I am a direct beneficiary of the most successful social movement in American history. I am a gay man. Born in 1983 when a mysterious disease was beginning to decimate an earlier generation of gay men against a backdrop of societal indifference, I now live in a country where gay people can marry, serve openly in the military, and are legally protected from discrimination. Public polling regularly indicates that a large majority of Americans are accepting of their gay and lesbian fellow citizens, a majority that, thanks to the broadmindedness of younger generations, grows larger every year. Excepting some conservative subcultural redoubts and a few professional sports leagues, openly gay people can now be found in practically every arena of American life. The presidential candidacy of Pete Buttigieg suggests that the election of an openly gay person to the highest office in the land could happen within my lifetime.
This welcome state of affairs would have been unimaginable to all but the most clairvoyant of gay people (and, for that matter, straight people) born in the middle of the last century. As an historian of the gay experience who came to understand the fact of his own nature around the time that our leaders were busy passing measures aimed at stigmatizing gay people (the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and the paradoxically named Defense of Marriage Act), it was certainly unimaginable to me. For what qualifies the gay movement as more successful than any of the other campaigns for equality waged by American minority groups is both the extent of the transformation that has been achieved (in both law and public attitudes) and the rapidity with which it occurred.
It is increasingly difficult to remember today, but within living memory the homosexual was the most despised figure in the American imagination. Diagnosed as mentally ill by the medical establishment, condemned as heathens from the pulpit of every major religious denomination, their conduct deemed illegal by the state, gay men and women — commonly referred to as “perverts,” “sex deviants,” and even less pleasant epithets — once occupied a place comparable to that of the dissident in a totalitarian regime. Between 1946 and 1961, the year before Illinois became the first state to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting adults, state and municipal governments imposed some one million criminal penalties upon gay people for offenses ranging from holding hands to dancing to sex, a legal regime approximating what Christopher Isherwood memorably described as a “heterosexual dictatorship.” Indeed, when it came to gay people, the legal system sanctioned illegality, in the form of the “gay panic” defense that enabled assailants to justify their violent, even homicidal assaults on gay men as fits of temporary insanity “provoked” by a homosexual’s “indecent advance.” The Postal Service impounded gay literary magazines and the FBI spied on gay rights organizations. Declared enemies of the state by leaders of both political parties, gay people were prohibited from working for the federal government until 1975, and barred from holding security clearances for another two decades.
Such was the revulsion that homosexuality aroused among the general public that, in the year I was born, Edwin Edwards, the notoriously corrupt governor of Louisiana, quipped that “the only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” Edwards might have intended his remark as a joke, but he expressed an important, if rarely acknowledged, axiom about American public life, which was that the only thing as bad as murdering a member of the opposite sex was loving a member of the same one.
In 2004, President George W. Bush won reelection after campaigning for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. While that effort failed, over two dozen states eventually adopted anti-gay marriage amendments to their constitutions. But hearts and minds were already beginning to change. The year Bush attempted to enshrine discrimination in our country’s founding document, sixty percent of Americans opposed same-sex marriage and only thirty-one percent supported it. Within fifteen years, those figures had reversed, representing the most dramatic shift in public opinion about a social issue in the history of polling. Today Pete Buttigieg serves in the Cabinet, where the greatest controversy surrounding his sexual orientation was the complaint that he took too much paternity leave.
This astonishing metamorphosis in the status of the homosexual from what one elderly gay man once described to me as America’s “last lepers” into full and equal members of society has had a profound impact on gay and straight people alike. By coming out of their closets, gay men and women helped the country overcome one of its most deep-seated yet irrational fears, which was ultimately a fear of difference. This national coming out has transformed relationships between friends, colleagues, even strangers. (It is often strangers who threaten gay people most, which is why the quotidian act of holding hands with one’s partner in public can be a courageous act.) Most significant is the change that has happened within families, where the revelation of a loved one’s homosexuality less frequently leads to the rejection and banishment that used to be the norm.
Acknowledging progress is often difficult for those fighting to achieve it, as doing so can feel like complacency when so much important work remains to be done. If gay rights activists have been hesitant to trumpet their victories, their opponents have demonstrated the opposite tendency, treating each concession to the dignity of gay people as yet another precipitous step in the decline of Western civilization. Decriminalizing homosexuality, they warned, would lead to “special rights” — that is, equal treatment — for homosexuals, which would in turn lead to the recognition of gay marriages, the legalization of polygamy and bestiality, and the rebuilding of Sodom and Gomorrah. When, in 1996, the Supreme Court struck down a constitutional amendment in Colorado that would have prohibited the state from protecting gay people from discrimination, Justice Antonin Scalia prophesied that, as a consequence of this protection, laws against polygamy would eventually fall. Seven years later, when the Court struck down a Texas law prohibiting private sexual acts between persons of the same sex, Scalia added “state laws against bigamy…adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality and obscenity…” as next on the legal chopping block.
So swift has been the transformation of the legal landscape that conservatives have often been unable to describe it in terms other than the conspiratorial. Reviewing one such tract, a book called The Homosexual Network, in National Review in the early 1980’s, the conservative commentator Joseph Sobran remarked that the book’s “most important lesson” is one that “transcends homosexuality.” Most worrisome to Sobran was how “a very small number of people, united on behalf of a cause heartily despised by the great majority of others, can, even in a democracy, gain unbelievable leverage.” The charge that liberal elites impose their will on conservative majorities has long been a staple of American populist rhetoric, and many conservatives criticize the legal victories for gay equality on the grounds that they were decided by “activist judges.” But Sobran’s lament about the ability of “despised” homosexuals to “gain unbelievable leverage” over the mass of decent God-fearing Americans “even in a democracy” missed the mark. For whatever one thinks about the aims of the gay rights movement, its undeniable success is not a repudiation of democracy but a vindication of it.
That movement is widely believed to have begun with the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, when the patrons at a gay bar in Greenwich Village fought back against a police raid. (Even the provision of liquor to homosexuals was once illegal.) Over the course of three days and nights, hundreds of angry homosexuals joined the fray, and the spirit of gay liberation was set free. “Do You Think Homosexuals Are Revolting?” a pamphlet distributed in the exhilarating weeks following the unrest cheekily asked. “You Bet Your Sweet Ass We Are.”
The riot in downtown New York, which was reported in newspapers across the country, was without question a pivotal moment in the history of gay America. News of the homosexuals who had, so contrary to type, bravely resisted state oppression made a profound impact on individual gay men and lesbians, helping them come to terms with their sexuality and recognize that they were a part of something much larger than themselves. But while Stonewall was the birthplace of gay liberation, the movement for gay civic equality had begun much earlier. After some fizzling starts in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the early 1950’s, the effort found its footing in the more staid precincts of Washington, D.C. The leaders of this cause may not have been “revolting” drag queens, but they were revolutionaries, of a sort.
