INTRO: IDENTITY CONFUSION
The other day at the gym a guy came in. He was tiny in height, but toned and dry. He was wearing stylish green shorts and a white tank top. His entire body was covered in beautiful colored tattoos. It looked both manly and extremely stylish. Besides that, he looked polished, sporty, highly attractive, and intimidating. He was clearly showing off his body - but it worked.
He walked in, scanned the room, and immediately started performing. He did a bit of calisthenics, some kettlebell work - clean, controlled, effortless, like he barely had to try. And then, as if that was all he came for, he left again after twenty minutes. A group of teenage boys who'd been staring at him were left behind in awe.
He had not come there to work out in any ordinary sense. He had come to appear. That was what made the impression so curious to me. The thought arrived almost before I could censor it: this man did not register to me as a homosexual at all, yet he was unmistakably gay. Not in the flattened modern sense of the word, but in an older and more elusive one.
What struck me in that moment was not merely a private association, but a distinction language has made increasingly hard to express. The available words now force together things that, in experience, do not always belong together: sexual preference, public identity, cultural style, political affiliation, and social belonging. The man at the gym made that confusion visible because he seemed to possess many of the qualities without necessarily possessing the defining one.
This brief one-man performance stood in sharp contrast to the all-pervasive language of community that has come into fashion around gay culture over the past decade. The language surrounding Pride events is revealing. Pride Amsterdam states that “we as the LGBTQIA+ community need to make our voices heard in a visible and combative way.” Its Arts & Culture program offers the formula almost too neatly when it says that “identity, freedom and community come together.”
Whenever homosexuality is treated as a communal experience, I’ve always felt a certain unease. To me, it has always been something highly personal in essence: intimate, particular, and not easily transferred from one life to another. I have always resisted the idea that identity results naturally from same-sex desire. Yet that very assumption is now central to the way the word gay is used, which has come to mean two different things.
On the one hand, it now refers to the prevailing identity attached to the sexual “orientation.” The word community reinforces this by assuming that identity and belonging follow naturally from sexuality. On the other hand, as I use the word, gay refers to something else: a sensibility, a style, and a standing in relation to the world — something closer to a metaphysical orientation. The great confusion of the modern gay identity lies in the assumption that sexual preference and this sensibility come as a package deal. I doubt that they do.
At forty-four, I am old enough to remember a time when the relation between these things still seemed looser, more varied, and more interesting than the official language now allows. The gay identity was already there, of course, but it did not yet feel so coercive, and it was not something gay people seemed to take quite so seriously. What has gradually emerged instead is a more rigid formation, shaped largely by media culture, political activism, academic interpretation, corporate institutions, and the class of professional spokespeople attached to the so-called community: homosexuality incorporated into a wider identity organized around visibility, representation, political activism, and public belonging.
The modern identity often presents itself not merely as a way of describing a sexual reality — and, for non-gays, almost as a user manual — but as a claim: a claim to specialness, to moral authority, and at times to exemption from ordinary criticism. Under those conditions, judgment becomes difficult. Behaviors that ought to remain open to scrutiny are instead normalized, excused, or defended in the name of the identity to which they have been attached.
What is strange is that this collectivized identity rests on remarkably shallow grounds. A sexual preference alone cannot bear the weight now placed upon it. It draws moral force from elsewhere, above all from the language of injury, exclusion, and victimhood.
The paradox is that the more homosexuality is accepted, the less one would expect that kind of language to dominate. Yet it often grows louder. That suggests the injury in question does not lie only, perhaps not even mainly, in social rejection. It has become part of the structure of the identity itself: a source of meaning, cohesion, and authority.
This essay is my attempt to describe homosexuality the way I came to understand it - first in myself, later in the world around me - and to show how that understanding changed over time. It is also an attempt to examine the assumptions that now surround the modern gay identity, the ideas that sustain it, and the sources from which it draws its peculiar force and authority. I did not inherit my view from a handbook, an activist script, or an academic theory; I had to build it from experience, observation, and the ever-growing irritation of realizing that the official language never quite fit.
Over time that irritation has turned into something sharper: anger at the ever-growing machinery of display that now surrounds it all. Under the banners of visibility, pride, and representation, a highly personal matter is pressed into public form again and again, until identity itself begins to stiffen into a suffocating form of conformity. And that conformity is often mistaken for liberation and freedom.
The damage is not merely linguistic. People are pushed to recognize themselves in a formula that may have very little to do with how they actually live, express their desire, or understand themselves. They are made to answer for a public culture they may neither recognize nor wish to defend.
The discourse on homosexuality is one in which academics, political activists, and professional spokespeople have far too much influence. They do not merely describe the gay culture; they increasingly administer its meaning. I refuse to outsource the meaning I give it to these people - and I hope others won't either.
A confusing terminology has helped make it possible to turn a sexual reality into a dominant identity. This identity produces a shallow culture with ready-made scripts - a worldview - that kills the very purpose and role gay culture traditionally had, and alienates the very people it claims to represent.
EARLY EXPERIENCES
By early puberty, my sexuality already had a clear direction. I was well aware of it, without being troubled by it in the slightest. I don't remember lying in bed at night thinking, "If only I were different." I didn't experience it as guilt, or as a corruption of my character, or as a moral shortcoming that demanded healing. Sometimes I wondered, almost casually, whether it might be a passing thing, though even that thought wasn't anxious; it was simply the mind testing possibilities. It did not preoccupy me. It was simply there, and I treated it as something very private rather than something I needed to share with others.
What changed for me — around the age of sixteen — was not the desire itself but the atmosphere around it. I began to notice homosexuality being spoken of and shown more openly in pop culture: still rarely, still tentatively — awkward, still charged, but no longer unthinkable. And something clicked in me then: “So this is what you call what I’m doing … and maybe it is something I can be open about — maybe even something I can own with a certain sense of confidence and style.”
I had always felt different for many reasons, long before I became aware of my sexuality, and I had endured the loneliness and intensity that difference brings. In that context my homosexuality did not feel like a wound that required healing; it felt like a reward — almost a crown — an unexpected affirmation that my outsiderhood was not merely a burden but could become a source of joy, even a form of power. That, ultimately, was the motivation behind wanting to be open about it.
Even though I never felt the need to make my homosexuality a secret, I also never felt the need to turn it into a grand proclamation, let alone an all-consuming lifestyle — or something I constantly needed to be confronted with or reminded of. For me it was primarily about sexuality, and then the practical problem of how to live that reality in the world: how to find sexual partners, how to make friends, and how to find a boyfriend. Going out to gay places wasn't some political statement or identity ritual. I simply had to leave the house if I wanted some fun.
