The Homo and the Negro
THE HOMO & THE NEGRO
MASCULINIST MEDITATIONS ON
POLITICS & POPULAR CULTURE
by
JAMES J. O’MEARA
SECOND, EMBIGGENED EDITION
EDITED BY GREG JOHNSON
Counter-Currents Publishing
San Francisco
2017
Copyright © 2017 by James J. O’Meara
All rights reserved
Cover image:
Anthony van Dyck,
Portrait of Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard
Stuart (later Earl of Lichfield), circa 1638,
National Gallery, London
Cover design by Kevin I. Slaughter
Published in the United States by
COUNTER-CURRENTS PUBLISHING LTD.
P.O. Box 22638
San Francisco, CA 94122
USA
http://www.counter-currents.com/
Hardcover ISBN: Paperback ISBN: 978-1-940933-14-6
E-book ISBN: 978-1-940933-15-3
The Library of Congress has catalogued the first edition as follows.
O’Meara, James J., 1956-
The homo & the Negro masculinist meditations on politics & popular culture / by James J. O'Meara.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-935965-47-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-935965-48-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-935965-49-7 (ebook : alk. paper)
1. Masculinity. 2. Conservatism. 3. Homosexuality. I. Title. II. Title: Homo and the Negro masculinist meditations on politics and popular culture.
BF692.5.O596 2012
306--dc23
2012028370
CONTENTS
1. Five Years On: Preface to the Embiggened Edition
2. The Homo & the Negro:
A Masculinist View of the Futility of the “Right”
3. Homosexuality, “Traditionalism,” &
Really-Existing Tradition
4. A Band Apart: Wulf Grimsson’s Loki’s Way
5. Sir Noël Coward, 1899–1973
6. Accommodate This! Bruce Jenner& the Hermetic Rebis
7. Milo & the Miles
8. Wild Boys vs. “Hard Men”
9. Fashion Tips for the Far-from-Fabulous Right
10. This Old Gay House
11. The Gilmore Girls Occupy Wall Street
12. “God, I’m with a heathen”: The Rebirth of the
Männerbund in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables
13. Of Costner, Corpses, & Conception: Mother’s Day
Meditations on The Untouchables & The Big Chill
14. The Baker Street Männerbund: Some Thoughts on Holmes, Watson, Bond, & Bonding
15. Humphrey Bogart: Man Among
the Cockroaches
16. He Writes! You Read! They Live
17. I’ll Have a White Rock, Please:
Implicit Whiteness, Aryan Futurism, & the
Godlike Genius of Scott Walker
18. The Counter-Currents Interview
About the Author
Brigit Brat, d. 2011
Sound
Alisdair Clarke, d. 2008
Vision
FOREWORD
My many intellectual debts will be easily seen in the pages that follow. But first I must thank Greg Johnson, White Eminence of the North American New Right, for encouraging me to write for his flagship blog, Counter-Currents, and then having the notion that some of those pieces would look very nice between hard covers.
In writing these and others I have benefited from online discussions with Ean Frick as well as many commentators, including about half a dozen loyal, possibly deeply disturbed, Constant Readers of my blog, and real-time discussions with Collin Cleary, Jef Costello, and Derek Hawthorne.
I would also like to avail myself of the wise words of the moral philosopher Richard Taylor, who disclaimed the customary “responsibility for any remaining errors,” reasoning that one can only be responsible for what one is aware of, and if he had been aware of any errors, he would have corrected them.
Vive, vale!
James J. O’Meara
Rust Belt, USA
June 13, 2012
“You must choose, brothers, you must choose.”
—Brother J. C. Crawford, Zenta New Year Invocation
October 30–31, 1968
The Psychedelic Stooges and The MC5
Russ Gibb’s Grande Ballroom, Detroit
FIVE YEARS ON:
PREFACE TO THE EMBIGGENED EDITION
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock―to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
―Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
“In normal times, evil should be fought by good, but in times like this, well, it should be fought by another kind of evil”
―Aereon (Judi Dench) near the beginning of
The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)
“Five years, what a surprise!”
―David Bowie, “Five Years” from The Rise and Fall
of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars (1972)
If, as Dr. Johnson said, no man but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money, the author of this one must be a blockhead of Peanuts proportions.
At the risk of what has come to be called “virtue-signaling,” may I say that this was simply an attempt, not to make money, but to bring the Good News and to change the world for the better.
So what was I trying to do?
At the time, I was heavily reading the work of Julius Evola; this itself represented an evolution of sorts, as I had been introduced in my teens, through Alan Watts,1 to the ideas of René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, the so-called “Traditionalists,” and later induced, under the tutelage of Dr. John N. Deck, to revere the more purely Western Neo-Platonists, especially Plotinus.2
Evola, however, while firmly upholding the work of Guénon, took it in a new direction, one which emphasized social concerns and even geopolitics.3 This seemed much more interesting than just waiting around for the end of the Kali Yuga, however spectacular that promised to be.
