PLEASE PICK ME! On Leaving the Alphabet Cult and Finding My Self

Surviving the LGBT Cult of Conformity

“Pride is not the opposite of shame. It is its source. The only antidote to shame is true humility”. —some anime or something

I. THE SLIDE OF ASSIMILATION

We are all sold the lie.

Love and hope and empathy and rainbows.

We are all fed the marketing.

Live your truth! Be your authentic self! #ItGetsBetter! Rainbows! Pride!

Gay men like myself are led to believe that in coming out, there is a “community” waiting for you — one of endless love, support, and acceptance, with friendship overflowing in abundance.

We are told that in coming out, we are walking into the embrace of warm, inviting, rainbow-colored arms.

In reality, we are being shoved into the jaws of a shark.

I came out at 18 years old, expecting to be embraced by this “community”. For years, I tried to make my way down the slide of assimilation, desperately hoping to be understood by them.

“Love and hope and empathy” wasn’t exactly my experience…

From the moment I came out, I was surprised by how out of place I felt amongst most gay people. Being told “You’re ugly” and “You’re crazy” from other gay men was something I got very much used to — way more than any person ever should. The scorn and judgement that I was told I’d experience from straight people was now what I was experiencing on a daily basis from gay people. They wouldn’t just pick apart your insecurities — they had a remarkable ability to make you feel insecure about the qualities you actually like about yourself!

Today, I am able to distinguish and identify them as “mainstream” liberal establishment gays. Members of the “LGBTQ community”. Alphabet people. I will refer to them from hereon as The Stepford Gays.

But at the time, not having that knowledge or that language to separate, I spent most days wondering… “Why are gay people like this?”

As a closeted teenager, my biggest fear in coming out was that it would strip away my individuality, and that I would forever be known as “the GAY guy” first, and as a person second — if at all.

This is a fear I expected to encounter from straight people, yet experienced tenfold from gay people — many of whom seemed perfectly content to let their personhood take a backseat to their identity. 

For a people who claim that they’re fighting norms, they have a visceral hatred for anything that falls outside of their norms. They are authoritarians — they just pray to a different authority.

Having now declared myself part of their world, like the Little Mermaid, I was finding myself muzzled and voiceless. It seemed no matter where I went amongst gay crowds, no matter what I did, I just didn’t fit in. For a people that preach about self-acceptance, there is nobody on this earth more obsessed with labels and people fitting neatly into predetermined boxes. You had to look a certain way, you had to dress a certain way, you had to think a certain way, you had to be a certain archetype, you had to listen to a certain kind of music, you had to all have the same “acceptably gay” interests.

They invent boxes, then break your bones trying to crush and contort you into them.

As someone who grew up traveling like a gypsy and singing in punk bands, the punk rock worldview of individuality and antiestablishment nonconformity… that wasn’t a costume for me. That was something that I lived and breathed. But I soon learned that these values were inherently incompatible with the values of this community.

Every day I felt bombarded by judgmental questions and accusatory “why”s. Why do you wear your hair like that? Why are you dressed like that? Why do you listen that loud music? Why would you say that? Why would you laugh at that?

The why’s were never designed to reach any sort of mutual understanding, but to tacitly point out that you are the other.

I had been told that in coming out, I would be allowed to be my honest and authentic self. But I quickly found out that the absolute last thing you can be in the alphabet community is your honest authentic self. It is just not a community where individuality is tolerated. It is a world where your spirit is crushed and your personhood is erased — painted over by a rainbow.

In all honesty, as much as I could feel the Stepford Gays’ immense dislike of me… the feeling was mutual.

It was a very isolating feeling grappling with a simple fact: I just don’t like these people!

Everything about them drove me crazy. The cattiness. The cruelty. The phoniness. The conformity. The constant judgement. The obsession with labels and neat little boxes. The obsession with being gay. The fixation on judging other people by how “gay” they do or don’t seem, and which boxes they do or do not fulfill. The way their gestures and mannerisms somehow conformed with everyone else’s. Their apparent delusion that a sexual orientation is a substitute for a personality. Many of them felt as plastic on the inside as they were on the outside.