The central figure was a Harvard-trained astronomer named Franklin E. Kameny. In 1957, Kameny was fired from his job with the Army Map Service on account of his homosexuality. Thousands of people had already been terminated on such grounds, but Kameny was the first to challenge his dismissal, a decision that would, in the words of the legal scholar William Eskridge, eventually make him “the Rosa Parks and the Martin Luther King and the Thurgood Marshall of the gay rights movement.’” In 1960, Kameny appealed to the Supreme Court to restore his job. The petition that he wrote invoked the noblest aspirations of the American founding: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To the government’s claim that his firing was justified on account of its right to prohibit those engaged in “immoral” conduct, Kameny replied with what was, for its time, a radical, even scandalous, retort: “Petitioner asserts, flatly, unequivocally, and absolutely uncompromisingly, that homosexuality, whether by mere inclination or by overt act, is not only not immoral, but that, for those choosing voluntarily to engage in homosexual acts, such acts are moral in a real and positive sense, and are good, right, and desirable, socially and personally.” He continued: “In their being nothing more than a reflection of ancient primitive, archaic, obsolete taboos and prejudices, the policies are an incongruous, anachronistic relic of the Stone Age carried over into the Space Age — and a harmful relic!”
Inspired by the African-American civil rights movement, Kameny expressed his outrage at being treated as a “second-rate citizen,” and like the leaders of that heroic struggle he appealed to America’s revolutionary founding document for redress:
We may commence with the Declaration of Independence, and its affirmation, as an “inalienable right,” that of “the pursuit of happiness.” Surely a most fundamental, unobjectionable, and unexceptionable element in human happiness is the right to bestow affection upon, and to receive affection from whom one wishes. Yet, upon pain of severe penalty, the government itself would abridge this right for the homosexual.
Kameny’s arguments may have been revolutionary, but his goals were not. He had no desire to overturn the American government; he just wanted it to live up to its self-proclaimed principles. When his appeal to the Supreme Court was denied, Kameny founded the first sustained organization in the United States to represent the interests of “homophiles” (as some gays called themselves at the time), the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., in which capacity he led peaceful protests, wrote letters to every member of Congress, and engaged in public awareness campaigns. In 1965 — four years before Stonewall — Kameny organized the first picket for gay rights outside the White House. Men were required to wear jackets and ties; women, blouses and skirts reaching below the knee. “If you’re asking for equal employment rights,” he instructed his nine comrades, “look employable.” Eight years later, he played a crucial role in lobbying the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its register of mental disorders.
To the younger and more militant gay liberationists of New York and San Francisco, Kameny’s dedication to liberal reform reeked of assimilationism. Many of them came to view Kameny with contempt, speaking of him in the same tones with which black nationalists derided Martin Luther King, Jr. With his fussy dress codes, his carefully typewritten letters, and his veneration of the Constitution, Kameny was a practitioner of dreaded “respectability politics,” which for radicals (then and now) has been the great scourge of American liberalism. But Kameny was no conformist. In his petition in 1960, he declared:
These entire proceedings, from the Civil Service Commission regulation through its administration and the consequent adverse personnel actions, to respondents’ courtroom arguments, are a classic, textbook exercise in the imposition of conformity for the sake of nothing else than conformity, and of the rigorous suppression of dissent, difference, and non-conformity. There is no more reason or need for a citizen’s sexual tastes or habits to conform to those of the majority than there is for his gastronomic ones to do so, and there is certainly no rational basis for making his employment, whether private or by the government, contingent upon such conformity.
In 2015 — fifty years after staging his picket outside the White House, and four years after his death at the age of eighty-six — Kameny was vindicated when the very Supreme Court that had refused to hear his case of wrongful termination ruled that the Constitution recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry. Obergefell v. Hodges was a momentous victory for the American principle of equality before the law, achieved through the American principles of freedom of expression and freedom of association. (Today it is not uncommon for gay couples to include excerpts from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion among the readings at their wedding ceremonies). Five years later the Court completed the work of Kameny and his legatees in Bostock v. Clayton County, ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gay and transgender people from discrimination in the same way that it does other minority groups. By this point, the court was mainly tying up loose ends, as the private sector had already begun instituting its own nondiscrimination policies. Finally, it seemed, America had put the gay question to rest.
II
One of the most puzzling aspects of our contemporary political debate has been the reemergence of gay rights — or, in the parlance of our times, “LGBTQ rights” — as a subject of fierce public controversy. The major battleground is the public schools, where, over the past several years, states and municipalities across the country have passed laws prohibiting discussion of subjects pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity in early grade levels. Some of the rhetoric surrounding these efforts (describing schoolteachers as “groomers”) has a distinctly menacing tone, invoking ugly stereotypes of gay men as pedophiles.
But just as the rhetoric of the anti-gay right harks back to a darker time, the language of some of those purporting to speak on behalf of “LGBTQ people” has assumed something of a retro quality as well. The most visible manifestation of this development has been the revival of the word represented by the last letter in that cumbersome acronym: “queer.” A decade ago, the New York Times had printed this word — commonly regarded as a slur — only eighty-five times in the paper’s entire history. In 2022 alone, the Times published it well over six hundred times. (Pamela Paul published these figures in her Times column last October.) Once difficult to find on the website or in the literature of the country’s leading gay rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), “queer” is rapidly replacing “gay” and “lesbian” in our discourse. Last year, in a six-and-a-half-minute video introducing herself, HRC’s new president did not once utter those words. She did employ “queer.”
Like nearly all words, “queer” has several meanings, and its usage has evolved over time. Seventy years ago, some masculine “straight-acting” gay men favored “queer” as a means of differentiating themselves from their more effeminate brothers, whom they derided as “fairies.” (Gays are as capable as any minority group of replicating among themselves the prejudice that they endure in mainstream society, a lamentable form of self-hatred that often stigmatizes the more flamboyant, the more gender nonconforming, the “swish” who could not “pass” for straight if his life depended on it. As Kameny himself argued, homosexuals “are as honest and as dishonest, as reliable and as unreliable, as industrious and as lazy, as conscientious and as irresponsible, as liberal and as conservative, as religious and as irreligious, as much law-abiding and law-breaking as is the citizenry at large.”) The most common usage of “queer,” however, was as a derogatory epithet. It ranked with “faggot,” and was often the last word a gay man heard before having his head bashed in.
Around the late 1980’s, justifiably angered at the societal apathy towards the AIDS crisis, some left-wing gays and lesbians defiantly appropriated “queer” from the homophobes. The radical direct-action group Queer Nation outed closeted public figures and famously disrupted a taping of the “Arsenio Hall Show” to protest the appearance of the gay-bashing comedian Andrew Dice Clay. Today, in its most innocuous application, “queer” can serve as a concise label for the entire LGBTQ community — not all transgender people are homosexuals, and many lesbians feel left out by the term “gay.” Popular television shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Queer as Folk do not carry a political connotation so much as they do a playful one. To adopt a critical “queer” approach — to examine literature, film, art, historical episodes, or relationships for homosexual subtexts — can be a valid method of analysis. Adopting a slur used by one’s enemies, according to this reasoning, robs the word of its ability to harm.
