JD Vance wrote in "Hillbilly Elegy" that he once became convinced he was gay when he was a kid.
"The only thing I knew about gay men was that they preferred men to women," he wrote.
That is the salient thing to know about gay men. Why did you convince yourself that you were gay based on that important data point?
His grandmother quickly put that notion to rest, asking him: "JD, do you want to suck dicks?"
You didn't know being a gay man involved sucking dicks? What did you think "preferring" men to women meant, preferring to have a brewski with men? Preferring to watch the football game with men? No, Vance: You knew that "preferring" men to women meant gay men preferred other men as sex partners, to suck and be sucked. And on that understanding you became convinced you were gay.
You're a phony! You don't know who the fuck you are; you can't decide on a name for yourself; you analogized Trump to Hitler; now you're his running "mate"; making the white power Ok hand symbol; And YOU DID GET YOUR ear pierced like your current hero! You married in a joint Christian/Hindu ceremony to a woman of Indian descent. You convinced yourself you were gay; your closest friend was trans. And this is the point, Bowman/Hamel/Vance: Not that any of those other id's and preferences and belief systems is "wrong". Rather it is,
The Unnerving Changeability of JD Vance
In “Hillbilly Elegy,” the 2016 memoir that made JD Vance a celebrity, he described constantly remaking his childhood self to fit the rotating cast of father figures his unsound mother brought into their lives. “With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it, I pretended earrings were cool — so much so that he thought it appropriate to pierce my ear,” Vance wrote. “With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of ‘girlieness,’ I had thick skin and loved police cars. With Ken, an odd man who proposed to Mom three days into their relationship, I was a kind brother to his two children.”
Vance’s yearning for a father is a constant theme in the book, as is his willingness to rationalize the flaws of the men he looks up to. At one point, he is reunited with his biological father, who gave him up for adoption when he was in kindergarten. The women in Vance’s life — not just his mother, but also his beloved sister, grandmother and aunt — told him that his dad had been “mean” and abusive, but he doesn’t believe it, preferring to think that there had only been “a bit of pushing, some plate throwing, but nothing more.”
You're beyond a phony and weird. You're FUCKED UP IN THE HEAD, VANCE! That's who you are.
His father was a devoted Pentecostal, and for a time Vance gave up his Black Sabbath CDs and became one, too. “I’m not sure if I liked the structure or if I just wanted to share in something that was important to him — both, I suppose — but I became a devoted convert,” he wrote.
“Devoted convert” may be the role he inhabits most naturally. In 2016 Vance speculated that Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” Now he’s his running mate. A lot has been written trying to understand Vance’s ideological journey, but at least part of the story seems to be hiding in plain sight in his book. In attaching himself to the most bellicose patriarch he can find, he’s re-enacting a childhood pattern.
There is, of course, nothing inherently pathological about changing one’s political views. [Absolutely correct.] Vance, however, swapped out not just his beliefs but his entire public persona in just a few short years.“Hillbilly Elegy” contains an indictment of “conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics”...
Vance presented their views as self-defeating: “We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us,” he wrote, adding, “You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society.”
Now Vance promotes all these things. He’s argued that Alex Jones is more trustworthy than Rachel Maddow and that Joe Biden may be intentionally flooding the country with fentanyl to kill off MAGA voters. He gave a speech in 2021 titled, “The Universities Are the Enemy.”
... there is something particularly extreme about Vance’s transformation, suggesting he hasn’t left behind the mutability that once served as a survival strategy.
...
In 2020, Vance wrote an essay detailing his journey from Pentecostalism through the new atheism of Christopher Hitchens and finally into Catholicism. He portrayed his young adult rejection of religion as essentially mimetic, something he absorbed from his university surroundings rather than decided on for himself. One of the things that brought him back to religion was meeting the right-wing venture capitalist [gay] Peter Thiel, who would eventually become a patron. Thiel “was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, but he was also a Christian,” Vance wrote. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019. By then, he’d become part of a new conservative elite in which many leading intellectual figures were also Catholic.
Now this person of unusual suggestibility has become second in command to a first-order demagogue, giving himself over to MAGA theology. As Mother Jones reported on Thursday, Vance recently endorsed a new book called “Unhumans,” co-written by the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, which demonizes progressives as nonpeople who must be crushed by extra-democratic means. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” the book’s co-writers say.
It is perhaps not surprising that Vance has ended up in this milieu. Authoritarian personalities, as the German social psychologist Erich Fromm argued, long to dominate, but they long just as much to submit.
