his betrayal, O’Neal lived under the witness protection program for fifteen years and finally told his story in the 1989 documentary series Eyes on the Prize. The night his episode aired, O’Neal died by suicide.
How does it feel to betray one’s own people? To “stick a fist” in their pain? I don’t know for sure if Smollett orchestrated his hate crime, though I’m strongly inclined to agree that he did, but I can imagine that the immense guilt from doing something so objectively terrible would break someone’s mind. Smollett might have to believe he is innocent; otherwise he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. Every interview I’ve seen with him is of a person divorced from reality.
In all fairness, though—reality does suck. Smollett and I are about the same age, both Black, both gay, both with maternal affection for Taraji P. Henson. I can understand the urge to, really, burn all this to the goddamn ground. Smollett simply weaponized his identity. And had he gotten away with it, no thanks to that meddling Chicago PD, he would’ve been…not the gay Tupac but at least the gay Drake. An endearing, if at times questionable, light-skinned nigga.
While I could easily argue that Smollett’s relative wealth and notoriety inoculated him against the worst intentions of this country, he was never wealthy or famous enough to be completely immune to the twin diseases of racism and homophobia. I can say that for someone without his means and privilege, the constant pressures of being marginalized, demonized, and scapegoated can drive you mad.
When you’ve been victimized all your life—by society, by family, by your own insecurities forged from a life of hardship—you tend to see victimization everywhere, whether it exists or not. And you can either succumb to that victimization or find a way to make it work for you. For instance: White guilt. The gift that keeps on giving. No person of color should ever give up the opportunity to capitalize on white guilt. It’s our birthright. Your ancestors enslaved my ancestors? Affirmative action should be the least you can do.
But it is maddening, to be a minority within a minority. You can start to think you deserve to be punished, to struggle, to be unhappy; you begin to think you are less than, that you are unworthy. And when you feel unworthy, that your life will always be impossibly hard, what’s to stop you from just saying, “Fuck it,” and burning it all to the ground? The victim becomes the villain. If you’re taught to believe that you’re the villain, the cause of all society’s ills, then you might relent and embody the villain. It’s what inner-city Black kids have been dealing with for generations. But Smollett is not an inner-city kid.
I have no interest in or intention of explaining or justifying Smollett’s motivations, but he capitalized on very real injustices that were all too easy to believe. If he did what it’s pretty evident he did, then he sold out both Black and queer people for personal gain and salvation. He weaponized victimization and in doing so became a villain.
History, much like Disney, is full of gay villains. Unlike Disney, history’s gay villains are usually no fun. And certainly not nearly as fabulous as, say, Ursula, the sea witch from The Little Mermaid, or Maleficent, the witch queen from Sleeping Beauty. Milo Yiannopoulos may have tried to pull off a dramatic cape in his time, but I assure you: It didn’t work, mama.
I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of gay villains, though. Because gays throughout history have been maligned and victimized, we were powerless, and so a gay villain, in my mind, was simply reclaiming the power stripped from them. But what was the price of that power? And was it ever worth it?
Three gay villains come to mind, at least when it comes to the promulgation of white supremacy, which, for my money, is the greatest evil in the world today. The aforementioned Yiannopoulos and his goose-stepping foregays, Renaud Camus and Ernst Röhm.
In 2016, Out decided to run a long profile on gay cartoon villain Milo Yiannopoulos, including a photo shoot with that messy faggot dressed up as a clown, as if to make light of his overtly racist and fascist rhetoric. It was a terrible idea, which much of the staff told editor in chief Aaron Hicklin. But Aaron, a real stickler for objective journalism, was blinded by his own commitment to objectivity. Yiannopoulos was gay and making a name for himself in the public sphere, so we, as a gay outlet, had an obligation to cover him. But the photo shoot? That was glamorizing an idiot.
The backlash was swift. The gays called out Out for giving Yiannopoulos a platform, while I and several members of the staff publicly denounced the story. While I can respect Aaron’s intentions, there’s a right way of dealing with fascists, and dressing them up as Punchinella isn’t it.
Yiannopoulos was another in a disturbing line of white faggots who cozied up to, and enabled, fascism. In 1979, French writer and academic Renaud Camus published Tricks, “a sexual odyssey” detailing a young gay Frenchman’s twenty-five brief sexual encounters from Paris and the French Riviera to Milan, New York, and San Francisco. Noted literary queer Allen Ginsberg called Camus’s world “completely that of a new urban homosexual; at ease in half a dozen countries.”
