Trolling for Trump

Yiannopoulos wasn’t a Republican—or even an American, having grown up in southern England. But he had a keen sense for how he could climb to the top of the country’s conservative media universe by slaying every politically correct piety that stood in his way. Joining Breitbart in 2014, Yiannopoulos gained instant notoriety through the Gamergate controversy, in which some video game fans accused the gaming industry of being more interested in increasing female and LGBTQ representation in games than in making better player experiences. In columns with titles like “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart,” Yiannopoulos attracted millions of readers and demonstrated the potential for energizing white male outrage around fears of demographic change and of their cultural displacement by liberal “social justice warriors.” Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s editor-in-chief, urged Yiannopoulos on, charging him with nothing short of helping to “save Western civilization.”⁵

With his effete, flamboyant style—he wore multi-strand pearl bracelets at his wrist and big gold charms around his neck, and he ostentatiously bragged about his frequent sex with Black men—Yiannopoulos was an unlikely choice as the public face of white male grievance. But Yiannopoulos’s aggressive, unapologetic flaunting of his sexuality proved instrumental to that mission. While Yiannopoulos derided the Left for a focus on diversity and identity that he contended promoted victimhood and groupthink, he happily wielded his own sexuality against any charges of racism. The mouthpiece of the alt-right couldn’t be racist, he constantly repeated, because he had a long-term Black boyfriend and a love of “Black dick.”⁶ (Similarly, Yiannopoulos shot down those who called him anti-Semitic by citing his own Jewish heritage, although he was a practicing Catholic.)

Yiannopoulos’s fan base of young, straight white males who devoured his columns, reposted his fiery tweets, and filled up college auditoriums for his “Dangerous Faggot” tour didn’t much share his predilections. Still, feeling marginalized by campus politics, feminism, and cultural liberalism, they relished how he crassly skewered liberal propriety and PC culture. And when Yiannopoulos wrote about gay men, his audience recognized that he was doing so to advance larger arguments that included them. For instance, Yiannopoulos characterized gay men as “naturally smart and capable people” who believed in meritocracy. Because of that, he wrote, “It should chafe gays … to be told promotions and other achievements should not go to them, not because of lack of ability, but because gays (and especially white gay men) are no longer at the top of the left’s victim hierarchy.” In portraying white gay males as marginalized by America’s liberal politics, Yiannopoulos implicitly conveyed how much more subjugated white heterosexual men were by such a system.⁷

Everything he did, Yiannopoulos contended, was about “breaking taboos and laughing at things that people tell me are forbidden to joke about,” frat boy rabble-rousing repositioned as heroic “free speech.”⁸ One year, Yiannopoulos declared his birthday to be “World Patriarchy Day” and told his followers to “catcall at least five women.” Elsewhere, he launched the “Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant,” a scholarship only for white men so that they could finally be “on equal footing with their female, queer, and ethnic minority classmates.”⁹ When progressives protested his talks or university administrators called off an event, he countered that it only proved his point that liberal “cancel culture” wanted to wipe out everything white men enjoyed. In that way, Yiannopoulos foreshadowed Donald Trump, who would soon argue that any criticisms of him were really attacks on the honest, hardworking white folks who supported him. Yiannopoulos used condemnations of him to heighten his fans’ own sense that they were being unfairly persecuted, a sentiment that was growing across the Right.¹⁰ Deeming themselves proxy targets in a larger cultural war, Yiannopoulos—and later Trump—channeled the personal rage and resentments of conservative, white Americans into a powerful political force. …

An ardent anti-feminism drove these gay alt-righters—and their popularity. When attempting to make serious arguments, they contended that feminism was a poisonous ideology that criminalized men for their natural traits and inclinations. Far more often, they resorted to trash talk, like Yiannopoulos bellowing “feminism is cancer” and [homosexual white fascist Jack] Donovan regularly referring to women as “bitches” and “whores.” An unsubtle hatred of women also pulsed through how they talked about their own sexuality, [which] aimed to demonstrate his solidarity with heterosexual men who were said to suffer under punitive campus consent codes and were accused of promulgating “rape culture.”¹¹

