Alex Morse and Gay Panic
American Puritanism rears its ugly head on "the Left" | #TC80
Welcome to Third Cultured, a reading of international relations focused on the American Empire’s great power competition with China and Russia, and the global state of LGBTQ+ rights — written by yours truly, Kyle Borland. My goal is to create a community that cares about foreign affairs while understanding the unique role Queer people play in the United States and the world-at-large.
Thanks for reading. This newsletter is free but – if you’d like to support it or me – please subscribe below, heart this post, or support my Patreon.
Stay safe and healthy, beautiful people. And, thanks for reading.
xoxo,
Kyle (@kgborland)
The (online) American Left debated a set of allegations over the weekend made by the College Democrats of Massachusetts against Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse – a 31-year-old first elected nine years ago during his senior year of college – claiming the mayor participated in “inappropriate behavior” with college students during his nine-year tenure.
His supposed crimes during that time are threefold:
Adding college students to his “Close Friends” on Instagram and sending DMs
Matching with adult men on Grindr and Tinder
Having consensual gay sex with other adult gay men who were not his students
No, I’m not joking.
You see, what some folks on “the Left” would have you think in the year of our lord 2020 is that “justice” is when you side with accusers without any due diligence or process. If someone makes an accusation, then you are guilty by default. Nevermind that there is no evidence, in this case in particular, but in many of the Left’s most recent panics, and a call for said corroboration will have you labeled an “enabler” faster than DSA can un-endorse someone. (At this point, getting their endorsement should come with a *.)
The bar for “harm” is not set at harassment or violence. Oh no, today merely making an adult uncomfortable will have you sent to the ninth ring of Hell.
In this case, not a single shred of evidence has come forward. On the contrary, in the Boston Globe article covering the allegations, the only explicitly cited example said – in plain English – that they weren’t aware of Morse’s status as mayor or as a lecturer at their university until after their encounter, and felt “uncomfortable” afterward.
How can information you don’t know have had power over your decision-making?
Spoiler alert: it can’t.
Now, I’m admittedly very close to this situation. I have both dated men much older than me since the moment I turned 18 and was removed from an executive board position in my sophomore year of college over gay panic. In my own experience, other board members (all cishet) who also skipped conference sessions (to fuck, to nap, to shop, etc.), were not penalized, but I was because “going on a date with a professional reflects poorly on our department.” They then proceeded to remove me from my position and attempted to force me to reveal the professional’s place of work, so they could contact them. I flatly refused both the assistant deans and a panel of professors’ request to reveal his identity. Why? Because it was none of their damn business.
So, I say this next part from a place of personal understanding and having consumed as many takes on this situation as possible since Friday: buck the fuck up.
“No adult should have to apologize for having sex, for having personal relationships.”
– Mayor Alex Morse on The Hill’s “Rising” program
It is not the job of adults to police the consensual sexual interactions of other adults. College students are not children. They have full agency. More importantly, we cannot ruin the personal and professional life of anyone over unsubstantiated allegations that amount to “he made another adult uncomfortable.” If the bar is discomfort, then we are about to go down a jagged, rocky slope and the people who get up at the bottom will not be the folks they claim to advocate for.
College students are adults. This infantilization of adults is perhaps the most egregious aspect of this whole debacle. Being a “student” does not strip them of their full-throated agency as an adult human being. We won’t even get into the classist nature of these critiques. Does anyone care what a 20-year old tradesman or furniture salesman is doing with his penis? No, unfortunately, we reserve this coddling for the spawn of the elite set. So elite they view every interaction through a lens of “power dynamics” that routinely positions them, conveniently, as “victims” or “survivors.”
As Matt Taibbi put it perfectly:
There are a million reasons to be disgusted by this story – the overt trading in ancient homophobic tropes about sexual predation, the Moral-Majority style sexual Puritanism, the nauseating neo-Bolshevik terminology (“gatekeeper” is set to be this generation’s kulak) and the ludicrous political implications, with would-be mega-progressives laboring to keep someone like Morse from unseating a favorite of Lockheed-Martin and Altria from one of the Hill’s most powerful committees.
But the most grotesque part of the story is the obsessive/delusional misunderstanding of “power,” which after years of intersectional propaganda has become the primary lens through which young progressives see the world. Constant preaching that all human interactions are political contests, with one side always getting the better of the other, has made a whole generation phobic about adulthood.
This terror of a world separated into victimizers and victims has already ruined journalism, where a new class of reporters is so locked into the idea that every second of airtime or line of an editorial is an exercise of power that they’ve begun demanding the removal of alternative political viewpoints from their publications — other ideas make them feel literally unsafe.
Which brings us back to the Left’s latest strain of puritanism.
These students are not “survivors” or “victims” by any stretch of the imagination. Words mean things. These young adults were not assaulted or harmed by their own admission. Maybe in another timeline where someone was actually willing to go on the record, we could say differently, but I’m not going to twist myself into knots because people under 25’s concept of “power” doesn’t extend beyond their bubble of personal space. As many have said, the “new Left” is more focused on a politics of personal validation rather than one that builds genuine power to enact tangible change.
You can see this schism in power analysis in the endorsements that have stuck by Morse and the one’s that jumped ship almost immediately. On one side, you have the LGBT Victory Fund, MA Nurses, Andrew Yang, and local electeds reaffirming their support for Morse and decrying the blatant homophobia consuming his critics online and in the district. (Notable highlight: the Massachusetts Nurses continued to support him because he supports Medicare For All – their ultimate policy goal.)
“We’re a highly sex-negative society. And we have this fantasy that people in politics are asexual beings behind closed doors.”