The gay men I met gave form to something I had already sensed. Many were like me: ordinary, self-possessed, socially unembarrassed, and far removed from the familiar caricature one had been taught to associate with the word gay. They did not present themselves as representatives of anything. They simply lived their sexuality without turning it into something larger than it was. Looking back, I think we belonged — without quite knowing it — to a particular form of gay life at the end of the 1990s: openly homosexual, socially at ease, and yet almost entirely uninterested in turning sexuality into an ideology, let alone a religion.
People like me saw our sexuality as something we owned, not something we necessarily associated with the word pride, although that term was already floating around everywhere. Even then, I felt a certain resistance to it — a resistance I never entirely lost. The gays I knew wanted to go out to have fun; talk of political issues or about suppression was not something people I knew engaged in.
Many of my friends were often strikingly unsetimental about their sexuality. By the end of the 1990s, for them as for me, there was often no rational reason to hide it any longer. To do so felt ridiculous, even childish. That was a large part of the atmosphere of the time. One could still face some disapproval, of course. Some of my friends had even served in the army. Others had parents who disliked it intensely. Even so, it was no reason to hide it. In company one mentioned it once, and that was it. Nothing dramatic.
There is nothing historically exceptional about men like that. Gays like that must have always existed. There were always men who had no personal issues with their sexuality from an early age — men for whom it was not a “problem” in the psychological or moral sense, but simply a fact of life. One must have such an attitude to have the audacity to form a network. Sexual needs are not enough to do that. Desire alone does not build an underground; a certain natural ease with oneself does.
The miniseries Fellow Travelers (Showtime, 2023), set largely in the 1950s, gives a very good account of this. It shows that there was always this underground - and that it was held up by exactly that kind of attitude. You see men who are careful, yes, but not shattered; discreet, yes, but not confused about what they want. The network exists because people already have enough inner permission to seek each other out, to return, to recognize each other, to create routines and places.
It's a reminder that "being in the closet" is often just a modern insult for what used to be a practical way of living, and that there have always been homosexual men who lived their reality without turning it into a total identity and a hunger for recognition.
At nineteen, when I moved to a larger place with a more developed gay nightlife, I noticed that the local gay and lesbian association had already begun to lose its function. The parties it organized, especially for young people, were no longer drawing many visitors. There was simply less need for them. The scene for younger people had moved elsewhere: into bars, clubs, private circles, and the more casual networks of ordinary nightlife.
FINDING A LANGUAGE
I have never entirely lost a certain unease about having to reveal my sexuality to other people. I simply do not like the almost constant expectation that one must declare it. That led to some awkward situations. I usually do not tell people much that is personal about myself, and so when people discovered I had a male partner, some felt almost betrayed. Sexuality is often expected to be revealed early on. At times, non-disclosure has been treated as a form of deception.
What bothered me was not merely the awkwardness of those situations, but the assumption behind them: that sexuality disclosed something essential about the person, and therefore had to be declared. I did not yet have a proper language for resisting that assumption, even though I felt the resistance clearly. Homosexuality was real enough: a pattern of sexual attraction and acts, a private and enduring reality, but not an identity that had to organize my entire self-understanding.
As a student, I became familiar with ideas about my sexuality that helped me make sense of this instinct. They did not create the thought in me; they clarified something I already felt. They gave me a language for resisting the idea that homosexuality had to become an identity.
I found that clarity in writers like Gore Vidal, who seemed almost like the last living defender of that distinction: the refusal to convert acts into a total identity. “There is no such thing as a homosexual person, there are only homosexual acts.” I have always understood what he meant by that. It is something one does, not something one is. In him, it was a refusal of recruitment: one could live a certain way without turning it into a public role, a creed, or a political allegiance.
Vidal’s insistence on this distinction has to be read against the background of the post-Stonewall developments of the 1960s and 1970s. As homosexuality was increasingly turned into a public identity, a political cause, and a community one was expected to join, Vidal rejected the entire movement of thought behind it.
“They say sexual activity is the equivalent of human identity. What a crazy notion,” he said late in life. Elsewhere he put the same refusal even more broadly: “There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.” He was not merely refusing a word. He was rejecting the conversion of sexual conduct into a social destiny.
What is almost horrifying is the way academics — and the usual self-appointed spokespeople of the so-called community — continue to attack Vidal for his supposed hypocrisy. How could a man live with a man for much of his life and still refuse to call himself gay? To me, that refusal was perfectly understandable.
Jay Parini, Vidal’s friend and biographer, suggested that Vidal’s refusal to think of himself as “a gay guy” made him “self-hating,” asking, “How could he despise gays as much as he did?” In a review of Tim Teeman’s In Bed with Gore Vidal, Vidal’s same-sex desire is described as “a problem he worked out so torturously.” Andrew O’Hehir, reviewing the documentary Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, describes Vidal as shaped by “privilege, oppression and the refined self-hatred of pre-Stonewall gay identity.”
That is exactly the interpretive trap Vidal resisted. The refusal to adopt the identity is immediately translated into evidence of damage. What cannot be admitted is the simpler possibility: that he meant what he said.
Part of this refusal seems to have come from Vidal’s long preoccupation with the classical world. Edmund White has suggested that Vidal was “deeply grounded by research in the classical period,” and that ancient Greece helped shape his resistance to modern sexual labels.
The classical world offered Vidal something useful: a historical reminder that sexual acts, even when tolerated, have not always been organized into the fixed identities modern people now take for granted.
Vidal did not want to be made into a gay icon. He actively refused to appear on the covers of gay magazines. He wanted to be known as a writer, not as a so-called “gay writer.” What, after all, did his historical novels, his political essays, or his writing religion and sex have to do with his sexuality or his way of life? To him, his private life had very little, if anything, to do with his work or his public persona. He seemed horrified by the direction in which all of this was heading.
Men like Vidal belonged to the generation of my grandparents, born roughly a hundred years ago. His way of thinking was not unusual among men of that generation. To me, that older generation — whatever its constraints — often had a healthier relation to same-sex desire than the one that dominates today. I still think that.
There is an important distinction that has largely disappeared from how people talk about this subject. Homosexuality as sexual acts and homosexuality as identity have become almost impossible to separate in people’s minds. When people say things like “he is in the closet” or “he is a homophobe,” what they often mean is simply this: he does not accept the identity now attached to the sexuality.
One of the familiar claims of what is commonly referred to as “the gay community” is that being gay is not a choice. If by that one means same-sex attraction, the slogan is probably right — although one can choose whether or not to act on one’s sexual impulses. Adopting the sexual identity, however, is a choice, whether its defenders like it or not. Once acts and identity are confused — fused, if you will — that distinction becomes almost unsayable: the moment one refuses the identity, one is treated as if one were refusing the sexual reality itself.
