The Lover is playing at the Keble O’Reilly Theatre tonight at 7:30pm for the last show of its run.

 

It is late November 2013. Jeremy Paxman adopts his trademark supercilious lean as he introduces his guests on Newsnight. The screen behind him reads only the word “gay” in comically large Times New Roman.

 

The first guest is Will Young, a pop singer, the second an arrestingly louche journalist who is as of yet unknown to the public. They discuss, without reaching a particularly useful conclusion, the merits (or lack thereof) of the tagline that was rammed down the throats of reluctant schoolboys from the late 2000s onwards—‘don’t use gay in a negative way.’ The two men are very different interpretations of the same sexual archetype. Slim, effeminate and most certainly ‘takers’, not givers. Young, in his ironic white-shirt-and-Nike-sportswear combination (surely some sort of low-vibrational ‘deconstruction’ of the formal Newsnight medium) clashes violently with his counterpart, who sports a tattersall shirt, tweeds, and loafers with purple socks. It’s a marvellous piece of semiotic play—an ode to the long tradition of the aristocratic aesthete with a penchant for a ‘sensitive’ crime. A Lord Alfred Douglas or a Montague Withnail wearily beset by mud and mundanity. “Being young’s all about being naughty, and being transgressive” he quips, with a roguish smirk.

 

This was one of the first public appearances of a man who came to be a fairly seismic cultural figure. Three years later, he would appear on various legacy media outlets with a shock of Hitlerjugend-blonde hair, a Saint Laurent military jacket, and a set of pearls as the infamous Milo Yiannopoulos. He became a key player in an emergent online movement of anti-liberal commentators. Yiannopoulos became known for his raucous appearances on chat and panel shows. Each followed much the same script; Yiannopoulos would slay a number of liberal sacred cows to the mock- (or genuine, but frankly, is there any meaningful difference?) horror of the host. The disenfranchised mass furtively watched it, giddy as schoolgirls, as he dared to utter the verboten.

 

These outdated culture war battles are not very interesting now, but Yiannopoulos as an archetype remains profoundly so. His chief asset was not really what he said, but what he was. He was an old-school transgressive homosexual in a landscape that was attempting to sanitise and sanctify ‘identity’. He had something different, an alternative—the amoral sneer; the hauteur of the beautiful boy who pities the bumbling straights still chasing the shadow of their mother. The spirit of the brattish bourgeois white girl with a taste for the exotic. ‘He hit me and it felt like a kiss’ and so on. While the Will Youngs tried to get boys to stop calling each other gay in the changing room, Yiannopoulos put on his heels and blush and demanded to be called a faggot. He was a sexual jester.

 

In the tradition of Tom of Finland he worshipped the strongman, the great father (he deified Trump, whom he referred to as ‘Daddy’), the rippling muscularity of the steely police officer or soldier. He understood the intimate relationship between the totalitarian militaristic impulse and the homoerotic. The heady sensuality of the jackboot, the uniform, the Oval Office. The libidinal urge towards the flag and the soil. Yiannopoulos brought the old world of aristocratic buggery and Apollonian paiderastia (of the Athenian and Vatican persuasions) into the world of YouTube and Twitter (indeed, his eventual cancellation came after a discussion on the sundry pleasures of boy-love on Joe Rogan’s podcast). He was at once utterly out of place in the twenty-first century and a phenomenon that only the internet could have spawned.

 

His fame was a symbolic watershed in internet cultural discourse—a new means of mainstream propagation of ideas that had been kept out of official channels for some time. Many will be familiar with the ‘Woke Liberal Destroyed’ format that became ubiquitous on YouTube around that time, and the raft of new commentators who appeared (Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder and the like). This movement, of which Yiannopoulos was a big part, was the coal in the engine-room of the Trump train, and scores of invigorated youngsters dutifully shovelled it in with their clicks and shares.

 

We have chosen to discuss Yiannopoulos as a means to contextualise the contemporary internet cultural sphere. Put simply, he fired the starter pistol on an internet revolution. This reaction against end-of-history liberalism and techno-futurism rampant since the fall of the Soviet Union led to the creation of numerous online spaces dedicated to vitality and virtue over decadence and decay. The return of traditional manhood, competence, fitness, health, wisdom. For women, a rejection of bourgeois feminism and sexual libertinism. There was a resurgence of the spirit of intellectual punk personified by Camille Paglia in the 1990s that gave a two-fingered salute to the anodyne moral safetyism that had taken hold in the academy.

 

While some revolted, others held on tight. Both sides receded into rigid ideological frames. Once-nuanced discussion became self-consuming, meta-obsessed with absurd hot-button issues (can a woman have a penis and whatnot). Tribes formed, discourse became increasingly ironic and detached. ‘Sick’ humour, in the style of the great Mort Sahl, became the default—anti-humour, post-irony. What does it really mean? Does it mean anything? Do they really think that? Are you blue-pilled, red-pilled, black-pilled, white-pilled, pink-pilled?

 

This created archetypal polarities that appear everywhere online. Brat girls for Kamala / Sigma Boys for Trump. Trans joy will outlive you all / they’re putting chemicals in the water to turn the frogs gay. Sissy degenerate submissive race-traitor gooners / based semen retention looksmaxxed 6’5” man in finance. Plant-based ultra-processed body-positive queers / animal-based carnivore MMA chads. Anti-natalist ‘it’s so cruel to bring children into a world with climate change’ academic feminist cosmopolitans / eight children homemade yoghurt from breast milk fertility goddess blonde bombshell pastoral farm table Tradwives. ‘Why shouldn’t a man pay for everything’ through vocal fry and lip filler / Asking OnlyFans Models What Their Body Count Is’.

 

There is a great tussle between these two magnetic poles, between the flattening forces of free markets, progressivism, globalisation, and secularisation (what David Goodhart calls ‘double liberalism’—liberalism in both economy and culture) and the pull to tradition, nation, cultural preservation, family, faith, moral certainties. The left-right axis is utterly out of date; think of all the low-resolution jargon that serves as a grotesque red herring that can be easily packaged and sold on by grifters and media types for clicks; ‘woke’, ‘snowflake’, ‘far-right’.

 

These are crass distractions from a great symbolic conflict that is being fought as the unstoppable forces of materialism, globalisation, homogenisation, and secular moral uncertainty run their course. As a result of these forces, atomised and rootless, we are imprisoned by compulsive libidinal dependency to all forms of stimulating pleasure, from food to TikTok to pornography. We scroll, we checkout, we ejaculate, we consume. We become so corrupted by pornography that we are numbed to real people. We spend so long in the dopaminergic fantasy-heaven of Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts that we never want to leave our rooms. And yet we search for something more in the age of frictionless automation, for something behind the curtain. For spirit, soul, transcendence.

 

As we, the internet generation, the inheritors of a means of communication and exchange so powerful that it would supersede any primitive man’s notion of a deity, face our great spiritual war, the question is simple. Gooner or Demi-God, which will you be? ∎

 

Words by Raphael da Silva and Solomon de la Mer. Image Courtesy of Maya Herz.