Some argue that the embrace of “queer” over “gay” represents a natural evolution in the use of language, no different from the way in which “gay” started to replace “homosexual” and “homophile” in the 1970’s. But whether used pejoratively, proudly, or as a matter of mere linguistic convenience, “queer” has always been a loaded word, encompassing meanings and implications that the more neutral “gay” lacks. Some of those who embrace “queer” liken themselves to African-Americans who have reclaimed “nigger.” But the comparison doesn’t wash. Where university course books abound in Queer Studies classes, there are no course offerings, mercifully, in N-word Studies. (See the difference? Having reluctantly used the word once I don’t wish to use it again.) You will never hear Oprah Winfrey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., or Hakeem Jeffries use this word to refer to themselves or another black person. The disgusting word has of course been given a new lease on life in popular African-American culture, particularly in hip-hop, where it is commonplace, the result of a complicated psychology and sociology; but there, too, all the entertainment pleasure notwithstanding, it grates.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “queer” adjectivally as “strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric, in appearance or character.” As a noun, “queer” denotes a “questionable character, suspicious, dubious.” Many of those who embrace “queer” over “gay” do so precisely because it connotes marginalization. All minorities have found a certain dark glamor in deviance, a kind of reverse prestige in marginalization, even if none have ever wished to pay the price. Many gays — like many straights — reject the mainstream, which they find stifling and oppressive, and they wish to subvert it. “Queer,” in this sense, implies less a sexual orientation than a socio-political one. Identifying herself as “queer past gay,” the late radical feminist author bell hooks said that being queer is not “about who you’re having sex with — that can be a dimension of it — but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” After years of rejection by society, acceptance can mean the end of dissidence, of coolness, of the romance of rebellion.
Such an expansive definition, however, means that anyone — including heterosexuals — can now identify as queer. Not long ago a male journalist “came out” as queer on Twitter while making sure to note that “I’m attracted to a wide range of women, but not men at all.” In case this identity saga seemed illogical, he explained that “embracing being queer was as much an intellectual journey as it was other areas. Just the way I think of structural oppression comes from not feeling heteronormative in my thinking about things.” What regular gay people strived long and hard to transform into one identity attribute among many, to make as relevant to a person’s character as their eye color or shoe size, queers seek to italicize and imbue with transgression. “Queerness” is an attempt to revive homosexuality’s lost radical splendor, which is the inevitable consequence of the attainment of rights and the spread of decency. “Queerness” is a means by which anyone — regardless of sexual orientation — can assume a posture of defiance against mainstream society and bourgeois values.
The first thing a gay person understands about their sexual orientation is that they harbor a dangerous secret, one requiring them to pretend that they are something that they are not. For gay people, the process of coming out is sacred, marking the point when they stop living a lie and begin living in truth. For this reason, a heterosexual who “comes out” as queer disrespects a long and harsh struggle and reeks of identity slumming, like the episode of “Seinfeld” in which Jerry’s dentist converts to Judaism “just for the jokes.” The pose is a moral travesty. The British lesbian writer Julie Bindel has observed that “queer” has increasingly come to describe “anyone who decides that admitting to being heterosexual is boring.”
The proliferation of functionally straight people declaring themselves queer has been a subject of bemused ridicule among actual gay people for some time. But the adoption of various queer identities is no longer an isolated trend. Over the past decade, the proportion of Generation Z (those born after 1997) which identifies as LGBT has tripled to twenty-one percent. (One poll puts the figure at forty percent). Among millennials (those born between 1980 and 1997), this figure doubled from slightly over five percent to ten and a half percent. The rapid rise in LGBT identification is a phenomenon exclusive to young people; the fraction of Generation X, Baby Boomers, and those born before 1946 who identify as LGBT has remained roughly stable (at 4.2 percent, 2.6 percent, and .8 percent, respectively).
Some might argue that this increase in LGBT identification among the young is the natural, and welcome, result of America becoming more tolerant of diverse sexual and gender identities; that, just as the number of left-handed people increased once we stopped forcing kids to write with their right hands, so has the number of people willing to acknowledge their LGBT identity similarly grown. But the increase in LGBT identity has not correlated with a rise in same-sex behavior. In 2008, five percent of Americans under thirty identified as LGBT, and a similar number reported engaging in same-sex relations. By 2021, while the proportion of this cohort identifying as LGBT more than tripled, only half of them reported same-sex sexual activity.
This incongruence is owed partly to the increase in the number of people, particularly young people, identifying as bisexual. More than half of LGBT Americans, fifty-seven percent, define themselves this way. Yet among those married or cohabitating, they are overwhelmingly paired with a member of the opposite sex. This has led to the curious outcome whereby LGBT Americans — a group once known quaintly as “the gay community” — are now more likely to be married or living with someone of the opposite sex (twenty-two percent) than with someone of the same sex (sixteen percent). Queerness, then, is increasingly becoming just another trend that gay people innovate (like fashionable neighborhoods, music, clothing, and other forms of cultural expression) and straight people adopt.
The rise in LGBT identity is also a markedly political development. Across time, cultures, and geography, homosexuality has always been a naturally occurring and randomly distributed phenomenon, “numbering its adherents everywhere,” as Proust wrote, “among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne.” Gay people can be found among every race, class, nationality, and political camp; the only way in which they are uniform is in the nature of their same-sex attraction. And yet, from 2008 to 2021, LGBT identification tripled among self-identified “very liberal” college students while rising only three to nine percent among those who are slightly liberal, moderate, and conservative. Today, while five percent of “very conservative” college students identify as LGBT, a full half of “very liberal” students do. Even accounting for the entirely understandable fact that gay people tend to be more liberal than the rest of the general population (a trend that has been decreasing along with the political saliency of homosexuality), there is no explanation for this massive disparity other than that it is exogenously influenced.
Heavily influenced by social media and the broader political environment, the biological identity of gayness is being superseded by the subjective identity of queerness. Whereas the former is innate and has no inherent political ramifications, the latter can be freely chosen and is politically radical. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a very liberal white female college student who supports shouting down a campus speaker has a seventy percent likelihood of identifying as LGBT. Unsurprisingly, there are psychological consequences for those who decide to put themselves “at odds with everything around” them. Despite the growing societal acceptance of homosexuality, the number of LGBT students reporting mental health issues has soared over the past decade. “It is possible that the groups which report worse mental health — such as young LGBT and very liberal people — have disproportionately shaped, and been shaped by, a new left-modernist culture,” writes Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck College, who has studied the rise in LGBT identity among youth. “This zeitgeist values transgressing social boundaries while valorizing vulnerability and victimhood.”
A zeitgeist of transgression and victimhood is one that, by definition, will never be satisfied. It will forever be in opposition. “I feel an inexplicable amount of rage witnessing the Senate likely to overcome the filibuster to vote to codify marriage rights for same-sex couples.” These words condemning last year’s belated legislative codification of marriage equality came not from a fire-breathing evangelical preacher, but from the deputy director for Transgender Justice at the American Civil Liberties Union, a leading figure of the queer left named Chase Strangio.