Steadily searching the intertubes for more on Evola, one day I came across the writings of Alisdair Clarke, a theorist of what was then called the English New Right. Clarke had given Evola’s work another turn of the screw, and developing certain hints in Evola’s later books about Orders and Elites in the creation of Aryan culture, had begun to explore the historical role of the Männerbund, the bands of warrior youths, through his blog, Aryan Futurism.4
A not entirely irrelevant point was that these bands were, as a friend once usefully put it, “homoerotic though not necessarily homosexual.” Jack Donovan, who would give this line of thought its most intensely practical developments, later began calling them “androphilic.”5
At this point the penny dropped, and I had what might modestly be described as a world-shattering, epoch-making epiphany. As George Carlin said about capitalism, I had nailed together two things that had never been nailed together before.
There was a fatal inconsistency at the heart of the “radical Right,” which tirelessly banged on about The White Race, Western man, Aryan Culture, Odinism,6 etc., yet under the continuing widespread influence of what I came to call “Judaic Family Values” maintained a loathing of any hint of the androphilic associations that were characteristic of Aryan cultures and essential to the creation and preservation of those cultures.
As for the more moderate, traditional
Right of the “conservatives” or Republicans, it was flawed as well; supposedly pragmatic and practical, their even more entrenched Christian homophobia prevented them from accessing the culture-creating and sustaining talents of the androphiles, leading to the Right’s perennial status as “beautiful losers.”7
Even Steve Sailer, one of the sharpest knives on the right side of the drawer, seems nonplussed:
As I’ve mentioned before, the inner elite of the celebrated Black Lives Matter movement is heavily homosexual. I think that was part of BLM’s appeal to political, NGO, and corporate elites: BLM seemed safer than the typical black agitators. These weren’t ex-con hard men like the Black Panthers of yore, these were irate lesbians and peevish gays. How much damage could they do? Well, judging from the extraordinary increase in black-on-black homicides since Ferguson, a lot.8
Contrarywise, the Left had reaped nothing but benefits from the perception of being the “natural home” of these confirmed bachelors, who contributed their unsurpassed talents in symbol manipulation, along with their disposable income and all that non-family time on their hands to the cultural triumph of the Left; while their contrived “gay” identity caused them to “swerve”—to use Camille Paglia’s term—from their role as guardians of traditional Western culture into lives of empty promiscuity and consumerism.9
And yet, as I recalled from dim memories of New York clubland (as they say, if you remember Limelight, you weren’t there),10 there was no more “implicitly White” an autonomous zone than a gay dance club, especially on Tuesday nights.11
While some, like Paul Gottfried, have noted the rise to dominance of the originally and still predominantly Jewish NeoCons, (almost?) no one had sussed out that the rot had set in long before, in the open-air insane asylum of First Century Palestine.12
I don’t recall if Alisdair brought up the idea of developing these ideas myself, or if I was only inspired by his own blog (a new tool for dissemination of ideas at the time), but it seemed unusual enough and important enough that I decided to get this down in writing.
Since all this was taking place in the intersection of art, religion, and politics, it occurred to me that the best vehicle would be a Manifesto, as favored by groups ranging from the Rosicrucians to the Communists to the Surrealists and Futurists (Aryan Futurism, indeed!)13 Something along the lines of de Sade’s “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans.”14
Hence, the broad strokes and blunt, bald assertions, leaving the reader the task of finding cites and making connections, if he wanted to, before taking it as a guide to action. I also found this to be an excellent way to overcome a decades-long writers block.
Another influence, from student days, was Marshall McLuhan. Wikipedia15 says:
While some critics have taken issue with McLuhan’s writing style and mode of argument, McLuhan himself urged readers to think of his work as “probes” or “mosaics” offering a toolkit approach to thinking about the media. His eclectic writing style has also been praised for its postmodern sensibilities16 and suitability for virtual space.17
“Mosaic,” of course, was the browser that popularized the web, and since the Manifesto was first published online,18 I intended to make full use of hyperlinks to create an experience of what Michael Hoffman calls “loose cognition” and which he believes is necessary for grasping new ideas.19 Again, Jack Donovan was one of the few who “got it,” saying “Reading [the Manifesto] is a psychedelic experience.”
Perhaps the most decisive influence, or perhaps just the most useful way to look at what I was doing, came again from Alan Watts; this time, ironically, from the period after his abandonment of Traditionalism.
