Milo Yiannopoulos says he regrets ‘mainstreaming homosexuality’ with MAGA drag queen

Right-wing provocateur and so-called ‘ex-gay’ Milo Yiannopoulos has claimed he regrets “mainstreaming homosexuality in the Republican Party” during an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

The far-right pundit and former Breitbart editor – who worked for firebrand MAGA representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and helped Kanye West with his unsuccessful 2024 election campaign before serving as the controversial rapper’s chief of staff – has described himself as an ‘ex-gay’ since 2021 and supports vile conversion therapy.

Despite marrying a man in 2017, Yiannopoulos has long spoken out against LGBTQ+ rights and associated with conservative figures and groups which hold bigoted views about the community, including being the marshal for a ‘Straight Pride’ parade in 2019 and urging Australians to vote against gay marriage in 2017. In 2021, he even threw his “sodomy stone” – his wedding ring – into the ocean to highlight he was now “sodomy free”.

Speaking to Tucker Carlson, who was dismissed by Fox News in April 2023, Yiannopoulos claimed he now “hates himself” for being an openly gay man in the Republican Party.

“I have to be honest with you, I bear some responsibility for this because it was me, 10 years ago — mainstreaming homosexuality in the Republican Party is the great regret of my life, more so than anything I’ve done to my own soul, which is a lot,” he said.

“I was not intending to give birth to this huge generation of gay Republicans who now think it’s openly fine to traffic in babies and to be a gay Republican, and I feel a great deal of responsibility for that. I hate myself for that a little bit.”

Yiannopoulos went on to say: “It’s the great regret of my life, because it has given rise to horrors I never imagined. I mean, Lenin said, ‘All revolutionaries come to hate their children.’ Well, the gay horrors that I’ve given birth to — [Republican drag queen] Lady MAGA, [neo-Nazi] Nick Fuentes — I mean, they keep me up at night.”

After revealing he had been celibate for five years, Yiannopoulos insisted – despite much evidence to the contrary – that “nobody’s gay”, adding a person’s queerness is caused by “trauma”.

“In almost every case, and certainly in every male case, it is a trauma response,” he said.

“It is not a sexuality. It is not part of what you are, or who you are, or a component of your personality … it is a set of behaviors that emerges in people with a number of very easily identifiable common etiologies.”

Yiannopoulos went on to describe LGBTQ+ identities as “demonic” and bizarrely claimed gay men can  “compel” others to fall in love with them or make people “throw themselves off a cliff”.

“The worst and most sinister bit of magic is that you can trick someone or compel someone against their will to fall in love with you, or to throw themselves off a cliff,” he said. “The most frightening thing about magic is its ability to compel the wills of others.

“And that’s what I think homosexuals are seeking … because they feel so powerless in their own lives and have this understanding that they are broken people without agency over their own sex lives, over their bodies. … Like, I don’t even have control over me, but I’m damn well going to have control over you. That’s, I think, a lot of it.”

Contrary to what Yiannopoulos believes, it is not possible to change someones sexuality and/or gender via conversion therapy and the practices have been completely discredited by all major health and psychological organisations, including the NHS.

Conversion therapy incorporates various physically, emotionally and psychologically abusive practices that can supposedly change someone’s gender and/or sexuality. This can include berating or beating, being forced to pray as a form of healing, and “corrective rape”.