A significant part of my career has (begrudgingly) been devoted to marriage-related litigation. I find it disappointing how much time and resources went into fighting for inclusion in the deeply flawed and fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage. I believe in many ways, the mainstream LGBTQ legal movement caused significant harm in further entrenching the institution of marriage as an organizing structure of US civil society.
Even equality, for him, is not worth the renunciation of the glamour of outsiderhood.
This cleaving to marginality helps to explain the queer aversion to Pete Buttigieg, whose most vocal opponents were found not among the homophobic right but among the queer left, who saw in the former mayor of South Bend a paragon of “homonormativity.” During the campaign of 2020, a group of activists calling themselves “Queers Against Pete” attempted to disrupt his events. In a screed for The New Republic that the magazine later retracted, the writer Dale Peck derided Buttigieg as “Mary Pete,” the gay version of an Uncle Tom. That Buttigieg is not a “socialist” or a “revolutionary” offended Masha Gessen of The New Yorker, who bemoaned his appeal to “older, white, straight people,” a quality that rendered him “a straight politician in a gay man’s body.” There is something repulsive about the policing of authenticity, and historically it has been one of the most destructive ways in which members of a minority turn on each other.
Reflecting upon a TIME magazine cover featuring Buttigieg and his husband standing outside their home, Greta LaFleur, a professor of American Studies at Yale, considered how “our first gay first family might actually be a straight one.” For those confused as to how a same-sex couple could qualify as “straight,” LaFleur explained: “If straight people can be queer — as so many of them seem so impatient to explain to me — can’t gay people also be straight?” The title of this ugly little diatribe? “Heterosexuality Without Women.” LaFleur never delineated just what she meant by “heterosexuality,” imputing it to the Buttigiegs based upon their appearance (“I wondered, for a second, if they were actually wearing the same pair of pants,”) traditionalism (the image reeked of “Norman Rockwell,”) and sexual modesty (“there’s actually no sex at center stage”).
It is important to say clearly, therefore, that aside from same-sex attraction, there is no “correct” way to be gay, just as there is no “correct” way to be left-handed, and to claim otherwise is not progressive but regressive, foisting upon gay people the same gendered expectations and roles from which they fought so long and hard to break free. These critics are like the progressive fools of the 1980s who said that Margaret Thatcher was not really a woman, and their doctrinaire definitions are pernicious. That Buttigieg has chosen a life of white picket fences, childrearing, and monogamy makes him no less of a gay man than one who opts for a life of childless hedonism in the gay ghetto. Of course Buttigieg is gay. What he isn’t is queer.
With its insistence that gay people adhere to a very narrow set of political and identitarian commitments, to a particular definition that delegitimates everything outside of itself, political queerness is deeply illiberal. This is in stark opposition to the spirit of the mainstream gay rights movement, which was liberal in every sense — philosophically, temperamentally, and procedurally. It achieved its liberal aspirations (securing equality) by striving for liberal aims (access to marriage and the military) via liberal means (at the ballot box, through the courts, and in the public square). Appealing to liberal values, it accomplished an incredible revolution in human consciousness, radically transforming how Americans viewed a once despised minority. And it did so animated by the liberal belief that inclusion does not require the erasure of one’s own particular identity, or even the tempering of it. By design, the gay movement was capacious, and made room for queers in its vision of an America where sexual orientation was no longer a barrier to equal citizenship. Queerness, alas, has no room for gays.
The victory of the gay movement and its usurpation by the queer one represents an ominous succession. The gay movement sought to reform laws and attitudes so that they would align with America’s founding liberal principles; the queer movement posits that such principles are intrinsically oppressive and therefore deserving of denigration. The gay movement was grounded in objective fact; the queer movement is rooted in Gnostic postmodernism. For the gay movement, homosexuality was something to be treated as any other benign human trait, whereas the queer movement imbues same-sex desire and gender nonconformity with a revolutionary socio-political valence. (Not for the first time, revolution is deemed more important than rights.) And whereas the gay movement strived for mainstream acceptance of gay people, the queer movement finds the very concept of a mainstream malevolent, a form of “structural violence.” Illiberal in its tactics, antinomian in its ideology, scornful of ordinary people and how they choose to live, and glorifying marginalization, queerness is a betrayal of the gay movement, and of gay people themselves.
III
The foundations of queer politics lie in queer theory. Like the other tributaries of post-structuralist thought, queer theory explains the entirety of human relations — indeed, of human existence itself — in terms of power. In his pioneering History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault posited that homosexuality is a socially constructed identity that was imposed upon a set of practices in the middle of the nineteenth century. “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of superior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul,” he wrote. “The sodomite had been a temporary sinner; the homosexual was now a species.” The homosexual did not exist until this point; he was created by “discourses” that privileged the “normal.” The classification of homosexuality, and the subsequent “creation” of the homosexual, was another bourgeois capitalist tool of oppression.
Foucault was right to contend that the concept of sexual orientation, and the subsequent “invention” of the homosexual, were uniquely modern. Where he erred was in his claim that this new understanding was an oppressive deployment of discursive power. On the contrary, it was the single most liberating development in the history of homosexuality, in that it allowed society to understand gay people as a distinct minority group that could seek legal recognition and protection.
When you work your way through their ostentatiously abstruse vocabulary, the intent of the queer theorists becomes clear: revolution against the “normal,” however it happens to be understood. “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant,” David Halperin, one of the leading academic queer theorists, explained in 1995 in Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Historiography. In this analysis, expanding our conception of the normal — which the gay movement stupendously achieved — is worse than insufficient. It is a sordid collaboration with power. (This is how the extension of hard-won marriage rights to gay people becomes the strengthening of a “fundamentally violent institution.”) Standing among the vanguard that is striving to hasten our redemption, our glorious human future, is a never-ending obligation. “Normalizing the queer would be, after all, its sad finish,” Judith Butler, one of the grand poobahs of queer theory, explains. Only liberation from the normal will do. Lacking a normative dimension to its analysis, queer theory is, at its essence, nihilistic. “There is nothing in particular to which [queer] necessarily refers,” Halperin writes. “It is an identity without an essence.” Which allows for an ideology without limits.
In 1984, in her influential article “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” Gayle Rubin delineated the consequences of such an ideology. Widely considered to be one of the foundational texts of queer theory, Rubin’s thesis is that “sex is always political.” Hip to the fact that “sexuality is impervious to political analysis as long as it is primarily conceived as a biological phenomenon or an aspect of individual psychology,” she must therefore negate biology, psychology, and the historical record. Rubin is a cultural anthropologist; like the other leading queer theorists, she has no formal training in the hard sciences or history. This absence of knowledge is of no hindrance to the queer theorists, of course. Biology, psychology, and even in history all are mere “discourses” shaped by those holding “power,” and all must bow before the tyranny of the emancipatory theory.
