INTRO: RIGHT-WING GAYS
When I began publishing my essays online, I promoted them on Facebook. A man I did not know sent me a brief personal message. Thanks to the community, he said, he could work as an artist, and he was doing well. He had not read any of the essays. Yet even in that brief exchange, I sensed that he felt attacked. He did not say what exactly bothered him.
I did not know how to respond. Was he implying that I should stop writing because he was doing well and what I wrote might offend him? That is what his remark seemed to ask of me.
It is a reaction I have met again and again. Say something critical about gay culture, even mildly, and someone takes it as a personal insult. The answer is not an argument but a feeling. In his case, the reaction was understandable: he did not seem to be an artist who happened to be gay, but a “gay artist.” The community was his theme, his audience and his market.
Others feel that the community itself has been taken from them. Over the past few years, a new type of gay man has begun to push back: one who calls himself right-wing. Some are conservatives in the conventional sense. Others appear to have adopted the label mainly because they no longer recognize themselves in the movement that claims to represent them.
They object to Pride, gender politics, the expanding acronym and the compulsory cheerfulness surrounding it all. What unites these right-wing voices is the demand that the LGB separate itself from the TQ+.
Adam Farrell is one of the people giving voice to this position in the Facebook group The Right Wing Gay Community. He is around my age, and the way he talks about his sexuality sounds uncannily familiar. More than that, I recognize the attitude behind it. Like him, I remember the 1990s, when the aspiration surrounding homosexuality was almost the opposite of what it is today.
In one of his videos, Farrell says something remarkable: “I have gay friends, but I don’t seek them out.” He remembers the objective of the gay movement as people becoming “color-blind when it comes to these things.”
It was a deep-seated wish and, as I remember it, the prevailing attitude among gay men themselves. Homosexuality should eventually cease to matter.
Farrell believes that this objective has been abandoned. “The flag has been hijacked,” he says. Pride no longer presents homosexuality as a private fact. It puts on a show, as he describes it: people walking naked through the street, appearing in dog masks, collars and nappies, men dressed as women, and an expanding number of identities demanding public recognition.
The message is no longer that these people should be free to live as they wish. It is: “This is the way you have to accept us.” The homosexual man who blends in is no longer enough.
Yet something in Farrell’s account bothered me: the charge of a takeover, echoed by many right-wing gays. It assumes that before transgender and queer activists arrived, there existed a distinct, coherent and sane gay culture and identity belonging naturally to homosexuals, until others seized its flag.
The remedy then seems obvious: movement and flag must be returned to their supposed original owners. But who are their rightful owners?
Most homosexuals I knew kept a certain distance from identifying as gay. Their attitude was closer to: yes, I am gay; fine; whatever. They might visit gay venues, have homosexual friends and organize parts of their lives around sex with men. Yet they did not imagine that their sexuality meant belonging to a vast international collective or a distinct political body. Nor did it give them a common personality structure or tell them what to think.
The pronouncements of professional gay organizers and spokespeople were taken with a grain of salt. Many paid lip service to their objectives, but they simply wanted to be left alone. In this respect, Farrell is not unusual. What is unusual is that he feels compelled to say it so publicly—and that a stance once common among gay men must now be defended as right-wing.
The right-wing gays recognize the problem in its queer form. But they fail to see that much of it was already present among those who turned being gay into a mode of belonging. They continue to speak of “our flag,” “our movement” and “our community,” and complain that the movement no longer represents “us.” I never experienced my sexuality as membership in a community.
For men like Farrell and me, the word “gay” was synonymous with “homosexual.” For others, it had meant much more: an entire worldview. Much of what Farrell objects to was already present in that broader meaning.
The derailment did not begin when people appeared who identified as queer. It grew out of the gradual transformation of homosexuality into an ever-expanding collective identity. It began in the late 1960s, when homosexuality became the basis of a political movement. Gayness acquired a personality, a history, a politics and a moral standing. Although sexuality remained its tangible element, almost everything constructed around it could be detached from it.
People who were not in the strict sense homosexual, but felt like outsiders, eventually recognized themselves in that remainder. Someone has spent years feeling bullied, rejected, lonely, overlooked or simply unable to belong. Then a community tells him: you are not weird; you are special. You are not the problem; society is. You are no longer alone; you have us.
The promise of belonging comes with a political explanation: traditional ideas caused his suffering, and the anger he already feels has a legitimate object. Gender nonconformity fits readily into this account: the inability or unwillingness to conform to conventional roles becomes evidence that those roles are oppressive.
Queer activists are late converts to the gay identity. They seem to embrace its coming-out ritual and its promise of an authentic self more intensely than many homosexuals of an earlier generation. The people most relaxed about their same-sex attraction often need such an identity least. Those who initially experienced their sexuality or gender nonconformity as a personal crisis—or even rejected it—may later become its most enthusiastic believers.
