Disgraced ex-gay MAGA provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos admitted he regrets “mainstreaming homosexuality in the Republican Party” in an interview released last Wednesday with anti-LGBTQ+ former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Yiannopoulos – who was ostracized from Republican circles after his comments seemingly supporting child rape – publicly renounced his homosexuality in 2021. He told Carlson that homosexuality is caused by childhood trauma, that gay activists “invented” the idea of sexual orientation as a fixed identity, and that his Roman Catholicism helps him stay away from “demonic” homosexual promiscuity.

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“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,” Yiannopoulos 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.”

“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,” he added.

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Yiannopoulos later told Carlson that “nobody’s gay,” that male homosexuality is a result of past trauma, and that gayness as a fixed identity “was invented wholesale” by gay activists who wanted to silence those who consider homosexuality a sin, The Christian Post reported. He then said he came out as gay at age 14 after a childhood alienated from his father (who he called “bad” and a criminal), and a stepfather who didn’t respect his privacy.

Yiannopoulos then agreed with Carlson that his homosexuality had a “demonic” addictive nature of sexual compulsions that enslaved his mind and drove his behavior. Yiannopoulos then said that there are many closeted conservatives in Washington D.C. and that homosexuals have a “sinister bit of magic” to “compel” others to fall in love with them or make people “throw themselves off a cliff.”

“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,” Yiannopoulos told Carlson. “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.”

The rise and fall of Milo Yiannopoulos

Although Yiannopoulos was raised in Britain, he rose to prominence during the 2014 Gamergate harassment campaign against inclusive video games and journalism coverage. Over many years, he became known for his attacks on women, Black Lives Matter activists, transgender people, and Muslims.

From 2014 to 2017, he worked as a writer and editor at the American right-wing publication Breitbart News. In 2017, Buzzfeed News revealed that, while working for Breitbart, Yiannopoulos regularly solicited ideas from antisemites and neo-Nazis like Andrew Auernheimer, administrator of neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, and pro-Nazi commentator Baked Alaska.

In July 2016, Yiannopoulos was permanently banned by Twitter after making repeated transphobic and racist posts referring to comedian Leslie Jones as “a black dude.” The following year, the publisher Simon and Schuster cancelled Yiannopoulos’ poorly written book, Dangerous. When Yiannopoulos pledged to sue the publisher for $10 million, his lawyers dropped him.

Around the same time, Yiannopoulos’ comments seemingly supporting child rape resurfaced. He said some 13-year-olds are sexually and emotionally mature enough to consent to sex with adults and said that he was personally grateful that a priest molested him as a child because it made him good at oral sex. He later defended these comments as “gallows humor” to deal with his sexual abuse.

After his comments surfaced, the conservative CPAC conference and right-wing hate site Breitbart both dropped him from their rosters. In April 2018, Yiannopoulos and a friend got ejected from a Manhattan bar by a group of Democratic Socialists shouting, “Nazi scum get out.” In December 2018, leaked Australian court documents showed that Yiannopoulos was nearly $2 million in debt to the Hawaii hotel where he married, as well as the aforementioned legal team that dropped him.

By that time, Yiannopoulos had resorted to selling useless nutritional supplements on the right-wing conspiracy theory show Info Wars. When Yiannopoulos set up a campaign on Patreon to help raise money, the platform banned him. Then, after repeatedly failing to organize a speaking tour through Australia, the country banned him.

By 2019, conservative organizers in Oklahoma left him in even more debt when they unexpectedly cancelled his speaking appointments in the state. Then Facebook and Instagram banned him, denying him some of his last major mainstream platforms.

Though he married his husband that same year, in August 2019, he served as grand marshal for a “straight pride” parade in Boston. By March 2021, Yiannopoulos declared himself an “ex-gay” and said his husband had been “demoted” to a “housemate.” He threw his “sodomy stone” — his $150,000 engagement ring — into the ocean.

He has since said he believes homosexuality is a sin and supports conversion therapy, a debunked form of psychological torture that purports to change people’s sexual orientation and gender identity.

In December 2020, Yiannopoulos denounced Trump, calling him “a selfish clown” and saying that he would dedicate “the rest of my life to the destruction of the Republican Party.” He claimed that he arranged an infamous November 2022 dinner between Trump, anti-Semitic rapper Ye West (formerly Kanye West), and far-right commentator Nick Fuentes to “make Trump’s life miserable.” He also served as an intern for U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ troll.

Afterward, he began staying in Florida, appearing regularly on TruNews, and announced his plans to open a conversion therapy operation. In 2021, Milo claimed that dogs stopped barking at him since he came out as “ex-gay.” The Hill Reporter also noted his social media posts showing self-inflicted wounds on his body, which he claims he does whenever he has “urges” to be gay.

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