Rise of the gay authoritarians
by Brendan O’Neill, The Australian:
The great Anthony Burgess is best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, famously immortalised in blood-spattered celluloid by Stanley Kubrick. But he wrote what I consider to be a better novel, The Wanting Seed, published in 1962, which is about a world in which you have to be gay to get ahead.
Like A Clockwork Orange, it’s a dystopian tale, in which the gay authorities promote homosexuality in an effort to stop humans from breeding and having so many kids. Gay people get better jobs and run politics and the police, while straights are effectively forbidden from polite society.
It’s brilliantly Burgessian: a comic dystopia rather than the tragic sort done so well by Orwell. And this week, it proved kind of prophetic. Well, someone was sacked allegedly for being straight.
It was Cassandra Liebeknecht, unceremoniously booted out of her role as boss of Adelaide’s annual queer arts event, Feast Festival. Feast says she’s being investigated for unprofessional conduct, but Liebeknecht says the allegations are false and that she has been mistreated because she’s a breeder, as straights are disparagingly referred to in A Wanting Seed.
Her claims sound like something out of that topsy-turvy novel of gay repression of straights. “I’ve been spat on, I’ve had people scare me, I’ve had people contact me at work anonymously, saying ‘I know where your children go to school’,” she says.
I’m sorry, but this reminded me of the darker shenanigans in The Wanting Seed, where those with an “aura of fertility” — straights — are set upon by “swift, balletic” mobs.
Of course, we don’t live in that Burgessian world, really. Straights are not repressed. Young gays still find life harder than young straights, though thanks to the new tolerance of gayness they’re usually OK by adulthood.
And yet there is a creepingly authoritarian feel to some gay politics, an almost Burgessian intolerance, not so much of straights per se, but of certain ways of thinking, of certain ideas and identities.
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