Blaire and Milo: A Case Study in Uncertainty

CW: discussions of passing privilege, rape, sexual assault, lolcow culture, transmisogyny, transphobia, exploitation, some slurs are used in their original and unedited context to better show the kind of persons we’re dealing with

The alt-right and alt-lite are really fascinating corners of the Internet. The fact that they’ve managed to gain so much traction while also being one of the most obtuse political movements out there, encompassing personalities from Richard Spencer to Gavin McInnes the Living Shitpost to Ethan and Hila Klein, is arguably the reason why I’m attracted in figuring out how the movement works and how it often views the world. Chances are: we’ve all dipped our toe into fringe elements now associated with the alt-right - I’ve been obsessed with lolcow culture ever since 2008-09, thanks to Michelle Pickens talking to me about a little known person by the name of Christine Chandler, and I’ve even interacted a few times on that side of the coin. I was involved in Gamergate for a while, joining the endless bandwagon of hate against unpopular feminist critic of video games and unpopular joke game designer who tried her hand at a serious narrative for once.

However, what drove me away from those movements - lolcow culture forums overflowing with many a trans person with loud beliefs and/or quirky behaviors on the Internet (counting people who aren’t so much lolcowish as much as they’re a bit blunt with their politics, i.e. Nat Parrott, Jacob Chapman, Zinnia Jones), often deadnaming them in the same manner a certain Iranian heel would use cheap heat in order to rile up an audience; Gamergate quickly growing out of control and coming up with all sorts of wacky conspiracies, one of which was near-comically transphobic (apparently a Young Republican wanted to be Congressman so bad that they transitioned into a woman, married a sci-fi author, learned iOS development, created a crappy game and got so popular with the professional victimhood that she decided to run for Congress) - wasn’t just the fact that these movements often stripped the humanity out of their subjects. As much as Encyclopedia Dramatica about hates anybody with any Internet notoriety, they about hate everything under the sun except for Fat Larry’s Band. They still imbued their subjects with a sense of humanity - the schadenfreude is laid on thick, but it’s laid on in a somewhat sympathetic manner (i.e. these are humans making big mistakes). Gamergate and lolcow culture, on the other hand, engaged in what I’ve seen the old CWCki call “A-Logging,” or when somebody hates something so much that they’ll try to antagonize them for no good reason out of the off chance that they’ll one day be rid of them.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today.

Internet discourse has morphed itself into an odd monster over the past five years, mostly thanks to Gamergate and the increased prevalence of open trans people on the Internet thanks to a certain Tumblr user whose insecurity over her passing and her parents desperately wanting her to be the boyest boy who ever boy’d led her to walk in front of a Peterbilt. At first it was just Christine-chan and Timbox and Joe Cracker and all of those weirdos on the Internet who don’t really know how to respond to people calling them weird.

Now, the hot new thing to make fun of is a trans woman on YouTube who simply doesn’t give a damn and mostly uses MDE-style shock humor to spice up otherwise straightforward academic discussion videos. Or that woman who has a YouTube channel with the goal of educating kids about really well-known queer issues, i.e. acknowledging that, no, that show with the guys dressed up like girls being judged on how girly they can dress that their parents watch isn’t an anomaly and yes, kids can feel disconnect either (and that it’s not just Internet commentators, grunge superstars and Adam Duritz). Or that lanky British guy who makes videos making fun of idiots who think they’re so cool because they’re gamers and they take their conservatism to such dangerous and pathetic extremes. Or that genderqueer masc person who made a video about how if one is raised in a specific society with otherism, they’ll have some of that otherism rub off on them (and that it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but don’t be upset when you come off the wrong way to somebody).

There are always reasons that these people are made fun of - ContraPoints gets a lot of crap for trying to discuss issues with centrists and right-wingers; Queer Kids is pretty on-the-nose and doesn’t really help destroy the stereotype that the gays are after your kids; Harry gets into at least two spats a year over being a dick in film school; Milo Stewart did use clickbaity titling in order to sell his video - but nothing to warrant Christine-chan levels of obsession and deconstruction. Like, as much as I’d like to have a nice Pepsi-and-electric-brandy with Nat, I’m not going to document the time some bear at a mall told her that Natalie was a better name than the one her parents gave her. Even Christine-chan isn’t that interesting of a person anymore since all she’s doing is drawing Sonichu comics (and making decent bank) and not macing GameStop employees in the face or trying to run over hobby shop proprietors who, if they actually ran that YouTube account, were near-unprofessional and didn’t take the high ground, instead calling a rude customer who did way too much stupid crap as “always an unsportsman-like punk.”

