Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.

Ben Appel has lived through enough memoir-ready horrors to fill several volumes, but he’s kept it down to one. Its title is Cis White Gay, and what a powerhouse of a book it is. “I was a girly boy,” Appel begins. “My favorite toy was a My Little Pony.” Unfortunately, his family belonged to a Baltimore-area Christian cult, the Lamb of God, which taught him to see every day as “an existential battle, a moral test that would determine the eternal fate of my soul.”

There was only one way to deal with being a “girly boy” in such an environment: change! But Appel couldn’t win. He was mocked and bullied for being a sissy. Then, when he dated a girl, he was laughed at for thinking he could pass as heterosexual. Still, he worked like hell to fit in. He struggled, with some success, to be “straight-acting.” He also tried – endlessly, but hopelessly – to pray the gay away. In seventh grade, the stress made him turn to hard liquor and cigarettes. Then his parents divorced, whereupon his mother’s personality did a 180 (a subject that could merit a memoir all its own). At nineteen, on Bourbon Street during a vacation with friends in New Orleans, Appel shared the fact of his sexual innocence with a stranger, who thereupon took him home and introduced him to every kind of gay sex possible. That was when Appel started cocaine.

So it began. Opioids and hallucinogens followed, and then a week in a psych ward, where he experienced “paranoia, delusions, suicidal and homicidal ideation.” After his release, he began attending what he thought was an Alcoholics Anonymous group but which turned out to be yet another cult, which encouraged its members “to cut off contact with nongroup members, discontinue psychiatric medication and talk therapy, and have sex with older members, including Mike” (the leader). Appel quit, spent three weeks on heroin, quit cold turkey, fell into a job as a hairdresser, sobered up, and began attending legit AA meetings.

It’s at this point in Appel’s story that politics enters the picture. The year was 2012, and Appel, now 28, campaigned actively for same-sex marriage in Maryland. A year earlier, he hadn’t cared about the issue. “Deep down,” he writes, “I didn’t believe gay men were capable of truly falling in love, especially the kind that would make them want to enter a lifelong, legal commitment.” But in summer 2011, he met Drew. “I felt fast and hard. Two months in, I told him, ‘I think I want to marry you.’ His brown eyes lit up. ‘Me too,’ he said.” At once, Appel became a passionate activist for same-sex marriage. Many of his opponents, he knew, were the kind of people whom he’d grown up in Lamb of God. But others, to his surprise, were his fellow gays – gay radicals, to be specific, for whom being gay meant staying forever on the margins, as  outlaws, denied marriage and military service while agitating for socialist utopia.

In his discussion of these matters, Appel works in a kind word about my 1993 book A Place at the Table, in which I argued for same-sex marriage, and, more broadly, for the acceptance of gay people as part of the fabric of American life. I’d like to say that it’s very gratifying to see someone setting the record straight (no pun intended). Ever since Obergefell vs. Hodges, the queer left – the professional gay activist class that made handsome salaries at gay-rights organizations like HRC and GLAAD – has been rewriting gay history, pretending that they were always in favor of same-sex marriage.

It’s a lie, and a breathtaking one. Appel quotes radical lesbian Donna Minkowicz as saying, in response to the title of my book, that she didn’t want a place at the table; she wanted to turn the table over. In short, she wanted revolution. She made that remark on a 1994 episode of the Charlie Rose Show, on which I also appeared, along with playwright Tony Kushner, who agreed with her. And (as I’ve noted elsewhere, because it’s so very much worth noting) when the New York Times began running wedding announcements for gay couples, who was the very first gay couple to get one? Why, Kushner and his partner, Mark Harris. So it was that Kushner’s fierce and purportedly principled opposition to same-sex marriage was dropped down the Orwellian memory hole.

