Ben Appel’s Battle with Queer Radicalism

Introduction

This week, we’re going to dive back into the culture war over gender—which, as my guest will explain, also manifests itself as a civil war within the LGB & T communities.

That guest, gay writer Ben Appel, grew up in a Maryland-based Christian cult known as Lamb of God—in which he was taught that homosexual acts, and even mere homosexual thoughts, were a pathway to hell.

In time, Ben developed an OCD-like fixation on the rituals of prayer, spending endless hours begging God for forgiveness—a centuries-old Christian reflex known as “scrupulosity.”

Ironically, Ben’s mental-health problems only got worse after his family moved away from the Lamb of God cult, when Ben was 12 years old.

Suddenly, he was thrown into a large public-school environment that his isolated Christian upbringing had never prepared him for.

In response to bullying from homophobic classmates, Ben became consumed with shame and crippling anxiety—causing him to become even more compulsive about his prayer rituals.

Eventually, he self-medicated with alcohol and drugs, dropped out of college, and fell into a spiral of addiction, psychosis, and suicidal ideation.

Once in his 20s, Ben went clean with the help of a 12-step program, and became more comfortable with his sexuality.

When gay marriage was on the Maryland ballot in the 2012 election, he became a gay-rights activist, and envisioned a career in the field.

He’d enjoyed writing since grade school, and enrolled in Columbia University at age 30, with hopes of becoming a professional writer whose work would fuel the fight for LGBT rights and social justice.

Finally, he thought, after suffering through childhood traumas, addiction, and a number of false starts on the road to recovery, he’d found a community of caring, supportive people who shared his progressive values.

But as it turns out, the LGB & T communities he encountered at Columbia proved just as judgmental and cultish as the Lamb of God milieu he remembered from his childhood.

As Ben will discuss, this was a time when the so-called radical wing of the gay-rights movement was asserting itself at the expense of the so-called assimilationist wing, which had successfully fought for the rights of gay Americans to marry and serve in the military.

The radicals that Ben met at Columbia were interested in more dubious goals, such as destroying capitalism, replacing biological sex with gender identity as a marker of manhood and womanhood, and generally remaking society through an ill-defined process known as “queering.”

And when Ben questioned these ideas in class or in print, he was disparaged by his classmates as too white and too “cis”—which is to say, not transgender.

This treatment sent Ben into another mental-health spiral—and another bout of scrupulosity.

Except this time, Ben wasn’t seeking forgiveness from God, but from social-justice ideological enforcers who refused to tolerate dissent.

Please enjoy my interview with Ben Appel, author of the newly published memoir, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.

Chapters
00:00 Intro / Pre-Conversation
03:27 Navigating Political Landscapes
04:37 The Evolution of Activism
05:07 Assimilation vs. Radicalism
05:51 Personal Reflections on Activism
06:59 Language and Identity
09:18 Growing Up in a Cult
12:19 Covenant Communities Explained
14:22 The Psychological Toll
16:28 Freedom and Control
18:45 Community Life and Pressure
21:27 Leaving the Community
23:01 Struggling With Identity
28:12 Scrupulosity and Self-Judgement
33:04 A Turning Point in New Orleans
36:51 Descent Into Addiction
41:53 Finding Recovery and New Community
47:56 The Journey of Self-Discovery
48:08 How Marriage Changed Things
52:33 Love and Activism
54:43 Awakening of a New Activist
58:25 Navigating New Orthodoxy
01:02:17 Breaking Point at Columbia
01:05:29 Community, Belonging & Identity