Gay hated when out as conservative
Chadwick Moore
Updated: Chadwick Moore, a 33-year-old journalist living in Williamsburg, had been a lifelong liberal. Then, last September, he penned a profile for Out Magazine of Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial and outspoken critic of feminism, Muslims and gay rights (despite being openly gay himself). Although the story didn’t take a stance on Yiannopoulos, Moore found himself pilloried by fellow Democrats and ostracized by longtime friends.
Update: The latest in the ongoing saga of Yannopoulos is a just scheduled appearance on this Friday's episode of the HBO inane leftist talk show Real Time with Bill Maher. This could be entertaining - a first for Maher.
For the New York Post's Michael Kaplan, Moore tells how angry backlash drove him further to the right. The full story may be found at this link and experts of that story follow:
When Out magazine assigned me an interview with the Breitbart.com rabble-rouser Milo Yiannopoulos... I thought he was a nasty attention-whore, but I wanted to do a neutral piece on him that simply put the facts out there.
Chadwick Moore in his East Williamsburg home Photo by Annie Wermiel, New York Post
After the story posted online in the early hours of Sept. 21, I woke up to more than 100 Twitter notifications on my iPhone. Trolls were calling me a Nazi, death threats rolled in and a joke photo that I posed for in a burka served as “proof” that I am an Islamophobe.
I’m not.
Most disconcertingly, it wasn’t just strangers voicing radical discontent. Personal friends of mine — men in their 60s who had been my longtime mentors — were coming at me. They wrote on Facebook that the story was “irresponsible” and “dangerous.” A dozen or so people unfriended me. A petition was circulated online, condemning the magazine and my article. All I had done was write a balanced story on an outspoken Trump supporter for a liberal, gay magazine, and now I was being attacked. I felt alienated and frightened.
I began to realize that maybe my opinions just didn’t fit in with the liberal status quo, which seems to mean that you must absolutely hate Trump, his supporters and everything they believe. If you dare not to protest or boycott Trump, you are a traitor.
If you dare to question liberal stances or make an effort toward understanding why conservatives think the way they do, you are a traitor.
It can seem like liberals are actually against free speech if it fails to conform with the way they think. And I don’t want to be a part of that club anymore.
It used to be that if you were a gay, educated atheist living in New York, you had no choice but to be liberal. But as I met more Trump supporters with whom I was able to have engaging, civil discussions about issues that impact us all, I realized that I like these people — even if I have some issues with Trump himself.