Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
September 2001 – According to science fiction movies, there are a number of different ways to take over the earth if you're an alien life form. You can take the less-than-subtle approach of the creepy critters in War of the Worlds or Independence Day and blast the earth to smithereens, or the messy approach of The Blob, and eat everything that moves.
Or you can covertly replace people with exact counterfeit models, until everyone looks human but is actually an alien. That was the premise of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a chilling book written by Jack Finney and first published in 1955, which also spawned two popular films - one in 1956 and another in 1978. In Invasion, alien plants produce pods which mold a non-human clone when in close proximity to a person. The result is something that appears human, but is devoid of true human nature - especially emotion. The clones then begin setting pods next to unwary people, thus threatening to colonize the earth.
Some have seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers as an allegory dealing with U.S. paranoia about communism taking over the nation, or even dealing with cultural conformity in the 1950s.
Either way, the truth is that none of us likes the feeling that something or someone is trying to surreptitiously worm its way into our heads without us knowing it - in an attempt to make us do things we wouldn't ordinarily do. That's why people don't like the underlying concept of subliminal advertising or propaganda - both of which involve manipulating us without the mind being told what's going on.
So what would Americans think if they found out that "gay" activists, representing a small sliver of the population, were doing just that - using propaganda to invade the minds of the general public and insert a strange, or "alien," worldview, in an attempt to change public policy?
A frustrated revolution
While it may initially sound like paranoia, that is exactly what has been underway since 1985, when two homosexuals wrote "Waging Peace: A Gay Battle Plan to Persuade Straight America," in which they boldly admitted their intent to manipulate American sensibilities by using
pro-homosexual propaganda.
Written for the now-defunct homosexual magazine Christopher Street by Marshall K. Kirk and Erastes Pill, a pseudonym for Hunter Madsen, the article became a number one national bestselling book, After the Ball, four years later. Considered ground-breaking back then, 16 years later one is amazed by the simple fact that its strategy has been adopted - explicitly or implicitly - virtually across the board within the homosexual movement.
The tone of both the article and book was one of frustration with "the gay revolution in America," as the authors concluded that the revolution had failed. The momentum of those heady days following the movement's birth in 1969 during the Stonewall riots in New York City had dissipated, and activists were floundering for a plan to re-energize their community.
The fault lay in the optimism of homosexual activists - whom Kirk and Madsen refer to as "Pollyannas" - who believed that patience was all that was needed to overcome "the monolithic force of mainstream intransigence" toward homosexuality.
The old strategy consisted of "urgent whispering into the ears of sympathetic liberal politicians," Kirk and Madsen said, who passed a few positive pro-homosexual measures in scattered liberal communities. The hope was that either the public wouldn't notice or would soon become
sympathetic to the "gay" movement.
Kirk and Madsen saw this as a fatal flaw because there was "no nationwide appreciation of the gay community, nor sympathy for it, nor even much tolerance toward it." The reaction of the majority of straight Americans toward homosexuals ranged from an uneasy discomfort to deep-seated revulsion, fear and hatred. Homosexuals are "America's caste of detested untouchables."
Without widespread public support for the homosexual agenda, liberal politicians were not enough to turn the tide. Small victories became short-lived, often overturned by an explosion of public fury - and therein lay the problem.
"Any way you dice it," the authors wrote, "the enduring obstacle is the public, not its leaders."
A revolutionary new strategy
Kirk and Madsen advocated something radically new for homosexuals who, "as an oppressed minority, have not made the necessary effort to change the majority's social values."
If the problem was the public, then "gay" activists should begin trying to "soften the social attitudes of the mainstream" in order to "to gain straight tolerance and acceptance." This shouldn't be just one of the goals of activists - Kirk and Madsen insisted it must be the goal.
"The gay community needs a plan to get tough on the values of the straight mainstream." In short, they said, homosexual activists needed a blueprint that is "calculated and hard-hitting."
"Get tough" on straights? What form did such a plan take? "It is time to learn from Madison Avenue, and to roll out the big guns," the writers said. "We are talking about propaganda."
It's strange to see homosexual activists admit in print that they intend to manipulate the public in an attempt to influence attitudes. But for Kirk and Madsen, the ends justify the means. Homophobia, they write in After the Ball, has its origins "in the minds of men, and must be
stopped there with the help of propaganda."
A revolution, however, must have firepower, and in the case of propaganda, TV, radio, and the mainstream press are the weapons of choice.
"At the core of our program is a media campaign to change the way average citizens view homosexuality," they admitted.
Capturing the media
Changing the way the American mainstream looks at homosexuality is certainly a simple goal, but simple goals often require a complex approach, and Kirk and Madsen advocated a program that was ambitious to the nth degree. After the Ball called for the wholesale capture of the U.S. media, and the use of that media for the propagation of the homosexual agenda.
It didn't take long for activists to jump on the Kirk and Madsen bandwagon. In After the Ball, the authors gleefully reported that in 1988 - just two years after "Waging Peace" had been published - a "war conference" of 175 leading gay activists, representing organizations from across the country, gathered "to establish a four-point agenda for the gay movement."
Kirk and Madsen said the conference established as its top priority a nation-wide media campaign promoting a positive image of homosexuals. In its final statement the group said, "We must consider the media in every project we undertake. We must, in addition, take every advantage we can to include public service announcements and paid advertisements, and to cultivate reporters and editors of newspapers, radio, and television. To help facilitate this we need national media workshops to train our leaders. Our media efforts are fundamental to the full acceptance of us in American life."
Kirk and Madsen made clear in After the Ball why they felt the media - and especially television - was the best instrument of propaganda available to homosexual activists. Most obviously, TV's "breadth of audience is unparalleled. Because virtually every household owns a TV set and watches it daily, television reaches more of the public than any other medium."
Clearly, television fit their strategy for propaganda. In chilling fashion, the authors said TV is "the most graphic and intrusive medium for our message. In everyday life, intrusiveness is considered impolite; but not in public communications, where nine-tenths of the challenge is simply getting people's attention.. [T]elevision is the most cogent medium, combining sight, sound, and motion to make new pictures so vivid that they can displace the old."
Conclusion
The proposal penned by Kirk and Madsen, which called for the use of an "intrusive" media in order to "displace" traditional beliefs about homosexuality, has been implemented with amazing success.
In fact, last year Entertainment Weekly ran an expose entitled "Hollywood's Gay Power Surge," noting the speed and energy with which Hollywood's homosexual insiders have transformed Tinseltown, its entertainment product, and America's perspective on homosexuality. The article states that "audiences are more accepting of gay entertainment
than ever before."
No one is suggesting that, somewhere out there in a brilliantly-lit, well-decorated back room, there is an executive board of homosexuals meeting until the wee hours, commanding an army of loyal minions in Hollywood and New York, who tirelessly work to turn straight Americans
into compliant, mindless zombies.
Nevertheless, it is clear that a 1989 national bestseller injected certain ideas into the homosexual community that have long since become well-entrenched guideposts pointing to a "gay utopia."
A generation or two earlier, this plot to invade the minds of mainstream Americans with a subversive concept would have produced at least irritation, if not indignation. Instead, an inattentive and often indifferent majority seem to be the perfect, fertile field for a strange new idea. 