Rather than seeking some supposed “transcendental unity” above, behind, or perhaps beneath the variety of religions and cultures,
Watts . . . turned toward hermeneutical analyses exploring interconnections and disjunctions between localized narratives. Through this kind of interpretive study, one arrives at an expanded awareness and comprehension of perspectives via the dialectical rotation of differing vantage points.20
In Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship21 Watts describes his technique as the “Chinese Box method” (although it sounds more like the Russian Doll method): what happens when we fit, say, Christianity into Hinduism, and—if we can—vice versa?
And so, what happens if we fit a gangster movie into the historical role of the Männerbund,22 or a Henry James nouvelle into the metaphysics of René Guénon,23 or Julius Evola’s prehistoric history into the Cthulhu Mythos?24
Have I been understood?25 Apparently, no.26
Most recently, and most publicly, a screed on Slate, which erroneously but gratifyingly dubbed me “a leader of the alt Right,” asserted that my thesis was designed to “attract” gays (like some flying insects) into the clutches of the New Right. The exact opposite of my intentions, of course.27
Reading this perhaps deliberately illiterate piece,28 I could only recall the scene in Annie Hall where Woody can conveniently pull Marshal McLuhan—appropriately enough—out from behind a lobby poster to berate a loudmouth academic:
Marshall McLuhan: I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!
Alvy Singer: Boy, if life were only like this!
I despair, I really do.29
Nor has the response on the Right been encouraging. One blogger responded to an essay added to this edition, “This Old Gay House,” a look at the role of homosexual men in historic preservation, with the laconic: “Yeah, we get it: you’re gay30 and want to be accepted.”31
While a mere comment, calling attention to the historical fact of Baron von Steuben’s key role in America’s victory in the Revolutionary War, due to Washington’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, met with sneering sloganeering: “Must everything be pozz’d?”32
Indeed. I came to feel as if I had shown up at a party, laden with balloons, puppies, and ice cream—Hey, guys, we can add millions to our movement, and the best kind, with high IQs, lots of money and oodles of free time! And all we have to do is live up to our Aryan heritage!—only to have my contributions swept from my arms, hammered into the ground, and shat upon.
But let us continue our meditations.
Let’s start with the title—the only thing that most of my critics have read—and the subsequent analysis of the archetypes I call the Homo and the Negro. The choice of this nomenclature I call, without false modesty, sheer genius; and like all such strokes of genius, it seems, subsequently, to be only inevitable.
The rhythm, the rhyme; perfect.
And what else could I have used? If I had wanted to be purely offensive, I would have said The F*g and the N*gger, but that kind of Daily Shoah vulgarity is not how I roll. The politically correct terminology—The Gay and the Black, I suppose33—would have been a betrayal of my purpose right from the start.
The Homo and the Negro perfectly evokes the pre-PC, post-War era, the crest of the wave of White Western Civilization, when such terms were perfectly acceptable; still being un-PC enough to get people’s attention and set them on edge, while also being unquestionably objective (being merely the apocopations of the eminently scientific terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘negroid’).34
The downside, however, is that readers—or more likely, potential readers and those lazy non-readers known as “journalists”—have quite misconstrued the content. As my most perceptive reviewer on Amazon points out, “this is not a book about homos and negroes.” Nor, despite what the journalists say, is homosexuality, or sexuality as such, or race, my only concerns, and certainly not my obsessions.35
In fact, were I to point to my “best” essay, or favorite, or most characteristic, it would likely be “‘God, I’m with a heathen’: The Rebirth of the Männerbund in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables,” which touches the one only implicitly, the other not at all, except perhaps in terms of European et
hnicities.36
Nevertheless, old softy that I am, and always looking to give my reader the maximum bang for his beloved buck, this “Embiggened” edition adds a few pieces of a psycho-sexual nature. ¡Disfrute!
But there are limits to how much even the kindest author can be expected to spoon-feed his readers. How could I be expected to plan for a potential audience dumber than ever before, and getting dumber?37 No wonder then that they can only crave safe spaces, and when challenged, resort to violence.38
The Homo and the Negro are ideal types, through which I seek to explain certain features of Western culture, especially current year America. It’s just the way I think, but it does seem common enough on the Right, with such thinkers as Oswald Spengler (who spoke in his Decline of the West of the need for “physiognomic tact” over and above mere fact-grubbing39) and Alfred Rosenberg (whose Myth of the Twentieth Century could have profited from a snappier title, such as The Aryan and the Judaic); two authors, come to think of it, rather frequently misunderstood.
The most proximate and substantive influence, though, was the magnum opus of old-style Lefty Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), a study of Western Culture that not only employs the technique of identifying the origin and historical metamorphoses of the titular personae, but also was among the first to adumbrate the idea40 of homosexuals as an essential part of (implicitly) White culture: