Ideological intolerance may
not be typically thought of as stemming from a psychological pathology from
unresolved emotional problems, especially if the ideology is classified under “political
speech.” Even so, the vehemence with which flashes of hostility are unleashed by
an intolerant ideologue against people objecting to the person’s ideology and
thus to it being imposed as if it were God’s eternal truth is plainly
psychological. Volunteering at a film festival in San Francisco in late June, 2026,
I was the receiver, or lightening rod, of such vitriol from two attendees and the
festival’s manager who oversaw the volunteers because I had unwittingly made
statements that violated the dominant ideology not only at the festival, but in
San Francisco moreover. In business schools, it is well known (or should be
well known) that an organizational culture can reflect a wider culture in the
organization’s environment. A toxic local or societal norm, which reflects values,
beliefs, and even assumptions held by a sufficient proportion of inhabitants to
gain a “critical mass,” can infect organizational cultures within the locality
or society. I contend that this dynamic applied to the Frameline (LGBT) film festival in
2026 and the wider the Castro (gay) district of San Francisco then, where the
festival was based. The same overreaching ideology and hostile defense mechanism
were salient both in the non-profit organization and, extending beyond the
Castro neighborhood, in San Francisco itself as well as in at least some of the
suburbs.
On my first shift as a
volunteer, and I agreed to volunteer at all so I could include some examples of
“gay cinema” in a forthcoming book I was writing on film as an excellent medium
for stimulating philosophical and theological thinking, I casually mentioned to
two young women who had just seen the film that was shown during my first shift
that I was impressed that the film has two lesbian sex scenes. Even though my
tone was that of a compliment, one of the young (presumably lesbian) women
angrily declared to me, “That’s heterosexual sex!” as if her fact trumped what was merely an opinion
on my part. “No,” I slowly retorted, “a sex scene with two vaginas is not
heterosexual.” To my shock, the two women dismissed this fact by
stating, as if declaring a fact of their own making, “No, it doesn’t work that
way.” Translation: two vaginas without any penis in a sex act is heterosexual
if one of the women self-identifies mentally as a man, which was the case in
the film. The context of my remark was that I came slowly to the realization
during the film that the sex scenes involved two vaginas rather than a vagina
and a penis. My position was that a person’s mental state does not impact the
label on whether a sex scene is homosexual or heterosexual; a (real) penis and
a vagina, and, technically, penetration of the former into the latter, are
requisite to a sex scene being classified as heterosexual rather than homosexual.
That ideological fervor can overreach so much, even to contradict such
well-established labels as homosexual and heterosexual (and violate even common
sense!), means that a vulnerability exists in the human brain, and therefore
human nature itself, with respect to ideology in relation to facts. In
other words, the fact/value distinction is vulnerable to values overruling
facts.
I was stunned during the ensuing
week when I discussed the conversation with other people. A handful, all under
35 years old, pushed back against my rather obvious claim that a sex scene
centered on and involving two vaginas (and no penises) is not heterosexual. One
college student said, “It could be.” Plain and simply, she was incorrect. Tellingly,
people over 40, on the other hand, were as stunned as I was regarding the pushback
I had been encountering. “That’s just crazy,” an 88 year-old gay man said in
referring to the assertion that a sexual act between two vaginas (and no penis)
is heterosexual. The human mind seems to be too weak, at least in the case of
ideologues, to put the brakes on an ideology when it has gone too far in a
person’s mind. Psychology is in the mix. One young man who actually had been
awarded a Ph.D. in natural science repeatedly shouted at me at a coffee shop as
if he were regressing back to his childhood, “You’re an idiot! You’re an idiot!”
He could barely control himself emotionally. The arrogance that is in ideological
idolatry can be so powerful in the mind that it malfunctions without even
realizing it. The impact of ideology on a mind’s self-regulatory features
deserves much greater attention both in scholarship and the public square.
