Glenn Greenwald Is Not a Victim

In a scene from the 1961 British neo-noir film Victim, four gay men are having a conversation about private morality and public norms. All of them are being extorted by a blackmail ring. The film’s lawyer hero, Melville “Mel” Farr (Dirk Bogarde), wants to go to the police, while the others just want to pay up. The dispute turns into a discussion of the sodomy law that keeps them all closeted. “Why should I be forced to live outside the law,” one vents, “because I find love in the only way I can?” Farr points out that the man is a celebrated actor. People like him “set a fashion.” If his sexuality became public, if “the young people” knew how he lived, might it become “an example to follow”? Might it become a new public norm?

A peer then chimes in that of course everyone agrees “youth must be protected,” but “that doesn’t mean consenting males in private should be pilloried by an antiquated law.” In fact, Farr’s heroic arc bends toward challenging that law at the risk of his own career. Released in the middle of the Wolfenden report’s decade-long deliberations, Victim was expressly crafted with the goal of inspiring life to imitate art. Too edgy for the MPAA’s seal of approval (the first film to use the word “homosexual”), the didactic script succeeded in shifting British public opinion. By 1967, consensual adult homosexual acts had been legalized in England and Wales.

In the year of our Lord 2025, the movie appears comically quaint. Not only have public norms indeed turned inside out (as Farr predicts in what was intended as a moment of devil’s advocacy), but even some of society’s alleged “conservative” minority are willing to bend with the wind. This has been most recently on display in the reactions to Glenn Greenwald’s leaked fetish tape.

Allegedly, Greenwald’s own official X account briefly retweeted the tape (now scrubbed). Greenwald claimed that the video was posted online without his “knowledge or consent” and that the “motive was a maliciously political one.” Speculation ran wild about who lay behind the leak, including elaborate anti-Israel conspiracy theories. This echoes Greenwald’s ominous suggestions of “attacks” by “the state” when he preempted a 2013 New York Daily News scoop about his “corporate interest in adult videos.” Whoever the villain in his journalistic hero’s journey might be at a given time, it is somehow never Glenn Greenwald. 

Greenwald’s first reaction statement admitted “no embarrassment or regret” about the humiliating footage, which depicted “consenting adults engaged in intimate actions in their private lives.” (We will spare readers from the gory details.) He further went on to deny that the scene was set in his own house, which was raised as a potential cause for legal alarm, given that he has two adopted children. 

Whether this is true or false, those children should be cause enough for “embarrassment or regret.” They are a silent indictment not only of Greenwald, but of the whole society complicit in normalizing his homosexual “marriage” and family formation. That normalization was built on the myth that homosexual love is no less natural than the love between a man and a woman, and that homosexuals demand only the right to live their normal private lives in peace and quiet. Now Greenwald demands we approve his simulacrum of “family” life while he conducts his sexual affairs like a rank libertine. It’s almost as if this was the whole game, the whole time.

Yet various figures have leapt to Greenwald’s defense, including figures who not five minutes ago were decrying the breakdown of sexual norms. Katy Faust has compiled a string of examples in one convenient X thread, featuring “Conservatism, Inc.” heavy-hitters like Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Charlie Kirk. When the “non-binary” Sam Brinton was caught stealing luggage, it was politically expedient for Kelly to ridicule him as Biden’s “diversity hire.” But the scandal around Greenwald is “irrelevant BS.” Owens has opined at length about how “Oh, but I’m gay” became “a default excuse for immorality,” particularly for gay men who can’t keep their unbridled lust in check. But Greenwald is “one of the most important and honest voices of our time.” Kirk mocked a gay Democrat staffer’s leaked sex tape, contrasting his light treatment with the punishment of January 6 protesters. But Greenwald’s leak is “politically motivated, criminal, and disgusting.” 

Conservatism, Inc. made a similar rush to congratulate Dave Rubin and his lover on their surrogate twin boys, inspiring Rubin to reassure his listening audience that the people who think “conservatives hate gays” have got it all wrong. Ron DeSantis’s office even sent him a pair of onesies. Of course, these sorts of explicitly affirming gestures from “conservatives” are the necessary proof for Rubin’s conclusion about their lack of “hate.” Otherwise, he might have to reassess.

The Greenwald scandal is simply the latest reminder that true sexual conservatism is not defined by the political shell games of Conservatism, Inc., whether the club is circling wagons around homosexual or heterosexual debauchery. In an attempted tu quoque, Greenwald pointed out that one of his critics was a great admirer of Donald Trump, whose frank libertinism Greenwald personally respects. While this doesn’t expunge his own hypocrisy, actual conservatives should accept his smug invitation to consistency. Greenwald’s conduct is deviant and worthy of stigma, but so too is Elon Musk’s shameless quest to have as many children by as many different women as possible. There should be no “their deviants” and “our deviants” about it, particularly where children are involved.

Once, there was a reasonable conservative case against allowing sexual deviance to go on being the blackmailer’s charter. That case was made in a time when not even progressive activists could have foreseen the depth and rapidity of our descent into shameless corruption, including corruption of “the youth.” There remains a case for keeping the government out of the bedroom. But it has never been clearer that in the wild pendulum swing from 1961 to 2025, society failed to stop at justice along the way.