Pride was therefore hijacked, and it was not. Its constituency changed, but the existing creed supplied the method of expansion. Queer detached the gay identity from homosexual desire while retaining its promise of liberation, belonging and distinction. The identity became the essential thing; the sexuality that had given rise to it became optional.
Many people can no longer distinguish between homosexuality and the identity built around it. The queer movement wants us to forget completely that they are distinct things. It makes everything about identity, yet it cannot do without the sex. That is the contradiction at the heart of its expansion.
Those on the right want to return the flag to homosexuals. I am not sure the flag should belong to anyone. The real question is why a sexual preference that was supposed to become socially irrelevant was turned into a collective identity—and why the people least attached to its tangible sexual basis have become its most fervent believers.
A HOME FOR THE OUTSIDER
I had always felt out of place, and identifying with other gay people did not change that. I could recognize something of myself in particular homosexual men, sometimes very strongly, but I never mistook that recognition for a sense of belonging to a larger community. With most, I shared little beyond the direction of my sexual desire. Homosexuality could create affinities, encounters and even a small social world. It did not create a natural “we.”
The identity built on exclusive same-sex attraction, and the culture around it, struck me as narrow and limiting. They placed too much weight on sex and sexual expression in determining a man’s place in society and his entire outlook. I kept my distance from them.
That distance did not feel entirely chosen. Part of it came from shortcomings I recognized in myself. I found social situations difficult and avoided people whenever I could. These difficulties made me stand out, but I did not want to build an identity around them. I wanted to overcome them, not make a home in the things that held me back.
It was not simply a matter of my own avoidance. I also encountered hostility, especially among gay men. Once, as I was leaving the gym, I stopped to speak to a man I knew. Beside him stood a slightly overweight gay man I had never met. Out of nowhere, he said: “You only go to the gym because you want to get more sex.” I stood there wondering what could have provoked him to say such a thing.
On another occasion, I met two men who already knew one another. One of them was interested in me, but the feeling was not mutual. Later, the other showed me photographs of the men he liked: skinny, emo-looking men who looked nothing like me. I found him very attractive, yet I felt relieved. His taste lay so clearly elsewhere that there seemed to be room for something else. I thought we might become friends.
That never happened. The first man told the other that I was “dangerous” and “untrustworthy.” After I heard this, I never saw either of them again.
Incidents like these recurred throughout my adult life until they formed a pattern. Rejection, rivalry and gossip entered situations in which I had hoped friendship might develop. They often came from men who barely knew me. There was no relationship to repair and no specific grievance I could answer. In later years, the spite grew even more vicious.
Others found no home there either. A few years ago, a right-wing gay initiative emerged in the Netherlands: Stichting De Roze Leeuw, or The Pink Lion. Founded by Lennard van Mil, it presents itself as an organization for ordinary, level-headed homosexuals who refuse to make their sexuality, in its own words, “their entire identity.”
On the public broadcaster VPRO, Lennard sat opposite a man named Rik in a discussion about Pride. Rik defended the familiar ideal of a gay community. Their disagreement went beyond marches and parades: it revealed two different understandings of what the gay world is and what it is supposed to provide.
Lennard described the gay scene as he had experienced it: “There is a great deal of hatred, jealousy and envy, and people stabbing one another in the back.” He also questioned the language of community around it: “An image is always presented of a community—of ‘us’ against the rest of the world. But what does that community actually consist of?” His own organization, he pointed out, had been made unwelcome at Pride. “For us, that idea of community therefore no longer applies.”
“My experience was very different,” Rik replied. “The friends I made there were a safe haven for me. People often speak of your ‘chosen family,’ and that is genuinely how I experienced it.” Lennard had described the character of a social world; Rik described the role a few people within it had played in his life.
The feeling may have been entirely sincere. It was not, however, an answer. Finding loyal friends in a social world does not disprove hostility or exclusion within it. That a particular circle became Rik’s family showed that he belonged. It did not show that the rest of them did.
The disagreement sharpened when Rik said that he had grown more comfortable calling himself queer. The word was important to him because his sexuality had affected how others treated him and how he had experienced coming out. Lennard remained unconvinced. There was sexuality, he replied, but also “your experiences, your friends and the people you have met.” Why reduce all this to queer? “There is so much more to a person.”
Rik had explained why the identity mattered to him, not why it should define him. For him, identity was a matter of feeling: the experiences surrounding his sexuality had become inseparable from his understanding of himself. Lennard argued from reason and asked whether they should be.