In addition to mental
states, ideological fervor and even intense flashes of anger do not trump cognitive
definitions. The sheer presumption in contradicting definitions, even more than
the flashes of anger unleased on me, is what really shocked me because I had never
encountered such overreaching of an ideology. Such presumption is like
arrogance on stilts during a flood, and yet strangely such an ideologue’s mind
is unaware of the overreach and its presumption. Besides the blatant distortion
of the word “heterosexual” beyond recognition such that it could be applied as
a label to homosexual sex acts in a film, the vengeance of the two young
lesbians complaining about my “inappropriate” statement—the very word, inappropriate,
signals subjectivity—added insult to the initial injury of being so blatantly
disrespected. But for their ideological fervor having reached the level of
idolatry, the two young women could have left the theater without feeling an
instinctual urge to harm me. Pleasure from inflicting pain on another person is
garden variety sadism, and, according to Nietzsche, the original function of
punishment before moral responsibility came to be associated.
Cicily Singh, who managed
the Frameline (LGBT) festival’s volunteer corps that year, instinctually
reacted to the women’s complaint of my “inappropriate” statements ideologically,
meaning with much prejudice because she held the very same ideology as the two
women at the theater. For Cicily wrote a hostile, accusatory email to me
without even having contacted me first to ask what I had actually said to the two
vindictive young women. “The film contains a lesbian sex scene,” and
then my explaining, “because there are two vaginas,” is in no sense inappropriate,
especially at a gay film festival! Ironically, it was Cicily’s email that
was inappropriate. She must have been very ideologically and, relatedly,
emotionally incensed, for she was sufficiently impulsive to send me the harsh,
accusatory email, which contained an implicit threat that my continued involvement
at the festival was then on thin ice, in time for me to read her message while
I was en route to my last shift, rather than only once it had been
completed. Ideological idolatry and the related emotional state can confound
rationality, and thus thinking strategically. I unilaterally activated the
implied threat and implemented it myself—"that’s called taking the initiative.”[1]
I quickly wrote a brief rebuttal and turned back (to do my own work!) rather
than continue on to the theater to freely give my labor to such a resentful,
too ideologically-driven group of people as were evidently running the film
festival. Afterall, this point must be made perfectly clear: saying that a sex
scene is not heterosexual because it is centered on and delimited by two
vaginas is not inappropriate; in fact, it is an accurate statement, and
entirely fitting at an LGBT (gay) film festival.
It is important to situate
both the two young lesbians and Cicily in the local gay culture of San Francisco,
which I at the time may have been very distinct from the gay cultures in other
cities in several respects—all in excess. To be sure, I have no empirical
studies to cite to support my conjecture. From my own observations of the
distinctive sub-culture, my impression is that gay men under 50 or 60 years of
age in the Castro district were both more ideologically fixated and angrier at people
who opposed their sociopolitical-linguistic ideology than were gay men
typically in other large cities in North America and Europe. San Francisco “Pride”
had arguably gone too far in its ideological intolerance and aggressive vindictiveness
not in pushing back against heterosexual anti-gay prejudice but, rather,
against non-acceptance of the “woke” ideology and agenda, and in particular the
linguistic dogmatism. Home-grown ideology, rather than opposition by evangelical
Christians to homosexuality, had become a problem in the Castro (gay) district by
2026 as evinced by the presumed entitlement to overreach and to lash out in
anger so to verbally attack anyone who is an obstacle to the overly expansive
sense of self and the presumption to declare facts out of what is actually
ideological opinion. The advocates and defenders of the “woke” ideology had
taken the place of the evangelical “Christian right” of the 1980s in claiming
truth for themselves out of what was in actuality opinion. The ideological
intolerance had shifted from the hard right to the progressive left since the
twentieth century. That virtually none of the gay inhabitants of the Castro were
probably conscious of having taken their own ideology too far both in its
content and its vehement defense can be taken as an indictment on the human
brain itself, and, more particularly, on its ability to perceive going too
far.