On the other, progressives are jumping the gun to stay in good graces with the purity police, including Jamaal Bowman (even after Morse campaigned for him during a pandemic), the Western Mass Sunrise Movement (I guess anonymous feelings trump climate change?), Justice Democrats, IfNotNow, and the Working Families Party. All of them patronizing to Morse, in detail, the exact way he can grovel to earn their approval again. Because let’s be honest. The only thing these organizations have to offer is moral approval, but first, you must admit you’re at fault even when you did nothing wrong. (Especially if you’re Queer.) When what has been alleged barely garners an apology – which they’ve received – and now it’s time for them to decide if they can accept that or not. The rest is between them and their therapist(s).
Mayor Morse is simply the latest in a string of accusations against progressive candidates looking to unseat entrenched Democratic incumbents. His opponent, Congressman Richard Neal (D-MA1), is a 30-year representative who happens to be one of the most corporate-backed members of Congress on either side of the aisle. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say Lockheed Martin is thankful to these college students for their shallow misunderstanding (at best) of “power dynamics.” As I said above, young adults don’t view politics as an accumulation of power to effect change, but as an arena for self-validation and flagellation. A virtue-signaling contest that never ends.
“Media like the Boston Globe, have given more scrutiny to my personal sex life than they have to Congressman Neal’s 30 years of corruption. People in this district and across the country see this for what it is: a very suspicious argument and allegation coming out three weeks before the election.”
Conveniently, this story broke three weeks before the surging Morse was to challenge Neal at the ballot box, and, on top of that, the Congressman donated directly to the organization making the unfounded allegations. Tell me, are we supposed to go along with the lie that young adults are to be coddled while also ignoring what we see with our own eyes? I can’t do either, but there’s a lot of folks online that can do both.
On Tuesday, The Intercept published that chief strategist for the UMass Amherst College Democrats, Timothy Ennis, had several notable connections with Congressman Neal and was not shy about his excitement to work with the congressman. Claire Sheedy, a rising sophomore who was active in the College Democrats chapter until the letter was published, told The Intercept:
In November 2019, when Ennis was president of the College Democrats chapter, the pair were in New Hampshire together campaigning for Buttigieg, and Ennis, she said, opened up about his respect for Neal in a car ride through New Hampshire. “He spoke very highly of Mr. Neal,” Sheedy said. “What he said to me was he wanted Neal to be his ‘in’ to politics and work his way up from there.”
Sheedy said she asked Ennis what he thought of Morse, and Ennis said Morse socialized with students in a way he found creepy, and that Morse had recently matched with a student on Tinder, a dating app. Sheedy said she didn’t think of it again until last week, when she and the other members of the College Democrats were told by leadership that they had written a letter on the members’ behalf to the local college paper, which had published an article based on it.
Another former rising sophomore member, Helena Middleton, left a couple of days before the letter was published because of the organization’s notable anti-Morse bias. When asked about the letter, she said:
“…definitely wasn’t aware of the letter or any issues until after it was released. They just made a statement. I thought it was odd that they never filed any complaints to UMass before this, which is what you’re supposed to do if you’re a registered student org.”
It’s unsurprising then that in an interview with The Hill’s “Rising,” Morse accused the College Democrats of shopping the story around to major publications like the Washington Post and Politico who refused to run the story without someone on the record (a journalistic standard). In a local college newspaper, the organization found someone willing to copy-and-paste sensational allegations without a second thought.
Despite this obvious gay panic-driven “smear the queer” campaign, or likely because of it, Morse’s campaign had one of its best fundraising weeks ever since launching his campaign. Mayor Morse summed it up well when he said:
“This has become about the politics of personal destruction, and not about policy because Congressman Neal knows he can’t win on policy.”
As a gay man, I am proud that Morse stood firm against this Lavender Scare. As an American, I am proud that he pushed back against the ravenous online mob who’s own twisted pursuit of victimization has tainted the necessary conversations around consent and power started by the #MeToo movement. These allegations, and those pushing them, do a disservice to the progress the movement has made when they equate an adult’s discomfort to violence and harassment.
What does that say to actual survivors?
To accept allegations with no evidence when other survivors have testified in explicit detail before the US Senate or published their experience for all to consume is a child’s perspective. It means de-centering the progressive movement’s power building and focusing on the individual feelings of unnamed young adults.
It is far past time that the American Left reckon with its demons. We cannot continue down the path of puritanical witch hunts while calling ourselves “progressives.” We cannot allow the co-opting of social justice and survivor language to be applied to discomfort in a world so full of violence and harassment. There is no justice in what we are doing now to Alex Morse. These are age-old, homophobic tropes attempting to paint a gay man as a sex-obsessed predator for engaging in consensual sex. It’s a vocal minority parading around like a moral majority, holding their own masquerade of virtuosity.
What these anonymous accusers expected was for Morse to cave under the weight of their allegations. In the current climate, who could blame them for making such a determination? Unfortunately for them, Alex Morse has a spine. He will not allow the moral proclivities of some keyboard warriors to stop him from addressing the true issues we face as a nation: climate change, corporate corruption, imperialism, police brutality, and more.
If any evidence should come to light, then I will eat my words, but justice is not supposed to depend on what could happen. It is built on what did happen. At this moment, all that happened was consensual gay sex between young adults and the projection of puritanical morality from a disoriented generation.
Oh, and one last thing, when all the gay men say it’s gay panic, maybe next time we can actually count on our fellow Queers to have our back rather than lecturing us about our own lived experiences.
But, that’s an essay for another time.
“People like me, who have had to endure an over-policing of our sex lives as a member of the Queer community, are so familiar with this language. This framing of gay men as predators is incredibly problematic and is something that we’ve been going up against for generations. So many people messaging me saying, ‘Stay in this fight!’ Young people and Queer people need freedom, too, and we deserve to run for office. Will young people, will gay people ever run for office, if this is how powerful people are going to treat us when we want to make a difference in this country?”