Being Gay: Milo Yiannopoulos & Conversion Therapy.

[Music]
so just to be clear this is real you are actually actually started changing your life i demoted the gentleman i was living with to uh housemate um yeah and i'm now going and moving to florida and i'm going to open uh a clinic i'm going to open a uh have you said this publicly i've missed this i have it was in the new york post a couple weeks ago but uh people are too scared to talk about it unlike a lot of a lot of a lot of gay people or or people with these tendencies who try to go into reparative therapy or who try to change their lives a lot of them are people who have had very unsatisfactory sex lives because they've been held back by feelings of you know inadequacy or shame or they've been you know overweight and not got the sex partners they wanted i've been very handsome and very desirable my whole life so i've never had a problem finding i'm just trying to tell you my story [Music] why don't you just make it like straight lessons you guys can like instruct me in the ways i have some work to do on my mannerisms um that my lifestyle at least is is now uh becoming more congruent with with garden with my faith and all the rest of it and i have now achieved something that i thought was impossible i've become a straight white male if i wasn't committed i wouldn't be in polyester for a start yeah um i wouldn't be drinking becks she was drinking a bag you do look like you you're dressed as a straight guy for halloween he's like i need a ford hat a tommy hill bigger shirt get some glue on chest hair i took the jewelry off i got one cross i'm like i'm doing the best i can i'm not even jewish anymore i grew up my hillbilly hair i'm actually doing something quite revolutionary and difficult which is i'm trying to like re-virginize myself so uh yesterday i did some star wars lego oh no um i've never had a problem finding sexual partners and i've had lots of lots of them and it's interfaced with other addictions and compulsions and dependencies and diversions in my life so i guess this brings up a question do you ever foresee yourself um finding a wife and having a family it's asking a lot well sure know people who were where i am now who were here 20 years years ago and who now have children and a wife and a very happy which is very inspirational to me but for want of a better expression they weren't quite such enthusiastic homosexuals to begin with uh as to whether i you will see a beautiful latina and lots of little little latinopolises you know yeah um by my side at an awards ceremony in 20 years who knows but i yeah i certainly hope so i'll be honest with you right now the prospect is not exciting to me well is it physically or otherwise it needn't be and look i just want to be clear that it really makes no difference you're open to what god's plan is for you and as he heals you as he heals all of us we change and our affections change one of the ways you know that um uh gay as a choice is um and not you're not born this way is there are some factors that are fairly reliable indicators of whether somebody will end up being gay okay absent fathers and overbearing mothers are a really reliable indicator someone's going to be gay which i think explains why there are so many you think that's part of the recipe yeah so which explains why there are so many black and jewish homosexuals right um absent fathers and overbearing mothers i had absent father mother was not overbearing though there you go i had absolutely my mom was young that was very young so you got the hair color but not the full dick sucking yes was my father absent he was murdered he was stabbed you know that's not like you absent it's not illegal to offer electroshock therapy so we'll just call it the pence pathway and we'll uh you know i'm being silly but my aspiration is to start with one place in florida where people can come for residential treatment i'm not a clinician obviously i'm going through this journey myself one of the things i can do is help put money together with expertise together with a bit of pr and you know whatever and and and you know mix it all together and normally it thinks things turn out well and my my goal with it would be just to to to make something a little bit i guess like planned parenthood in the sense that not selling baby parts obviously but but in the sense that we'll do some clinical work but we'll also publish some research and we'll also do lots of public relations and i can build an auditorium and and give speeches again at last lesbian is not a thing there are no lesbians i mean women have very malleable sexualities and um so occasionally a woman will there's probably like five people who are actual real lesbians probably tammy bruce and camille parley and they're the only ones um but they're every every other woman is kind of wandering backwards and forwards between men and women in their life and everybody who knows a lesbian knows that's true the nature of female sexuality is completely different okay i mean i didn't mean to go down that that rabbit trail i i'm just making a larger point that that narrative of someone switching and being no sure but it's different right you would expect a woman to go backwards and forwards and they all do but male homosexuality seems to be a bit more sticky right when when a man gets stuck into these habits these these uh behaviors he tends not to come back out of it again on the whole so on those rare occasions you're right of course you know yes yes the media covers all this stuff up doesn't fit the narrative we know that on the rare occasion that a man flips back or aims to get themselves out of a sinful and self-destructive way of life that's something we really ought to celebrate and see i'm not bothered that people talk about whether people talk about lesbians going backwards and forwards because they do that their whole life it's not news it's not news when any of them do it but it is news when a man does it and we ought to make as much of an effort as we can to fight the enforced you know the omerta of the mainstream media when it comes to men who are seeking to find their way out of this lifestyle because when a man does it's a big deal and it doesn't happen very often i wish it did and i hope to i hope to be part of making it happen more often the reason you're able to do what you do specifically this idea of opening up this clinic in florida is because you have courage and that is what is lacking in the leadership class certainly in corporate leadership but also in political leadership apart from trump and a handful of people there