After having quit the
festival after the second of my three shifts, I voted with my feet on the day
after the festival’s closing night by not going to downtown San Francisco to
watch the gays in their parade; I had heard and witnessed too much hostility
and self-righteousness in that sub-culture for its advocates to deserve being
watched performing “on stage.” I will not furnish several examples of the
toxicity manifested as hostility and even aggressiveness within the
subculture—the dysfunctional psychology mirrors and likely even augmented or
intensified the anger and vindictiveness that I encountered at the Frameline
film festival. By analogy, the more general heating of the temperature at the
Castro arguably contributed to the “heatwave” that I encountered at the film
festival. During that very week, in fact, scientists were making precisely this
argument in regard to the heatwave then occurring in Europe—the temporary El
Nino was not the driving force behind the record heat.
Several contributory factors
can be identified to account for the impact of the toxic Castro culture (i.e., global
warming) on the film festival’s organizational dysfunction (i.e., the
heatwave). Firstly, the harsh rudeness and abject inconsiderateness, and even
cruelty, with which gay men in the Castro commonly would intentionally not show
up for previously-arranged (sex) date without even bothering to cancel because
suddenly another man is available for sex. A guy not showing up, without bothering
to cancel, at a meeting place (e.g., my place or yours) previously agreed with
another guy was called “flaking,” and the disrespect in particular and the
passive aggression more generally were severe enough psychologically to cause strong
anger. Similarly, the language that Castro men typically used in rejecting unwanted
overtures by other men for sex, such as “you’re fat” and “you’re old; you don’t
belong in this bar,” doubtlessly caused outrage. Rather than being emotionally
hurt from prejudice locally against homosexuality, too many gay men in the
Castro were slicing into other gay men there too often and too deeply. It is as
if enjoying being cruel had become engrained within gay culture. It may
be that the ideological anger that was directed to me at the festival was fueled
at least in part by the legitimate anger and even rage caused by gay men there.
It is not as if such intense anger simply dissipates on its own; rather, it
seeks openings.
Secondly, I learned from two
long-time residents—two friends of mine—that the gay employees in the Castro
who worked as bartenders and servers (waiters) had a reputation by 2026 for
being rude, and even hostile, to customers—ruder than in other areas of the
city. In the Castro, tips at fast-food (i.e., counter) food-places, bars,
and even coffee shops were, according to several gay men and at least one
resentful employee at the coffee shop, Poesia, required rather than up to the discretion of the patrons. “It’s the
Castro standard,” a young gay man sitting with a friend at a table near mine
outside at Poesia’s street-level café said in scolding me for having
just objected to the petulant, hostile employee who had angrily chastised me for
not tipping on coffee orders, which, by the way, the customers picked up at the
counter and returned after use to a plastic bin. The self-righteous, immature
gay man sitting near me then dismissively walked away from me with his friend
while making it clear to me that he was laughing at me for having insisted
that tips are not required anywhere, even in the Castro. In other words,
the “standard” was wrong, and employees of the various establishments were wholly
without justification in tacitly punishing regular customers who do not tip on
every occasion. That tips were by then solicited prior to any service in
many food establishments everywhere is nonsensical enough; that the
self-interested employees at the cash registers in the Castro retail district blatantly
looked at the screen to see if customers were selecting tips is unseemly. That
an employee would then lash out at a customer for not designating a tip prior
to service and thus before the quality of service can possibly be assessed,
as if tipping were required, is beyond the pale and thus points to a
dysfunctional business climate.
It is possible that at least
some of the employees’ hostility toward non-tipping customers was due to pent
up anger from having been rudely and even cruelly treated by other gay men in
the context of “hooking up” for sex, and from other sordid behaviors discussed
below. My larger point is that the vindictiveness of the two young women in the
theater and the accusatory hostility of Cicily can be seen as not so isolated
as they may prime facie appear.
