Before The Term "Gay Mafia"
06/11/2012
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Back in the 1930s, the great poet W.H. Auden used to joke about the cultural power of well-placed homosexuals like himself. (The heterosexual George Orwell would fulminate about the influence of Auden's coterie of "nancy poets," while the vaguer Evelyn Waugh would lampoon Auden and Isherwood as Parsnip and Pimpernell, who respond to WWII by fleeing across the Atlantic). The term Auden used for gay influence was "the Homintern." 

It's a reference to Moscow's Communist International or Comintern, but it only makes sense funny if you use the proper BBC pronunciation of "homosexual" with a short initial "o" as in "homogenized."

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