Heavily influenced by Marx, the queer theorists neatly apply his economic analysis to sexual relations. In place of his pyramidical class system with its oppressive capitalists on top and oppressed proletarians toiling down below, Rubin constructs a “sexual hierarchy” in the form of a “charmed circle” reinforcing a system of laws that “operate to coerce everyone towards normality.” In the middle of this circle sits the various forms of privileged sexuality: “heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive, and non-commercial. It should be coupled, relational, within the same generation, and occur at home.” Existing precariously on the circle’s “outer limits” is “bad, abnormal, unnatural, damned sexuality,” as well as sex that is “homosexual, unmarried, promiscuous, non-procreative, or commercial.” Rubin’s description of how this sexual system operates parodies the Marxist dialectic of class struggle:
Differences in social value create friction among these groups, who engage in political contest to alter or maintain their place in the ranking. Contemporary sexual politics should be reconceptualized in terms of the emergence and on-going development of this system, its social relations, the ideologies which interpret it, and its characteristic modes of conflict.
The sexual hierarchy is of a piece with the other forms of oppression that exist within bourgeois societies. “All these hierarchies of sexual value — religious, psychiatric, and popular — function in much the same ways as do ideological systems of racism, ethnocentrism, and religious chauvinism,” Rubin writes. “They rationalize the well-being of the sexually privileged and the adversity of the sexual rabble.”
According to Rubin, Western societies vigilantly police their systems of sexual oppression lest the acceptance of any form of “abnormal” sexuality spark the “domino theory of sexual peril” whereby the entire structure would collapse. “If anything is permitted to cross this erotic DMZ, the barrier against scary sex will crumble and something unspeakable will skitter across,” she declares. The goal, then, should be not to expand the “charmed circle” so as to include homosexuality, but do away with it altogether. Foreshadowing the attacks on Pete Buttigieg and other “cisgender white gay men” that has become such a staple of queer discourse, Rubin observes that while “most homosexuality is still on the bad side of the line… if it is coupled and monogamous, the society is beginning to recognize that it includes the full range of human interaction.” That, believe it or not, is a bad thing. By contrast, she complains that “promiscuous homosexuality, sadomasochism, fetishism, transsexuality, and cross-generational encounters are still viewed as unmodulated horrors incapable of affection, love, free choice, kindness, or transcendence.”
Most gay people would be repelled at seeing their sexual orientation, a core aspect of their identity, conflated with pastimes such as “sadomasochism” and “fetishism.” Elsewhere Rubin lists homosexuality alongside other “innocuous behaviors” such as “prostitution, obscenity, or recreational drug use.” But if the biological phenomenon of sexual orientation is no more legitimate a basis for sexual identity than anything else, and all notions of boundaries and propriety are mere instruments of power dynamics, then there is no justification — moral, philosophical, or legal — for deeming a homosexual identity more valid than a sadomasochistic or fetishistic one. (The Reverend Jerry Falwell agreed.) The happiness of the many is to be held hostage to the cheap transgressiveness of the few. Devoid of any limiting principle, queer theory compels its adherents to wage perpetual war against the “normal” — often from the precious and protected ramparts of the faculty lounge.
This ethos of self-imposed marginalization is a recipe for permanent despair, but for its advocates it is thrilling all the same, for one must forever be seeking novel ways to épater la bourgeoisie. “Sexualities keep marching out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and on to the pages of social history,” Rubin marvels. “At present, several other groups are trying to emulate the success of homosexuals. Bisexuals, sadomasochists, individuals who prefer cross-generational encounters, transsexuals, and transvestites are all in various states of community formation and identity acquisition.” She has seen the future and it is queer.
In their contention that homosexuality is a series of freely chosen acts, a voluntary persona rather than an inborn identity (a claim directly at odds with the most fundamental premise of the gay rights movement), the queer theorists are in odd alignment with the reactionary forces which have everywhere sought to repress gay people. And this is not the only notion that the queer theorists share with their far-right antagonists; the two sides operate in a perverse symbiosis. Rubin seems keen on validating the portents of anti-gay bigots who argue that toleration of homosexuality will open the floodgates to other moral depredations. Her warning is like Scalia’s. “Sodomy laws, adult incest laws…clearly interfere with consensual behavior and impose criminal penalties on it,” she writes. “If it is difficult for gay people to find employment where they do not have to pretend, it is doubly and triply so for more exotically sexed individuals. Sadomasochists leave their fetish clothes at home, and know that they must be especially careful to conceal their real identities. An exposed pedophile would probably be stoned out of the office.”
This lament for the plight of pedophiles — one of several groups whom Rubin sympathetically describes, alongside homosexuals, as “erotic dissidents” — is not an isolated one. Throughout her canonical essay Rubin decries the treatment of those preferring “cross-generational encounters,” a euphemism that she employs not in reference to the May-December romance. “Adults who deviate too much from conventional standards of sexual conduct are often denied contact with the young, even their own,” she laments, along with the fact that “members of the teaching professions are closely monitored for signs of sexual misconduct.” Rubin lauds the notorious North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) for its opposition to child pornography laws. “Although the Supreme Court has also ruled that it is a constitutional right to possess obscene material for private use, some child pornography laws prohibit even the private possession of any sexual material involving minors.” The horror! America’s treatment of pedophiles brings to her mind nothing so much as the twinned Red and Lavender Scares of the McCarthy era:
Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt. A lot of people will be embarrassed by their collaboration with this persecution, but it will be too late to do much good for those men who have spent their lives in prison.
The defense of pedophilia is a running theme in the literature of queer theory. Describing the transformation of sexual acts into sexual orientation in his History of Sexuality, Foucault relates the story of a nineteenth-century French farmhand who “had obtained a few caresses from a little girl” and was subsequently reported to the authorities by her parents. “What is the significant thing about this story?” Foucault asks. “The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration.” The possibility that the “bucolic pleasures” Foucault so elegiacally describes in this rhapsody to child molestation might not have been “inconsequential” for the “little girl” does not vex him. No, what concerns Foucault is that the behavior of the farmhand is seized upon by jurists, doctors, clinicians, magistrates, and all the other lickspittles of “power.” Foucault is shaken by how “our society — and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures — assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating.” In the late 1970s Foucault advocated for abolishing France’s age of consent laws, and in 2021 he was accused posthumously of raping boys as young as eight while living in Tunisia in the late 1960s.
For the queer theorists, the taboo on “cross-generational” or “intergenerational” sex is just another deplorable boundary to “queerness.” “Why is age — unlike, say, race or class — understood as a sexualized power-differential protected by law?” asks Annamarie Jagose in Queer Theory: An Introduction. “Is it possible to eroticize children in an ethical way? These are the questions commonly raised — and by no means yet resolved — in the controversy over intergenerational sex.” Judith Buterl, an internationally renowned practitioner of the rhetorical question, smuggles pedophilia into a long list including a number of worthy concerns: “If marriage and the military are to remain contested zones, as they surely should, it will be crucial to maintain a political culture of contestation on these and other parallel issues, such as the legitimacy and legality of public zones of sexual exchange, intergenerational sex, adoption outside marriage, increased research and testing for AIDS, and transgender politics. All of these are debated issues, but where can the debate, the contest, take place?” Are pedophiles, then, merely queer?