The conflation of acts and identity did not come from nowhere. It belongs to a modern way of thinking in which sex is no longer treated merely as appetite, temptation, pleasure, sin, or habit, but as evidence of the kind of person one is. Michel Foucault captured this shift when he wrote that “the nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood,” and that “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” The word homosexual itself belongs to that late nineteenth-century world of medicine, law enforcement, and classification, where sexual acts were gradually redescribed as character, disposition, and type.
The decisive shift was not merely that society became more tolerant or more repressive. It was that sex became biographical. It was made to explain the person. Foucault’s point was precisely that sexuality became something through which modern people were asked to understand themselves, confess the truth about themselves, and be understood by others. Once that happens, homosexuality can no longer remain merely something one does, or even something one repeatedly wants and seeks. It becomes something one is expected to be.
What people now find almost impossible to grasp is that the sex and the identity are not necessarily the same thing. They became difficult to separate because modern society taught people to fuse acts, desire, social role, and public declaration into one package.
Once sexuality began to function as a way of explaining the person — a function it has only assumed more forcefully over time — expectations followed. One was no longer expected merely to live in a certain way, but to adopt the language, role, and public meaning that supposedly matched it. Refusal could then be read as concealment. Yet homosexual worlds must have existed long before this modern compulsion to turn a sex into identity.
Identity does not merely classify; it collectivizes. It suggests that those who share a sexual preference must also share a common inner life, a common language, and even a common destiny. Homosexuality does not distribute meaning so neatly. Sexuality may shape one man’s life profoundly and hardly shape another’s at all. For one it opens a world; for another it remains a minor fact of life. For one it becomes an entire lifestyle; for another, just a form of pleasure. That, too, is part of what gets lost once identity takes over.
There were times when collective action was needed, when homosexuals were being excluded, treated as ill, or even criminalized. That does not mean that homosexuality as such requires permanent activism, visibility, representation, or political management. Much of that supposed necessity is exaggerated. Indeed, manufactured urgency has itself become one of the main justifications for building and maintaining the gay collective.
The confusion is also linguistic. Not only acts and identity have been fused; so have the words homosexual and gay. They are now used as synonyms, as if they named the same reality. I do not think they do. Once they are treated as interchangeable, the modern gay identity becomes much harder to resist. The linguistic confusion gives it extra force. Until that confusion is resolved, it is difficult to think clearly about any of this.
BECOMING GAY
The confusion has only deepened under the wider LGBTQ+ umbrella. Homosexuality is still named, but increasingly in a language that makes it harder to recognize on its own terms. Even the simple idea of being drawn to one’s own sex is often translated into the language of gender, as if homosexuality itself had to be softened, expanded, or absorbed into something more current. In that wider vocabulary, homosexuality remains present as a word, but begins to disappear as a distinct reality.
Some would argue that queer is simply gay made broader — gay for more people, including people who are not homosexual. In practice, that is exactly the problem: queer has become a widened, transferable version of gayness — gayness detached from homosexuality.
Another author from Vidal’s generation brings the problem of naming such things into sharper focus: James Baldwin. He had always resisted being reduced to a racial representative; he continued to call himself an “American writer” rather than a “Black writer.” In a similar way, he felt uneasy about the newer sexual and identity vocabulary.
In a 1984 interview, Baldwin made clear that the word gay did not sit easily with him and that he had “never understood exactly what is meant by it.” Speaking about the gay community of his day, he added: “I simply feel it’s a world that has very little to do with me, with where I did my growing up.” Elsewhere in the same conversation he said: “The people who were my lovers, well, the word ‘gay’ wouldn’t have meant anything to them.” The available words were not meaningless, but they were too small, too incomplete for the experience they were supposed to describe.
My own understanding of gayness came to me much later, and it had almost nothing to do with sex. It came from other people, after the age of thirty. They would say things like, “He is so gay,” not necessarily as an accusation, but as a kind of shorthand, as if they were pointing to something obvious that I myself had not realized. My gayness, in that sense, had to be pointed out to me.
What I gradually came to see, however, was that this “gayness” was not the prescribed identity now attached to homosexuality. Being gay, in the sense that finally became clear to me, was a sensibility: an attitude toward life and toward the prevailing morals of society; a slight subversiveness, an instinctive refusal to belong too easily. It could imply an alternative way of living, not because it dictated one, but because it carried an outsider’s angle on the world.
And insofar as it is an identity at all, it is, to me, precisely that: an outsider identity — not a credential, not a banner, not a place in the procession.
Once one becomes aware of that sensibility, another quality comes into view: a heightened sensitivity not only to beauty and absurdity, but to the moral atmosphere itself. Gayness, for me, has always seemed to move between radiance and shadow, between the innocent and the forbidden, between charm and danger.
The bright - joy, lightness, play, innocence, charm. The dark - transgression, darkness, excess, the pull toward what society forbids and then privately craves. The point here is not that gays are at the same time saints or monsters; the point is that gayness often lives closer to certain polarities, is more attuned to them, and more exposed to them. It moves, almost naturally, in that charged space where innocence and transgression touch - and it is in that tension that gayness has always operated.
Precisely because gayness lives so close to those polarities, it has often involved, for me, mixed feelings about my own sexuality. It operates on a spectrum between two poles. On one side there is something joyful and life-affirming: wit, play, glamour, a lightness that can feel like freedom. On the other side there is a darker pole — marked by doubt, fear, secrecy, sometimes even self-contempt or despair.
Not because homosexuality is necessarily “bad,” but because sexuality is rarely a simple matter. It touches freedom, vulnerability, intimacy, pride, exposure, and the wish to remain private. It can be a source of joy and unease, of confidence and reserve, sometimes at the same time. Most lives move between these extremes, sometimes shifting over time, sometimes carrying both at once.
The modern identity-conscious homosexual cannot tolerate this polarity any longer. The shadow side of his sexuality does not exist to him. And to the extent that he's aware of it, outwardly he must display the bright side. The rainbow frenzy, the growing number of visibility rituals, and the omnipresence of the Pride flag — all of which have spiraled in recent years — are partly due to that form of denial.
The old spectrum has almost completely been cast aside by a new polarity: you either hide your sexuality or declare it publicly. As if the only meaningful question were whether one declares oneself and becomes visible, as if one’s entire moral status depended on announcing oneself loudly enough. In that frame, discretion about sex is treated as pathology and the need for privacy as dishonesty. All nuance has disappeared. And the result is a new kind of pressure: not the old pressure to suppress, but the modern pressure to perform openness.
Being Gay, as I mean it here, should not be confused either with homosexuality as such or with mere nonconformity. Not every homosexual is gay in this sense. A man may be exclusively attracted to other men and still lack this particular sensibility: this angle on life, this mixture of outsiderhood, irony, and heightened attunement.
