The Freemasons!…The Illuminati!…and Kirk and Madsen!
Jonathan Rowe on Jan 8th 2006
Often when watching C-SPAN, I notice the “black helicopter” crowd calls in and I see Brian Lamb smirk and do his best not to roll his eyes. Soon they start talking about the “master-plan” of the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral commission and the New World Order. Well we can add another set of names to that list: Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, authors of the “secret blueprint” of the gay agenda, After the Ball!
Seriously though, Kirk and Madsen’s book has become something of an urban myth among the looney right. WorldNutDaily’s David Kupelian has a new book where After the Ball features prominently in “The Marketing of Evil.” Yes, it was a real book. But no, the way in which it is portrayed is simply not accurate. Just do a google search on After the Ball and see what comes up. Pro-gay sites? Gays talking about how wonderful a book it is because they can use it to advance their agenda? No. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of “gay activists” have never read and probably never even heard of the book.
So what does pop up on the google search? All antigay conspiracy mongering.
On the other hand, do a google on Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer, Jonathan Rauch (more libertarian/conservative), Michelangelo Signorile, Urvashi Vaid (more lefty), Michael Warner (radical lefty), and what do you see? A mix of gay-related sites, critical discussion by nongay sites, and criticisms by the antigay right. You see, the gay community and its allies aren’t shy about discussing its ideas. So why is there literally almost no discussion to be found by the gay community on After the Ball? Well it must be just like the Freemasons and their secret handshake there is a conspiracy of silence. But the jig is up because the other side has our “secret playbook”!
A few years ago, Steve Miller nailed it:
I vaguely remember this book from my years as a GLAAD committee chair in New York (before being pushed out for raising objections to the group’s unctuous political correctness). I recall that “After the Ball” did make a good case for a mainstream gay rights movement that focused on placing the normality of our lives before the American public — and using professional PR strategies to accomplish this. But the book didn’t generate much buzz among the lefty lesbigay activists at the helm of “the movement” and certainly was never adopted as any kind of a blueprint. Today it’s all but forgotten. To suggest that this book is and has been driving a “gay agenda” is bizarre to say the least. How gullible are these people?
Filed in The Belfry, The Bookshelf, The Boudoir
I get a chuckle everyday, as i walk into downtown, passing in front of the newly renovated Masonic Temple which sits directly across the street from the Roman Catholic Cathedral and Chancery. For NYE this year, the local lesbian rock band played in the main, and stunningly beautifully redone, concert hall of the Mason’s, while the local Symphony, conducted by a well-known gay and internationally respected maestro, played in the Cathedral. It is very difficult to see any conspiracies that would link all of this together.
It’s a bizarre opinion piece, that’s for sure, one that sets a new standard even for the WND.
It also confirms one of the things I’ve always noticed about conservatives, and that ought to be made into a post of its own soon: Quite often I find among them the bad habit of identifying oppositional ideas and/or political programs from ten or more years ago, and then claiming that they are a current menace to American society. It seems unthinkable to the author of this piece, for example, that perhaps the red-hot gay sex lives of the 1970s may have cooled down a bit in the age of AIDS, and that gay marriage may actually be teaching us some responsibility, too. Heaven knows that my sex life as a married and faithful gay man is nothing like what many of the pioneers of gay life have had. It’s just not on my agenda. (Frankly, I can’t even imagine finding time for five hundred sex partners in a year, much less libido.)
The same can be noted, I think, in many conservatives’ ideas about present-day feminism. Listen to them, and you might think that feminism was all about separatism, identity politics, even bra-burning. But most of the really cutting-edge feminist theory today is (somewhat weirdly) interested in masculinity, and in critiquing men’s images of manliness. All political considerations aside, I would think that conservatives ought to find this real present-day feminism a lot more threatening to the established order. Yet they’re still blasting away at the brand of separatist feminism that went completely out of fashion at least a decade ago. I guess that to be really appropriate as a target, an idea must also have few defenders; it makes the victories easier.
Tuesday Toutings
Wow, lots today, gathered over a week or more and bookmarked for…
[...] Rather, I’m going to update a point I made earlier when I discussed Kupelian’s book. The book relies heavily on Marshall Kirk’s and Hunter Madsen’s book, After the Ball — a progay rights book, written by two marketers who suggested using classic marketing techniques to change people’s minds in favor of gay rights — as the prototype for The Marketing of Evil. [...]
G.Washington And other free MASONS wore their crests as they set up this country the way they felt it should be run and since that day men like him have the say in everything that happen in this country. I would like to spend a weekend with this group and straighten out the road they have put us on before the camps and gated communities which will put my grandchildren and possibly my own children on the outside looking in, but down deep a man like me scares the hell out of them ,tHEY WOULDN’T WANT TO FACE THE TRUTH.
r/e.deininger Teaneck NJ
As one of the authors of that ‘all but forgotten’ book in discussion - AFTER THE BALL: HOW AMERICA WILL CONQUER ITS FEAR OF GAYS IN THE ‘90S — I agree that the religious right has been deliberately distorting the book’s relevance to the modern gay rights movement. Few gays today remember the book.
For anyone still interested, ATB was published in 1989, and stirred a ruckus at the time (Time, Newsweek, Wash. Post, even the Wall St. Journal ran an excerpt). Its authors were excoriated by most of what constituted the gay activist leadership in the US at that time, mainly because the book harshly disparaged their tired tactics, analyzed the psychological underpinnings of homophobia and, informed by that analysis, laid out a quite different communication strategy for gaining gay rights — a strategy that drove self-styled queer radicals up the wall. Both straights and gay moderates, however, loved the book. I’m told that excerpts of the article upon which the book was based were read aloud, in affirmation, at the founding meeting of GLAAD. The book’s thinking preceded and, in many ways, presaged the better-publicized cases by made Bruce Bawer, Sullivan, and the rest of that conservative crowd.
None of this explains, however, why religious bigots continue to cast Kirk and Madsen, preposterously, as the gay movement’s Elders of Zion. They do so because our book spoke in alarmingly direct language about the brute mechanics of public opinion manipulation, and about the Religious Right’s aggressive use of those mechanics. Worse, we dared to suggest that gays fight fire with fire, and laid out a plan for doing so. In this plan, the Right had found a simulacrum of its much sought “gay agenda”, the blueprint for the gigantic gay conspiracy that it wished to believe was on the march. Their thinking is hooey, and their own rhetorical use of ATB is so deceptive that it marks them out clearly for what they are: manipulative liars. In any case, I must sit by, and watch them misrepresent my writing, over and over, year after year. Tiresome.