Out of his dozens and dozens of books, Tricks remains Camus’s most translated work, but he is most famous, or infamous, for the book he published more than thirty years later, which has been widely adopted by white supremacists.
Published in 2012, Le Grand Remplacement posits the conspiracy theory that Europe’s white majority is in danger of being replaced by Muslim and darker-skinned immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa. “The great replacement is very simple,” Camus said of his doctrine. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people.”
The great replacement soon became the raison d’être for white supremacists: In 2019, the New Zealand Christchurch mosque shooter named his manifesto after Camus’s book. Before that, angry, tiki torch–wielding white nationalists chanted, “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville, Virginia, during a Unite the Right rally in 2017, which resulted in the death of Heather Heyer. White supremacy is now the most dangerous and insidious form of terrorism, with considerable thanks to three gay white men.
That Camus once advocated for open borders, at least when it came to the sexual tourism of the modern gay man, and he now desires a xenophobic, ethnically pure France may come as a surprise. But he’s hardly the first, or last, homosexual to willfully become an instrument in the spread of white supremacy.
When reached by The Washington Post for comment in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, Camus claimed he condemned violence, but at the same time he supported how his conspiracy theory has been interpreted. That same theory has and will continue to lead to increased violence in the name of some alleged “white genocide.”
Now. When one thinks of “white genocide,” it’s usually white people committing genocide against another group, because, well, facts. White people are not endangered. The biggest killer of white people is probably other white people. But when it comes to committing genocide, the whites are undefeated.
There was the genocide of indigenous peoples of America by white colonizers, the genocide of Black people in the Jim Crow South by the Ku Klux Klan, and of course the genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany by the ultimate white supremacists, which was also helped along by—you guessed it—a white gay.
After serving in World War I, Ernst Röhm became one of the earliest defectors to the Nazi Party, where he became close friends and political allies with Adolf Hitler. Their friendship has often stoked rumors that Hitler himself was gay.
Initially founded to counter communism in postwar Germany, the Nazi Party rose to power in the early 1920s using an agenda bolstered by pseudoscience and propaganda around the idea of a German master race. In order to achieve racial purity, the party began systematically targeting “inferior” races, most notoriously Jews.
Hitler assumed leadership of the party in 1921, and after he was briefly imprisoned in 1923, he appointed Röhm to take charge of the SA, the Nazi’s militia. In 1925, Hitler and Röhm had a falling-out that prompted the latter to find self-imposed exile in Bolivia. Then, in 1930, Hitler telephoned Röhm to tell him that he needed him back in Germany to serve as the SA chief of staff.
Under Röhm, the SA grew into a feared and powerful presence, facilitating the growth of the Nazi Party. Still, the homosexuality of Röhm and other SA officers, including his deputy Edmund Heines, remained a liability to the party—a Socialist Democratic newspaper published a letter from Röhm to a friend spilling the tea on his gay affairs in 1931. Though Hitler was aware of Röhm’s sexuality, he didn’t seem to have a problem as long as the SA was strong-arming him into power.
Röhm was among the more radical in the Nazi Party leadership, and soon rumbles began that he was a threat to Hitler’s power. The SA, with its more than three million members, was unruly and unpredictable, and the moral character of Röhm and others within its ranks (read: the gay thing) led to dissent. Hitler tried to weaken the militia and reduce its numbers, but Röhm objected. Party conservatives, no fan of “the gay thing,” worried more about his political aspirations and feared he would eventually attempt a coup against Hitler. Threatened with martial law and the loss of power, Hitler finally decided to oust Röhm.
On June 30, 1934, Hitler and his SS, the group that had effectively replaced the SA, arrived at the Hanselbauer Hotel near Munich, where Röhm and his supporters were staying. Hitler’s forces surprised the sleeping men in a purge known as the Night of the Long Knives. Heines, Röhm’s deputy, was caught in bed with an unidentified eighteen-year-old boy; they were both taken outside and shot.
Hitler, still hesitant to send Röhm off to execution, had him arrested and afforded him the opportunity to die by suicide instead. When two senior Nazi officers handed the SA leader a loaded pistol and gave him ten minutes to do the deed, he refused, saying, “If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself.”
I wonder if Röhm always knew it would end like this. If he guessed that his proximity to power would not ultimately protect him when others were sent to concentration camps for the same sin against nature. I doubt it. But proximity to power is not power itself. And once you become a threat to that power, your days are numbered and whatever deficiencies or abnormalities you possess will be used against you. The Nazis were, after all, about purity, and as much as I love it, there’s nothing pure about butt sex. That’s kinda the appeal.