The opposite confusion is just as common now: the idea, beloved of queer theory and its popular imitators, that every outsider, eccentric, or misfit is somehow already “gay” or queer. That seems to me false as well. Gayness is not just a synonym for strangeness or not fitting in, nor does every form of difference translate into sexual deviance. It has its own shape, its own atmosphere, and its own history.
I mean a particular sensibility that may historically have grown around homosexual life: a certain irony, a certain distance from ordinary moral seriousness, a sharper eye for absurdity, form, role-playing, and hypocrisy. One sees it in very different figures.
In Gore Vidal it appears as wit, detachment, and a refusal of recruitment. In Oscar Wilde, as stylization, play, provocation, and charm. In Omar Little, the gay character from The Wire (HBO, 2002), it appears in a darker register: the criminal as outsider, loner, code-bound figure, theatrical presence, and moral distance from the crowd. And then there are counter-figures like David Fisher from Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001), who are useful precisely because they show the limit of the equation: a man may be homosexual without naturally falling into the public script of gayness at all.
Gayness is not an essence and not a checklist; it is a family resemblance historically formed in and around homosexual worlds.
The historian David M. Halperin suggests that gayness is, at least in large part, acquired through transmission. In How to Be Gay, he argues that same-sex desire alone does not make a man gay; gayness also involves a way of relating to the world, learned from other gay men. I would not simply adopt that view. It makes gayness sound too much like a cultural curriculum — which, to some extent, it may be — but it points to something important: gayness is not identical with homosexuality. It has to do with style, recognition, and a particular way of seeing.
The words homosexual and gay are now used almost interchangeably. Gay has almost completely replaced homosexual, and I cannot change that. But to me they never meant the same thing. If the terms were mine to choose, I would not even call the prescribed identity of the day the gay identity, but the homosexual identity. That would be more accurate.
What is now dominant is not gayness come into its own, but homosexuality reorganized as public identity under the conditions of media culture, activism, and institutional repetition. Being gay, as I understand it, was never primarily about joining the center, speaking in its official tones, or becoming one of its moral ornaments. It belonged to another sphere: more marginal, more ironic, more private, more resistant to collective simplification. What one can witness now is not the triumph of gayness, but its displacement by a public identity centered on sexual preference — one that can be administered, performed, and endlessly reproduced.
Gay, as I use the word, refers to something harder to define. It names a way of standing in relation to the world: stylized, ironic, alert to beauty and absurdity, and resistant to ordinary forms of belonging. Precisely for that reason, it is not something one can simply claim for oneself. To call oneself gay in this older, richer sense too easily is highly presumptuous. It treats as a self-description something that must in some sense show itself, or be recognized, rather than merely declared in the confession ritual known as “coming out.”
Modern culture tends to assume that every homosexual already partakes in the full meaning and prestige of gayness. The homosexual is no longer merely someone with a certain sexual reality but is quietly credited with a whole cluster of flattering attributes — sensitivity, style, outsider depth, moral insight, even a kind of cultural radiance.
One sees this presumption in the rhetoric of authenticity surrounding Pride events. There is a lot of talk about a world in which everyone can be their “authentic self,” while prominent gay figures like Carson Kressley says that one is most successful as one’s “most authentic version” and insists that therefore “it’s very important to have visibility.” The implication is telling. In this rhetoric, the gay identity is not treated merely as a name for a sexual reality, but as something that is expected to confer a fuller relation to oneself: greater authenticity, greater self-knowledge, and a more exemplary courage in appearing before others. A gay man is an enlightened homosexual; not simply someone with a certain desire, but someone already much closer to truth.
What is known as “the gay identity” does not merely classify, or even collectivize; it sanctifies. It turns a sexual fact into something socially elevated, as if homosexuality itself conferred a richer personality, a finer sensibility, or a deeper inner life. That confusion is flattering to many people, but it does not make it any less false.
I do not regard the word homosexual as outdated or improper, simply because it has a controversial or shady history attached to it. It remains a useful term if one wants to speak plainly about a sexual reality, even if not in all contexts.
A related term reveals the same confusion: the commonly used phrase “the gay community” quietly presupposes, beneath the surface, a distinction it usually denies. Those who invoke it cannot merely mean homosexuals as such, since they themselves know perfectly well that not all homosexuals are gay in the fuller sense. What they usually have in mind is a more elevated type: people thought to possess not only the sexual reality, but also a superior moral and cultural consciousness — politically progressive, at least when it comes to “gay issues,” sexually enlightened and liberated, and for that reason supposedly more alert to the injustices and hypocrisies of society. That, in the end, is what the sexualization of visibility is mostly about.
The language of community therefore conceals a hierarchy, and with it an exclusion. It divides homosexuals into those who are seen as fully formed, conscious, and somehow enriched by their sexuality, and those who are merely homosexual. The latter are not always explicitly cast out, but they are quietly devalued: treated as sexually limited, morally less evolved, psychologically stuck, somewhat repressed, often faintly ridiculous — the sort of people one is expected to pity, patronize, or dismiss.
The distinction between the two becomes even clearer with the queer and gender turn. On the one hand, homosexuals who lack the approved sensibility are quietly pushed to the margins. On the other, one is increasingly asked to accept that people may be regarded as gay (called Queer now) without being homosexual at all. The result is a strange inversion: homosexuality no longer secures entry into the gay or queer community, while gayness is extended far beyond homosexuality.
An important reason why I am writing on this subject is to keep apart things that are now constantly fused. Being gay — and even being homosexual — is not the same thing as accepting the dominant, almost compulsory identity now attached to homosexuality. That identity is far more than a label. It provides a whole script: how to conduct oneself in public, what attitudes to display, what causes to attach oneself to, and, above all, where one’s allegiances are expected to lie. The two are now constantly mixed up, but they are not the same, and much of my experience has consisted in learning to keep them apart.
The identity has become potent not only because it provides a script, but also because it offers a form of belonging beyond national boundaries. It is transnational. It is portable. One can cross borders and still enter the same symbolic world: the same flags, the same language of authenticity and visibility, the same assumptions about oppression, liberation, and pride. One can see here the global outlook of the political project attached to it: homosexuality is to be made legible everywhere through the same language of identity, rights, visibility, representation, and liberation. In that sense it offers something older forms of belonging often cannot: immediate recognition without much shared history. It promises entry into a community that seems at once intimate and cosmopolitan.
For those who may feel estranged from nation, family, church, or local custom, that can be immensely seductive. It does not merely name a sexual reality; it offers a ready-made form of belonging, one that flatters the person who adopts it by making him feel at once more modern, more enlightened, and less provincial than the worlds he came from.
