During his fifteen minutes of fame, I’ve seen Mr. Gannon/Guckert reviled as a “gay male prostitute” at least a dozen times, for instance, here. Any man who is a prostitute is obviously a male prostitute, and is also, slightly less obviously, a gay prostitute. For whatever reason, men who provide sexual services to women for money are called gigolos or (more ambiguously) escorts, but not prostitutes. Both adjectives are therefore unnecessary.

Anyone who insists on referring to someone we already know is male as a “gay male prostitute” obviously thinks that that is something worse than an ordinary straight female prostitute. I can see why the Pope might think that: if homosexual acts are sinful, and prostitutional acts are sinful, then any act that falls into both categories is (I think it’s safe to assume) more sinful than if it were one or the other but not both. Of course, the Church also teaches that sexual acts between a man and a woman are sinful if they don’t use the usual orifices in the traditional way, so female prostitutes and their customers very often qualify for the two-sins-in-one deal as well.

I don’t see how anyone who insists on the doubly redundant phrase “gay male prostitute” can avoid the imputation that he (and it usually is a he) thinks that gay sex is in itself more depraved, more sinful, more perverted, all around worse, than straight sex. It appears that a large portion of the left today has opinions on homosexuality very different from what they like to pretend.