The officers shot Röhm, and the Nazis attempted to expunge him from its official history, along with the thousands of homosexual men and millions of Jews they imprisoned and killed in concentration camps out of some baseless idea of racial purity. Röhm, however, would prove an inspiration—and yet, somehow, not a warning—for the gay man credited with the twenty-first century’s alt-right movement.
Progress in queer rights has never been propelled by cis white men because they can always rely on their identity to buffer them against the myriad injustices of a society initially designed in their favor. Unlike trans people or people of color, they can easily pass within the upper echelons of society’s power structures. Key word being “easily.” Just look at evil gay billionaire Peter Thiel. Don’t look too long or hard or he might sue you, as he did when Gawker ran a series of stories effectively outing him in 2007 and he sued the outlet out of existence.
Thiel enacted the kind of revenge I can only dream of, a long game involving Hulk Hogan and years and millions of dollars in lawsuits, ending with Gawker’s demise. While the politics of outing people are up for debate, Thiel’s proven himself a cozy bedfellow with white supremacists in the past, having met with noted white nationalist Kevin DeAnna in 2016, the same year he emerged as one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors. Imagine if the fight for queer visibility were up to the Peter Thiels of the world, men who would gain the whole straight world for the price of their gay soul.
But thankfully we had the Marsha P. Johnsons and Sylvia Riveras of the world, people who couldn’t and wouldn’t hide in plain sight, and who didn’t believe that they should have to either. Some white men would rather align themselves with whiteness, with the status quo, than with what could be perceived as the greater good for what they don’t perceive as their own community.
Within a series of emails BuzzFeed obtained in its lengthy 2017 exposé on the mainstreaming of the white nationalist movement, Milo Yiannopoulos—then tech editor of the far-right troll factory Breitbart—shared his password with a colleague: “LongKnives1290.” The Long Knives in reference to the purge that killed the undesirable Nazis, 1290 referring to the year King Edward I expelled the Jews from England. Yiannopoulos and Breitbart had often and vehemently, amid the threat of litigation, denied that he was a racist or a white nationalist. With the exposé, however, that cover, tenuous at best, was blown.
For several years, Yiannopoulos—emboldened and groomed by Breitbart co-founder Steve Bannon—had played a coy game of First Amendment tag with the media, making vile comments about Muslims, women, gays, and basically anyone he hoped to get a rise out of, while blithely defending his freedom of speech and coating his act in the unconvincing veneer of satire. He built a large following online, frequently testing the limits of Twitter before he was permanently banned in July 2016.
By then, Yiannopoulos had proven himself a useful recruitment tool to the alt-right ideology, his article “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” serving as a Le Grand Remplacement for bros. As a gay man spouting white nationalist rhetoric, he positioned himself as some sort of chimerical neo-Nazi mascot, like if Ernst Röhm had a bad dye job and a Twitter account. Yiannopoulos took his sadistic show on the road with the Dangerous Faggot tour, darkening the doorsteps of campuses around the United States and United Kingdom. Everywhere he went, Yiannopoulos was greeted by protest, which was entirely the point. He successfully whipped up controversy, and the Breitbart brand only got stronger, Yiannopoulos becoming its polarizing star.
With Breitbart, Yiannopoulos and Bannon tapped into a lingering resentment over the politically correct, inclusive, “love is love” Obama era and weaponized it into a movement encompassing the greatest hits of white male grievance, from anarchism all the way down to xenophobia. The “Jews will not replace us” folks. The Blue Lives Matter, men’s rights, white genocide folks. And, most tellingly, the “Make America Great Again” folks. With the election of Donald Trump, the alt-right went from being an online menace to a political and social force to be reckoned with, but Yiannopoulos soon found himself on the outs.
According to the emails BuzzFeed retrieved, Yiannopoulos had some lingering resentment over not being able to pontificate at the Republican National Convention in July 2016—an opportunity afforded to noted evil gay billionaire Peter Thiel. “No gays rule doesn’t apply to Thiel apparently,” he complained. Ironic, isn’t it, how people like Röhm, Heines, and Yiannopoulos can actively participate in a group that despises who they are, blatantly uses them to justify its own ends, and just as blatantly discards them once they’ve outlived their purpose? No, “ironic” isn’t the word for it—“sad,” “pathetic,” “insane.” One of those seems more fitting.