Same-sex attraction and homosexuality, too, are easily treated as interchangeable words. Same-sex attraction can be a passing thing, a situational curiosity, a weak or intermittent inclination that doesn't necessarily organise a life. Homosexuality, as I use the word, is narrower and more concrete: a persistent sexual pattern - strong enough, durable enough, to shape what one actually seeks and does over time. Yet even that does not mean it must become one’s identity.
One of the ironies of the gay identity is that it advertises itself as sexual openness, while homosexuality itself often involves a narrowing of sexual desire. A person with occasional same-sex attraction may, in a literal sense, be more broadly oriented sexually than a homosexual person. The gay man, by contrast, is constrained by the force, persistence, and often exclusivity of his attraction. Yet the identity reverses this: it treats a narrower sexual pattern as though it naturally produced a broader and more liberated consciousness.
That is why the distinction matters. One can live a sexual reality, without wanting to make it one's identity. Today's culture refuses to accept that distinction, even moralizes it: a person who won't adopt the prescribed identity is labeled as being in denial, a hypocrite, or even a homophobe. In my view they mostly and sincerely want another life, or don't want to be associated with the cult-like elements of today's gay culture.
Many homosexuals have a highly problematic relationship with being gay, often because it isn't something you can simply decide to adopt. You either have it in you, or you don't. And if you don't, then trying to become gay can be like trying to acquire a disposition by force - and can be potentially dangerous.
I've seen this in many aging homosexuals who haven't completely lost the feeling for the gravity between homosexuality and being gay, and who were desperately trying to become more gay. They feel they have only been homosexuals. They want to escape the prison of domestication. They feel robbed, or feel that they have missed out on a lot. A person like that often becomes obsessed with hunting after much younger guys, becomes sexually promiscuous, takes drugs, and engages in other highly reckless behaviors. I've seen it turn destructive (even deadly) very fast, because they cannot handle it. Reducing gayness to edgy behaviors can be very one-sided and dangerous.
There is also the reverse. People I looked up to - who were great at being gay - later told me they saw no reason to live after the age of forty. To them, gayness was associated with youthfulness, being cool, and a certain playfulness that gave their life meaning. When that playfulness fades, the spell breaks, and what remains can feel like a void. I've seen this end deadly more than once. And yet these people are still in my mind: as a reminder of who I am, but also as a reminder that gayness - even being a homosexual - is not for everyone.
Those who survive sometimes fill the void by completely turning themselves over to the darker side of homosexuality. Men who once had a certain morality - even in the midst of promiscuity, drugs, and partying - can reach a point where they stop holding anything back. What was once excess with limits becomes excess without limits: not pleasure anymore, but compulsion; not freedom anymore, but surrender - often expressed in becoming nasty, mean, and cruel, to themselves and to others.
This points beyond individual character. The attraction of such excess has something to do with the kind of space gay culture historically provided: a hidden sphere in which ordinary rules were loosened, intensity was heightened, and another self could briefly appear. To understand both the appeal and the danger of that world, one has to see what sort of escape from modern life it seemed to offer.
THE DOUBLE LIFE
Max Weber’s understanding of modernity helps explain one of the deeper functions of gay life. In Science as a Vocation, he writes that “many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces.” If ordinary life becomes increasingly rationalized, managed, and disciplined, many human desires and value-impulses do not disappear.
They simply cease to fit comfortably within the respectable surface of life. They have nowhere obvious to go there, so they seek another sphere, governed by a more subversive morality. Historically, the gay world has been one of the clearest embodiments of that need: the need for a double life.
In that sense, the gay world was born not only from prohibition, but from disenchantment. It offered a sphere in which impulses that no longer fit the rationalized surface of modern life could still acquire secrecy, intensity, and shape. It was not merely a public role, still less a minority asking for recognition, but a hidden world in which desires, forms of life, and possibilities of experience that did not belong in the managed order could still be lived.
The double life did not arise only from fear, nor should it be dismissed as mere hypocrisy. It was one of the forms in which same-sex desire could be lived in a world that had no settled or honest place for it. This is why the older gay world should not be understood only through the modern language of repression.
George Chauncey, writing in Gay New York in 1994, reminds us that the older homosexual world did not simply cower in shame. It “deliberately cultivated ambiguity,” and many older men did not regard coming out in the modern sense as necessary. To “come out” often meant something more limited and more concrete: to oneself and to the gay world.
The double life did more than protect homosexuals; it formed them. Out of secrecy, compartments, and selective recognition grew a culture of gestures, codes, stylization, and mutual intelligence. Chauncey’s histories show men moving between personas and communicating through signs that others of their kind could read.
David M. Halperin, in How to Be Gay (2012), describes gayness as “a specific way of being” that men “must learn from one another.” That is exactly the point. Gayness is passed on. What later became gay culture was not simply the spontaneous expression of same-sex desire. It was a form shaped under conditions of divided life, and passed on through codes, stylizations, mutual recognition, and selective disclosure.
The old gay world was not, however, an egalitarian brotherhood. Nor was it a single “community” in the sentimental sense in which the word is now used. It was a world of asymmetries, codes, and subtle ranks. Chauncey reconstructs a differentiated social world of fairies, queers, and trade, marked by class, style, respectability, and contested status. He shows that the place of fairies was often “highly contested,” that middle-class men could be hostile or ambivalent toward them, and that different subgroups occupied markedly different positions within that world. That older world was not held together by public declaration, but by practical forms of recognition, informal tolerance, and a willingness to live with ambiguity.
For me, a culture of relentless openness is almost the opposite of the older gay world. It misunderstands what that world historically offered. Contemporary culture wants everything visible, announced, celebrated, and certified; it treats discretion as pathology and privacy as dishonesty. Even practices that once depended on secrecy and coded recognition — outdoor cruising, for instance — are now discussed openly online and in magazines, interpreted culturally, and paradoxically folded into the activist language of visibility. What is at stake here is more than openness. It is a growing impatience with the distinction between public and private itself, and with any sphere of life that does not ask to be publicly certified.
Yet the older, more covert forms of gay culture — bathhouses, bars, clubs with dark corners and unspoken codes — were often better suited to the needs that modern life itself created. They depended on compartments, selective recognition, and the legitimacy of a discreet private sphere that did not need to justify itself in public.
The modern gay identity reverses that logic. It makes visibility central. With it comes a culture of display: boasting about the lifestyle, insinuating that all men are somehow gay “deep down,” and drawing others, almost with missionary zeal, into the version of gayness one has made into an ideal. Homosexuality becomes something that must not merely be lived, but exhibited, advertised, and turned into a social fact that others are expected to acknowledge.
The irony is that the older, shadowy world never needed a coherent public mythology, let alone a formal creed. It did not need moral theater. It functioned because it was practical: it offered a place for secrecy, intensity, and pleasure. Once homosexuality is turned into an identity, something else is needed to hold it together — a founding myth, a moral mission, and new claims to specialness.
