Smooth as Silk

Dale Vree
You should know by now that the mass media have been mainstreaming homosexuality. Rod Dreher [pictured far left], who works for a mainstream daily newspaper, has an article in Touchstone (Sept. 2005) titled "Pink Campaign: How the Media Made Homosexuality Mainstream." He says: "Every media product -- every newspaper or television report, every movie, every TV show, and so forth -- is shaped by choices made by the creators, producers, and editors. Those choices will inevitably reflect the judgment of those creators, not only about what's right and what's wrong, but more fundamentally, about what constitutes the range of acceptable opinion."

Dreher says that for the mass media, "Sexual repression is responsible for human misery, and must be fought at every turn if we are to be free and happy. The people who went on to make the movies, the television shows, the music, and the news products...agree with this view...and business people, who may or may not be personally conservative, have not hesitated to co-opt the message of sexual liberation to sell their products."

As for mainstreaming homosexuality, Dreher says: "You might have thought that the advent of AIDS in the 1980s would have sobered up our culture about promiscuity in general, and specifically about its key role in male homosexual identity. But a funny thing happened: In the media, AIDS carriers became identified solely as victims -- victims of cruel fate and a repressive society.... The message went out through the media that promiscuous gays who contracted AIDS were not to blame for their predicament -- which is no more true than to say that a two-pack-a-day smoker is not responsible for his emphysema. We have no problem blaming the smoker.... But with AIDS, it was different."

Dreher quotes a 2003 story from the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Michael Wilke, who advises corporations about how to advertise in the gay community, lauds...['gay'-friendly TV] programming (including Queer as Folk, Will and Grace, and Boy Meets Boy). He said, 'It gives straight viewers a chance to make friends with gays in their living room. It's like sensitivity training.' Robert Thompson...said, 'This is the genius of television. Gay characters are a hot genre, the shows have a cumulative power, and they end up moving the center of public opinion.'"

You might think that conservative media might be different. However, Dreher says: "In the early 1990s, I was a television critic for the Washington Times. One of the biggest television stories in either 1992 or 1993 was the debut of Matt, an openly gay character on the [neoconservative] Fox nighttime soap Melrose Place.... The producers made Matt into a veritable saint, and audiences got comfortable with him.... Just over a decade from the moment when Fox tentatively stepped forward with an openly gay character in prime time, homosexuality is at the white-hot center of our popular culture." (And, by the way, we've had several of our "gay"-unfriendly ads rejected by neoconservative publications and even one conservative publication.)

Dreher says the media "consciously work to marginalize any negative judgment of homosexuality" and "the media ignore or downplay unpleasant or inconvenient facts." And here's the kicker. Dreher says: "This is...why you have seen little, if any, reference in the mainstream media to the role male homosexual culture played in the Catholic sex-abuse scandal. Mainstream journalists are making conscious decisions to ignore it. When I arrived in Dallas in the summer of 2002 to cover the historic meeting of the Catholic bishops for National Review, I was asked to brief a correspondent for [neocon] Fox News who had been put onto the story at the last minute. When I got to the part about the role of male homosexuality in Catholic clerical culture, I told her she needed to speak to Michael S. Rose, who was at the conference [meeting], and whose terrific book Goodbye, Good Men was an important exposé of the so-called lavender mafia. The reporter shook her head and said the crew had orders from New York, from the top of the company, not to talk to him [Rose], and to stay off the homosexual thing. If Fox News...is spinning the news like that, what hope do you have that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, and other agenda-setting news media will be honest?"

We live in a free country, but don't think for a moment that you've not been subliminally manipulated. The Communists have had harsh re-education camps while the Americans have the "genius of television," and you should know which one is more effective. Communist propaganda was crude; American propaganda is smooth as silk.

[This article was originally published as a New Oxford Note in the New Oxford Review (March 2006), pp. 20-21, and is reprinted here by permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley CA 94706, U.S.A.]