The Elephant in the Closet

Are self-hating closeted gays the most underrecognized destructive force on the planet?

I’ve been sitting with this idea for a while, letting time nourish the seed,an idea that has only recently begun to bud with evidence. It's circumstantial, sure, and drawn from perception and personal experience, but still, the question persists and has flourished under the newest regime: the MAGAT regime.

Now hold on a minute, CZ, are you claiming that Trump and his sycophants are all secretly gay? My answer: Yes/No. Some. It’s nuanced, but not that nuanced. It's more about factions. Within the MAGA and broader conservative movement, there's always been a common thread of sexual repression. Whether it’s Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, bragging about monitoring his son’s phone for porn, or the infamous fact that every Republican National Convention seems to crash Grindr, the popular gay dating app.

But the broader cultural moment is louder. Today we see a proliferation of “alpha male” influencers like Andrew Tate and the Fresh & Fit crowd, or more mundane versions like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman. They rant about collapsing testosterone levels, red-faced and screen-shouting about how what they’re doing isn’t steroids, bro. "Nah bro, get your levels checked. Testosterone is a miracle. It does A, B, and C with little to no side effects. Trust me, bro."

They pine for a bygone era where men were “real men.” You know, like the 1920s, '30s, and '40s,when, supposedly, the American landscape was dominated by modern-day Adonis’s bursting with muscle and masculine energy. The truth? Those men were starving. Wiry and lean. Dressed in loose-fitting clothes not for style, but because malnutrition and grueling labor ruled the day. It was the Depression. Before that, the indentured working class barely survived.

This mythology of the past, the golden age narrative, is nationalist adjacent. Always has been. It's a romanticized farce magnifying a few wins while ignoring the widespread destitution of the Gilded Age and beyond.

And at the core of this influencer culture is a deep, festering crisis of male identity. Since the '60s and '70s, feminism has propelled women into the 21st century, out of the shackles of the home and into the professional sphere. Women were told to get educated, work, and, while doing so, still carry the family. Men? They didn’t adapt. They bumbled along, confused and increasingly bitter as liberty began to disperse toward their feminine counterparts.

These men saw equality not as progress, but as a zero-sum game, sharing power meant losing it. What they really mourned was the loss of control.

And yes, when women entered the workplace, they did lose an identity, one often forced upon them, yes, but an identity nonetheless. In return, they gained choice. Liberation, sexual and social. And with that came fear from many men, who, instead of evolving emotionally, doubled down on what they knew: their value as breadwinners. They clung to outdated roles in modern relationships, hoping the old playbook would still apply.

Rather than grow, they regressed. Many have now tethered their futures to orange strongmen and influencer demagogues. They cry about “feminism” and “wokeism” destroying traditional values,but what’s really happening is that cultural progress is exposing the hollow underbelly of a stagnant and emotionally stunted subsection of men. These guys parrot the gospel of Tate, Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and others, never questioning why they feel so alienated in the first place.

And yet, when I hear them speak, I can’t help but wonder: aren’t these dudes kinda... gay?

Seriously, dear reader, what’s your first thought when you hear this?

“Sex is for making children. Any man who has sex with women because it ‘feels good’ is gay. Oh my pee pee feels good this is great! In fact, if you are 40 with less than 5 children, you’re probably gay.”

Andrew Tate tweeted this. He sat down, typed that, thought about it, and hit “send.” This was his alpha male take. My takeaway, beyond the comedic absurdity, is: wait... I’m 39 with two kids and a vasectomy. So, am I gay now? Maybe in Tate’s world, yeah.

But maybe he's accidentally right.

Think about it. Some of the most extreme culturally “alpha male” environments in the modern world? The military and prison. Both are hotbeds for male sexual violence. Both have stereotypical, meme-level reputations for male-on-male assault. And if we go back to the favorite era of many alpha-worshipping bros, the Spartans, they literally bred themselves out of existence with long military campaigns away from women... and plenty of time spent with each other.

Even the Greek philosophers, often quoted and misquoted by today's intellectual right, weren’t too fond of women. They often described women as broken, malformed versions of men. Some believed that giving birth to a daughter was a sign that something had gone wrong with the man during conception.

So, I ask again, maybe the most alpha male is actually deeply homosexual. But instead of living openly, that repressed energy festers and fuels violence. The hatred of women. The hatred of gay men who do live freely. All that loathing, all that projection, aimed outward.

You can see it in the eyes of JD Vance, Josh Hawley, and Lindsey Graham, that edge, that barely hidden nihilistic disgust for large swaths of humanity. It’s like an inconvenient mirror being held up to their faces, reflecting the blemishes and excess weight of shame and desire they can't stand to look at.

How many more of these small-hearted men must we endure before we finally realize that self-hatred, left unchecked, metastasizes? It festers and spreads, until the people who most resemble the part of ourselves we fear the most become the targets.

Maybe that’s why the trans community, .0009% of the U.S. population, takes up 50% of the conservative mind’s mental bandwidth.

Because the closet is crowded. And the elephant inside it? Still angry.

-CZ