VICTIMHOOD CULTURE
The gay identity, as it has recently evolved, is deeply rooted in victimhood culture. Being gay — and even living as a homosexual — has something to do, however, with a particular kind of suffering, though not necessarily in the way that the culture imagines. It can give rise to certain attributes and patterns of behavior, a gay person may have or develop.
James Baldwin reminds us that one can never be reduced to sexuality alone. In Baldwin, sexuality is inextricably bound up with race, poverty, religion, exile, power, and the conditions under which one comes of age. When asked about the word “gay,” he said that it had “always rubbed” him “the wrong way,” and that the gay world had “very little to do with me, with where I did my growing up.” This means more than that Baldwin did not fit into the gay community of his day. It points to a deeper difficulty: sexuality may be real, and in one sense shared by many, but the meaning it acquires depends on the many pressures of a life.
For a certain strand of gay activism, these pressures are still the rationale for organizing and protesting. Pride New York argues that “we are every permutation of humanity in terms of identities from race, class and gender … what better movement has set as its vision and mission a connectedness with all of the struggles for justice?” Community here is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Victimhood, in this context, is not merely personal suffering, and not merely suffering caused by sexuality. It is the language through which separate grievances are joined, organized, and given moral force.
The way the modern homosexual is imagined to suffer is different, however — at least in its popularized form. He suffers because of his sexuality, supposedly from early childhood on, and that suffering is not only remembered; it is expected. It becomes the required origin story, the master key meant to explain everything.
And yet this one-size-fits-all identity is built on very narrow common ground: the only thing gay people can safely be presumed to share is their sexual preference. Everything else is added afterward and unequally distributed. In that version, homosexuality is not merely a reality to live with; it becomes the ultimate wound, the one thing that can be narrated as common and then turned into an identity.
This is where the trouble starts. Identity does not automatically follow from sexual preference, let alone from sexual acts. Once the sexual fact is made into the shared injury, victimhood moves to the center of the identity. It becomes the main preoccupation, and the more people identify with the suffering, the more they begin to cultivate it. From there, all sorts of strange distortions follow.
The most telling example is its confession culture and the narrative script that comes with it. The ritual is familiar: a life reinterpreted as secrecy and fear, of hiding who one truly is, followed by a decisive moment of disclosure, and then the claim that one has finally become oneself. I have always thought that people who talk like this must be mere homosexuals; they cannot be gay. The cheesy sentimentality gives them away.
What strikes me is that so many describe it in almost identical sentences. That sameness seems unreal. It suggests that the experience is no longer simply being remembered, but formatted for recognition. One does not merely tell what happened; one learns how such a story is supposed to sound. It must contain the expected elements, usually in the same order: secrecy, fear, shame, courage, disclosure, liberation. It is told in the form people want to hear. It is not necessarily how it went.
An essential feature of victimhood culture is that coming out no longer functions merely as disclosure. It is no longer simply a matter of saying: by the way, I’m gay, just so you know, this is not a big issue. One sees this in the endless “My Coming Out Story” videos on social media, where private revelation has become a repeatable genre, almost a template. Coming out becomes something for which one expects more than recognition; one expects celebration.
Even rainbow crossings painted onto roads can be read in this way: not merely as signs of tolerance, but as little monuments to the courage of coming out. And the activist gay professionals who install and unveil them often seem, at the same time, to be erecting monuments to themselves.
This raises an awkward question: who most needs the ritual of coming out? Often it is not those who had already found ways to live with their sexuality, however discreetly, but those who had serious difficulties with it. For them, the identity makes the conflicted feelings around the sex more bearable. It gives those feelings an explanation: it is this horrible society that made you hate your sexuality; it wasn’t you.
That is how the identity salvages people, and also how it corrupts them. What I resist most is the later elevation of declaration into a shared experience and a moral standard for everyone. For some people, being open about one’s sexuality — owning it, so to speak — is simply not a momentous event.
Having conflicted feelings about one’s sexuality, including being attracted to the same sex, is not necessarily a sign of shame, repression, or self-hatred. It may be part of a sane relation to sexuality itself. Sex touches pleasure, longing, privacy, vulnerability, risk, and, yes, morality too. Why should it be simple? The complete absence of inner conflict about these things seems stranger to me than the conflict itself. I still have such conflicts to this day.
That, however, is often what the word Pride has come to mean among those who adopt the identity most fully: not merely the refusal of shame, but the overcoming of all reserve, the shedding of all inhibition when it comes to sex. It turns ambivalence and restraint into defects. The same people who speak in sentimental terms about victimhood, healing, and community can also defend sexual behavior that seems to me highly questionable. Trauma and shame become the rationale through which such behavior is justified.
This is one of the most peculiar features of the identity: it links victimhood to hedonism and promiscuity in a way older gay cultures did not always need to do. Sexual openness becomes the overcoming of shame; self-display becomes representation; inhibition becomes repression; restraint is treated as fear. Victimhood turns sexual excess into something that sounds morally justified — even exemplary, something others are supposed to learn from.
Victimhood was not always at the core of gay culture. It is a fairly recent phenomenon. Victimhood culture has created a new identity while presenting it as the one that was always there. As homosexuality became more accepted, one might have expected the language of injury to lose force. Instead, it became more central. Why?
Catherine Liu helps explain the liberal cultural atmosphere from which this indulgence in trauma has emerged. In Virtue Hoarders (2021), her critique of the professional-managerial class helps clarify the kind of world in which this language circulates: educated, therapeutic, morally self-assured, fluent in the language of harm and care. It is a world in which liberal-minded professionals, often working in NGOs, gay and lesbian associations, and similar institutions, make themselves the owners of problems they want to manage, though not necessarily solve.
Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman’s The Empire of Trauma (2009) describes the deeper shift behind it: trauma is no longer simply endured, but becomes a public language of recognition and moral force. Trauma became a culturally and politically respectable category. It gives suffering a recognized form, and allows the victim not only to be heard, but to speak with a special kind of legitimacy. I would add that, in this sense, trauma becomes something one works and speaks through, something one can be trained to manage, something that can, above all, give access to authority.
That matters greatly in the gay world, where many justify their activism, their right to speak on behalf of others, and their claim to represent the community through a prior claim to victimhood. One sees this everywhere in the therapeutic podcast culture around gay life. In an episode of Gay Men Going Deeper, for example, a guest’s experience of spiritual abuse is presented as the very thing that allows him to become a leader in the queer community and help others overcome their own religious trauma. The pattern is telling: personal injury becomes public mission.
The irony is that the escape from real or supposed religious oppression often carries the religious form with it. Confession, testimony, healing, conversion, sin, redemption, community — all reappear inside the community, now translated into therapeutic and activist language. The content changes, but the structure remains.
