In this episode Trent reveals the strategies outlined in a secret 1990’s LGBT activism manual and what we should learn from their approach and how to respond to it.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Today, I want to talk about the ’90s. I’m not going to talk about Pogs or Nickelodeon cartoons, but I do want to talk about a book that was instrumental in changing the national conversation on LGBT issues, a book whose tactics are still used today by those who defend LGBT ideology, and what we can learn from it. Frankly as Catholics and as Christians, we want to capture hearts and minds. You can’t just have good arguments. Good arguments are very, very helpful, but there’s a certain approach that one must take in putting forward controversial ideas. So I find this book fascinating just to learn from that, but also as a student of history to find out what happened.
Trent Horn:
So what is the book I want to talk about? I have it right here. It’s called After the Ball. So After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen. So the book came out, I think, like 1988, 1989 and Kirk and Madsen are part of the LGBT movement and they’re a part at least defending it, and they argue in this book, they say, “Look, the LGBT so-called civil rights movement has been going at things the wrong way and we need to change the approach if we’re going to change public opinion on this issue.” So they wrote this book and Kirk and Madsen, their background is actually in advertising. So what they said is the LGBT movement needs to take a lesson from Madison Avenue as they call it, from advertising executive firms in order to change public perception. That makes sense, right? You want to change public perception of things and what shapes a lot of our perceptions in life? The advertisements that we watch. So that was the approach they wanted to take. I want to talk about that book, its tactics that we still see today, and then also how we can learn from that.
Trent Horn:
So I’ll just read you a part of this review from the Los Angeles Times, came out in 1989 by Johnathan [Kirsch 00:02:17], a review of Kirk and Madsen’s book. He writes, “One out of 10 Americans is gay according to Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen in After the Ball.” Actually, that’s from the Kinsey Institute and we now know that is incorrect. It’s more closer to 1% to 2% identify as LGBT, but Kirk and Madsen would say that doesn’t matter because they’re doing propaganda, but here, I’ll continue. “These 25 million men and women are, from the book, ‘forced to cower and skulk like a German Jew of the ’30s.’ They are the victims of a national sickness that manifests itself in the fear and hatred of homosexuality. The only appropriate response from the gay community and the only way to put an end to their oppression is ‘ice cold controlled directed rage.'”
Trent Horn:
Now, here’s what’s interesting. The article goes on to say, “But After the Ball is not a call to the barricades. Rather, it is a curious call to the storyboards and 30-second spots of Madison Avenue, a kind of sanitized upscale media radicalism that finds mass demonstrations to be ghastly freak shows and prefers highway billboards that ‘earnestly [propound 00:03:30] appealing truisms, the safer and more platitudinous the better.’ The authors readily admit,” I love this excerpt from the book, “we are talking about propaganda.” So here, what Kirk and Madsen are saying is that members of the LGBT community can be angry, but he’s telling them that they need to fight smart. They need to direct it in very clever ways. One of the big arguments in the book is they say, “Stop with the outlandish behavior.”
Trent Horn:
So I thought of that today about that article I talked about before last week about the LGBT pride parades introducing children to this, having, let’s say, drag queen story hour at libraries. Kirk and Madsen, if you were to try that back in the ’90s, Kirk and Madsen would say that is the completely wrong way to go about it because back then, the LGBT movement had no social currency, even in Hollywood, even in places where they are generally accepted in movies and television shows. They’re the butt of jokes. It’s interesting, right, when you watch movies from the ’90s and you see how they discuss LGBT issues, even mainstream movies. Nowadays, those same movies could never be made. They’d be instantly canceled. In fact, transgender is a plot point in the movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Remember that with Jim Carrey? It’s an important point of the plot, but the ways that it’s handled in the movie back then, that movie would be protested. It would be destroyed. It wouldn’t even have a release or at least not with those elements in it. You see how things have changed since then.
Trent Horn:
So I want to talk about After the Ball and I’m going to read to you some excerpts from the book that show what kind of the general strategy is. Okay. So Kirk and Madsen divide up their audience into three groups: intransigents, ambivalent skeptics, and friends. The idea here is intransigents are people who are vocally opposed to homosexual behavior, to LGBT ideology. They’re vocally opposed. They’re not going to change their minds and so these are people that Kirk and Madsen would say, “Don’t waste your time on them. Ignore them. Don’t interact with them. The only interaction you should have with the intransigents is efforts to silence them, to just find ways to get the community to rally behind shutting them up.” So the only way you want to interact with them is to pick the most vile members of the intransigents and make them representative of the whole. That will come up here with another tactic that’s called jamming. So you have the intransigents. You have friends. These are people the fully agree and are great and you just want to mobilize them and get them on the same page.
