LAWRENCE AUSTER, the formidable journalist and thinker who died last year, was a prolific letter writer. For him, the letter was a necessary medium of cultural combat. Aside from the many letters he wrote to family and friends, which were of a different nature, he frequently wrote to magazines, newspapers and radio stations. He wrote letters to the New York transit authority about loud music and the poor design of subway cars. He wrote letters to his landlord about the tiles in the entranceway and to neighbors who let their charcoal smoke drift into his apartment.

Though these letters often involved complaints — he tended to complain about very important things or what most people would consider very minor things, rather than anything in between these two extremes — he never seemed deterred by the possibility that his letters might be unread even when they were lengthy. Who knows how many people were bewildered to find that someone had applied such deep and eloquent analysis to what they had said or done. Who knows how many people did that most difficult of all things and found themselves unexpectedly engaging in the act of thinking after reading an Auster letter.

Below is an example of one of his letters. It is dated Oct., 28, 1997 and is addressed to the commentator and film critic Michael Medved concerning a review he wrote for The New York Post.

Dear Mr. Medved:

On a Saturday night a few weeks ago my friend —- and I were looking for a movie to see. She had noticed that you had given three and a half stars to “In and Out,” the comedy about a high school teacher who is “outed” by a former student. We weren’t particularly eager to see a movie about homosexuality, but this movie, at least as the tv ads portrayed it, seemed to be about someone who is falsely thought to be homosexual; it didn’t seem to be gay agitprop but a comedy that might take an unpredictable angle on the subject of people’s attitudes toward homosexuality. That, combined with your strong recommendation of the film, and your reputation as an upholder of “traditional values,” persuaded us to see it.

Well, were we in for a surprise. Not only was “In & Out” an insultingly stupid, vulgar, and dishonest movie in innumerable ways, it also turned out to be a blatant piece of homosexual propaganda. Without showing anything real about homosexuality (indeed, that was part of its technique) it mainstreamed homosexuality, presenting it as harmless and sweet and “all-American,” as something that only an idiot could have any problem with. The practical effect of this movie on people will be to make it impossible for them to oppose or criticize homosexuality or the gay agenda.

Some of the brain-washing in the film is obvious, as in the climactic scene where the entire town declares “I’m gay,” in solidarity with the “gay” teacher. Some of the brain-washing is subtle, as in the fact that the characters in the movie (all of them unsophisticated residents of a small mid-Western city) never use the neutral, descriptive word “homosexual,” but only the approving, politically correct word “gay.” Significantly, the only instance in which a character even tries to say “homosexual” is when Bob Newhart as the absurdly uptight, conservative school principal, in the act of firing Kevin Kline for his gayness, helplessly stutters the word for several seconds. The subliminal message here is that anyone who has not signed on to the gay agenda is sexually fearful and repressed. (In the same way, the sexual liberationists of the 1960s mocked as sexually inadequate anyone who defended traditional sexual norms–a most effective technique of intimidation and mind-control.)

As we were talking about the movie afterwards, it occurred to us why you had recommended it. As a movie critic, you are not a moral traditionalist in any serious way. For you, traditionalism simply means that you like movies that are “sweet” and “wholesome” and “family-oriented,” that are not nasty and ugly and nihilistic. On the basis of this litmus test, if a movie seems sweet and positive, you will approve of it, no matter what its actual content.

The above insight was confirmed when I looked up your review of “In & Out” in the September 19th New York Post. The review concluded with these words: “[W]hat ultimately distinguishes ‘In & Out’ isn’t its ‘gayness,’ but its all-embracing, warm-hearted  humanity.” By this standard, Mr. Medved, if Hollywood made a movie about, say, Middle American teenagers practicing vampirism (which is actually happening today) and if the movie avoided the graphic reality of vampirism and presented the subject in a funny, wholesome way, then you would say: “What distinguishes this movie isn’t its ‘vampirism, but its all-embracing, warm-hearted humanity.” Ditto a movie that presented Nazis as clean-living and wholesome. But wait–Nazi propaganda movies did present Nazis as clean-living and wholesome!

In any event, the “warm-heartedness” of “In & Out,” if that is what it is, is rather selective. For one thing, the movie treats as a buffoon Kevin Kline’s fiance, played by Joan Cusack, whose marriage and hopes for happiness are cruelly shattered by his coming out as a homosexual at their wedding. In the mocking way this character and her distress are portrayed, the movie displays a contempt for women that is typical of the male homosexual culture. As [my friend] points out, the movie is a kind of homosexual wish fulfilment, in which a dowdy, ridiculous woman is rejected in favor of a hunky, “neat” guy. How could you not notice, or be offended by, this callous treatment of the movie’s main female character? The answer, once again, is that it’s all done in a comedic fashion, and no permanent harm is done. Thus the movie fools its audience, and its “conservative” reviewer, into imagining that homosexuality has no costs to anyone.