And there’s a cottage industry for making fun of these people. You’ve heard the names - Carl Benjamin of the Proto-Indo-European Empire, whose pronunciation of PIE is so bad that it sounds like he’s another snarky Brit who loves to hear himself speak; Phil Mason of “religion often teaches us really dumb things, but Islam is like the Scientology of religion by the way check out my occasional science experiments” fame; even Ethan and Hila Klein, two people I looked up to for being two of the oddest YouTubers in the world who wouldn’t compromise despite becoming massive, are engaging in this sort of stuff, even going as far as inviting Jordan Peterson, the Ben Carson of sociopolitical philosophy, to chew the fat on their podcast. But two names in particular intrigue me the most, mostly because they’re LGBT and speaking out against their kind in that sort of “why do you guys have to be loud” Garrison Keillor op-ed/rejected bit from “News from Lake Wobegon” manner...

...but also because I think their life experiences have contributed to their decisions.

Blaire White and Milo Yiannopoulos are walking contradictions. Blaire White, somebody who seems concerned with the idea of passing - prioritizing it above all others - doesn’t really get when older queer kids, in an effort to pass much better when they’re adults, decide to take what they call “hormone blockers” before they’re old enough to start the spicy juice. Or, as she puts it, “the kids are taking the hormones because their parents are telling them to.” And Milo - oh, boy, Milo - had a bit of a falling from grace earlier in the year when somebody revealed some rather upsetting interviews he did with the Drunken Peasants about his own discovery of his homosexuality, a thing he’s both proud and ashamed of. In short, he credited a “Father Michael” of introducing him to being an open gay man, but he’s also admitted that Michael exploited him sexually. Milo was raped by a priest, which opened his eyes to his sexuality.

Now those are the short of it. The reasons why I’m interested in them is not because they’re relevant - Blaire White’s pretty old hat and boring and relies on the same old shock and cringe humor that every YouTuber engages in; Milo is just another Facebook pundit who was popular for roughly a year before his world was mostly destroyed by everybody coming to the conclusion that he was a pedophilia supporter. I’m interested in them because they’re so much more than being messes. We get a lot of juicy psychology looking at why they do the things they do. They’re not just aberrations - they’re holdovers from an older time.

Blaire White was raised in a time where it wasn’t okay to outwardly transition in your childhood years. People thought the idea of being trans was just something only desperate adults and drunk college students and artsy types do in order to give their life a bit more spice rather than it being a really large disconnect from the role you’ve been assigned in society/your body’s adherence to that role. Blaire White has always experienced that lingering doubt in her mind that maybe she wasn’t exactly the boy her parents assumed she was, but she didn’t come out/transition until she went to college. To her, it’s a curse - the idea that she’s always had that lingering doubt, that itch that she couldn’t scratch unless if she totally reinvented herself is, according to her, something really similar to not being able to control your emotions or randomly imagining things that aren’t there. It could very well be screwy wiring in her brain or it could be that she watched The Little Mermaid and Aladdin one too many times to the point of internalizing the “I Want” songs as a part of her psyche. To her, that’s all it was - probably because that’s how society presented it (and still does) for the longest time. Cait Jenner and Transparent are so popular amongst cis (as in, people who don’t outwardly identify as trans in any way) people because they confirm that stereotype - that being trans is just something only depressed and irrelevant middle-aged people do. To most people, especially Blaire, there’s not a lot more. If she’s feeling the thoughts of a depressed and irrelevant person undergoing a midlife crisis, Blaire thinks there’s something desperately wrong.