It felt like a colorless world, where everything is predetermined — every emotion scheduled, decided upon, and spoon-fed to you.

Our values felt totally out of sync. I quickly learned that the gay culture is basically an upside-down land. The things we look at as being universally positive and healthy values are the things that are shunned in the gay world — while toxic, self-destructive behavior is lauded and glamorized. What would roundly be viewed as poisonous amongst the general public, is rebranded as “fabulous” the moment it involves gay people. Gay men have been sold a false bill of goods. One that is the road to a lonely and unhappy life.

This culture creates an insurmountable defect when it comes to the pursuit of romance. For straight people, there are certain standards that exist: Open the door, get to know somebody before jumping in bed, respect your woman, honor your man. These things might be in short supply in our postmodern times, but they are at least concepts that exist. For gay men, no such concepts exist. There are no standards. There is no expectation of any sort of baseline decency.

Some people believe that politics is what created this malaise. But this has little to do with politics. It is a deep cultural rot, the reenforcement of a tightly-controlled echo chamber, and a vicious cycle of bullshit that many gay men struggle to pull ourselves out of. Politics is just the next evolution of that. I was a liberal loyal Democrat, and yet I showed too much of an independent spirit. So I would never be viewed as an equal.

Did their emotional instability create their politics, or did they select their politics based on their emotional instability? It’s the drag queen and the egg.

One thing I have learned with certainty: The mainstream LGBT community is significantly more about hate than it is about love. Hatred of the other and mutual resentments are amongst the only things they have in common beyond identity.

For a people who shriek “Love is love”, there is a significant deficit of it in the gay culture. Monogamy is seen as an undesirable taboo. Love has been replaced by anonymous hookups and casual sex. (And just wait until straight people realize that the most toxic elements of the gay culture has long since been exported to the straight world via mainstream culture… so now we all get to be miserable and unhappy together, yay!)

Being a person who unabashedly wants to love and be loved will make you extremely unpopular in the gay world. Monogamy is considered the chess club of gaydom. Looking at their values, one can’t help but wonder… isn’t there more than this?

In the gay culture, you have the right to marry — but not the right to love.

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Some people say that I believe these things because I hate gay people. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It is out of a profound love for my fellow homos that I tell them the truth: That we can be more than this. We are better than this bullshit. We can aspire to more than being the drunk slut at the bar.

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I always assumed that even noticing these things, let alone feeling so strongly about them, made me some freak anomaly — that I was the only person who felt this overwhelmingly negative and stifling experience from the mainstream LGBT culture. Turns out I’m anything but. My experience is not unique. I of course don’t speak for all gay people… but I do speak for some. Way more than you’d think…

When you give it a moment of thought, all of their conventions fall apart. You begin to see through the charade and wonder why this alleged community even exists.

Why is the idea so normalized that having romantic interest in the same sex means that a group of people would have any other commonalities? What exactly do any of us have in common?

Can anyone imagine me and Hannah Gadsby having a jolly old time and laughing together? Do you think I’d have a whole lot in common with the guys from Queer Eye? When you look at damn near any mainstream alphabet person on TikTok… does that seem like someone I would be friends with? Is that really someone I would share “community” with?

Hell no! And they would probably say the same thing about me. And that’s okay.

This is the secret truth about the LGBT community: None of them actually like each other. Every letter is at war with every letter, not to mention at war with each other. They hate everything including themselves. It’s toxic and dysfunctional. But is there any other way it could’ve gone?

The fact is: Sharing the same sexual orientation with someone does not a community make. The word “community” has been so perverted — force-fed to us like a goose for pâté — that we’ve grown accustomed to its absence of any deeper spiritual meaning. A community built around sharing a sexuality or a gender is as arbitrary and as hollow as a community built around people who have the same hair color. Are brunettes expected to pledge a loyalty oath to the hair community? No. So why do we expect that of all those who are same-sex attracted?

