People regularly mistake this one couple for “father and son.” That should be your first sign that something might be wrong.
According to a glowing profile from British LGBT media website PinkNews, a 55-year-old named Mark and a 22-year-old named Kayleb have dated for almost six years — that’s right, since Kayleb was 17, barely above the legal age of consent.
The two “were initially in a Sugar Daddy arrangement,” per PinkNews, yet “after finding a strong connection they decided to become official.” With a quote from Kayleb featured at the end, the puff piece tells us “to keep your mind open and know that love comes in many shapes, forms, sizes, colours, and ages.”
Hell no.
My mind is not open to alarming sexual deviancy that borders on pedophilia, (it’s ephebophilia, if we are parsing words) and the pages of LGBT media shouldn’t be either. This sad excuse for journalism hurts the gay community and sets us back literal decades in the name of wokeness extrapolated to the absurd.
The issue is not the couple’s homosexuality. Rather, it’s the disturbing attempt to “normalize” 30-year age gaps that involve a middle-aged man preying on a teenage boy and possibly paying him for sex. (What does “sugar daddy” mean to you?) Now, it’d be one thing if it was a huge age gap between say, a 30-year-old and a 60-year-old. Such an age-gap relationship may be a bit odd, but it’s not exploitative or predatory.
Yet the imbalance of power and maturity gap between a grown man and a teenage boy is far too great for a healthy relationship to occur, making this instance a clear example of exploitation. The attempt to spin this as the latest update in the LGBTQIA+ game of alphabet soup is insane, and more importantly, hurts our efforts to gain acceptance for same-sex relationships by lumping them in with sexual deviancy.
And since when is a “sugar daddy” relationship, as the piece glosses over, considered healthy or acceptable? We must never accept the moral normalization of a young man or woman trading sexual favors for gifts or other forms of financial compensation from an older man. It’s fundamentally immoral, cheapens sexual intimacy, and frankly, is just downright creepy.
LGBT media ostensibly exists to uplift sexual minorities, but it regularly does the opposite when it falls victim to the woke politics of the day. Think about it: Many ultra-social-conservative websites or homophobic groups will likely plaster this headline or article over their next homophobic mailer. Some will probably use it, unfairly, to insinuate that all gay people are somehow deviant, sick, or predatory even though people like Mark and Kayleb are an small minority of the gay community.
Now, it’s important to note that PinkNews took down the profile and deleted their video tweets promoting it within 24 hours. For that much, at least, they deserve some modicum of credit.
But how on Earth did the author of this piece, Fiona Hayward, ever think this kind of coverage was acceptable? What editor green-lit this for publication? This latest instance of insanity only further shows that PinkNews, and left-wing LGBT media more broadly, need to seriously up their standards and take their responsibilities as journalists more seriously.