For Yiannopoulos, the beginning of the end came when he made some favorable comments about pedophilia in January 2016 that came back to haunt him a year later as he was readying to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference—where the “gay” rules were apparently a bit more lenient. Yiannopoulos was sabotaged by—surprise, surprise—a conservative website, which unearthed the damning interview, and within days he had been forced to resign from Breitbart. At least publicly. He would lurk about in the shadows, gradually fading into the Breitbart ether as 2017 wore on and he became even more of a caricature of himself.
In his wake, Yiannopoulos left the alt-right—this ginned-up section of American life that dresses white supremacy in respectability and academia, like that of Renaud Camus. But just what they believe in and just what they’re so angry about can be confusing, to say the least.
Equally confounding: Gays for Trump. They’re no Ernst Röhms or Edmund Heineses or Milo Yiannopoulai, but they do have something in common. It’s not self-loathing, which people often attribute to those who seem to go against their own interests. Rather, I think, it’s just selfishness. It’s putting oneself above all else, even when it’s to the detriment of others, of millions, or more. It’s seeing one’s humanity as greater and more important than someone else’s. It has nothing to do with white supremacy; it’s a general sense of supremacy, and the belief in one’s whiteness is either the scapegoat or the catalyst.
And out of that belief, they lay their chips with the winning hand—the one that’s had its thumb on the scale all these centuries. It can be as simple as supporting Trump after getting snubbed by Hillary—as one gay political power couple actually did when Clinton refused a photo with them. Or going all-in at Breitbart because someone terrible believed you were terrible, too. Or railing against the passage of time as some form of white genocide. Or just everything Ernst Röhm did. Though they may claim some higher purpose, that purpose is always self-aggrandizing, at all costs.
While Jussie Smollett’s transgressions were hardly on a massive scale, his motive was still self-aggrandizement. I have more sympathy for him than, say, Milo Yiannopoulos, because he’s Black. America is built against Black people, so I can understand wanting to even the scales somehow.
What I can’t understand is why it was done so badly. I have the same problem with a lot of Black-owned businesses. Like, I want to support them, but there’s always something janky going on. There are misspellings on the website, or someone drops the ball on a shipment, or the quality of the product is just not quite there. These shortcomings are usually the product of limited resources and not necessarily incompetence, though with Smollett I think it was just plain incompetence. The resources were there!
If he wanted to pull off a proper scheme, he should’ve outsourced his deviousness rather than taking it all on himself. Typical rookie mistake. You can’t tell me there’s not a real-life Olivia Pope ready and willing to orchestrate a fake hate crime for the right price. If there isn’t, that means there’s a gaping hole in the market and I’m the swing-coat-wearing diva to do it, dammit. I’ve fancied myself a villain most of my life anyway. I’m always literally one minor transgression away from resolving to ruin someone’s life at all costs.
Belief in my own villainy comes from a rejection of my own victimhood. I hate feeling victimized. I hate feeling helpless. And that hate quickly turns to rage. Maybe it’s the Scorpio in me. We’re a notoriously vengeful sign. Obsessively vengeful, really. A guy blocked me on Instagram (and Scruff, and Grindr, and probably LinkedIn) months ago and I’m still casually plotting his downfall—and I will continue to as long as I draw breath. Astrology permitting, my instinctive reaction to being hurt is to hurt whoever hurt me. I think that’s a human instinct, otherwise we wouldn’t have “an eye for an eye” as one of the oldest lessons of civilized society.
I’ve long sought to indulge my deep-seated villainy, to let my rage run unfettered, but, unfortunately, years of feeling victimized have made it impossible for me to truly be a villain. Having suffered at numerous points in my life, I’ve developed an enormous, incredibly annoying capacity for empathy. Hurting someone because they hurt me always feels like the right thing, the thing I want to do, but I invariably start thinking about why that person hurt me in the first place.
That boy who blocked me, he treated me like an asshole for months, but I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt because I didn’t and couldn’t know what he was going through. Even when he blocked me, I understood why, though it enraged me. It’s the understanding that gets me. Rage sets in and I’m firing on all vengeful cylinders, but once I place myself in my proposed victim’s footsteps, my will to destroy dissipates. I’d be a terrible villain, I’m sad to say.
But I have found a way to monetize my victimhood. And you’re reading it. People have been reading and sharing and commenting on my victimhood for years. Because it never seemed fair to me that I should suffer and not get anything out of it. By turning my pain into art and into profit, without deliberately hurting anyone—save for a few white boys who blocked me, but that’s the stuff of petty crooks, not supervillains—I’ve been able to relinquish my own feelings of victimhood.
Despite wanting to be a villain, I’m the hero of my own story.