Donovan rejected the gay identity, naming his orientation “androphilia,” a term he defined as an adoration of masculinity so passionate it included having sex with other men. It also imagined social settings in which women were peripheral, if not absent altogether: places where men could do whatever they wanted— even pursue homosexual pleasure— without the oppressive presence of women who allegedly always wanted to control them. In short, one man’s androphilia could be another man’s misogyny. Rather than separated by their different sexual interests, androphiles and heterosexuals were connected by a shared disdain for women—and a corollary belief in male supremacy. …

Additionally, Donovan posited that heterosexuals deserved greater power and privileges than homosexuals because of their “reproductive sexuality.”¹² This view nodded to the alt-right’s obsession with propagating the white race. It also used the appearance of biological fact to justify social hierarchies, affirming heterosexuality’s superiority purportedly on the basis of science rather than morality. And it showed how gay white men who eschewed LGBTQ rights could expand and strengthen the alt-right movement. “Because of their lack of immediate family,” Colin Liddell, the editor of Alternative Right, explained, “gays often have a stronger feeling for the ‘wider family.’ The left has successfully displaced this sentiment to the fake ‘gay community’ or to leftist causes in general, but the true wider family for gays is their particular tribal or ethnic group.”¹³ The white nationalist publisher Greg Johnson agreed. “As long as homosexuals uphold healthy norms and have something positive to contribute,” he wrote, “they can and do make our movement stronger.”¹⁴

In 2015, Milo Yiannopoulos began using his Breitbart column to stump for Trump. On Reddit, Yiannopoulos served as the honorary moderator for the largest Trump community, with more than 200,000 subscribers.¹⁵ Yiannopoulos thrilled at Trump’s coarse language, offensive insults, and blatant disregard for “the language codes” Yiannopoulos argued the Left used to silence conservatives. “It’s what I’ve been doing for years, and it’s what Trump is now doing on the national stage,” he wrote approvingly.¹⁶ He claimed credit for laying the groundwork for Trump by normalizing a bellicose and bombastic politics on Breitbart. “Trump capitalized on what we had been charting,” Yiannopoulos boasted. “He couldn’t have done it without us.”¹⁷ When Steve Bannon left Breitbart to take over Trump’s campaign in the last months of the race, the link between Yiannopoulos and Trump became more direct. “He uses phrases extremely close to what I say,” Yiannopoulos emailed a colleague. “Bannon is feeding him.”¹⁸

Yiannopoulos, who said he didn’t care about politics, had no interest in making a policy case for Trump. Instead, he pontificated on what it meant to be a Trump supporter. He glorified Trumpism as a form of cultural protest, irreverent expression, and anti-authoritarian gusto. Despite his frequent attacks on identity politics, Yiannopoulos particularly showcased Trump’s gay support to his mostly straight readers, telling them that their backing Trump was a rebellious, subversive act.

Yiannopoulos argued that gay life had become stultifying and boring as it collapsed under the pressures of liberal conformity. In his viral essay “How Donald Trump Made It Cool to Be Gay Again,” Yiannopoulos claimed gays were flocking to Trump because he was bringing “decadence and troublemaking back to gay life.” Yiannopoulos believed that gay men were cultural outlaws at heart who had castrated and domesticated themselves to win society’s approval. But gay men were meant to be dangerous and deviant, “the opposite of politically correct,” and Trump had reignited that spirit. “After all,” he commented, “we love subversion, and being a gay leftwinger—or even just being gay—is no longer rebellious.”¹⁹

The GOProud crowd [a libertarian gay and lesbian 527 organization] had similarly blamed liberalism and political correctness for taking all the fun out of gay life. But that view of history overlooked the fact that gay conservatives, like Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan, and much of Log Cabin’s leadership, had purposefully de-emphasized—and sometimes shamed—overt gay sexuality while cultivating public images of gay men as respectable and upstanding citizens: the good neighbor, the responsible professional, the beloved family member. In reappropriating camp and promoting an open, rabid sexuality, Yiannopoulos and his compatriots resurrected a strain of gay conservatism that had all but disappeared since the mid-1980s. For this lot, the nostalgia conjured by Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan suggested a variation—Make America Pre-AIDS Again.²⁰ Yet, notably, Yiannopoulos asserted a hearty and unbridled gay sexuality and sensibility to repudiate liberal pieties, especially feminism, rather than to defend bodily autonomy… Under increasing pressure from provocateurs of all sorts, a once robust Never Trump movement shrank to a shadow of its former self.