Asked what queer meant, Rik compared it to placing all the colors beside one another and passing a wet cloth across them until they formed a rainbow-colored stain. Queer identity presents itself as an ever-expanding diversity, yet his image, perhaps more than he intended, describes the opposite: all the colors disappear into one. Behind the multiplying identities stands a single identity—queer.
Then the conversation turned to politics. Rik associated Lennard’s conservative organization with fear and anger. The “violence and suffering” inflicted by the wider political right, he explained, were being “projected” onto them. He accused the right of scapegoating liberal gay people, leaving Lennard to answer for people and actions beyond his own position.
“We are told: you are gay, so you must think in a particular way,” Lennard replied. Why should he accept that? “I still decide for myself, as a person, how I think.” His conservatism seemed partly a protest against that expectation. The community that celebrated his difference was less comfortable with differences of opinion.
He also objected to the culture of Pride, which he thought placed too much emphasis on “a position of victimhood” and on what made life difficult. He wanted a situation in which a person’s background or sexual orientation no longer mattered.
Rik believed that the disappearance of Pride would be “extremely bad.” Coming together and making themselves visible “first of all to one another as a community,” he argued, gave people “a great deal of strength.” Pride was “not so much directed towards the outside world. It is something for the community.”
Rik’s words came with an echo. The family of friends, people coming into their own, a home where they finally recognize themselves: I had heard all of it many times before, above all on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Since it first aired in 2009, it has shaped a great deal of contemporary gay culture.
The show was brought to my attention early on. It was good television, although I could rarely relate to the contestants. Alongside the competition came the recurring accounts of rejection, the need for a chosen family and the promise of an authentic self. Over time, I heard the same story more and more outside the show, until I began to wonder whether people were describing their lives or learning how to describe them.
Many spoke of having been rejected for “being gay.” But what did that explain here: their sexuality, their mannerisms, their sense of being different? Rejection could draw someone toward the identity; the identity could then become the explanation for that rejection. The suffering might be real without every part of it having the same cause.
RuPaul built an extraordinary franchise around a promise. Its emotional center was the chosen family: if the family you were born into could not accept you, you could find people who would. There was truth in that. Gay and transgender people have often had to form relationships outside the family, and some of those relationships possessed a loyalty that biological ties did not. However, the show offered more than companionship. What made you difficult or embarrassing elsewhere would be recognized, cultivated and put on display. It offered an audience, applause and the possibility of turning rejection into distinction.
That distinction came with a hierarchy. Michel Foucault famously described how nineteenth-century medicine turned the homosexual from someone who committed certain acts into a type of person, defined by “a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul.” “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration,” he wrote; “the homosexual was now a species.” RuPaul revived that species and crowned it. The queen stood at the top: the man who displayed his inner femininity most openly was the most “gay” of all.
Twenty years ago, drag occupied a much smaller place in the gay world as I knew it. Some people enjoyed it; others had little interest. It belonged largely to a particular part of gay male nightlife. Yet Drag Race has grown wildly out of proportion to the world it originally portrayed.
Drag has become an emblem of inclusion. Corporations celebrate it, public institutions welcome it, and children are invited to encounter it in schools and libraries. Even women, whose appearance and mannerisms it parodies, are expected to applaud. A nightlife subculture has been transformed into a moral and educational project.
Rik illustrated the shift himself. He brought up drag queen story hours, describing protests against them as opposition to people “expressing their art in their own way.” In his account, objections to placing a form of entertainment often built around vulgarity and sexual innuendo in front of children became attempts to restrict artistic expression. Whether the setting was appropriate was a question he did not address.
What unsettles me is not cross-dressing itself, which I never truly liked, but the authority it has acquired. The performance is now treated as an expression of authenticity, visibility as virtue and discomfort as evidence of prejudice. The home created for outsiders no longer asks merely to be left in peace. It instructs the world outside it.
Those most attached to the gay identity are often drawn to precisely this: its gender-nonconforming side. They have little difficulty feeling connected to transsexuals and others whose sexuality or gender falls outside conventional expectations. For them, LGBTQ makes sense as an overarching identity and a political outlook: the connection extends beyond whom they desire to what they believe their difference means.
Lennard and Rik had moved in the same world and come away with opposite experiences of it. Rik found a family in the community; Lennard found that its promise of a home did not extend to him. What brought one closer to the identity left the other more distant from it.
THE IDENTITY TRAP
Not every homosexual needs to be gay. Everyone needs some sense of who he is. I had one by not having one, or at least not a strong one, and that hindered my development and at times caused me a great deal of trouble. Among other things, I grew up in a place or country I was not originally from.
Yet it had a good side. I can claim to be my own person. My influences feel chosen. Identities often feel like prisons, and I was never locked into one. Whenever I became part of a larger group of friends later in life, I felt lost, as though I were losing myself. I could identify with certain men who were like me, and somehow we found each other. Sexuality mattered to us, but it did not tell us who we were. Nobody had issued it to us.