And what happens to the gay Americans who don’t want to be in a community with them?

It all comes down to one word: Abuse.

Let’s be very clear. A majority of what is pushed on us by the modern LGBT establishment and its disciples, is the language of abusers.

The idea that because somebody was nice to you once, you owe them the rest of your life, is the ethos of an abuser.

If they treat you poorly, yet make you believe that you still owe them your debt, your servitude, and your eternal loyalty...

If they try to use social ostracism as a coercion tactic…

If they use guilt, coercion, and shame to try and make you sleep with people you don’t want to sleep with…

If they try to control your words, thoughts, and who you can be friends with...

That’s not a community. It is abuse.

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II. LEAVING THE RAINBOW MATRIX

I never knew that there was another way. Being a born and raised New Yorker in a tightly constricted blue bubble, nobody ever tells you these things. But at a certain point along the way, and after years of trying to fit in with these people to no avail — the monopoly that the leftist alphabet had on my mind slowly started to loose its grip.

The seeds of my red pilling that were subconsciously laced throughout my life all these years, finally began to come to fruition in 2016. Having always been politically conscious and a lifelong Democrat, I wanted to educate myself on who to vote for between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Yet like most cults, the more I asked questions, the more hate I got for it — told to shut up and do as I’m told. Cults really don’t want you researching them.

Suddenly, the sparkle-colored glasses I had worn since the day I came out of the closet, were coming undone. Everywhere I turned, I saw leftist alphabet people being abjectly awful in ways I could no longer ignore. The same types who for years had bombarded me with “You’re ugly” and “You’re crazy” were now seeking to bring that same venom towards the rest of society.

I remember very clearly the day that some girls I knew (one was a writer for Buzzfeed) proudly spoke of how they went to a memorial for the victims of the Pulse Orlando shooting, and “heckled” it for having “too many white people”. Imagine thinking you’re the good guys for proudly HECKLING a memorial.

I then found out about leftist Democrats undoing HIV disclosure laws — states making it legal to intentionally give someone HIV. Putting gay men at risk to sexual predators who mean them harm. THAT is how much this “community” cares about its members.

The foreshadowing was there all along of what would come. All of the cultural toxicity that had been bubbling underneath the surface for so long had now come full circle and made its way into the politics they promote. I became disgusted seeing how my identity was being used to justify some of the most unconscionable and authoritarian policies in human history. From forced wedding cakes to drag queen children to double mastectomies for 12 year olds. I couldn’t believe how what was once supposed to be the gay community, was now giving validity to every ugly stereotype that had ever been used against gay people since the dawn of time.

So I questioned these things. And I questioned them some more.

Suffice to say, it did not go over well…

Open discussion would never be a threat to an actual community. But it is always the single biggest threat to a cult.

It was around this time that I first began hearing about pronouns and They/Thems and other such nonsense. I now had chubby women calling themselves “trans” and screaming in my face that I’m a bigot if I don’t sleep with them. Suddenly, the word “queer” became the politically correct term for all gay people.

The definition of queer is abnormal, worthless, suspicious, differing from what is normal, of a questionable nature or character; mentally unbalanced or deranged.

Aren’t these all the things that gay people spent decades trying to make people understand that we are not? Yet gay people who just want to live their lives as multifaceted individuals were now considered relics of a bygone era. This was now “the QUEER community”.

I thought back to being that closeted teenager, desperately afraid of my individuality being stripped away and only ever being seen as “the gay guy”. We had finally moved past that in society — all for our own community to bring us right back to that place? A place where one is solely ever defined and judged by their immutable traits? No. That doesn’t work for me.

I was done. I was so, so done. After years and years of biting my tongue and swallowing my pride, I was now ready for a conscious uncoupling. It’s not you — it’s me. (But also, it’s you.)

So I finally decided to speak up — unabashedly and unapologetically. I didn’t just assert my individuality — I made sure it was the wrecking ball through their house of cards.

