The most popular celebrity in the “alt-right” is a gay British college dropout, and he’s coming to FAU and UM – even though one of those schools has banned him
“If there was a homophobia problem in America, it’s gone,” declared Milo Yiannopoulos as his tour bus rolled out of Houston last week in a thunderstorm.
“I can’t find any here,” he said. “I can’t find any.”
Yiannopoulos and his crew of eight were driving through Texas in his black custom 45-foot bus — with the words “The Dangerous Faggot Tour” emblazoned on the side in four-foot-high white letters. So he insists it’s not for lack of trying.
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Gay in a different way
The controversial 32-year-old British citizen says he couldn’t even find homophobia in Lubbock, where he spoke Sept. 12 at Texas Tech to a standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 conservative students. (The topic was, “Why do so many lesbians fake hate crimes?”)
The most homophobic thing he heard: “I don’t agree with your lifestyle, but I agree with you.”
Agreeing with Yiannopoulos would repulse many people, straight and gay. He’s the second-most famous staffer at the hyper-conservative website Breitbart.com. (No. 1 would be CEO Steve Bannon, who has temporarily stepped down to become CEO of Donald Trump’s campaign.) In just the past year, Yiannopoulos has written…
- “Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy.” Among the evidence: “your birth control injection will add on pounds that will prevent the injection you really want — of man meat.”
- “In terms of female happiness, women’s liberation was probably a mistake, and it was a mistake driven by technology that was, of course, invented by men.”
- After the Pulse nightclub shooting, he asked, “How many more innocent gays need to die before we admit that America, and the world, has an Islam problem? I don’t mean a ‘radical Islam’ problem or an ‘extremist Islam problem.’ Violence is not the extreme in Islam any more: it’s the norm.”
He also launched the Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant, “a scholarship exclusively available to white men who wish to pursue their post-secondary education on equal footing with their female, queer and ethnic minority classmates.”
Popular for being unpopular
While no one has won his grant yet, Yiannopoulos’s words have won thousands of fans. Before Twitter banned him in July for mocking Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones – a twisted tale unto itself – he had nearly 350,000 followers. His Youtube channel has more than 277,000 subscribers.
Now he’s touring America’s campuses in his shiny new bus, speaking and even performing occasionally in drag. The topics change with each stop, but the purpose is the same: “My mission is the destruction of political correctness in America, and everything I do should be viewed through that lens.”
He’s booked at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton from 7-9 p.m. next Thursday, Sept. 29 in the Student Union auditorium. He was scheduled to appear at the University of Miami on Oct. 3, but Breitbart reported last week...
University of Miami’s College Republicans group received notification that the Dangerous Faggot event set to take place on October 3rd at Bank United Field House was to be cancelled due to “security concerns.” What these security concerns were exactly was not detailed.
SFGN sought comment from UM officials but has not heard back. Yiannopoulos is undaunted — after his FAU appearance, he’ll drive south to the private school’s Coral Gables campus.
“We’re gonna take the bus and park it outside the president’s office,” Yiannopoulos says. “We’ll ask him about what he believes these ‘security concerns’ are, and why he’s denying students the right to hear from me.”
Yiannopoulos says, “We only go to schools we’re invited to.” At FAU, that invitation supposedly came from the campus chapter of Turning Point USA. SFGN tried contacting the chapter’s current and past president, but neither has replied.
What will Yiannopoulos talk about? Certainly not lesbians making up hate crimes. He says he varies his topics.
“I haven’t decided yet,” he said last week. “I want to make it’s up-to-date and interesting, so I’ll see what happens” in the news.
For instance, on Wednesday, Yiannopoulos will pull into Louisiana State University, “performing in drag with a Trump-supporting rapper.” He says he’ll be dressed as a patriotic Marilyn Monroe but wouldn’t provide other details, lest it spoil the surprise.
The Dangerous Faggot Tour will cover 50 cities in the next six months, but Yiannopoulos has spoken at several U.S. colleges in the past. He’s often been met by protesters.
He insists he doesn’t mind — and actually encourages — heated debate on the integrity of his ideas. What ticks him off are attempts to stop his speeches from ever happening. According to Breitbart, at DePaul University in Chicago, protesters “stormed the stage, blew whistles, grabbed the microphone out of the interviewer’s hand and threatened to punch Yiannopoulos in the face.”
Yiannopoulos has cleverly undercut one reason to ban him from campus: He pays for everything. Students have often sought to ban controversial speakers based on an economic argument: Schools pay speakers with “activities and service fees.” These fees are tacked onto tuition and pay for everything from the Student Union to intramural sports.
Yiannopoulos argues that he’s revealing a truth many others don’t see: Liberals can’t handle diversity, while conservatives embrace it.
Related: Twitter Crackdown on Hate Speech Backfires
Homophobia phobia
“The left protests me as a human being,” Yiannopoulos says. “They can’t stand my existence as a homosexual who dares to go off script.”
As his bus navigated the thunderstorm in southeast Texas, Yiannopoulos boasted about the open-minded people he’s met throughout the state.
“As a Brit coming over to America, I’ve been amazed how lovely and kind and decent these people are,” he says. “I’m pulling up in a bus looking like a faggy Popeye reject, and I do not recognize the world liberals describe.”
Yiannopoulos says the homophobia he’s faced in this country comes from “coastal progressives.”
“The difference between the spitefulness and vitriol and unpleasantness of the left as contrasted with the warmth and kindness and basic human decency in Texas — it’s staggering,” he says. “The nastiest stuff I get is wholly from other gay progressives who make insinuations. There’s been some pretty homophobic stuff said about me — always from the left, never from the right.”
With his usual bravado, Yiannopoulos concludes, “I, more than any other gay person, is showing how far America has come.”
