I forgot to mention above that Daniel Mackler claims to be
"a filmmaker and musician".
More to the point, Daniel wrote an essay on homosexuality a couple of years ago. I've not read it again. Like you with his Orwellian essay on reproductive rights, I felt the same when Daniel received cheers from several co-reviewers on this other essay. Now I feel freer to speak out…
Firstly, all through his essay Daniel uses a word that I try to avoid. That word is "
gay": a sequestered word by the homosexual community (when I was a child that word meant cheerful). Repeat: I won't read the essay again. My liver is delicate to ingest some of Daniel's stuff. However, as far as I remember the essay, he wrote it as if homosexuality was not only as healthy as heterosexuality, but in some places he even hints that it might be healthier! (especially in context of his concerns about reproductive human rights).
But homosexuality cannot be as healthy as regular straight relationships in humans. This is so obvious that both Alice Miller and Lloyd deMause agree with the view that most homosexual behavior is sort of pathological. This doesn't mean that
every homo relation is intrinsically pathological. I for one believe that discrete, non-ostentatious, non-promiscuous and stable commitments might be relatively OK. But if I remember correctly, in his essay Daniel didn't make any distinctions in spite of the fact that, through bisexuals, the homo community brought the AIDS epidemic into the straight community. As a New Yorker, Daniel should know better what caused the AIDS epidemic: extreme promiscuity and the lifestyles among homosexuals. In his essay he preferred, instead, to bury his head in the sand.
In Dan's essay it also bothered me his pose as an objective scientist, a psychologist. As Wirsen demonstrated with beautiful prose in this very blog, this is a regression when compared to Miller's writing. The point is that, since Daniel Mackler's essay is sheer apologetics of homosexuality, my educated guess is that he may be a sort of closet homosexual.
Let me say that I have the right to speak in these terms because I myself had the usual homo experiences many have as adolescents. Now I know that those experiences had their basic etiology in my unconscious repulsion of my mother's figure. (The extremely disturbed mother I had a few decades ago made the young teen I was to view many women under a sinister light: an obvious projection.)
I have the courage to confess this. But Daniel Mackler never confessed anything about his actual experiences in any of his writing. If we claim to be "Miller's radical sons", reticence about one's own preferences only regresses our writing a giant step backwards of Miller's legacy. Not speaking out frankly about what made a confused adolescent have a couple of homo experiences, but instead theorizing from the Olympus as academic psychologists do, gravely obfuscates the issue. Further, such attitude gives the theorizer ample room to avoid exactly that which, in the first place, dragged the teenager to look for romantic accomplishment in same-sex relations.
There's no doubt in my mind that Daniel's advice to several people to "try celibacy" is the result of something seriously unsolved in his psyche. In the Internet I've even seen Dan advising celibacy in a board about his film on psych medications. That's a pretty freaked out advice since Dan is not telling he is probably projecting. He may well have been struggling with himself but, instead of telling it, he advices celibacy to
the other person.
A rather strange post by Dan in his vanished forum now comes to my mind. He asked the apparently bizarre question "And what about masturbation?" Nobody understood it because Dan didn't want us know he was probably referring to an inner warfare. The struggle with the sexual daimon was pandemic among Christian saints who believed that strict celibacy was the way to enlightenment. Read the
Confessions by Augustine. It's must reading and Penguin Books has a beautiful edition of it. But by talking always of "they", the homos, in his essay Daniel conveniently avoided the issue. It is not the needs of other people what he is addressing, but the projected struggle of his own mind. (I have approached an analogous case in
my analysis of Ronald L. Hubbard's disturbed mind.)
A couple of years ago I wanted to tell this all in Dan's forum. But again, because of the many cheers by the posters on Dan's homo essay (I remember Austerlitz saying it was so perfect that he would not even comment on it!), and because of my extremely brutal post about ugly homos, I refrained myself. I didn't want to hurt Daniel for a second time. But now that time has passed and that, as you say, he probably does not read this forum, I can finally speak my mind.