Thirdly, the hostility of
non-supervisory employees at retail establishments in the Castro went beyond resentment
due to a presumed entitlement to be tipped by every customer regardless of
service. For example, a young Black gay man working at one bar, “440,” presumed
himself entitled to demand of certain (Caucasian) tourists what their purposes
were in visiting the city. Another employee was reported to have told one such
tourist who complained about the first employee’s invasiveness, “We do screen certain
customers.” Of course, well-to-do tourists usually appear very suspicious, and
may even need to be strip-searched. This
story gets even better. At least one tourist that know of told the employee at
the front door, “It’s none of your business why I am in San Francisco.” Not to
be outdone by a mere prospective customer, the employee abused his discretion by
blocking that tourist’s access to the bar for having been rude. The tourist
subsequently reported that the other employee and several young gay customers
drinking beer just outside the bar chastised the tourist for being so
stupid as to be rude to an employee of the bar. Because the tourist had not
been at all rude, the multi-pronged attack was excessive, and thus can be taken
as yet another “data point” indicative of the excessive anger and hostility in
the Castro district. I suspect that the same ideology that I came up against at
the film festival was in play in the attack on the tourist. Furthermore, the
anger and vindictiveness that I encountered may have been excessive in part
because the “temperature” in the Castro was excessive.
The position of the city’s
Board of Supervisors—San Francisco’s City Council— was that screening tourists
is not the job of local businesses, and the statement, “It’s none of your
business,” is not rude, especially when it really is none of the employee’s
business! The outrageous presumptuousness
in the Castro’s culture can be calibrated by the reality-check by the city’s own
government. Of course, the likely negative impact on the city’s revenue from
the wholly unjustified screening of certain tourists at a local business during
a year when tourism was down was not lost on city hall. Even so, the egregiousness
displayed in front of the “440” bar is not unlike that which insists that a sex
scene involving two vaginas is heterosexual rather than homosexual.
Fourthly, evincing even more
hostility that the employees and even customers at “440” bar, a Black gay young
man who worked as a bouncer at another bar, “The Mix,” put at risk the elderly Caucasian
victim of a violent attack that had just been committed by two Black gay young
men as they were walking out of the same bathroom stall (likely sniffing
cocaine). Those two young men did not feel the need to walk around the victim,
who was waiting in line at the bathroom, in spite of there being enough space.
Instead, they decided to walk through the old man, who, after having been
thrown and slammed into a nearby wall, notified the bouncer and another
employee of having just been attacked, and called the emergency number of the
local police, who of course wanted the address of the bar, but the employee in
front of the bar checking ID’s refused to disclose the address to the victim
and the police on his phone, so the victim walked outside in front of the bar
and continued the call there. The two attackers, tipped off by an employee, I
suspect, that the victim was on the phone with the police, went outside to verbally
threaten the victim for having called the police. Astonishingly, the Black
bouncer was within earshot of the threats and yet he body-blocked the door so
the victim could not seek safety inside the bar, in spite having been attacked.
In fact, the bouncer let the two attackers back inside the bar! That bar’s organizational
culture was clearly very toxic, and the two young gay men who had been in the same
stall in the bathroom clearly had excess anger. Any prejudice against gays (or
Black people) by outsiders cannot be blamed; the excessive aggression was within
the gay “community.”