Similarly, what is so “warm-hearted” about the idea of the innocent Kline character, who is about to be married, being corrupted by the 40-second on-screen kiss from Tom Selleck (which, by the way, you didn’t warn your readers about)? And deciding, on that basis alone, that he, the Kline character, is “gay”? And instantly being completely comfortable and at peace with this new identity, even though he has had no homosexual experience in his life (and apparently no conscious thought about the subject) and thus has no way of knowing whether he would really like the homosexual “lifestyle”?

Thus the movie supports a core, though usually unstated, assumption of the gay liberationists, which is that if a person ever experiences any same-sex response (which most people do at some point in their lives) therefore he or she is “gay,” and must adopt “gayness” as his or her identity and behavior. As I’m sure you are aware, this is precisely the message that is being propagated in America’s schools and colleges by official gay advocates, who are encouraging–and in many cases forcing–young people to explore their homosexual feelings with the declared aim of giving them a positive orientation toward homosexuality.

But wait, I must be mistaken in all this. After all, haven’t you assured your readers that “In & Out” is not about gayness, but about “all-embracing, warm-hearted humanity?”

Mr. Medved, I have written this letter because we are in the midst of a horrifying cultural devolution in this country, and it is occurring on the so-called Right as well as the Left. Every day the utter collapse and fraudulence of conservatism, its ongoing surrender to and merging with the prevailing leftist–and increasingly nihilist–culture, and its constant betrayals of the political principles and moral values it claims to stand for, is manifested in new ways. I hope that you are not becoming a party to that betrayal.

Sincerely yours,

Lawrence Auster

— Comments —

A Grateful Reader writes:

It would do millions good to read that letter, but it could not see the letters section of the major newspapers. The letter was written in 1997, indicating that a generation has grown up under the indoctrination. In fact, a friend of mine who teaches in a conservative Christian college recently purchased Robert Reilly’s Making Gay Okay to use as apologetics for traditional values in her classes because, she says, all of her (conservative Christian) students arrive believing fully that homosexuality (and all that goes with it) is normal and healthy. This letter, too, should benefit her cause.

Buck writes:

I watched In & Out on Netflix last night. Oddly, it was only available for streaming last night. Today it isn’t.

Lawrence Auster was a great writer and thinker. I can think of no one who better articulates their thinking. I hope that you can post more. His review was near perfect, especially when he wrote: “insultingly stupid, vulgar, and dishonest movie in innumerable ways.” I understand why I never heard of the movie before.

I got a chuckle from one thing Larry wrote: “the 40-second on-screen kiss from Tom Selleck.” It certainly seemed like 40 seconds or more. I cringed and looked away to the elapsed time in the corner. It was a very long eleven seconds, but only eleven seconds. Surprised, I backed it up and double checked. That eleven second homo kiss must have had a universal repugnancy effect that made it seem interminable. This article on an Australian web site cite (I searched “Tom Selleck gay kiss” to see what else was said about it at the time.) discusses the movie and quotes Tom Selleck.

But this was no ordinary kiss. It lasted close to a minute and required a lot of acting on Selleck’s part. (…).

It’s ironic that Selleck is playing a gay character in this film. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that the actor sued an American tabloid magazine which accused him of being anti-gay, and rumour has it, he did In and Out to appease the gay community. “I think people may have thought that. I was well aware of that at the time.” In and Out could well have been in danger of offending the very gay community he may well have been trying to appease. Not so, the actor retorts. “Any comedy like this involves risks, and that’s the price you pay for opportunity. None of us were so afraid that it would scare us away. I considered it a terrific opportunity, like all of us.”

“I’m a registered independent with a lot of libertarian leanings.” — Tom Selleck on National Review Online (May 29, 2004)

Terry Morris writes:

On the forty second/eleven second homo kiss, one is tempted to believe – taking into account Auster’s, Buck’s and the Australian movie review site’s timeline descriptions – that the version of the movie Buck saw edits out thirty seconds of the (unedited) kiss. Certainly wouldn’t be anything outside the ordinary.

I did get a bit of a kick out of Selleck’s description of himself philosophically as a “registered independent with a lot of libertarian leanings,” as if this, to his mind, places him in an especial category morally and philosophically (unlike about 98% of the rest of modern Westerners! Ha, ha.), enabling him to judge rightly homosexuality and its perverted, liberationist lifestyle through a perfectly clear objective lens. Congratulations, sir! You’re a self-styled “free thinker” like virtually everybody else.

One thing is certain, though, Selleck definitely isn’t anti-gay. He simply prefers heterosexuality over homosexuality for himself, given the choice. I thought that was supposed to be okay under liberationist thinking, but I guess not.

Well, we can count on this: whatever the rules are amongst liberationist free-thinkers, they will be enforced … and relentlessly reinforced! Lovely.

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