Gay Hypocrisy
By Don | August 22, 2008
Gay activists are up in arms after they discover contribution to McCain campaign from gay website co-founder.
From the S.F. Bay Times.
They say politics makes for strange bedfellows, and that’s certainly true of the $2,300 contribution by a co-founder of Manhunt, the gay hookup site, to the campaign of Republican John McCain. Unfortunately, the boycott demands that came in response only prove once again that despite all our talk about prizing diversity, gay bedfellows make for strangers to tolerance - at least of the ideological variety.
A lot of eyebrows got raised when word got out that Jonathan Crutchley, one of two original investors behind Manhunt.net, had donated the maximum allowed by law to a presidential candidate with a rotten gay rights record. The site, which boasts a staggering 1 million members who generate $30 million a year in revenue, dwarfs gay.com and other Web holdings of the struggling PlanetOut. With the motto “Get on, Get off,” it’s also an unlikely cauldron for conservative politics.
News of Crutchley’s contribution to McCain could have been an opportunity for real discussion about why some gay folk prioritize other issues like national security - which Crutchley cited in his own defense - over “the gay agenda,” as he put it somewhat dismissively.
Of course that’s not what happened. The blogs howled with angry calls for horny gay boys everywhere to cancel their Manhunt accounts in protest. The righteous outrage all but ignored that Online Buddies, Inc., which operates Manhunt, had nothing to do with the donation from Crutchley, who chaired the company’s board of directors. What’s more, co-founder and CEO Larry Basile is a long-time supporter of Democrats and gay rights groups.
While Crutchley is villified by gay activists for his contribution, I expect that Christian conservatives will be calling on McCain to return the money which I doubt he will do.
1 Comment | Post a Comment
August 22 at 9:13 pm | #1 | Link
i live in San Francisco, and i have many gay friends, connected at varying degrees with the City’s ‘gay community.’ However, i use the term ‘gay community’ reluctantly, as the term seems to imply community moreso than community actually exists. Considering the fact that straight folks are infinitely divergent in their derivations of personal identity, it seems presumptive—unfair, even—to assume, for example, that gay people are unanimously polarised to the left. True, politicians sympathetic to gay rights are typically more liberal (or libertarian), and as basic civil rights tend to rank rather highly on the priority index, the left usually secures the ‘gay vote.’ However, this is only a small part of the picture. Several of my gay friends have surprised me when they said they voted for Bush, or that they were registered Republicans. Their reasoning? That their approval of Republican economic policy, and the idea of smaller government and lower taxes far overwhelmed issues like marriage, for example, which they didn’t see as of particular importance…