Fifthly, perhaps the most toxic
aspect of the gay culture in the Castro, and thus the source of the most
intense anger, which could easily feed into hostility towards people who do not
subscribe to the dominant ideology, concerns the severity of dysfunction in how
too many gay men there thought of and handled their romantic relationships—not just
“hooking up” for sex. It may be that Castro “standards” were too dogmatic in
being presented as requirements. We encountered this above concerning
tips, which were most definitely not required. A much more toxic “requirement”
commonly accepted by gay men under 40 in the Castro was having to accept the imposing
by a gay man on his boyfriend and even husband of a right to have
separate sex (i.e., excluding the boyfriend or husband) with other men even
with romantic attachment because, as this was explained to me rather
dogmatically, “everyone here does it.” The obvious emotional discomfort felt, while
the separate sex would be going on, by a boyfriend or husband who is in love with
the person engaged in the sex with someone else may even be dismissed by the
selfish and callous person in the convenient ideological belief that he has the
right to impose separate romantic sex because everyone else in the Castro was
doing it. Besides taking an obvious toll on the emotional intimacy and trust in
the relationship in which coupling would otherwise naturally take place, both
the decision to impose exogenous “making love,” as if such behavior were
justified simply because many gay men were doing it and subscribed to the
underlying “poly” ideology, and the callous disregard for the boyfriend’s or
husband’s obvious emotional pain doubtlessly caused deep emotional hurt and
anger in the boyfriend or husband that would not easily dissipate, but would
instead seek out openings to erupt in misdirected and thus excessive anger,
such as I encountered at the film festival. In fact, I encountered cases in
which the ideology “justifying” the imposition of a polyamorous (i.e., more
than one romantic love) relationship caused young men whose partners victimized
them by the imposition to deny any such discomfort or hurt feelings, let along
anger. One man in the Castro said to me, “I don’t mind that my boyfriend is
having a separate romantic sexual relationship.” Interestingly, when I asked a
few much older married gay men how they would feel were their respective
husbands to announce upcoming romantic sex with an old flame, those men admitted,
albeit hesitatively because they knew the polyamorous ideology was dominate
then in the Castro, that they would have a problem if their respective husbands
said that an old flame would be coming to town the next week and sex would occur.
“Yeah, I’d have a problem with that,” a man who had been with his partner for
thirty years in an open relationship. Honesty with the courage to go up
against a dogmatic ideology is a virtue. In contrast, feeling obliged to “stuff,”
or repress, and even deny the very existence of deep emotional discomfort and
anger because discomfort is disallowed by the ideology that insists that there
is nothing wrong with separate romantic sex, so any discomfort in the partner
left out would be unjustified, and thus inappropriate, and perhaps even
unfair to the partner having the separate romantic sex! Everyone does it in
the Castro, so why should I have to put up with his discomfort and even anger? The
level of psychological toxicity in such “reasoning” is astounding. Pent-up emotional
pain and hostility would be entirely natural, whereas the imposition would be
selfish ideological hubris that cares little if anything about the feelings of
other people.
That ideology comes with at
least two internal flaws. Firstly, it backs up its approval of the imposing of
a “right” to have separate romantic sex by championing the polyamorous, “multiple
loves,” relationship. But as a bisexual woman pointed out to me in the Castro
(as I was trying unsuccessfully to ask her out), “In a polyamorous relationship
in which more than two persons are in the same romantic relationship, every
party must freely consent; to affirm that outside romantic sex should be
accepted, and thus is legitimately imposed, is just an excuse to cheat.” There
was undoubtedly a lot of cheating on boyfriends and husbands in the Castro, as
if gay men have such overwhelming sexual urges that polyamorous sex and even
affairs outside of even such a multi-person relationship should be tolerated
even by boyfriends and husbands. Enough heterosexual men with strong sex drives
have nonetheless managed to be faithful sexually inside of marriage that manly
lust cannot excuse gay men who cheat on their boyfriends or husbands.
Secondly, the ideology behind the imposing makes use of the proposition that a widely followed societal custom (i.e., “Everybody here does it”) is ethical (“Everyone here should do it”) because it is widely accepted. This is an invalid argument. David Hume’s naturalistic fallacy is precisely the error of inferring from even a common practice that it justifies ethically rather than is merely descriptive. To treat a descriptive norm that is as a should just because the norm exists is an erroneous move in ethics. Ethical justification, such as by an ethical principle or theory, is necessary to get from is to ought.