One can see this mechanism very clearly in one of the signature terms to have emerged from this world: minority stress. In its popularized form, it is now used and abused everywhere. Terms like this do not merely elevate victimhood; they also make victims of people who are not victims, or who do not understand themselves that way.
That is why the newer gay identity so easily adopted this kind of language. Trauma was not simply attached to it from the outside; it was already woven into the identity’s formation. Suffering is no longer merely endured. It is interpreted, displayed, and made socially useful.
Seen this way, greater tolerance and acceptance do not necessarily make the suffering disappear. There is little incentive for solving anything, because the suffering has become too useful. It keeps the helpers employed, the spokespeople necessary, the campaigns urgent, the community wounded, and the machinery in motion. The injury must be perpetuated; too many people now depend on it.
In the end, victimhood is about status. Gays are placed within a wider hierarchy of suffering, somewhere just below Holocaust victims and victims of violent and sexual abuse. That position is powerful. It does not merely invite sympathy; it grants authority. It also creates a hierarchy inside the so-called community itself: those with the right story of suffering appear more authentic, more conscious, and more entitled to speak. To have suffered as a gay person becomes a ticket: I was bullied at school, therefore I may speak for the community; I was rejected, therefore I may explain homosexuality to others; I overcame shame, therefore I may advise, podcast, train, organize, and represent. Suffering becomes a qualification.
This raises the question of who actually constitutes the gay community. It cannot simply mean all homosexuals. Those without the proper story of suffering — no coming-out drama, no wound, no need for public affirmation — often stand strangely outside it. More often than not, they are treated as if they do not exist. They may be gay, but not quite members in the full moral sense; at best they become something closer to an ally, provided they remain sympathetic to the cause.
This is one of the things hidden by the word community. It pretends to name a simple collective, but in practice it contains a system of rank. At the top are those presumed to possess both qualities: the sexual reality and the sanctioned relation to it. They are not merely homosexual; they are thought to be more fully gay, more conscious, more wounded, more healed, more politically alert, more in possession of what it all supposedly means.
A community in which everyone is declared a victim must have something to conceal. It conceals the power of those who speak in the name of the victims. It conceals the class position of those who administer the language of harm. Above all, it conceals the fact that many homosexuals do not recognize themselves in the hurt being narrated for them.
More seriously, once “everybody a victim”, it can conceal concrete misconduct: bullying, manipulation, boundary-crossing, sexual opportunism, reckless advice, financial self-interest, and the exploitation of lonely, addicted, or unstable people. The language of care can become a shield. The helper is protected by the victim he claims to help.
The danger of indulging in victimhood is that it can make cruelty feel virtuous. One begins by denouncing oppression and ends by granting oneself permission to intimidate, shame, exclude, and punish. That, increasingly, is what I see: people speaking as victims while behaving like petty tyrants.
I can see why this identity appeals to many people, especially to those who have truly experienced themselves as victims. It gives them a place of belonging. It tells them that their pain has a name, that their loneliness was not random, that their difficulties were part of a larger story. I understand the attraction of that. My problem is the reduction: can all this suffering really be reduced to a sexual preference, even one that may come with socially deviant behavior. I doubt it. The suffering may be real, but the explanation the identity offers is far too narrow.
That is one reason the modern gay identity feels false to me. I remember a time when the identity was not taken with such solemn seriousness. It was taken with a grain of salt, not invested with this kind of symbolic and ideological force. Today, by contrast, it does not merely offer a way out of shame; it forbids the very ambivalence through which a more honest relation to sexuality might develop.
Sexuality is never merely a badge of liberation, nor merely a source of shame. It is bound up with fear, tenderness, loneliness, longing, violence, and the difficulty of becoming truthful about oneself. Having conflicted feelings about it are not automatically a shortcoming or a sign of repression. Sometimes they are signs that the issue has not yet been trivialized.
THE LOOSENING BOND
One of the implicit goals attached to gay activism is the complete erasure of homophobia. Not merely legal equality, not merely social tolerance, not even ordinary acceptance, but the disappearance of all discomfort, mockery, moral unease, hesitation, or negative judgment. I do not think that is possible. I am not even sure it is desirable.
Homosexuality will always carry a certain controversy, because sexuality itself carries controversy: privacy, exposure, morality, pleasure, disgust, fascination, fear, envy, and transgression. Gayness has always drawn part of its force from that charged terrain — from tension, secrecy, difference, and the nearness of what society both forbids and desires. A culture that tries to abolish every trace of hostility will end up trying to abolish ambiguity itself, and with it much of what made gay culture possible.
Part of the problem is that the word homophobia has become so vague and imprecise that it often explains very little. It can mean hatred, violence, disgust, moral disapproval, religious objection, mockery, bad taste, or simply irritation at the way sexuality is made public. These are not the same things. Once the meaning is stretched that far, it becomes less a description than a weapon.
It allows almost any resistance to the public display of gay culture to be treated as a moral shortcoming. But many people are not enraged by the sexuality as such; they are annoyed by the expectation that they must affirm it, celebrate it, and tolerate having it rubbed in their faces. That annoyance may not always be noble, but it is real. And the more it is dismissed as homophobia, the more resentment it creates.
The word helps perpetuate the political project because nobody knows where it begins or where it ends. That is its usefulness. It can always be expanded: from hatred to discomfort, from violence to mockery, from discrimination to refusal, from moral objection to simple irritation. The term becomes so elastic that it can always find new work to do.
I have seen this in smaller incidents that were treated as if they revealed the supposed backwardness of society itself. I remember hearing, again and again, the story of a taxi driver who supposedly refused to help a drag queen. For years, the story returned in different conversations, always with the same air of outrage and significance. At some point I could only think: is that all you have?
Behind this lies the need to keep building the community. If one watches online content around gay life, one quickly sees that this has become a major project to which many people are dedicated. Behind it lies the idea that gay men should somehow get along better: that the community must become kinder, healthier, more supportive, less divided, and above all less cruel. The concept of homophobia helps with that because it keeps the outside world morally suspect and threatening. If it is still everywhere, then the community must remain vigilant, visible, organized, and above all separate.
Gay Men’s Brotherhood, for instance, describes itself as “A New Kind of Gay Community,” offering “connection, healing and a safe place to belong,” while insisting that gay men “first need to do our own inner work.” The community is therefore not simply assumed; it has become a construction project that needs constant maintenance.