Trent Horn:
In between the intransigents and the friends, so you have your helpful allies, you have those that are very vocally opposed, you have the mushy middle in between. These are people that Kirk and Madsen call ambivalent skeptics. So they recommend two strategies for ambivalent skeptics, desensitize them and jam convert them or a process called jamming. First, I want to talk about desensitizing. This is what they say on page 177 of the book. “At least at the outset, we seek desensitization and nothing more. You can forget about trying to right upfront to persuade folks that homosexuality is a good thing, but if you can get them to think it is just another thing meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders, then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won.” Isn’t that fascinating? They said, “We’re not trying to convince people it’s a good thing. You start with tolerance and then eventually that becomes acceptance, then celebration.” It’s all about keeping your eye on the ball, after the ball, and that’s the theme with Kirk and Madsen.
Trent Horn:
They’re saying, “Look, the long game here, don’t blow it by doing a crazy, over-the-top drag show or parade that scandalizes children. Keep on the long game here and you can do all that stuff once society is firmly behind you, but until that point, you’ve got to be very smart.” So they apply something they call the keep talking principle to desensitize people. “The free and frequent discussion of gay rights by a variety of persons in a variety of places gives the impression that homosexuality is commonplace. That impression is essential because, as noted in the previous chapter, the acceptability of any new behavior ultimately hinges on the proportion of one’s fellows accepting or doing it.” Notice this part. “And when we say talk about homosexuality, we mean just that. In the early stages of the campaign, the public should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure to homosexual behavior itself.” They italicize the word sexual. “Instead, the imagery of sex per se should be downplayed and the issue of gay rights reduced as far as possible to an abstract social question.”
Trent Horn:
That’s exactly right and that’s exactly now more of the sexuality explicit things can come to the forefront because so much time was invested in taking the LGBT ideology and making it an abstract issue. People still want to treat it that way. When you get down to the essential nature, the visceral reality of what so-called gender reassignment surgery does to the human body, what is involved in sexual acts between two men, for example, that is something the other side does not want to talk about because it exposes how these things are contrary to nature that is built into the human person. So that’s desensitize. Let me talk a little bit about jamming then. For someone who might be in favor, but is not willing to take the next step, this is what they recommend.
Trent Horn:
What they say is, “The objective is to make homo-hating beliefs and actions look so nasty that average Americans will want to disassociate themselves from them. This, of course, is a variant on the process of jamming. We intend by this tactic to make the very expression of homo hatred so discreditable that even in the intransigents, the vocally opposed, will be silenced in public like racists and anti-Semites are today. The best way to make homo hatred look bad is to vilify those who victimize gays. The public should be shown images of ranting homo haters whose traits and attitudes appall and anger middle America.” So Kirk and Madsen are saying the images of those who identify as LGBT should be as bland and normal and just like everybody else. Ellen DeGeneres. Pete Buttigieg. That’s the image we need to have and that’s what was successful. The images, however, of those who oppose homosexuality should look very, very different from what is commonplace like people who hold up signs at the Westboro Baptist Church saying, “God hates F-A-Gs.”
Trent Horn:
Even people who are ambivalent towards homosexuality would say, “I would never go to a funeral and hold a sign like that. That’s crazy. I don’t want to be anything like those people.” That’s the jamming process to make you think you have to fully embrace the other side so you’re not like the fringe on a belief that you actually do hold the major tenets of. So that’s ignoring, jamming, desensitizing, and then recruiting. They say, “Well you got to recruit people,” but they caution actually and here’s what’s interesting about it. They caution about allying. They say, “Look, if we’re going to ally together …” This is a problem in the early ’90s. Kirk and Madsen are critical of LGBT people who would ally themselves with very controversial movements. They would say … There’s a chapter in here, it actually says, “Keep the message focused. You’re a homosexual, not a whale.” The idea here is that everyone is aligned … It says here, “We’re aligned with the Animal Protection League, migrant farm workers, Trotskyites, Fat Person Liberation Front, anti-apartheid, Save the Whales. They speak at our rallies, we speak at theirs, but the problem is the message gets lost.”