Identifying as gay, and later as queer, rests on the same wish to be one’s own person. Unlike other identities, it promises not to be a prison: coming out offers the freedom to be oneself. Why, then, do people need this one, collective, sexual and certified by others?
Part of the answer is historical. The identity once drew its force from real danger: prosecution, police raids, dismissal from jobs and open violence. A shared threat held people together. That threat has largely passed. One would expect the identity to loosen, and among many homosexuals it has.
Elsewhere it remains potent, and the reason is unheroic. An identity does not dissolve simply because its purpose has been served. People are employed by it, organizations depend on it, and some have built their entire sense of themselves upon it. Identity politics does not merely protect a difference. It keeps producing reasons for the difference to matter.
The other part lies deeper. Why sex, of all things? Other sources of identity have not disappeared: nation, religion, class and family still matter to most people. But sex had acquired a special authority. Ever since confession it has been treated as the secret of the self, and whatever one hides is easily mistaken for what one truly is.
In a world where almost everything is a matter of choice, sexual desire is one of the few things that does not feel chosen. It seems given, like fate, and therefore solid. Above all, it is permitted. In liberal culture, pride in one’s nation looks suspect, religious belonging looks narrow, and class has gone out of fashion.
It is also flattering. A sexual identity makes a person feel more modern and less provincial than the world he came from. Unlike a village or a church, it travels: one can cross a border and find the same flag, the same vocabulary, the same story. The imagined community of gay or queer people is international in scope.
The philosopher Alexander Douglas, in Against Identity, argues that the longing for a solid self can never be satisfied. People want an identity that holds when it is challenged, and they are ashamed when it rings hollow. The pursuit itself breeds envy and shame.
An identity promises substance. Where a life feels empty, it offers something to fill it with. It tells a person what he is, whom he belongs with and what his suffering has meant. The person is no longer simply lost. He has been wronged, and he belongs among others who were wronged the same way. A diagnosis can serve the same purpose: autism, for some, is no longer only a condition but an identity, with its own community, vocabulary and pride. The shame of not fitting in is not overcome. It is exchanged for a new place to fit in. That has never made sense to me.
Douglas, following René Girard, adds something less flattering. Identities are not discovered. They are imitated. People take their desires and their sense of who they are from those they admire, and they forget that they are copying. The model never looks like an imitator; he looks like the original. That is why the stories told on Drag Race began to reappear, almost word for word, in the mouths of people who had never stood on its stage.
The promise of coming out is the trap. Douglas warns that anyone who feels suddenly freed to be himself will in reality exercise a freedom to be somebody else. The closet is left behind, and a model is waiting at the door.
Imitation explains what I had long experienced without understanding it. Those who copy the same model become rivals: they want the same kind of men, the same standing, the same recognition. The community that promises outsiders a home turns into a place of comparison, gossip and quiet punishment. The hostility I met among gay men who barely knew me was not an exception to the identity. It belonged to it.
Even within my own small circle it was no different, though there the rivalry was not over sex but over who stood further outside. We recognized each other, measured each other and saw each other as competitors. That is why we were never truly friends, although something connected us.
None of this explains why the identity now inspires the greatest fervor among those whose attachment to it has much less to do with homosexual desire. For that, three things need to be kept apart. Being homosexual is a sexual fact. Being gay is a disposition, a set of personality traits: irony, style, nerve. Many homosexuals have something of it, but not all, and not in equal measure. More importantly, it cannot be claimed; others have to recognize it. Some people who are not homosexual have it too. The gay identity is a third thing: a cultural and political affiliation.
The identity offers what a temperament never could: distinction by declaration. The affiliation does the work a personality once had to do. It promises the prestige of being outside without the loneliness, risk and indifference that outsiderhood actually involves. That is why people who are not strictly homosexual can want it so badly. For many of them, the attraction was never the sex. It was the distinction.
Once acquired, the identity defends itself. Try getting somebody to understand something, Douglas writes, when his identity depends upon not understanding it. What it cannot afford to admit is simple: that it is not necessary. A homosexual can live contentedly without it. His difficulties may have causes that have nothing to do with society’s hostility, and some may come from the gay world itself.
To accept any of this would cost the believer his explanation, his community and the standing his suffering has given him. That is why the critic of the gay identity is rarely answered. He is diagnosed: ashamed, repressed, self-hating.
Douglas opens his book with a story from the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi. Hundun, the faceless emperor of the center, had two friends who wished to repay his kindness. They noticed that he alone had no openings through which to see, hear, eat and breathe. Each day they bored one hole into him. On the seventh day he died. The community does something similar with the homosexual who has no face of the approved kind. It means well. It gives him a face.
