Pride and Other Problems
Over the years, I have watched with an ever-growing astonishment how homosexuality is represented in media, in popular culture, and in the arts and social sciences. What began as mild unease has gradually curdled into something sharper — outright indignation, accompanied by the isolating suspicion that I may be one of the very few people who finds any of this offensive, or even simply off. My own ideas about how homosexuality is perceived and lived have rarely coincided with the prevailing ones, and I have long since stopped expecting them to. What I did not anticipate was how little room would remain for that divergence — how thoroughly the subject would lose the quality of distance it once had, becoming instead something inescapable, performed, and demanded. What I find most remarkable, still, is how few gay people dare to say so.
That people without a gay identity stay silent on these matters is, in one sense, inevitable. We live in a culture where almost any form of criticism can be labeled homophobia, and where that label is designed to end conversation rather than advance it. Historically, perhaps, one can see how this reflex developed. But it has long since stopped serving the purpose it once did, and the culture has not caught up. Whenever the topic arises, I get the impression that everyone — activists, journalists, well-meaning liberals — is still living somewhere in the 1950s, conducting an argument against enemies who have largely vanished. According to the self-appointed spokespeople of the so-called "gay community," homophobia is perpetually worsening, or at least on the rise again — if not here at home, then certainly in the rest of the world. A claim confirmed neither by official statistics nor, in my experience, by anything resembling lived reality. Yet it circulates endlessly, repeated with the confidence of those who have never been asked to back it up.
My experience tells a different story—though I have learned to offer this carefully, since personal testimony is immediately suspect when it fails to confirm the expected narrative. What I can say is this: I do not myself experience homophobia in any meaningful sense, and when I ask others who insist they do to share a specific example, what follows is usually illuminating. Most often I am met with an indignant look—the look of someone who cannot believe the question is being asked, as though the persecution must be so obvious that requesting evidence is itself a provocation. Or, after some hesitation, an experience is produced that barely merits the weight it is being asked to carry: Someone once spat in my face. Perhaps it happened. Perhaps it meant something. But a single ambiguous incident, dragged out to stand for an entire social condition, tells us more about the desire for victimhood than about the reality of discrimination.
This is the pattern that troubles me most: the elevation of marginal, sometimes invented, or at least unverified experiences into defining social truths. People want to hold on to a culture of persecution, long after the conditions that produced it have substantially changed. I have never seen myself as a victim or as part of an oppressed minority. I did not grow up with that self-conception, and I have never found it useful or honest. Nor did the people I surrounded myself with—people I assumed would be capable of a clearer view—seem to need it. And yet even among them, the narrative holds. Every time I have honestly tried to locate what I have failed to see, I have come away more rather than less certain about my original intuitions.
Those intuitions have not softened with time. If anything, watching what has unfolded in the last decade has made them harder and more specific. What I see now—the confident enforcement of a single acceptable story, the imposition of identities onto those who did not ask for them, the breathtaking certainty with which positions are held and critics are dispatched—these things already irritated me when they were in their early, milder forms. They irritated me then because they were intellectually dishonest. They trouble me now for a more serious reason: they are doing real harm, and that harm is becoming difficult to name because the language available for naming it has been captured by those causing it.
I have come to suspect, too, that the insistence on victimhood and heroism serves a concealing function. Behind the noise of activism and moral urgency, something quieter is being hidden: a culture that has become, in certain of its expressions, narcissistic and exhibitionist; relations that are sometimes exploitative; behaviors that occasionally cross into something that deserves to be called abuse or crime. I do not say this to be sensational. I say it because I think the compulsive emphasis on external enemies—homophobes, bigots, the structurally hostile society—makes it much harder to look honestly at what goes on inside. The simpler explanation for the noise is not always the more flattering one.
The essays collected here are my attempt to name what I think many people sense but hesitate to say. I am not offering a new orthodoxy to replace the old one. What I am offering is a kind of sanity check — particularly for those gay people who find themselves exhausted by the loudest voices claiming to speak in their name, who feel that something is being demanded of them that they did not agree to, and who have privately wondered whether their hesitation makes them the problem.
I am not writing as an academic, and I am not interested in mimicking academic authority. We live in a culture where academic discourse is treated as a privileged form of truth, where credentials function as passes, and where certain scholars—especially in the fields clustered around gender—seem to have confused expertise with moral standing. I am not asking for their permission. I write from experience, from observation, from thought, and from the stubborn conviction that clarity is possible and worth pursuing even without the apparatus of theory. Perhaps especially without it.
Much of what I want to say has become hard to express because the language available for it has, to no small extent, been bent out of shape. Words that once served to clarify now function as weapons or slogans. Concepts expand until they are so large they cover everything and explain nothing. Disagreement is treated not as a position to be engaged but as a symptom to be diagnosed—evidence of phobia, shame, or bad faith. When that is the conversational standard, nuance does not merely become difficult; it becomes suspect. A person may have aesthetic objections, moral reservations, or simply a different sensibility—and still be neither a bigot nor someone in denial. Yet the prevailing discourse leaves very little room for this, because leaving room for it would complicate the story.
I use the phrase "gay community" throughout these pages, but I use it with deliberate caution. What is called a community often functions more like a political party: a structure that rewards loyalty, punishes deviation, and produces spokespeople whose authority is rarely examined. This is not the result of any conspiracy. It is simply what happens when a group organizes itself around a grievance and never revises the terms of that grievance as circumstances change. The gatekeepers—gay media, the activists who orbit it, the cultural figures who validate it—tend toward the superficial, the vulgar, and the relentlessly moralizing. They operate in alliance with the incentives of contemporary identity politics: outrage, spectacle, simplification, an unrelenting sense of emergency — and no small amount of personal ambition and advancement. There is very little appetite among them for modesty, privacy, or pluralism—and yet those are precisely the values that gay life, at its best, has always depended on.
There is also the matter of American influence. In Europe, the tradition around citizenship and equality carries its own history, its own specific weight. The language of rights that now dominates these discussions does not emerge from that tradition; it arrives from across the Atlantic, as a kind of rhetorical transplant, borrowed from a different legal and cultural context and applied without much attention to whether it fits. The result is a politics that often feels more like a performance of an imported American script than a genuine engagement with local reality.
These pages are not written for the people most invested in that script. They are written for readers who still have an instinct for reality — who notice, even without being able to fully articulate why, that something is off; who suspect the official account is misrepresenting or missing something important; and who have not yet been convinced that their suspicion is itself a form of prejudice. If these pages provoke irritation in some readers, I accept that. If they provoke recognition in others, that is what I am hoping for.
Attempts have been made to criticise the people and ideas I take issue with here, and they have not always served the cause well. More serious critics find it hard to express themselves with precision, easily get caught up in their own contradictions — they want to hold on to a gay identity, but resist what that identity has become — or fall back on simplifications that are too easy to dismiss.
And then there are those of a different kind entirely — louder, cruder — who claim that behind the idea of Pride and its expansion into gender politics lurks the normalisation of paedophilia. That is not criticism. It is a slander that discredits everyone who has legitimate questions, and it lets the people who should be challenged off the hook entirely. You do not need to resort to such extremes to find fault with what is happening. The problems are visible enough without inventing monsters.