Trent Horn:
Back in 1988, they’re at a gay pride parade. They had signs that said, “Cruise men, not missiles.” Cruising is a term for finding casual sexual liaisons. Cruise missiles were a big part of Iran-Contra and a lot of the other controversies in the ’80s in Central America, things like that. He said, “No, this dilutes the message,” and they put this in here. “As a practical rule of thumb, gay organizations and strategists should think twice about pubic association with any group that is generally unpopular, smaller than the gay community, and concerned with issues remote from it.” So that’s why you even see within the past few years those who identify as LGBT will say, “Well we’re not with polygamists. We have nothing to do with polygamy. We have nothing to do with this or that.” They will wait until that other group is equal to or more accepted than them and then they will be willing to partner with it.
Trent Horn:
Finally, the very clear, on page 183 to 184, always portray yourself like the victim. Always portray yourself like the victim to get sympathy and credibility with the general public. So it says, “In practical terms, this means that cocky, mustachioed leather men, drag queens, and bull dykes would not appear in gay commercials and other public presentations. Conventional young people, middle-aged women, older folks of all races, not to mention parents and straight friends of gays. One could also argue lesbians should be featured more prominently than gay men in the early stages. Also, women are generally seen as less threatening than men. It cannot go without saying groups on the farthest margins of acceptability such as NAMBLA,” that’s the North America Man/Boy Love Association promoting pedophilia, “must play no part at all in such a campaign. Suspected child molesters will never look like victims.”
Trent Horn:
Now, here is the really interesting takeaway from the arguments. You remember all the arguments in the ’90s and the 2000s? Listen to this. “The public should be persuaded that gays are victims of circumstance, that they no more chose their sexual orientations than they did, say, their height, skin color, talents, or limitations. We argue that for all practical purposes gays should be considered to have been born gay,” in italics as if this was a new idea, “even though sexual orientation for most humans seems to be the product of a complex interaction between innate predispositions and environmental factors during childhood and early adolescence. To suggest that homosexuality might be chosen is to open the can of worms labeled moral choice and sin.”
Trent Horn:
Isn’t that fascinating? They recognized this way back in the late ’80s to say, “No, no, no. You got to say they’re born this way because if there’s choice that’s involved, people will not be sympathetic,” even though they knew it was not as simple as that. They lied. They lied because it was effective for their movement just like the pro-choice movement lied about the number of back alley abortions because it was effective for their movement. People, we’re fighting evil here and evil … It’s kind of like when I watch comic … When I read comic books and watch comic book movies, it always seems hard for the hero to fight the villain because the villain doesn’t play by any rules. So the villain can do all these awful things to get their end and the hero has a code of honor. There’s things he won’t do. Batman won’t kill. Heroes don’t kill people. Anti-hero is a different story, but true heroes, they don’t do that. They don’t sacrifice innocent people. So when I think of comic books, it’s like it’s hard. The other side, they don’t play by any rules, but also because of their lack of virtue and their disordered behavior, that will eventually catch up to them and the truth can be seen if we are diligent.
Trent Horn:
That’s why we have to be cognizant and knowledgeable about this. Matthew 10:16, one of my favorite Bible verses, “Be as gentle as doves and as wise as serpents.” So we have to know the tactics of those who disagree with us. We have to be able to neutralize those tactics and destroy the arguments and propaganda they are promoting without harming the person who is making them because our enemy is not Kirk and Madsen. Our enemy is not the leader of the human rights campaigns today. Our enemy is the devil and there are a bunch of innocent people that he has caught up in his sinful dragnet that we have to, through the grace of God and by living out our baptismal promises to be priest, prophet, and king to help spread the gospel to liberate people from that entrapment. That is what we are called to do. We cannot treat us versus them. It’s all of us together trying to help others who’ve been caught up in the clutches of the evil one.
Trent Horn:
That’s what we always have to keep at the front line. So we cannot use derogatory language. We cannot treat people who disagree with us as if they are less than human. We must instead rely on God’s grace and live out virtuous lives and present the truth in a persuasive and compassionate way. So I hope that was helpful for you all. By the way, you might be wondering, “Where can I get a copy of After the Ball?” It’s out of print. I don’t know anybody who has it. Maybe you can find … There’s copies going for like a few hundred bucks online. I’m so grateful I have this one. I actually have a section on my bookshelf with out-of-print books, they’re super expensive, that I’m glad I have. Maybe I’ll give you a tour of those in a future episode, but hey, thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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