Thankfully, Rubin’s prescience is as deficient as her ethics, and her prediction that sometime in the not-too-distant future “it will be much easier to show” that “boylovers” were the “victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt” in the way that gay men and lesbians were purged from the federal government has not come to pass. While its normalization of pedophilia — suddenly the dream of normality is valid! — remains on the margins, where decency and empathy decree it should be, queer theory has managed to infect our public life in other ways, mainly through its deconstruction of the sex binary and the supplanting of sex with gender.
The idea for which Butler is most famous — that gender is a social construct — is an important notion, even if thinkers from Plato to Wollstonecraft to Mill had recognized it long before she did. (To be sure, Butler’s claim that gender is entirely a social construct is far more sweeping and radical than what any of these earlier philosophers proposed.) Socially imposed gender norms can be a prison for many people, especially gay men and lesbians, who by their very nature as same-sex-attracted beings challenge the traditional notions of what it means to be a man or a woman. One of the great achievements of the gay movement was to rupture the conflation between biological sex and socially constructed gender; a man need not be stereotypically masculine in order to qualify as a man, nor need a woman be stereotypically feminine to count as a woman. Blurring the gender binary has helped all of us — gay, straight, bisexual — to live our lives free of gendered expectations and roles.
But there are limits to what social constructionism can explain. While gender may be, as Butler contends, in significant part “performative,” biological sex is not. It is real, immutable, and, among humans, dimorphic. The sex binary is certainly essential to homosexuality; without it, gay men and women would have no ability to comprehend themselves or to explain their same-sex orientation. If “man” and “woman” are not stable categories, then neither are “gay” and “lesbian.” These realities are at odds with the ascendant ideology of gender, which holds that the very existence of binaries and categories are mechanisms of oppression. By arguing that both biological sex and the sex binary are social constructions, gender ideology truncates gay identity by conceptualizing it as a halfway point to another sex. It also makes a mockery of transgender identity, which relies on the existence of the sex binary in an even more essential way. The renowned transgender economist Deirdre McCloskey entitled her memoir about her transition Crossing, evoking the process of traveling from one side of a boundary to another.
Until fairly recently, the term “transgender” referred to those with gender dysphoria, the psychological term, and the medical diagnosis, describing the severe sense of unease that one feels at the discordance between their biological sex and their gender identity. This condition affects an extremely small number of people. Today, the meaning of “transgender” has been broadened to include anyone who does not conform to stereotypical gender roles, a process of etymological imperialism that threatens to delegitimate gay men and lesbians. The Human Rights Campaign, for instance, defines “transgender” as “an umbrella term for people whose gender identity and/or expression is different from cultural expectations based on the sex they were assigned at birth,” a meaning so far-reaching as to comprise every gay person, who, by dint of their attraction to members of the same sex, expresses their gender in ways which are at odds with “cultural expectations.” A slide presentation recently delivered at my old elementary school described a “transgender person” as “someone whose gender identity or gender expression does not correspond with their sex assigned at birth,” which would make many effeminate men and masculine women transgender, and unwittingly invokes the nineteenth-century theory of “sexual inversion” that conceptualizes gay people as heterosexuals born in the wrong body.
It is ideas such as these which Republican politicians have cited as evidence for their claim that America’s public schools have become hotbeds of radical queer and gender theory. At first blush, this fracas seems like a rehash of the perennial battle over school curricula. From the Scopes trial to the Reagan-era clash over abstinence education, these controversies are invariably framed as contests between enlightened modernizers and neanderthal reactionaries. While claims of a nationwide effort to “groom” prepubescent children show the signs of an all-American moral panic, it is unfortunately the case that some of the central tenets of queer theory have escaped the ivory tower and found their way into some public schools. Materials published by the San Diego Unified School District, for instance, call for a “linguistic revolution to move beyond gender binaries,” whereby men are to be called “people with a penis” and women “people with a vulva.” A document promulgated by the Portland Public Schools maintains that the gender binary is a vestige of “white colonizers” and that terms such as “girls and boys,” “ladies and gentleman,” and “mom and dad” should be replaced with “people,” “folx,” and “guardians.” An education guide for teachers in Grades 3-8 promulgated by the Human Rights Campaign advises replacing the term “Snowman” with “Snowperson” so that students be made to “understand the differences between gender identity, sexual orientation and sex assigned at birth.”
In 2016, the Gay-Straight Alliance Network — an informal association of support groups for gay students with some four thousand chapters across the country — officially changed its name to the Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network, purportedly at the insistence of the “countless youth leaders who understand their genders and sexualities to be uniquely theirs and have moved beyond the labels of gay and straight, and the limits of a binary gender system.” A nine point manifesto drafted by the organization, explicitly inspired by the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program, calls for “the abolition of the police, ICE, Borders and the Judicial System,” “Decolonization and Reparations for all Indigenous and Black People,” and “an End of the Cisgender Heterosexual Patriarchy.”
The educators advancing this agenda surely think of themselves as well-intentioned, and the impulse to make schools — long sites of trauma for gay and transgender youth — more welcoming is salutary. But by inculcating young people in the tenets of radical gender ideology, these would-be revolutionaries are actually doing harm, proliferating sloppy and dogmatic ideas about some of the most fundamental dimensions of human life, exploiting the good will that the gay movement finally accrued, and confusing and hurting the very students they purport to help.
IV
It was to be expected, as societal approval of homosexuality soared and legal equality for gay people was finally achieved, that the infrastructure of the gay rights movement would be deployed on behalf of transgender people. So long as the aims and the tactics of the movement remain the same — securing legal equality and social acceptance — this is a worthy endeavor. Beholden to the concepts of radical gender ideology, however, the movement has gone beyond seeking for trans people what it won for gays, evolving from being a force that changed reality by transforming public attitudes into something that opposes reality itself.
The examples of this illusory program lie all around us. The steady erasure of the word “woman” in favor of the dehumanizing “pregnant person,” “menstruators,” and “bodies with vaginas.” The athletic triumphs of natal men competing in women’s sports competitions. The placement of natal men in women’s rape shelters and prisons. The ACLU’s expurgation of the words “woman,” “she,” and “her” from a Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotation extolling the importance of abortion rights. Facebook offering its users the option of seventy-one genders. Recently trying to locate the men’s room at a restaurant, I could only smile at the sign that sought to cause the least possible offense: “This is a bathroom with urinals and stalls.”
It used to be conservatives who told gay people that their sexuality could be corrected, that gay men finding “the right girl” (or, in the case of lesbians, “the right guy”) would fix their condition. Now it is self-fashioned progressives who instruct gays that they must get over their archaic attraction to people of the same-sex. According to the BBC style guide, a “homosexual” is a person who is “attracted to people of their own gender,” a linguistic legerdemain that, by virtue of the mantra that “trans women are women and trans men are men,” has led to lesbians being called “vagina fetishists” for their refusal to date “people with a penis.” In her lauded book The Right to Sex, the Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan asks us to “consider the gay men who express delighted disgust at vaginas … Is this the expression of an innate, and thus permissible revulsion — or a learned and suspect misogyny?” It happens that one of my earliest memories of the terrifying recognition that I might be different from other boys transpired when one of my bunkmates at summer camp unveiled a nudie mag hidden beneath his bed. We all huddled around, and when he turned to the page on which the object of our desires spread her legs, I felt a pit in my stomach as my bunkmates erupted in cries of adolescent exaltation. I can assure Professor Srinivasan that the basis of my reaction to that photograph, which I understood immediately as something I needed to keep secret, and which became a source of shame for years, was the furthest thing from “learned.”