there is no willingness to go against whatever cultural norms were invented five minutes ago i don't perceive it that way in myself i just i've always been aware that i had a responsibility because i had certain gifts to serve if i could you're also humble which is good well yeah now that you're not jewish or gay i feel like you were just a nazi when did i i don't know how i feel about blessings [Music] as a general rule in this life if you have a friend if you have a colleague if you have a co-worker if you just met someone on the internet the other day for the first time and they tell you that they're gay don't question it don't talk back don't ask for their credentials don't ask them to prove it to you that they're gay just just warmly accept it and proceed to treat them as gay and you know what if you go and you scroll down their timeline if you go when you check their instagram and you go and you check their facebook you might find evidence of some members of the opposite sex they used to be involved with if it's a gay man you might find they used to date a straight woman you might say hey i'm i'm friends with that ex girlfriend of yours and if it's a lesbian there might be some men in their past there might even be some people of the opposite sex they've had sex with this week and it's still on their twitter timeline or it's still thursday or you know you within six degrees of separation there may be strange and contradictory things about their claims to being gay or their claims to being straight and you know what you should just do them the courtesy you should just extend to them the privilege if they say that they're gay you're not going to question it you're going to treat it as a solid fact 99.9 percent of the time it's easy to live by this principle and once in a long while it's not so easy it's a bit of a challenge i had an interview a few months ago with a youtuber called frank tufano we talked about his crazy beliefs about politics and science and he doesn't believe in the theory of evolution it was an interesting uh clash of civilizations this interview i had with him and one of the things you're going to find out about frank stefano if you put his name into google is that he says he's straight and a lot of people on the internet say that he's gay and a lot of people ridicule him for that and insult him and they say they have the photographs to prove it they have videotaped to prove it i did not insult him that way even once i didn't ask him one question with the slightest double antoner in it he chooses to say that he's straight i'm aware that there is evidence on the internet of him having passed sexual relations with men all right and i treated him completely warmly and completely sincerely as a straight man we did we talked a little bit about some of the women he had a crush on in some of his some aspects of his romantic life such as they came up in the conversation in that interview i was not going to insult him by cross-examining his claims to being straight i was not going to confront him with the fact other people try to humiliate him by pointing out the extent to which he has a history of being bisexual or gay okay so 99 percent of the time it's real easy to live by this principle the truth is there are people out there who don't know yet if they are straight or if they're gay and you have to treat them with courtesy at every single stage of that process you cannot act as if you know better than they do even if you do so sometimes you might have it figured out before they do and you know what it's not your place it's not your place itself it's not your place to preempt their process of self-discovery most of the time easy to live by if you've known a lot of feminists if you've known a lot of women who are part of women's rights movements in any english speaking culture in the western world you will have known some women some who were heterosexual and got caught up in the intellectual and political climate of a woman's feminist movement and they started to think maybe they were gay they started to think hey this is great they suddenly have a whole new circle of friends they joined this movement with a mix of aspirations to make the world a better place maybe to engage in some kind of hard-hitting critique or analysis of what's wrong with western civilization or capitalism or patriarchy or what have you and maybe maybe just maybe sometimes some of these heterosexual women have had bad experiences with men in the past and they're interested in analyzing that and maybe there's a little bit of a sense of wanting revenge against an ex-boyfriend or an ex-husband or their own father or grandfather or whatever their story sometimes not all the time okay and up to a certain point they think hey maybe i can make this work there are now these women around me who are variously lesbian and bisexual and i like them and they like me and some point they hit a wall where they realize no being colleagues being political comrades being intellectual equals and friends and all the conviviality and cooperation that's wonderful that's great but there's something innate and intrinsic that differentiates them from me that you just can't fake one of the most interesting aspects of this is hearing it from the other side if you hear it from the women who are gay the women who are lesbian or really are bisexual when they make the effort of kind of bringing in a heterosexual woman to the community maybe that maybe the heterosexual woman doesn't say she said or maybe she says she's bisexual or lesbian or curious or doesn't want to try and then how they feel because a lot of the time they were optimistic like oh great they've got this new colleague they've got this new friend and maybe it's going to be romantic and maybe it's been a girlfriend and then they put themselves in that situation where they hit that wall and realize no all my optimism was misplaced i was overlooking or ignoring the extent to which there's i was overlooking or ignoring the extent to which this person isn't just different from me but they will never really be able to sympathize they will never really be able to understand what life is like for us that there's actually an unbridgeable gap there's a kind of alienation there there's a limit even to how far empathy can go now in our culture you pretty much never hear about a heterosexual young man who just gets so interested in being a hairdresser or involved in musical theater or modern dance or the fashion industry that he starts to think that he's gay almost never right but that really just reflects the depth of homophobia