The .Plan

A view from the inside:

‘I can’t date someone with a different belief system” is what he told me… So much for dating a proud, progressive, and ostensibly tolerant liberal. But with him, as with other liberals I know, tolerance does not always extend to appreciating someone else’s differing political views. Now living in Cambridge and having grown up in the suburbs of Boston and gone to school at Yale, I’ve been surrounded by liberals for nearly all of my life. Most would be astonished to hear that they’re the most intolerant people I’ve ever met…

As a gay recovering leftist – to my eternal shame, I canvassed for Ralph Nader in high school – I have grown accustomed to having difficulties in the dating world. At Yale, most people knew me as “the gay conservative” for a column I wrote in the school paper, and my notoriety – not the source of sexy fascination that I might have hoped it to be – certainly did not help my dating prospects…

Most gay people are liberal, and this is somewhat understandable; the left has embraced gay rights as a part of its political agenda, whereas the right, with some important exceptions, has not. But for many gays, liberalism is just as much a visceral, reactionary tendency as it is a positive affirmation of political belief. Many gays I know – especially those from red states – blame conservatism writ large as the villain that repressed them for so many years. Thus, their homosexuality dictates their political views on everything. For these gays, it is just as much a part of the “coming out” process to be a loud liberal as a proud homosexual.

But there’s nothing about my homosexuality that dictates a belief about raising the minimum wage, withdrawing immediately from Iraq, and backing teachers’ unions: all liberal causes that I strongly oppose.
–James Kirchick, “Left Out”, Boston Globe Magazine, August 5, 2007