The conflation of gender nonconformity with transgenderism has predictably resulted in an explosion in the number of young people identifying as transgender. Many if not most of these children are likely to be gay. In 2021 a study of boys with gender dysphoria found only a 12.2% persistence rate, and of the 87.8% who desisted, 63.6% grew up to be gay. Placing gender dysphoric children on puberty blockers, while perhaps necessary for an extremely small number undergoing severe distress, disrupts the stage of human development when sexual orientation becomes recognizable. “Gender-affirming care” involves procedures that can lead to a lifetime of being unable to achieve orgasm, and in most cases results in sterilization. The not insignificant number of those who undergo transition only to regret it later, the growing constituency known as “detransitioners,” commonly cite internalized homophobia as the impetus for believing they were trans — the false hope that, by changing their sex, they could rid themselves of their unwanted same-sex attraction. Staff at the United Kingdom’s leading gender identity clinic for young people (recently forced to shut down following a government investigation which faulted it for rushing young people to transition) used to morbidly joke that, thanks to their work, “there would be no gay people left.”
More recently than we would care to admit, gay people were institutionalized, lobotomized, and subjected to electroshock therapy, all in the attempt to “make” them straight. Today the inhuman practice of “conversion therapy” is outlawed in many states, and rightfully so. But a similar campaign is afoot to conflate this discredited practice with talk therapy for gender dysphoria, so that a child’s assertion that they are transgender would be sufficient grounds to place them on the path to gender reassignment surgery. Under this dispensation, anything short of “affirming” a transgender child’s identity would be considered a human rights violation. According to the Human Rights Campaign, “being transgender is not a phase, and trying to dismiss it as such can be harmful,” a claim at odds with the available scientific research and the experiences of other advanced democracies such as Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, which have all imposed stricter standards for the disbursement of puberty blockers to gender dysphoric children.
Gays have for decades been falsely accused of trying to “convert” children to their “lifestyle.” Ironically, it is now gay children who, by having their gender nonconformity misdiagnosed as gender dysphoria, are most at risk of undergoing a new form of conversion therapy. For what else are we to call the phenomenon by which children who would otherwise grow up to be healthy gay adults are encouraged to undergo irreversible medical interventions? This is conversion therapy, progressive-style.
The long march of what Rubin calls “identity acquisition” has no end, and in their incessant quest for norms against which to rebel, the advocates of queerness invent ever more obscure identities to embrace. As being gay no longer carries the cachet that it once did in progressive spaces, and public figures such as Caitlyn Jenner demonstrate that even transgender people can be Republicans, the progressive avant-garde has had to create new categories on the outermost limits of the “charmed circle” through which to stake their claim on marginality, and thereby on virtue. hence the emergence of the latest boutique identity to fasten itself onto the LGBT community: nonbinary.
Adopted by those who identify as existing outside the gender binary, the term “nonbinary” actually reifies the system that it is meant to deconstruct. By anointing themselves the possessors of a special and exclusive status — those who are neither male nor female — the members of this caste, this sexual-social avant-garde, relegate the rest of us to a sort of gender purgatory. “In reality, everybody is non-binary,” explains the political philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper. “We all actively participate in some gender norms, passively acquiesce with others, and positively rail against others still. So to call oneself non-binary is in fact to create a new false binary. It also often seems to involve, at least implicitly, placing oneself on the more complex and interesting side of that binary, enabling the non-binary person to claim to be both misunderstood and politically oppressed by the binary cisgender people.”
But apart from the infinitesimally small number of people born with both male and female sex characteristics (known as intersex), the concept of nonbinary is nonsensical. It is not an orientation (like homosexuality) or a medical condition (like gender dysphoria), but a political statement. Literally embodying the triumph of gender over sex, it is the queering of the self. The illogicality of the proposition, and the details of its real-life consequences, do not trouble those promoting it. “Clark prefers they/them/he pronouns and would like to be known as my kid/my son who is nonbinary,” the mother of a nonbinary kindergartner announced in a social media post with the pride that one reserves for sharing the news of their child’s acceptance into Harvard. “My son who is nonbinary” is as paradoxical as “nonbinary lesbian,” considering that the definition of a lesbian is a woman attracted to other women.
Mimicking the work of gay historians who have endeavored to document the pervasiveness of homosexuality throughout the span of human existence, queer activists have ransacked the past for validation of their identities. The principal result of this revisionist project to “queer” history has been the erasure of gay people, and women. One can scarcely read about the Stonewall Uprising today without being informed that it was “trans women of color,” not gay men and lesbians, who led the revolt; the elevation of two figures in particular, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, can only be described as a form of secular apotheosis. The list of famous figures (almost all women) posthumously claimed as having been transgender or nonbinary meanwhile grows at an impressive clip. Queen Hatshepsut, Joan of Arc, Vita Sackville-West, Radclyffe Hall, Louisa May Alcott, Marlene Dietrich — all have been classified as either transgender men or nonbinary, as anything other than what they were: women. Apparently, because these women refused to conform to stereotypical notions of femininity, excelled at traditionally male pursuits, and exhibited character traits commonly associated with men (strength, outspokenness, ambition), they were not actually women. Such interpretations are deeply regressive, and downplay the pervasive sexism that motivated some women to unshackle themselves from oppressive gender roles.
In 2020, “to ensure all members of the LGBTQ community feel welcome,” the famed gay Chicago neighborhood of Boystown was renamed “Northalsted.” Last year, in an article about the legacy of West Side Story, a contributor to the New York Times denigrated this classic and moving work of Americana as the creation of “four white men,” their homosexuality (never mind their Jewishness) offering no exculpation for their part in the racist patriarchy. In progressive spaces today, there are few social offenses worse than “dead-naming” a transgender person — to identify them by their given name rather than their chosen one. We have yet to devise a neologism for the process by which women and gay people are being queered out of existence.
Walt Whitman rhapsodized about the “unifying force” of the “dear love of comrades,” and gay writers across the generations have expounded upon the egalitarian promise of same-sex love. Transcending all lines of race, class, nationality, and social caste, the gay community is, by nature, representative of the whole of mankind. One of the most enriching aspects of being gay is the ability to venture anywhere in the world — from the remotest hamlet to the most bustling city — and find one’s brothers and sisters. But queerness, with its relentless creation of new sexual and gender identities, seeks to atomize us, and rather than toppling hierarchies it inverts them. “Trans people are sacred,” declares Joan of Arc in a recent production at Shakespeare’s Globe in London that envisioned the titular character as nonbinary. “We are the divine.” Hypocritically for a movement purporting to be progressive, queerness is the ultimate status symbol of a new elite, signifying one’s place above the “cishet” (cisgender heterosexual) masses. “Gay is good,” Frank Kameny valiantly assured his fellow homosexuals. “Queer is better,” our new leaders glibly declare.