Overnight I became a far-right alt-right homophobic transphobic problematic privileged cis white supremacist nazi. I lost every friend I’d ever had. Some of them even called me a “gay Uncle Tom”. I was very offended by this… because as we all know, a gay Uncle Tom is an “Auntie Mame”. Get it right, queers!

I never intended to walk away from the supposed “LGBT community”. But I unknowingly was.

Challenging their orthodoxy was the first strike, questioning their ideology was the second, and asserting my unwavering individuality was the death blow. I was from that moment onward, an apostate.

What I never could’ve imagined is what was waiting for me on the other side…

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III. PICK ME!

I learned a new term recently. It’s one that I’m called at least a few times a day.

You see, according to the alphabet people, I’m a “pick me”.

Calling LGBT dissidents a “pick me” is the buzzword of the month (just like problematic, traitor, grifter, and fascist before it). This is yet another way that the leftist alphabet industry dehumanizes dissidents. It is a way of avoiding any introspection for their own behavior, or any reflection on their own contradictory ideology. The alphabet cult desperately needs to believe that there is a nefarious and insincere motivation lurking beneath every LGBT person that doesn’t submit to their will. They divine themselves as Miss Cleo, knowing exactly what’s secretly in your heart and mind at all times.

A “pick me” is an LGBT person who apparently woke up one morning and decided that they would enjoy being shunned by their entire dating pool, ostracized by every friend they ever had, cancelled by the people who control their industries, and rejected by their own alleged community. All so they can be “picked” by the people who currently have precisely zero cultural power. A hefty price to be “picked”.

You would think gay people would know better than anyone that nobody would choose to be an outsider.

Why do they go so hard after the millions of LGBT people who reject their cult ideology and its abusive behavior? Because the worst fear of any cult is the unification of its dissidents, and the power of their truth. We find each other. And you have given us a very educational model of what NOT to be.

One of the most beautiful and unexpected things to happen to me over the last few years has been finding true support, love, and community from some of the people I least expected it from.

Conservatives! Christians! Gays! Amongst so many other types. The acceptance that I craved and never got from the Stepford Gays is the acceptance I have now found amongst my wrongthinkers.

Thinking back to my years spent trying to fit in with the alphabet people, it can be described in one word: Laughless. I always tried to maintain gay friends, yet those friendships would never last long. There would always be some “problematic” problem, which would typically result in them hating me.

What I consider to be one of the biggest blessings post-Walk Away, is that for the first time in my life, I have a whole bunch of very close gay friends. Real bonds that are based in real commonalities and things that are much deeper than any silly sexual orientation or political affiliation. Deep, meaningful, soulful friendships.

What I can say about my wrongthinker LGBT friends is that absolutely NONE of them are easily categorized into boxes. None of them are one-dimensional or archetypes. And they are anything but colorless.

What I’ve learned is that there is something powerful about the friendship that can exist between gay people who have shared the same experiences. But the important thing to note is that this one commonality is the frosting. It is not the cake. Your values, your character, your heart, mind, soul… THAT is the cake. And when those things collide… well, those are called Superfriends.

Since 2019, I have had the opportunity to travel the entire country speaking to entire rooms full of rebellious and free-thinking LGBT people. (Not to mention, some very kickass straights!) I had no idea how many of us there are. It has been the honor of my life. I never thought even one person who thought like me existed out there — let alone millions.

The Stepford Gays started this mess, and the Rebel Gays will finish it.

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I often think of the people who were abused by this vicious hateful cult and lost their battle. People like Wilson Gavin, a 21 year old gay man who took a stand against Drag Queen Story Hour, and took his life shortly after, following relentless attacks and harassment from the alphabet cult.

Daphne Dorman was a transgender woman and a comedian who was a friend of Dave Chappelle. When she stuck by her friend amidst controversy, the cult came for her. And like Wilson before her, they pushed her over the edge. Daphne passed away in 2019 from suicide.

When I first heard Dave Chappelle talk about his transgender friend Daphne, and the cruelty that she endured from her own “community”, he said something that really impacted me.

