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I once considered pitching publishers a book called 101 Things That Are Now Suddenly Gay, cataloguing the increasing number of completely non-gay things that fanatical homos now claim are gay after all, from ball bearings to hovercraft, upon no rational basis whatsoever.

Yet I have already been beaten to it by a temporary daily series from the pages of lefty U.K. newspaper The Guardian to celebrate this summer’s annual Gay Pride Month(s). This was called “My Unexpected Pride Icon” and was basically my old proposed book in short serial form—but taken seriously, not as a rainbow-mocking joke.

Vag-etarian Diet
To gain a taste of just how tenuous these “gay” icons were, consider journalist Lucy Knight’s piece praising “The Green Roasting Tin, a cookbook no lesbian vegetarian can be without.” Knight does admit the book’s recipes “are not specifically aimed at queer people,” but on the other hand observes that “the first time I cooked one, it was with my girlfriend—and she is now my wife.”

“You can certainly see why a homosexual might find himself attracted to a film promising some Free Willy in its title.”

Other similarly substantial “proof” the book is gay includes that the recipes are all very quick to make, half an hour at most, which is important because “booked and busy lesbians” like Lucy just don’t have much time to spare faffing around with utensils in kitchens like leisured straight trad-wives do.

Furthermore, said recipes pleasingly “play into stereotypes about gay and bisexual women” because they are all vegetarian in nature, like Lucy somehow claims most lesbians apparently now are too. Surely it is more likely that the true reason why a vegetarian cookbook should be full of vegetarian recipes is actually so it can appeal toward vegetarians, rather than toward lesbians?

Even more risible is Knight’s tentative assertion that the absence of any meat in the book subliminally stands in for an absence of any analogical penises upon its pages, nasty male items no self-respecting lettuce-licker would ever place inside her own pure green mouth: “I suppose you could say that this kind of food is a ‘queering’ of the meat-and-two-veg [i.e., penis and testicles] sit-down dinners associated with the traditional heterosexual British family unit.” Yes, I suppose you could say that, Lucy—but only if you’re employed to write for The Guardian.

Poo Stabbers
Another essay is about the supposed massive gayness of 1980s Hollywood slasher movies penned by novelist Juno Dawson, author of This Book Is Gay, which, to judge by the standards of The Guardian’s “Pride Icon” series, probably isn’t.

How are slasher movies gay? Because they feature lots of young men repeatedly being stabbed hard and fast from behind by older guys until they begin to bleed uncontrollably? No, because the heroic schoolchild main protagonists in them ultimately foil their would-be murderers and “emerge as survivors,” just like real-life queer kids often “emerge as survivors” from teenage torment at the hands of homophobic classroom bullies likewise. If films involving survivors are now automatically gay, that means Schindler’s List is also highly queer, doesn’t it?

As the golden age of slasher flicks was the 1980s, Dawson is “sure” their makers were somehow “inspired by…the unfolding AIDS crisis.” This dubious insight then allows her to perceive that the 1980s Hellraiser franchise, about evil spirits called Cenobites who rise from hell wearing fetish gear to kill humans in various highly agonizing and harshly penetrative ways, “is quite clearly about anal sex,” because its original creator was gay and liked to wear leather. No, that scene with Ned Beatty being told to squeal like a pig in Deliverance is “quite clearly about anal sex”; Hellraiser is quite clearly about big weird pain-demons with loads of pins sticking out of their heads. This isn’t the Epstein Tapes or CCTV footage of Michael Barrymore’s greatest pool parties.

Drawing upon other authors of celluloid Queer Theory, Dawson posits that the “mild-mannered” teenage schoolgirl who emerges from the exciting finale of most slasher flicks as the sole survivor is a coded transgender castrator of the cishetero patriarchy, who “often transforms into a masculinized tough girl by the end of the film,” a hero/heroine who “emasculates the (usually male) killer by removing his (usually phallic) weapon and then, often, kills him with it.”

That famous scene in Psycho where a cross-dressing Anthony Perkins stabs Janet Leigh to death in the shower—I always thought it was a knife he was using, not one of those! Dawson probably thinks the full, medically suppressed name of the Psycho director’s classic old TV show was Alfred Hitchcock Presents as Male.

Sperm Whale
Another unbelievably gay movie, at least according to an article by limp-wristed word-wrangler Louis Staples, is Free Willy, the 1993 children’s adventure about an abused whale escaping from captivity in a giant aquarium, then swimming away into the wide blue ocean—and the consequent liberatory freedom to be who he really is: a deep-sea deviant.

You can certainly see why a homosexual might find himself attracted to a film promising some Free Willy in its title, but there is more to it than this: When Willy the Whale jumps out away from the sea-life center, he is really escaping from the far worse captivity of socially enforced compulsory heterosexuality. For Staples, when Willy flees, “it feels like a moment of transformation, like a coming out story” for the big fat blubbery bender.

Although ostensibly aimed at innocent children, the movie’s true hidden “central theme” is to get infant viewers to turn gay, run away from home, and find their queer “chosen family” instead of their oppressive biological one, just like Willy does. The entire narrative reveals the hidden truth that “there is radical power in finding ‘your people’ (or in this case your whale).”

Staples does admit that “Free Willy isn’t queer in any explicit sense.” Yet Staples still appeared to find the marine mammal strangely appealing nonetheless: “In Free Willy…the film’s star is fairly helpless, like a slippery overgrown puppy who communicates through whining noises that are adorable and distressing.”

Is that what gay men these days really want to find in a sex partner? I didn’t realize Kevin Spacey was in that movie too.

Mirror Writing
Notice how none of these people choose as a “gay icon” any cultural artifact that is actually gay, just things that are gay only within the confines of their own strange little heads. It’s like they suffer from some poofy paranoia whereby everywhere they look, they see connections that don’t in any way actually exist: “Whales? Horror films? Vegan cookbooks? Yeah, they’re all queer, they are, just like me!”

Another way of putting this is that such people are really just a bunch of pathological narcissists; it may make a certain kind of sense that men who like other men, and women who like other women, are in some manner in love with their own selves by proxy.

Reputedly, that habitual player of pink pianos Liberace once persuaded his much younger lover to undergo plastic surgery to make him look more like…Liberace himself. Then Liberace would bend the boy over his instrument and tickle his ivories in front of a large mirror, so he could observe the closest thing there was to himself having sex with himself in glorious close-up. The queer writers of The Guardian seem to inhabit a similar mentally masturbatory Hall of Mirrors too.

Being totally in love with yourself never used to be considered something worth having any Pride in.