Anyway, the 2012 ballot issue won, making Maryland the first state to approve of same-sex marriage by popular vote. After the Supreme Court, three years later, made it the law of the land, Appel knew at once what his next cause would be: transgender rights. Yes, he was absolutely ignorant about transgenderism and “about what rights trans people wanted that they didn’t have.” But according to his principal sources of information on such matters – namely, “[t]he gay rights organizations and liberal media” – trans rights “was the natural next step in the fight for equality,” and that was enough for Appel, who, having grown ardent in his advocacy for “social justice,” quit hairdressing and became a student at Columbia University, where he expected to gain the education he needed to be an effective warrior for the left.

At first, he felt very much at home on Morningside Heights. At a campus Muslim event, in which he took part out of solidarity, he said a prayer, bowing toward Mecca, his forehead touching the ground. “I felt,” he recalls, “truly radical.” But in the eyes of his radical fellow students, he learned, he wasn’t radical at all. Dark skin? Muslim belief? Purported trans identity? These things made you an official victim – and hero – and gave you the right to put others in their place ideologically. But being gay didn’t count for anything. It was curious: in his boyhood Christian cult, being had made him anathema; at Columbia, being a gay person who wasn’t also black or Latino or Muslim or trans was also an abomination.

For a while he went along with the insanity. But not without a measure of unease.

In a course on Islam – which he took because, of course, he wanted to fight Islamophobia – he was told that gender is an illusion and that gays shouldn’t get married because it’s “not their political project.” Volunteering at GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation), he found himself for the first time in the company of “LGBT people exclusively referring to themselves as ‘queer.’” He also learned that he “was something called ‘cisgender,’” meaning “a person who identifies as their biological sex.” When one professor, David Halperin, taught that queerness was “not a sexual orientation, but rather a radical political project,” Appel felt Halperin had done him the service of showing him “exactly what I was not and never wanted to be.”

Yet still he didn’t cut loose from the left. Graduating from Columbia, he enrolled in an MFA program in the Midwest, hoping to discover a somewhat less far-out form of leftist activism. Alas, the same madness that had infected Columbia had spread not just to that flyover college but to society at large. Among the tenets of the new orthodoxy were that all white people were racist and that the police should be abolished. As for transgender ideology, it was J.K. Rowling who opened his eyes to that scam: “If sex isn’t real,” she tweeted, “there’s no same-sex attraction.” Eventually, Appel realized that his beloved social-justice movement had nothing to do with justice: “It was religious indoctrination.” In other words, a cult. When he published an essay about it online, it created such a firestorm on campus that he felt obliged to quit the MBA program. It was a relief. Finally he could be honest with himself: nonbinary is nonsense. Anti-white racism isn’t okay. Queer theory is crap.

He’d woken up from wokeness, escaped yet another cult. But not entirely. On Election Day 2020, he voted against Trump, as he had four years earlier. During Biden’s presidency, however, he watched in alarm as the gender cult grew more extreme and more powerful. Working full-time now as a professional writer, he interviewed men across the U.S. and Europe who’d been talked into undergoing “gender-affirming treatment” only to snap out of it, pursue detransitioning, and accept themselves as gay. After the Hamas massacres of October 7, Appel looked on in disgust as high-profile academics celebrated them as “awesome” and “exhilarating.” And to think that he had considered these people his allies!

When the 2024 elections came around, Appel didn’t vote for Trump –  but he didn’t vote for Kamala Harris either. And as the second Trump term proceeded, he cheered the president’s executive orders addressing DEI and gender ideology, the replacement of the expression “LGBTQ+” on government websites by “LGB,” and much else. And, well, that’s where Appel leaves us off. Bottom line about Cis White Gay: Appel’s ability to liberate himself from cults is impressive, even as his chronic tendency to replace one ideology, one dogma, with another continues to be worrisome. Lamentably, for example, he hasn’t fully shaken off the left’s propaganda about Trump – he parrots the absurd claims that the 2020 election was totally legit and that Trump is somehow “authoritarian.” Nonetheless, toward the end of this honest, deeply moving, and (indeed) noble page-turner, he’s able to write: Maybe Trump’s not so bad. Where does he go from here? Will he remain what he seems to be on the verge of becoming – a brave and fully independent thinker? I hope so. And I wish him the best.