In the Castro, the naturalistic
fallacy likely stems from self-righteous egoism that treats self-interest as
normative. Just because so many young and middle-age gay men in the Castro who were
in romantic relationships also had separate romantic sex outside of the relationships
does not mean that because the separate romantic sex is ethically justified
because such sex is in someone’s self-interest. For someone to inform a
prospective boyfriend, “I will have sex with my friends (including old and
current flames), and if you object, I’ll just have sex with strangers and risk
your health.” A prospective boyfriend should run, not walk, from such abject
coldness befitting a psychopath. Such d disregard for the feelings of a
prospective boyfriend may even include the motivation for pleasure from the
infliction of emotional pain. Furthermore, a fear of commitment, which can stem
from underlying severe emotional problems that have not been processed and
resolved, may draw on the power that a person has in a relationship to enforce
the demand that separate romantic sex be accepted. The use of separate sex as a
weapon to emotionally distant a boyfriend or husband points to severe emotional
problems even if the neurosis is ubiquitous in a city’s sub-culture and thus
misconstrued by its residents as normal rather than pathological. The
prolonging of adolescence, given the adamant refusal to deal with past
emotional distresses and the widespread occurrence of drug or alcohol addiction,
has arguably played a role in keeping the sub-culture dysfunctional. Even “cheating”
has also been conveniently and erroneously imposed as being “normal.” Such
sordid norms had arguably come to enjoy default-status by the mid 2020’s, and
it is precisely in being given the status of the status-quo that even highly
dysfunctional mentalities and practices can be deemed imposable. Such flagrantly
callous arrogance on stilts, as if during a biblical flood, suggests that a clean
sweep was desperately needed in the Castro to clear away the hubris. Bad air!
In conclusion, the narrow
ideological judgmentalism and the ensuing hostility toward (mis)perceived
threats at the Frameline film festival in 2026 was in sync with the toxic sub-culture
in the Castro district and aggravated by there being so much accumulated anger
and hurt feelings there. Lashing out at people who do not subscribe to a
dominant ideology that is rigorously enforced by passive aggression can be an
easy opening for pent-up anger from other things to finally erupt, especially
if an ideology shames that anger from being directed at its source. In terms of
further study, investigating how the Castro’s heavily ideological culture and excessive
built-up baseline of anger and hostility impacted the selection of films to be
included in the festival in 2026 might reveal not only how narrow the festival’s
ideological coverage actually was, but also just how reflective Framework was
that year of the local sub-culture. How many films were selected that are
critical of young “trophy whores,” for example, whose respective older “holders”
live with their respective real romantic partners even in another
country and yet the promiscuous young men who are selfishly being held at a
distance presume to impose separate romantic sex, even with the “primary and
secondary” in the other country on a prospective real boyfriend? Would a gay film director even make such a
film? Moreover, what would a truly diverse gay film festival look like?
Would the problem of gay men ruthlessly turning on each other be covered? It
seems to me that homosexual love can be just as healthy, self-confident and
trusting, and thus emotionally intimate, as the romantic love between a man and
a woman can be. It follows that ideological aggressive distancing is not inherent
in gay culture and psychology, but is instead an aberration that can be treated
even when it becomes ubiquitous in a gay district of a city. Ideological
idolatry should not be allowed to mask undergirding psychological pathology. As
I wrote to Cicily Singh regarding the two young women (paraphrasing here): “Clinical
psychology is not one of my academic fields, so I am not equipped to triage a
young person who is emotionally troubled and thus triggered by a perfectly acceptable
and thus appropriate statement. Best of luck.” That was my way of quitting
while at the same time criticizing the passive aggression by passive aggressively
“socially distancing” myself from an ideologically driven presumptiveness and
hostility by reducing it to psychology.
1. Quote taken from the film, Avatar
(2009), masterfully delivered by Stephen Lang as Colonel Miles Quaritch. “Reprising”
his role in the sequel was so outlandish in terms of the rationale for the reprisal
that the sequel itself could be said to be less than credible in terms of its
narrative. In other words, the rationale put that film under water.
