Milo is seeking the halo.
Prominent conservative activist and writer Milo Yiannopoulos was best known for bleached-blond hair, trolling leftists, appearing at college talks dressed in drag, and, most notably, his unabashed homosexuality. But he’ll soon, apparently, be better known for something that truly brings scorn today: Coming out as “ex-gay.”
Describing himself thus and as “sodomy free,” Yiannopoulos is now more fully embracing the Catholic faith in which he was raised; in fact, he’s even leading a daily online consecration to St. Joseph.
Much as with St. Augustine and his famous prayer “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!” Yiannopoulos had said in a 2019 interview that he knew his behavior was wrong but that insofar as rectifying it went, “I’m just not there yet.” He also confessed, “I don’t know if I’ll get there.”
But now, it appears, he’s arriving.
“When I used to kid that I only became gay to torment my mother, I wasn’t entirely joking,” Yiannopoulos said in a LifeSite interview published Tuesday. “Of course, I was never wholly at home in the gay lifestyle — Who [sic] is? Who could be? — and only leaned heavily into it in public because it drove liberals crazy to see a handsome, charismatic, intelligent gay man riotously celebrating conservative principles.”
“That’s not to say I didn’t throw myself enthusiastically into degeneracy of all kinds in my private life,” he continued. “I suppose I felt that’s all I deserved. I’d love to say it was all an act, and I’ve been straight this whole time, but even I don’t have that kind of commitment to performance art.”
I must say that despite having written an article or two critical of the man, I’ve always liked Yiannopoulos. No, I didn’t like much of his behavior, but I did respect his intelligence and, most importantly, his honesty. I’ve actually watched more of his interviews than most commentators have, and he would make admissions homosexuals generally wouldn’t: that the behavior was a choice, that he sensed it was wrong, and that he didn’t believe same-sex pairs should adopt children. So I actually did expect him to one day go straight.
That Yiannopoulos went straight to Jesus isn’t surprising, either. Even while living a life contrary to Catholic teaching, he would sometimes trumpet the faith (he did so at a college event once). And his faith, now flowering, was expressed well in the LifeSite interview. As he put it:
It feels as though a veil has been lifted in my house — like there’s something more real and honest going on than before. It’s been a gradual uncovering, rather than a dramatic reveal. Maybe that lack of theater or spectacle is a sign the gay impulses truly are receding?
The best metaphor I know is that of a flower blooming — of nature’s Epiphany — an image I know Caryll Houselander was fond of. I think it was Houselander who said, “Whatever is loving in man and whatever is lovable in man is Christ in man.” I take this to mean that the more love and the less lust in us, the more we cease to obscure Christ and instead reveal Him, in whose image we are made.
I don’t mean to suggest it’s been easy, just simple: Our Lord endured worse than any of us and promised us that we have to take up a heavy cross each day. Ronald Knox says the Via Crucis shows us the 3 ways we can carry our cross: With bitterness, like the unrepentant thief; with grim resignation, like the repentant thief who said it was what he deserved; or with love, like the Lord, who never minimized suffering but said it would, in God’s time, redeem us.
While Yiannopoulos is now flexing his theological muscle, he still displays the brashness that got him exiled from Twitter (in 2016) even before Big Tech went cancel-culture crazy. For example, “Trannies are demonic,” he also told LifeSite, after mentioning the “Terror of transsexuals.” “They are the Galli, the castrated priests of Cybele, the Magna mater, whom Augustine saw dancing in the streets of Carthage dressed like women.”
Speaking of the Sexual Devolution brings us to Yiannopoulos’s future plans. “Over the next decade, I would like to help rehabilitate what the media calls ‘conversion therapy’” (which is designed to help people eliminate unwanted same-sex attraction or feelings of sexual-identity confusion), he told LifeSite. “It does work, albeit not for everybody.”
Yiannopoulos also stated that he plans to devote himself to combating prenatal infanticide even more robustly than he did previously.
As to why he’s consecrating his life to St. Joseph, the writer said that secular recovery efforts are either temporary or fruitless. He explained that salvation is only found through Christ and His church’s prescriptions.
Yiannopoulos also learned through experience of what I call the sin connection. “They say if you let one sin in, others will follow, and now I truly know what that means,” he noted. “As I’ve begun to resist sinful sexual urges, I’ve found myself drinking less, smoking less … you name it.”
For sure: You either seek happiness in the ethereal or in the effluent, and stepping into the latter means sinking further and further from the former.
Lastly, Yiannopoulos also has good advice for others in his situation. “Check your pride, not your privilege,” he counsels. “So often it’s vanity or conceit or self-satisfaction that gets in the way of accepting Christ. Learn to catch it before it takes root, and difficult things suddenly don’t seem so difficult.”
Quite true. As I heard a wise clergyman once put it, there are two things we must accept to achieve wisdom: God exists — and you ain’t Him.