“I don’t know what the trans community did to her, but they were not her tribe. We were.”

That hit me like a ton of bricks. Especially considering how they treated her in the last days of her life — and how they continued to speak of her, even in death.

It is a daily occurrence for me these last few years that I am called a “traitor” against “my people”. People who never even liked me in the first place.

What I realized, and what I am trying to say to my former cuhmunitay, is this:

You’re not my people. You never were. You never will be. And that’s okay.

Trying to make my way down the slide of assimilation that is the mainstream gay culture was like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. (tehe, insert gay buttsex joke here…)

My people are those who are fucking REAL! Because frankly, there is nothing about the “LGBT community” that is real or authentic. It is all built upon aesthetics, superficialities, and mutual resentments. From phony hookups to phony outrage to phony Botox.

My people are the weirdos, the wrongthinkers, the individuals, the outcasts, the dissidents, the rebels, and the outliers. People who are unique and flawed and multifaceted and unabashed and self-aware. We are all sexualities, genders (both of them), races, religions, and creeds.

And guess what? We’re making our own damn community.

We all know that anyone who leaves the left, particularly the alphabet cult, will get a whole lot of hate. But what you will also get is more love, laughter, and genuine soulfulness than you ever could’ve imagined. The friends you will make will be the upgrade of all upgrades.

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In 2019, I did my first speaking event — the #WalkAway LGBT Town Hall, which brought together a sold out crowd of wrongthinkers. Naturally, the alphabet cult threw a hissie fit and created the shitstorm of all shitstorms to defame us and cancel our event. They labeled me “a clear and present danger to our queer communities”.

I always found that laughable.

And then I had a thought…

Maybe the Stepford Gays were right all along. Yknow what? I think they were right…

I am a clear and present danger to your queer community. I am a clear and present danger to groupthink, to conformity, to lies, propaganda, and bullshit. You can consider me the Leah Remini of the alphabet people, and I am here to dismantle your abusive hateful cult — brick by brick.

And I’m just getting started…

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What I can say with certainty to any future Rebel Gays in the making:

Be your own person and find your own tribe. It is the much harder path, but like any road that is harder, it is ultimately the most incredibly fulfilling one. The left and its colorless monoculture are skin deep. But real relationships are not. Relationships based on identity have a ceiling — and an expiration date. Genuine connections of the soul do not.

You are not required by the happenstance of your sexuality or gender identity to commune with abusive people whom you don’t even like. People who try to convince you you’re “queer” for who you love. You owe them nothing. They are entitled to nothing from you. Period.

Being your most authentic self means living life freely as YOUR most authentic self. Not their Authentic Self™.

As I began thinking about my journey and the things that brought me here, I pondered the virtue of being a “Pick me”.

Am I a “Pick me”? Absofuckinglutely. You bet your ass I am!

See, that is difference between the wrongthinkers and the alphabet people. We are not grouped together by arbitrary traits. Unlike the alphabet cult, we are not in an arranged marriage of circumstance. We actually choose to be around each other!

We pick each other!

And these are the people I would pick above anyone else.

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Reflecting upon this journey, throughout the rollercoaster of ups and downs, it is my friendships that make me realize I wouldn’t change a thing. And I regret nothing.

As someone who spent the first half of my life surrounded by people who agreed on absolutely everything 100% of the time (or at least pretended to…), there is nothing I love, value, or appreciate more than the fact that all of us here amongst this odd little family of misfit toys… we don’t all agree on ANY-DAMN-THING! What we do agree on is our shared love, our common values, and our ability to fucking LAUGH!

Now that is a community.

Looking back at where I’ve been and where I’m going, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The things in life that show you what not to be can be every bit as valuable as the things that show us what we should aspire to.

I made it through the wilderness of the cult, I reached the end of the alphabet, and I found my way home.

And so, feeling more content, more secure, and more open in my individual identity than ever before, I only have one thing left to say.

I am so glad that you guys pick me.

Because I pick you too.