Friday, June 23, 2006

Hunter Madsen Stops By:

Who is he? The author of the nefarious secret gay playbook, After the Ball. See these past two posts. He left a comment here. He wrote:

I came across your blog's comments on AFTER THE BALL -- a book that I co-authored with the late Marshall Kirk many years ago -- and had to smile; or perhaps it was a wince.

Idiots on the religious right have been treating us like the Elders of Zion ever since the book first came out, which is, as you say, preposterous. While the book was widely read (and, in most cases, excoriated) by gay activists when it was first published, in 1989, and while a great many of its techniques have obviously been employed by activists since then, I see no evidence that the book itself serves as any kind of reference for the movement today.

The book was prescient, perhaps, but to claim that its ideas pulled the movement down its current path is like pretending that the beams of a car's headlights "pull" the car along. We observed many notorious things in AFTER THE BALL, but our work seems to have had little actual influence. To keep insisting that it did is yet another sign, as if we needed any more, that agitators on the right, while professing their commitment to truth, lack fundamental intellectual integrity.

- Hunter Madsen


A question I would ask Mr. Madsen: Are you seeing any royalties from all of those folks on the religious right who seem to be the main present purchasers of your book? Or are they all buying used copies, and in that case, because of the first sale doctrine in copyright law, you wouldn't see any royalties?