in our society the fact that it's a much higher hurdle to go over that the inhibition is much greater if you're living in a culture that is more accepting of male homosexuality like thailand or thailand or have you heard of thailand there aren't that many cultures around the world that are accepting homosexuality but if it's thailand yeah there are going to be men who have a parallel process of figuring out that they're straight partly because they tried to be gay in some kind of subculture if not in a macro culture that's really kind of warm and encouraging or they happen to be surrounded by friends all of whom are gay blah blah blah blah parallel path admittedly none of these things apply to milo yiannopoulos milo yiannopoulos is not a heterosexual man who started living within a gay subculture that was so warm and so accepting that he started to think that he also might be gay milo yiannopoulos really is not even ex-gay his ideological position is to claim that homosexuality as such does not exist and he then wants to argue that the people who think that they're homosexual in fact have a kind of illness and he is now going to collect millions of dollars to open a clinic because he claims this is an illness he can help to cure all right in confronting the ex-gay movement in confronting the gay reparative therapy movement or gender realignment or we want to call it here in confronting this approach that many fundamentalist christians now try to make money out of to be blind it's very easy to leap to the question of efficacy it's very easy to jump to the stage of argument of insisting and saying but it doesn't work it can't work it never works all right and what you're skipping over is the most important part philosophically politically personally and every other way which is guess what guys even if it does work it's the wrong solution to your problem that's my position this kind of therapy he's talking about none of us can say none of us are in a position to say ever that it doesn't work and it's because of that first principle interests you if i had a friend who said much more sincerely than milo is doing that he tried being gay for a few years and he didn't like it it didn't work out for him so now he's gonna try to be straight and get a wife and kid and let's just say there's no religious baggage and there's nothing else involved okay what position do you think i'm in and again it doesn't matter if there are instagram photographs on the internet it doesn't matter if this guy had an only fans or an account on a porn website and was uploading videos of himself engaged in gay sex act there is no evidence there is no arbiter there is no judge but he himself if he has chosen really sincerely in his own mind if he has decided that he's fed up with being gay and he's gonna try to be straight right who am i who are any of us to say no you're wrong i veto your decision like my judgment is better than yours about your sexuality none of us are all right like i said 99.9 of the time it's easy to live by that principle once in a while okay and some of you in the audience will be in this kind of situation with a friend or a colleague a relative someone who decides to be ex-gay and most likely it will be because of religious guilt or you know they feel they had an epiphany or some kind of bizarre sense of supernatural quest but regardless think of the position you're in you're not in a position to say to them no you're not you don't feel that way you're not trying sadly you are in the position of having to step back and say hey this ultimately is about your journey of self-discovery and i'm out here in the cheap seats i'm out here i'm a i'm a distant spectator i'm never gonna know how you feel i'm never gonna know what you desire when you sit down with a catalog a clothing catalog and you're leafing through that are you once in a while turned on by the photographs of the guys or the girls or is it both all right that i can't read your mind there's and you know what even if i can read your mind because you might have some real close friends with no no no no no no brad i've sat next to brad when we were flipping through that close catalog and i was looking at the clothes and brad was looking at the dudes i could tell right you you might feel that you know brad better than brad no you might feel certain and it's still not your place it's still not appropriate you gotta live by that principle where you let him decide you let him discover it for himself okay ultimately you can change your behavior a straight woman can choose to live as if she's a lesbian a straight man behaviorally can choose to live as if he's gay and vice versa right the problem is precise that we're talking about something that's that's deeper that's more fundamental it's more profound than behavior we're talking about something that's part of the desire that comes before that behavior right on the level of instinct something as raw and immediate and irrational as how you respond to the sight of a spider crawling on a wall or a snake winding its way through the grass in that first split second before you've even had time to think through the word snake or spider on that level of instinct are you gay and are you straight and then once you have those feelings you know what are you going to do with them the tragedy of milo yiannopoulos is not that his crazy reparative therapy can't work it's that it's the wrong solution to the wrong problem okay because milo is not looking for someone to show him how he can have a wife and a child and live as a heterosexual man he's looking for someone to show him the way to god he's looking for someone to show him the way to a meaningful life and to a kind of afterlife a kind of absolution a kind of immortality a kind of moral certainty that i stopped believing in maybe when i was four years old right he wants something that is as self-contradictory and impossible to have and unattainable as a square circle as hot ice and to get it he's going to convince himself he's going to need to believe that he's heterosexual for a gay man to believe that he's straight is much easier than living in a godless world and believing that it's the creation of god the only cure for milo yiannopoulos is atheism the only way out of the cage he's built for himself it's not for him to rediscover that he's gay it's not for him to start believing again that being a homosexual is a biologically normal thing homosexuals should have rights that it's not a sickness etc etc the way out of the cage is for him to believe in nothing at all [Music] maybe we can we can practice yes