The recent convergence of identity politics and celebrity culture reinforces this. It supplies faces, slogans, rituals, public moments of recognition, and, most importantly, role models. One sees this in the way figures like the swimmer Tom Daley or the singer Troye Sivan are received. In outlets such as PinkNews or Gay Times, their careers are not discussed merely in terms of sport, music, talent, or fame, but almost immediately through the larger meaning of being openly gay. PinkNews, for instance, describes Sivan as a public LGBT advocate and quotes his GLAAD acceptance speech, where he says the award is “so much larger than me” and that the moment is about “visibility” and “representation.” The famous homosexual becomes a symbol; success is made to serve the community.
On the surface it looks like acceptance into ordinary forms of life, but it is about the construction and defense of a parallel world — a world with its own saints, villains, holidays, language, morals, and rules of belonging. That is what I find disturbing. The aim is not merely to live freely among others, but to live increasingly apart from them, as if gayness required a separate sphere held together by grievance, visibility, and the very difference acceptance was supposed to overcome.
It comes close to the separatist temptation one also finds in certain strands of radical feminism, which have argued that, without radical change, women may have to live apart from men. It creates the fantasy of a purified world, protected from ordinary society, justified by injury, and sustained by suspicion of those outside it. What emerges is not simply acceptance into ordinary life, but a segregated world.
One can see this in the proliferation of gay cruises, gay holidays, gay resorts, gay neighborhoods, gay film festivals, gay choirs, gay art, gay sports clubs, gay business networks, gay media, and gay awards. Some of these things have a practical function: they offer safety and recognition, and at the same time pleasure and escape.
Taken together, however, they reveal something more unsettling: the desire to create a self-segregated world with sexuality as the organizing principle of almost everything one does. That is what I find disturbing. It is not merely the wish to live freely among others, but the wish to reproduce the whole of life under the sign of identity, with homophobia serving as the permanent threat that justifies the whole arrangement.
Within that framework, even sexual habits can acquire political meaning. The promiscuous lifestyle is presented not simply as a choice, a taste, or a lifestyle, but as something always under siege: threatened by judgment, repression, religion, family, ordinary morality, and the hostile outside world. A whole network with an activist touch exists to protect it: to keep judgment at bay, translate criticism into hostility, and make ordinary reservations appear dangerous.
The way the community now sells and defends sex cannot hold up. Sex is presented as therapeutic, liberating, affirming, almost medicinal: the cure for shame, the proof of self-acceptance, the path toward becoming whole. But sex cannot bear that kind of meaning for long. It is too unstable, too private, bound up with exposure, power, risk, longing, humiliation, pleasure, and disappointment. The more sex is sold as liberation, and as a time-consuming pursuit around which much of life is organized, the more its darker realities must be denied.
The step from sexual openness to sexual exhibitionism may be the point at which the culture overplays its hand. Sexual openness is one thing; the public staging of sexuality is another. OnlyFans, sexualized Pride imagery, and exhibitionistic self-branding are presented as confidence, healing, representation, or the overcoming of shame.
Behind all this lies the assumption that sex deserves centrality. It should be talked about (endlessly), displayed, refined, expanded, made into identity, made into content. I doubt that. Sex matters, sometimes enormously, but it does not follow that it should become the organizing principle of a life.
A gay cruise is perhaps the clearest example. Atlantis Events calls its all-gay cruise “so much more than just a vacation”: a space where men can meet friends, “discover new ways to play,” and be their “authentic selves” among “like-minded guys.” It even adds: “There’s power in the gay experience.” The formula is revealing: sex, community, authenticity, and a vague politics of liberation are bundled together and sold as a holiday. Escape becomes a product; belonging becomes a product; even liberation becomes a product. The ship becomes a floating identity-world, where homosexuality supplies not only the atmosphere, but the market itself.
To remove all discomfort around this subject, homosexuality must be made harmless, cheerful, educational, therapeutic, inspirational, and publicly digestible. It must be stripped, at least from the outside, of all forms of danger, secrecy, irony, and moral tension. In other words, it must become less gay.
This flattening is forced both from without and from within. From without, homosexuality must be made acceptable to schools, HR departments, streaming platforms, political campaigns, and family-friendly public culture. From within, gay media, activists, influencers, and professional spokespeople reduce it to the same few scripts: visibility, pride, trauma, healing, sex, and representation. Part of this pressure comes from the fact that the gay identity has become a mass identity: the more people are asked to recognize themselves in it, the more uniform, simplified, and repeatable it has to become. The result is not richness but homogenization: homosexuality made presentable to the very world from which gayness once drew its distance.
That is why the modern gay identity should not be treated as the be-all and end-all of homosexual life. It is not the final liberation of homosexual life, but one public, managed, and sanitized version of it.
It whitewashes, salvages, and explains. It takes confused lives, lonely lives, damaged lives, ordinary lives, and gives them a flattering form. It says: your suffering was not random; it was part of the story. Your awkwardness was oppression. Your loneliness was minority stress. Your sexual unease was internalized homophobia. Your life now has a plot, an injury, and a community. That can be comforting. It can even be useful. But it can also become an end in itself.
The move toward the word queer can be understood as an attempt to save the old countercultural element of the gay world. As gay becomes increasingly respectable, institutional, cheerful, and publicly digestible, queer promises to restore danger, dissent, and refusal. At the same time, much of what queer claims as its own is borrowed from the old gayplaybook: the glamour of transgression, the rhetoric of refusal, the pleasure of standing at an angle to society. However, there is something strained about it. Once transgression has to be named, advertised, and taught as an identity, it has already lost much of its force. By then, the gesture has become beside the point.
The problem is not only that the queer umbrella fails to rescue the old countercultural element. The problem is that the world it tries to escape has itself become unbearably narrow. The modern gay community can be suffocatingly narrow-minded, boring, petty, sentimental, vulgar, oppressive and strangely literal. It is everything being gay was supposedly not about. A culture that once promised distance from ordinary moral seriousness now produces its own formulas, slogans, hierarchies, and compulsory forms of belonging.
The older underground world may not return, but the need behind it does. The need for a clandestine existence or a double life does not simply disappear because homosexuality becomes visible, accepted, or celebrated. For many homosexuals, there remains the need for another sphere: a world opposite to one’s ordinary world, a place of secrecy, intensity, erotic charge, and escape. Older gay culture, however imperfectly, gave that need some form.
That may be one reason sexualized drug use has become so destructive in parts of gay male culture. It is not only hedonism. It may also be the double life returning in distorted form. If the older hidden world is abolished, and if the official gay world becomes narrow-minded, sentimental, therapeutic, political, and publicly approved, then the need for another world does not vanish. It goes elsewhere — into drugs, compulsive and extreme sex, and forms of escape that quickly become unmanageable.
Gay people cannot simply leave the ordinary world and build a purified world of their own. That narrow world will not work for many. It becomes too small, too self-referential, and claustrophobic. Being gay once depended on moving between worlds, not replacing one world with another. At its best, it was not an ideology of separation. It was a way of preserving tension.