Gay Mafia, Gaystapo, and Homintern are pejorative terms for the influence of gay rights groups and the LGBT community in politics, media, culture, religion, and everyday life, along with the promotion of a perceived "gay agenda".
Usage
Homintern
In 1937 the English gay classics scholar Sir Maurice Bowra referred to himself as part of the "Homintern". However, there are competing claims about who coined the term – including Jocelyn Brooke, Harold Norse and W. H. Auden. Auden used the term in the "Parisian Review" in 1950. A takeoff on Comintern, it was meant to convey the idea of a global homosexual community. "Homintern" was also used by American Senator Joe McCarthy during the McCarthyist scare in the 1950s, who used it to claim that the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman were set on destroying America from within. Attempts were made to link Communism and homosexuality, with "homintern" a play on the word "Comintern". But the word was also used ironically by those in favor of gay rights. Homintern also appeared in a number of mass-circulation magazine articles during the 1960s - such as Ramparts, which in 1966 published an article by Gene Marine about the Homintern. It was also frequently used in the conservative magazine National Review. William F. Buckley, Jr. would warn of the machinations of the Homintern on his TV talk showFiring Line – feeding the conservative belief that the Homintern deliberately manipulated culture to encourage homosexuality by promoting camp programs such as the popular 1960s TV series Batman. Such magazine articles were often illustrated with the color lavender and the Homintern was sometimes called "the lavender conspiracy". It was subsequently claimed that there was a secret worldwide network of gay art gallery owners, ballet directors, movie producers, record label executives and photographers who, behind the scenes, determined who would become successful artists, dancers, actors, and models. The historian Michael S. Sherry has used the term hominterm discourse "for the untidy bundle of ideas and accusations about the gay creative presence".
The English critic Kenneth Tynan wrote to A.C. Spectorsky in 1967 proposing an article on the "Homosexual Mafia" in the arts. Spectorsky declined, although he admitted that "culture hounds were paying homage to faggotismo as they have never done before" Playboy would subsequently run a panel on gay issues in April 1971. "Gay Mafia" became more widely used in the US media in the 1980s and 1990s, such as the American daily The New York Post. The term was also used by the British tabloidThe Sun in 1998 in response to what it claimed was sinister dominance by gay men in the Labour Party Cabinet. The term "gay mafia" may also have gained wider popular prominence after it was used in both a 1995 Spy article and subsequently a 2002 Vanity Fair article, wherein Michael Ovitz, in an interview, stated that a "gay mafia" was largely responsible for his company's failures. Referring to criticism of Mozilla's chief executiveBrendan Eich who donated money to a ballot opposing gay marriage in 2014, the TV host Bill Maher argued "There is a gay mafia – if you cross them, you do get whacked."
Lavender mafia
While the term "Lavender Mafia" has occasionally been used to refer to informal networks of gay executives in the US entertainment industry, more generally it refers to Church politics. For example a faction within the leadership and clergy of the Roman Catholic Church that allegedly advocates the acceptance of homosexuality within the Church and its teachings. In 2013, Pope Francis spoke about a "gay lobby" within the Vatican, and promised to see what could be done. In July 2013, Francis went on to draw a distinction between the problem of lobbying and the sexual orientation of people: "If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?" "The problem", he said, "is not having this orientation. We must be brothers. The problem is lobbying by this orientation, or lobbies of greedy people, political lobbies, Masonic lobbies, so many lobbies. This is the worse problem."