V
To understand where queerness inevitably leads, consider the case of Sam Brinton.
Until late last year, Brinton was the deputy assistant secretary of spent fuel and waste disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. What distinguished Brinton from being just another Washington bureaucrat with a highfalutin’ title was their (Brinton uses they/them/their pronouns) status as the “first openly genderfluid” employee of the federal government, “genderfluid” being a gender identity that changes over time. According to one website, the frequency of this variance “can be occasionally, every month, every week, every day, to even every few moments a day depending upon the person.”
Aside from nuclear waste, Brinton’s other passion is “pup play,” a type of sexual fetish whose devotees adorn themselves in leather outfits and perform the rituals of a dog and its master. We know this because Brinton spoke frequently in public venues about the most intimate details of his sex life, traveling the country to deliver seminars on subjects such as “Spanking: From Calculus To Chemistry.” Visiting the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for a lecture on kink in 2017, Brinton discussed “how he enjoys tying up his significant other like a table, and eating his dinner on him while he watches Star Trek.” (The article in which this description appears was published before Brinton “came out” as genderfluid, thus the use of the masculine pronoun). Brinton is also a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of drag queens who take on the personas of nuns, where he is known as “Sister Ray Dee O’Active.” At a “Lavender Mass” in 2021, Brinton sang a song in tribute to “Daddy Fauci.”
Prior to his appointment at the Department of Energy, Brinton had worked as a nuclear waste advisor in the Trump administration, and held a high-profile job with the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide prevention hotline. Brinton’s expertise in this latter effort was hard-earned: as a young boy he was sent by their parents to a conversion therapist whose ghastly course of treatment included “tiny needles being stuck into my fingers and then pictures of explicit acts between men would be shown and I’d be electrocuted.” As they would later recount in the New York Times, “the therapist ordered me bound to a table to have ice, heat and electricity applied to my body.” In 2014, Brinton testified about their ordeal before the United Nations Convention Against Torture, alongside the mother of Michael Brown and a former inmate at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay. Brinton’s status as a conversion therapy victim made them a star on the LGBTQ activism circuit, earning them a place on the red carpet at the Academy Awards in 2018.
In their adoption of an eccentric gender identity, and the flaunting of their sexual kinks, and their resistance against the normal, Brinton was the epitome of the “queer” public servant — the antithesis of “homonormative” Pete Buttigieg. On their first day of work, Brinton posted a photo of themselves on Instagram vamping for the camera resplendent in stiletto heels, bright red lipstick, and a crimson dress. We had come a long way from Frank Kameny telling his fellow Mattachine Society members marching outside the White House in 1965, “If you’re asking for equal employment rights, look employable.”
Yet just a few months into Brinton’s tenure, the wisdom of Kameny’s admonition was confirmed when Brinton was charged with felony theft for allegedly stealing a woman’s suitcase worth $2,325 from a carousel at Minneapolis Airport. A few weeks later Brinton was again charged with theft for absconding with a woman’s bag in Las Vegas. After the Department of Energy fired Brinton, their status as a “survivor” of conversion therapy was called into question. According to a leading anti-conversion therapy activist, Brinton had refused to tell him either the name of their therapist or the clinic where their supposed torture occurred, making them, in the words of the activist, “the only survivor of conversion therapy I’ve encountered since 1998” to withhold such information. In light of this record, many of the other claims Brinton had made during their time in the limelight — that they had advised Michelle Obama on her footwear, or that they had secured a clause in their government contract releasing them from having to be in the same room as Mike Pence — began to look, well, queer.
In struggling for the right to serve their country, all that gay people ever asked for was to be treated equally. They did not insist upon different codes of dress or standards of conduct, nor did they feel the exhibitionistic need to share their sexual proclivities in public. (Indeed, it was the false perception of them as sex-obsessed that gay people had to overcome). The basis upon which gay people were discriminated — homosexuality — is an immutable trait, not a novel and freely chosen identity that changes by the hour. That Brinton was a suspect character ought to have been obvious long before they were promoted by the LGBTQ movement as a spokesperson, or hired by the federal government as a trailblazer for civil rights. But by 2022, no one in the LGBTQ movement, or in the leadership of a Democratic presidential administration, would state the obvious. And how could they? Queer had triumphed over gay. I gather that the reaction to the Brinton affair among the vast majority of gay people was similar to what every day Muslims feel following a terrorist attack. Where are the moderate gay leaders willing to come out and say that homosexuality is a religion of peace?
The words that oppressed groups choose to describe themselves are an indicator of their inner condition, of their self-respect or their lack of it. The words are synecdoches, informing us about how a group’s members perceive themselves and what they aspire to be. “Gay” was proclaimed with pride, and with the aspiration that a group of marginalized people might be recognized as part of the human whole. “Queer” is shouted with rejection, and the resigned expectation — the hope, even — that its adherents will remain forever on the margins. Queer has no faith in tolerance; on the contrary, it despises the concept as synonymous with sufferance. In its refusal to take yes for an answer, an essential avowal for any member of a minority group who gains the right to live equally in a free and open society, queerness is undoing decades of incontrovertible progress. It is a refusal to accept acceptance.
In America, being an individual and being a part of the mainstream are not antithetical propositions. For minority groups in Europe, the process of emancipation, the granting of recognition and rights, was conditional on the abandonment of difference. In America, no such grubby exchange is required. Here assimilation is not the same as homogenization. There is indeed a beautiful tradition of otherness in being gay, and one still comes across gay people who affectingly mourn what they feel has been lost with the triumph of gay equality and the mainstreaming of gay life. They resent the expectation that they should straighten up and get married and present themselves like Pete Buttigieg, and they speak with a sense of nostalgic sorrow about the rites and rituals of the old gay subculture. They endured discrimination, but they knew happiness. They miss the thrill of being a sexual outlaw, the feeling that they are getting away with something of which society disapproves. This sentiment is found almost exclusively among gay men of an older generation (lesbians being far too practical for such indulgences). But the important point is this: gay people can be gay in any way they wish to be gay. Otherness — or alterity, as the theorists like to say — does not need to be surrendered in exchange for acceptance.
Most gay people have no interest being conscripted into a furious ideological battering ram against bourgeois values, the sex binary, and the societal mainstream, and if the attempt to associate them with such a dead-end project succeeds, it will not be on their account. It will succeed because the forces of reaction, working in perverse synergy with the forces of queerness, make it so. At a time when reactionary homophobia is enjoying a resurgence, queerness plays directly into its hands. If the values represented by “LGBTQ” come to be seen by a majority of the public as hostile to their own — rather than as a confirmation of those values, which is what the older generation of gay activists, the valiant heroes of our cause, insisted — then gay people will suffer the consequences. It is long past time to recognize queerness for what it has become: a parasite on the gay rights movement, and on gay identity itself. Successive generations of gay men and women did not survive social ostracism, medicalized torture, governmental oppression, and a deadly plague only for the beneficiaries of their sacrifice to go back to being queers. 