Hundun’s facelessness was not a defect. It was his nature. The older homosexual world had something of it. The identity cannot tolerate that. It bores the holes.
Perhaps the purpose of life is to shatter identities. Life often does that by itself: through age, loss, the end of a way of living that once worked. The gay identity is in many ways well suited to adolescence, with a rebellious streak that can become increasingly comical as one grows older.
I have seen men whose gay life was youth and play, and who found nothing left when youth was gone. The danger is not losing an identity. It is building one that cannot survive being lost. The gay identity offers no ending. It turns aging into shame, restraint into repression, and change into a betrayal of the authentic self. People cling to an identity to be spared transformation.
THE CHOSEN ONES
The identity does not only shield a person from individuation. It also elevates him. I know the appeal. I did not experience my sexuality as a burden. It seemed almost like a piece of good fortune. It vindicated the distance I already felt from ordinary life and suggested that another kind of life might be available to me. What had previously seemed like an inability to belong became an opening.
Many people who identify as gay regard organized religion as their natural enemy. Yet the community they embrace reproduces its forms. Coming out becomes a confession, self-discovery a revelation, and rejection a source of moral authority. These forms culminate in the belief that their difference sets them apart even from other outsiders: they are the chosen ones.
It is understandable that people look for meaning in their sexuality or gender-nonconforming behavior. But when that search becomes a collective belief in their own special status, the community becomes more than a political body demanding recognition. It begins to resemble a cult.
This sense of collective distinction circulates through LGBTQ media: interviews, personal testimonies and accounts of “queer history.” A post by the Instagram account Fifty Shades of Gay gave it an unusually explicit expression.
Its subject was Edward Carpenter, the English poet, socialist thinker and early advocate of homosexual equality. Above his photograph stood the headline: “In 1908, He Called Queer People Spiritually Advanced Evolutionary Pioneers.” Whatever Carpenter himself meant, the headline gave sexual difference an almost otherworldly significance, placing those who embodied it ahead of the rest of humanity.
According to the post, Carpenter had searched for a language in which to understand himself and found one “for freedom, for equality.” The people he called Uranians “might become the advance guard of a new kind of society,” one “built on compassion instead of money, law and convention.” The outsider became a guide. His position outside ordinary society appeared to qualify him to lead it somewhere better.
Even the account of Carpenter’s domestic life carried a religious image. His household, the post explained, became “something close to a pilgrimage site.” Visitors were drawn by the possibility that the life described in his books could actually be lived.
The post was not entirely celebratory. Its final slides criticized Carpenter’s colonial assumptions, complicating the portrait of an enlightened man. One reader, however, embraced the headline’s promise without qualification: “I agree... we are the next phase of evolution...” Another replied: “And he’s RIGHT.” The first comment made the identification explicit. A claim about a historical figure had become a claim about “we.”
The move from individual insight to collective distinction is precisely what I question. Looking for meaning in one’s sexuality is natural, though not every interpretation is equally convincing. The difficulty begins when that meaning is handed to a person ready-made, as part of an identity he is invited to adopt. Before he has considered what his sexuality means in his own life, he is offered an account of what it means about people like him. One can find courage and inspiration in Carpenter’s life without imagining oneself more advanced than other people.
Sexual desire or a departure from conventional gender roles can indeed place a person at an angle to ordinary life; being attracted to men certainly placed me there. But that position is not a collective possession. It can emerge in an individual or flourish among a small circle of people; it cannot be guaranteed by membership in a community.
Yet it is precisely this position that the word queer turns into a shared identity. The connection no longer depends on shared sexual desire, but on the meaning attached to “being different.”
A promotional post for the wellbeing app Voda gave the idea an everyday expression. “A lot of people in the LGBTQ+ community carry a quiet question: am I queer enough?” it began. The question had a familiar sound: Am I a true believer? The post quoted the therapist Casey Tanner in reply: “Queer people do not need to have a queer relationship résumé to validate their identities.”
The point was fair as far as it went: one need not have acted on a desire to know that it exists. But the post went further, to membership: “However you choose to express your queerness, or not express it at all—you’re already part of this community.”
The sentence sounds generous. It is not innocent. The gay identity already confused sex with identity, but it still rested on something tangible. Here even that falls away. An identity that requires no desire and no conduct has no criterion left. Nothing can confirm it, and nothing can disqualify it. It can be claimed by anyone and, for the same reason, assigned to anyone.
Who, then, decides? Where the identity sets no limit, someone else must. Vagueness does not abolish authority; it hands it to those who interpret. The therapist, the app, the activist and the professional queer decide what the word means, who may use it and who has betrayed it. An identity open to everyone is governed by a few.