She’s tried desperately to be the person she always was, is and always shall be. She has spent so much time looking the part - blending into the rest of society - that she’s effectively become the queen of passing. She’s worked hard to get to where she is - and by God, she wants people to know where she’s coming from. To her, the wave of youth transitioning early, YouTube educational channels on queer issues presented in a kid-friendly manner (i.e. they’re don’t have sixteen or eight, Queer Kids ain’t exactly Mr. LaPaige), and the trans commentators who openly embrace their transness while also eschewing her more traditional way of doing things - i.e. women with beards, men with soft looks and boobs, Milo Stewart - are a threat to her self-esteem. She’s worked her ass off to get to where she is - and to see people getting an easier route than her comes across to her as an invalidation of her experience. Why did she go through all this crap - all this self-doubt - only for people to find an easier and better route? Her self-esteem is kaput. She has to tell people to go on the straight and narrow - that way, she can feel validated. She can feel like her effort was worth it. And it was worth it. I’m glad she’s living the life she wants to live, but I’m not glad that she wants to take away everybody else’s happiness because it apparently nullifies her efforts.

Traditionally, in the gay community, young gay men would engage in mentor-style relationships with older men, who help them navigate the ropes of contemporary gay life. We see bits and pieces of this in one of the monologues from The Vagina Monologues - the rather off-putting one that gets written in all of the conservative newspapers every time the local community theater decides to recite thirty monologues about womanhood, the one that used to end with “if it was rape, it was a good rape” (i.e. the monologue where the woman tells about being raped by her father when she was young; and her discovery of her own womanhood and sexuality when she enters into a mentoring relationship with an older woman when she turns 16). We see this a lot especially in how closeted gay men act - all of those rumors about J. Edgar “I totally killed John Dillinger, I totally fired the gun” Hoover and his lifelong personal assistant; Rock Hudson’s many relationships; Anthony Perkins’ boyfriend; Tab Hunter’s boyfriend. We even see this in contemporary gay relationships.

But usually, these mentoring relationships happen when the younger partner is, like, 18. It’s not like Woody Allen where he met Soon-yi Previn when she was 10 and only then decided to become her boyfriend when she turned 18 - that’s pretty messed-up. And yet that’s what Milo has effectively seen his experience with Father Michael as. He sees it as both his violation and his own first glimpse of happiness. Milo was raped. He was sexually assaulted. Father Michael made him do acts that nobody should make a 14-year-old person do. Milo knows he wasn’t of a mature enough mind to make the decision. He knew he was being exploited. And yet, in context of all of these Hollywood hunks and them having these sweet partners who are in their 20s and 30s, Milo wants to make himself think that he wasn’t violated because, believe it or not, Milo’s rape was the moment that Milo realized that he was gay.

Milo Yiannopoulos is a bit of a classicist. The dude looks a bit like a statue - he has some nice blond hair and his accent is charming. However, he’s big into old-time drag jokes, he’s not too keen on the sudden rise in trans visibility and sees it as the end result of hundreds of years of open backlash against gay men (or, as he put it, “trannies are gay”), the dude sees himself as the ultimate troll despite whining non-stop about things that bug him, and he about led a hate mob against a Saturday Night Live comedienne because she was in an okay Ghostbusters reboot/remake/remodel that wasn’t all too popular. He’s theatrical, but he’s also like Sam Hyde in that his actual points aren’t so much points as much as they’re the status quo retold in a slightly weirder way. Milo isn’t dangerous - his presentation makes us think he is. He’s just repeating the same crap everybody else before him has.

One thing you might notice about Milo is that he tends to bounce back and forth on how he views his own sexuality. He views it as part of him, but like Blaire White, he has this habit of viewing it as a curse - like that itch he can’t scratch. His sexuality, to him, led him to be exploited by Father Michael - but without Father Michael, he wouldn’t have realized that he was the way he was. The rest of the world, going away from mentoring relationships to widespread education (since there’s not a lot of need for 50-year-old gay men showing 20-year-olds the way to do things in Little Five Points), is scary to him. It’s unfamiliar territory. It’s untested. It’s going into the unknown. And frankly, that’s the way Blaire White views the things that surround her. They’re all part of the unknown. And defensively, rather than embrace the unknown or at least get to know it a bit more, they would rather fire their weapons at it, hoping for the unknown to go away and for things to go back to the way they were.

They’re afraid of the future.