Milo Yiannopoulos coming out as ‘straight’ is like taking the Social Justice final exam, where you have to sit down and do a lot of woke-math to work out if you should be offended by his announcement. 

It is a nightmare scenario of intersectional politics, where the desire to hate an individual conflicts with established virtues. 

Twitter doesn’t have a clue what to do with the hashtag, and nor do political commentators who risk sounding bigoted if they state how overjoyed they are that Milo has abandoned their favourite victimhood category, while at the same time expressing fury over anyone changing their mind about a sexual preference. 

As far as I can tell, the latter is the greater crime because it risks invalidating the supremacy of the movement. 

In a new grift, fascist MAGA lunatic Milo Yiannopoulos says he’s an “ex-gay” which that’s not how it works since it’s not a choice, I would know because I’m gay. It’s yet another way for this piece of shit to get loathsome hateful creatures to give him money.

Ricky Davila 

I am a proud gay man. Milo declaring that he’s an ex-gay is bullshit and dangerous to #LGBTQ youth whose families believe that homosexuality can be removed, denied or excised. We exist.

Nick Walden Poublon 

On balance, it looks like the needs of the collective outrank the personal rights of the individual to decide their sexual orientation. 

Milo made his shock decision after embracing Catholicism and accepting the challenge to live a chaste life. He might as well have dipped himself in kerosene, purchased a pack of matches, and block-booked Bunnings for the barbecue. 

The pitchforks of the social mob made a big song and dance a few months ago about the evils of religious conversion therapy ‘curing people of their gayness’. Anyone who voluntarily signed up to this was definitely an abused victim and therefore a socially convenient martyr deserving of unyielding sympathy and support. 

But what do you do if that victim is also Social Agitator in Chief and Agent Provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos? Can a hated political figure of the culture wars also be considered a victim? 

When you view the world through an infinitely divisible set of identity boxes defined by their victimhood and oppression, it can be tricky to come to a valid emotional conclusion about an individual. You have to balance the collective guilt of their physical attributes inherited at birth with the merits of personal actions – making sure to adjust for oppression. 

Considering that Milo is male, white, and British, let’s face it – he was starting at the bottom of a ladder missing most of its rungs. In his axis of original sin, Milo carries the crimes of his gender, race, and the last few hundred years of colonialism. 

Before you ask, no, you don’t get to trade off against any of the positive elements in these things. Victimhood math takes the worst bits of some social boxes and the best bits of others. It’s like trying to learn French. Some nouns are male and others are female. Don’t bother working out why, just get yourself a cheat sheet. 

In addition to this terrible start, Milo describes himself as ethnically Jewish. The woke seem to be split on this one – unable to decide if they despise all forms of organised religion (therefore making this a negative attribute) or allow Milo to carry over the victimhood status acquired from the Holocaust. Considering the left routinely call the Jewish Milo a ‘Nazi’, let’s just go ahead and assume this attribute cancels itself out. 

Milo has also been ridiculously broke. Usually, poverty is a huge tick as far as victimhood goes, but I have a Post-It note here that says you can only claim victimhood from poverty if you are poor for virtuous reasons. In this case, being de-platformed by social media gods and thrown into economic desolation is seen as a well-deserved punishment. The only problem is if the woke think that a ‘right-wing troll’ being poor is a good thing, does Milo get positive virtue points for that or negative ones? If he was rich, that would be a bad thing so I’m going to go ahead and give him a few pity points. 

Identifying as ‘gay’ has always been Milo’s strongest virtue, a situation multiplied by his declaration that his boyfriend is a black gay man (who has now been relegated to ‘a housemate’). There’s almost enough glitter under his roof to bring Milo back to an even social balance – until he opens his mouth.

Milo’s greatest sin is being funny. Comedy is strictly forbidden and as such, we must take this into consideration when carrying the 1’s over from the previous calculation. 

Comments like “I don’t know why Black Lives Matter even protest me. I’ve got more black in me than they do” triggered an eruption of woke rage so loud that it shattered my calculator and I had to begin the calculation again. 

What have we learned from writing this ideological mess of wokedom out in longhand? At the end of the day, the collectivist left are actually closeted individualists. If they hate someone enough, they’ll find a way to make the woke math add up to a witch hunt. 

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at Ko-Fi.