Its reach does not stop at its willing members. Being homosexual does not authorize anyone to call me queer or assign me to a community. An assurance of belonging becomes an appropriation when it includes people who never asked to be included.
The post’s own answer to its question was circular: “You are queer enough simply by existing as a queer person.” The reassurance returned to the identity it was supposed to explain. What being queer meant remained unresolved; belonging was affirmed.
That affirmation could be renewed through “queer events, queer friendships,” a “queer-affirming therapist,” or a space created with queer people in mind. Finally, the post introduced Voda itself, offering to help readers explore their identity and “feel at home in it.” The promise of a home now came with a network of relationships, professional services and a product.
The community’s claim extends backward into history. Individual lives are gathered into a collective whose name and boundaries are supplied by the present. Carpenter becomes a queer ancestor, and his ideas become part of what “we” supposedly stand for. Yet admiration does not establish membership, and another person’s achievements do not become common property simply because he was attracted to people of his own sex.
Not only people are claimed, but places too. On the podcast Getting Close, Andrew Keenan-Bolger discussed his novel Limelight, a coming-of-age story set in the New York theater world. During the interview, he described it as “just an inherently queer space.”
There is something recognizable in the description, but it claims too much. Many who shaped the performing arts were homosexual or gender-nonconforming, but their contributions did not make it the expression of a single culture and identity.
Once the identity was attached to it, however, its imaginative freedom, its departures from convention and its artistic achievements became sources of collective distinction, available to anyone who identified as queer, whether or not he had contributed anything to them.
As the interview continued, this claim to a lineage took on a mythic dimension. Explaining his use of magical realism, the author spoke of bringing “ghosts and angels” into the novel. He wanted his young protagonist, as he came out, to feel that “there is an army of people who came before him whether or not they are present” guiding him through his journey. The dead became companions in the discovery of an identity.
The interviewer responded with a declaration of his own: “I just feel such a deep kinship to queer and gay ancestors that is sort of inexplicable.” The author agreed at once: “Oh, 100%.” What made these people their ancestors? The dead might have understood themselves quite differently. But the kinship needed no explanation; the feeling was enough.
Admiration for earlier lives became a story about the person claiming them. The language was one of relatedness, but the gesture was not modest. By declaring himself their descendant, he raised himself to their level. Their courage, suffering and insight became his own, and with them a position from which to speak with authority.
The “community” now has its ancestors. Coming out becomes the discovery of more than a sexual desire: it reveals the kind of person one has supposedly always been, accompanied by predecessors whose lives give that discovery historical weight. Identification offers the feeling of having been one of the chosen all along.
The conversation then turned to the possibility of Limelight being banned. The interviewer offered what he explicitly called a compliment: the book would “piss off a lot of conservative people.” The author welcomed the thought: “Oh, I hope so.” Asked how he would feel about a ban, he said he would partly feel proud because “clearly they see it as a threat.” He also acknowledged the consequences of losing access to readers. Yet the prospect of opposition already made him a little martyr.
What remains less clear is where the challenge to convention lies. Gay relationships, drag and sexual self-discovery are familiar themes in mainstream entertainment, and even explicit sex is no longer inherently subversive. The capacity to offend some audiences does not make a work a threat to the larger culture.
Yet depictions of gay life in the media and on social media cling to an inherited picture of society. The two men spoke as though homosexuality were still unspeakable and its public expression necessarily an act of rebellion. Hostility had not disappeared, but that picture no longer described the culture around them. What helps keep it alive is the continued pushing of boundaries: when little is left to transgress, transgression has to be staged. For the author, the prospect of rejection promised to confirm that he was more than accepted: he was significant enough to be feared.
Rebellion thus becomes a calling, and greater acceptance does not bring it to an end. The word queer renews the mission and extends it beyond homosexuals. Those who identify with it can understand themselves as the people charged with exposing what society still represses and leading it toward liberation. This is what they are chosen for.
Yet the mission keeps returning to sex. Its rebellious authority is still drawn from sexual transgression, as though breaking a sexual convention necessarily challenged conventional thought. The identity claims to transcend sexuality and cannot do without it.
Suffering supplies the other source of that authority. Gay and queer suffering is treated as exceptional, as though sexuality or gender made loneliness, humiliation and exclusion more profound than they are in other lives. Other outsiders, whose difficulties carry no such name, remain invisible.
That standing can be borrowed: from the persecution of earlier generations, the injuries of people elsewhere, the suffering of friends. I have seen privileged people speak with an authority drawn from pain they never endured. Within the community, the same logic produces a ranking: the most marginalized are granted the most authority, and questioning them counts as dismissing their suffering.
This is where the figure I call the professional gay finds his footing: someone who makes interpreting gay life and speaking on behalf of a community part of his public role or career. The exchange between the two men in the Getting Close interview shows how this authority is acquired. They moved easily between personal experience, collective history and advice about what queer people need. The shared account of suffering gave their words representative weight.
Where does that leave the outsider who recognizes himself in none of these identities? There are many ways of feeling estranged or disconnected. Yet queer increasingly claims this territory as its own, as though sexuality and gender gave estrangement its most meaningful expression. I could feel that my sexuality made me different without imagining that homosexuals were a different kind of people.
Every revelation needs an audience. The queer experience is recounted with a solemnity that makes it sound like an awakening: suffering, self-discovery, acceptance, entry into a community of people who understand. Even sexual exhibitionism acquires the dignity of testimony. What troubles me is not the freedom to live differently. It is the demand that difference be acknowledged as a mark of exceptional worth. The chosen ones require witnesses.
A GAY IDENTITY FOR EVERYONE
The celebration of difference is accompanied by a celebration of numbers. On social media, reports that more people identify as LGBTQ are welcomed. The collective grows, and its growth is presented as personal liberation.
Homosexuals nevertheless constitute a small minority. In the Netherlands, a large survey in 2023 classified about 2.5 percent of people aged fifteen and over as homosexual: men attracted only to men and women attracted only to women. Its broader LGBTQIA category encompassed 17.7 percent. That larger figure did not mean that all these people called themselves LGBTQIA; the researchers grouped them together from their answers about attraction, gender and intersex status. The category established neither their identification with a community nor their attachment to its politics.
The increase in identification is substantial. Gallup found that 9 percent of American adults identified as LGBTQ+ in 2024, compared with 3.5 percent in 2012. These are not counts of homosexuals. They bring together several sexual orientations and gender identities, with bisexual people making up the largest share. What has grown is identification with a range of categories gathered beneath a common designation.
The numbers matter less than the meaning attached to that designation. Different desires and experiences are presented as the basis of one community, with a public voice and political expectations. An identity developed around homosexuality becomes available to people whose sexuality is not exclusively homosexual, while homosexuals who feel little attachment to it have less and less in common with what supposedly represents them.
Queer carries forward what the gay identity already offered: an account of oneself, a relationship to society and a promise of belonging. None of this language was new to me when the queer movement appeared. What changed was its authority: it increasingly claimed to speak for everyone. Yet expanding the range of people included does not expand the range of ways they are permitted to understand themselves. The identities multiply, but the expectations remain remarkably similar: a uniformity of difference.
Set the two side by side and little separates them. The coming-out story, in which a hidden truth is discovered and declared. The chosen family that replaces the one that failed. The account of suffering that explains a life. Pride as the annual ritual. Visibility as a duty. The flag. The ancestors. The spokespeople who explain what it all means. Every element of the gay identity has been kept but one. Queer is not a new identity. It is the old one with its single tangible condition removed.
Amir Odom, a conservative commentator, described learning those expectations in a conversation with Blaire White, a transgender woman known for her criticism of progressive gender politics. Both speak openly about their lives while resisting the politics attached to them. Recalling his coming out, Odom said: “I turned into a caricature of what I thought gay was supposed to be.” He had copied what he saw in mainstream media: “I thought that that’s what I was just supposed to be.”
At sixteen, he attended Pride and won a twerking competition. He laughed as he recalled his performance. Later, his enthusiasm for what he called “who wears the least parades” gave way to doubt: “I don’t really see the point of this anymore.” Acknowledging his sexuality had not settled how he wanted to live.
White had never felt the same attachment. “I never actually felt like a part of the LGBT community or anything,” she said. She had gay friends and, after transitioning, trans friends. Asked whether she had attended Pride to celebrate, she answered: “No. I just went to this one to film a video.” Of the identity itself, she observed: “There’s a script that you’re expected to follow.”
Her exchange with Odom complicated the distinction drawn by other right-wing gays. A transgender woman could feel just as distant from the collective identity as a homosexual man. What brought them together was their resistance to the expectations attached to their lives. The disagreement already present among homosexuals could extend across the very categories proposed as a way of resolving it.
They mocked a video introducing four neopronouns along with some cupcakes, but White distinguished between choosing a label and claiming a shared identity. “I’m not mad at anyone calling themselves what they want to call themselves,” she said. “When you try to say I’m non-binary, which means I’m trans, that’s when I’m going to have an issue.”
At a Beyoncé night in a gay club, Odom said, an older song would come on and he would catch someone’s eye across the room: “Oh my gosh, you’re a real fan.” They would sing together and enjoy the evening. Then they would exchange Instagram accounts, his commentary would come to light, and: “Blocked.”
He described a similar experience at a concert: someone stopped speaking to him and encouraged others to do the same. He began using another name and saying that he owned a marketing company. The pleasure they had shared was real. His politics, once known, could outweigh it.
In another video, Odom described homosexuals who were comfortable with their sexuality yet reluctant to come out because of what others might associate with it. The disclosure now required a qualification: “I’m gay, but I’m not like gay.” They wanted to acknowledge their desire without being assigned a public identity. Prominent figures had become, as Odom put it, “the spokesperson of everybody else,” giving strangers an image of these men before they had said a word.
Queer did not present itself as an extension of the gay identity. It presented itself as a revolt against it. In 1990, the activists of Queer Nation distributed a manifesto at the New York Pride march titled Queers Read This. Being queer, it declared, was “not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated.” It meant “leading a different sort of life.” The target was the respectable gay movement, with its lobbyists, its executive directors and its hunger for acceptance.
Yet the same manifesto already contained the seed of what queer would become. “Being queer,” it said, “is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are.” The revolt kept the one thing the gay identity could least afford to lose: the demand to be seen. Public expression remained central to its understanding of freedom.
The theory that followed promised something more radical still. The scholar David Halperin defined queer as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant,” and called it “an identity without an essence.” The emptiness was meant as freedom. In practice, it worked as an invitation: an identity without an essence excludes practically no one.
Those closest to the idea noticed early. Teresa de Lauretis, who coined the term “queer theory” in 1990, complained only four years later that it had “very quickly become a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry.” The sociologist Joshua Gamson named the dilemma underneath: “Fixed identity categories are both the basis for oppression and the basis for political power.” A movement that wants to dissolve identities still needs one to organize around. Queer retained the collective identity on which its political power depended.
My resistance to the collective identity did not mean that I longed for a more conventional life. The respectable gay world could feel narrow: the right body, the desirable boyfriend, the career, the money, the carefully displayed success. Queer held out room for what that world found embarrassing: femininity, ambiguity, eccentricity, an unwillingness to become respectable. Its questions about family, gender roles and sexual convention could be worth asking. I did not want admission to ordinary life to become the highest ambition available to a homosexual.
Not everyone who calls himself queer belongs to the world of influencers and professional gays. There are serious people among them, and I have some sympathy for what they want to preserve. They find the gay identity too centered on sex. They see what I see: a culture that became respectable, commercial and conformist, and that has little patience for the people it finds embarrassing. Their concern is not visibility but injustice: poverty, housing, prisons, the police, the people the respectable gay world would rather not be seen with.
Yet they answer the limits of one collective identity with another. Outsiderhood does not survive being organized. And the name they chose still refers to sex and gender: if the injustice is poverty, housing or prisons, why should the identity be sexual? The serious queer wants to preserve something real. He uses the very instrument that destroyed it.
The same holds for ambiguity. Queer tries to recover what the gay identity erased, and does so by turning ambiguity into an identity of its own. It gives a name to the refusal of names. What the older world could simply leave open, queer must declare as open, and then defend.
Even the absence of sexual interest can become an occasion for sustained sexual self-definition. Desire, its frequency, its conditions: each supplies material for another account of identity. Such distinctions may help someone understand an experience. I question the importance they are then asked to carry. A person can know whom he wants, or that he wants nobody, without making that knowledge the organizing principle of his life.
I have often thought that the gay identity is essentially an identity for teenagers. Who am I? Which people are mine? How should I present myself? Answering these questions need not become a permanent occupation. The promise of finding oneself becomes peculiar when it requires an audience, an expanding vocabulary and recurring reassurance that the discovery is valid. At some point, there should be a life to get on with. “Life is just so much bigger than who you want to have sex with,” White remarked.
These uniformizing tendencies also appeared in White and Odom’s discussion of unresolved wounds. “A lot of LGBT people have a lot of trauma in their childhoods,” White said. The conversation returned to an explanation already familiar from people identifying exclusively as gay: behind the adult stood the injured outsider, whose present difficulties were understood through earlier rejection.
The queer movement extends that account to more people; even its conservative critics can continue to use it. The proposed response changes—from collective affirmation to personal recovery—while the assumed history remains much the same. Yet similar difficulties can have different causes, and being different does not mean having suffered in the same way.
Towards the end, the conversation turned to what their suffering had enabled them to do. White spoke of transforming pain into “something that not only helps other people, but elevates you,” and of “the contract I have with God.” Odom agreed: “We’re using that to our advantage and helping millions of people out there.” The politics had changed, but the calling had not. Even resistance to the community could become another exemplary life, offered to followers as a way of understanding their own.
The opposition between respectable gays and radical queers became less convincing to me. One could reject respectability and remain attached to applause, professional advancement and commercial success; sexual boldness does not prevent an ordinary appetite for status. Independence has to appear in the choices a person makes. No designation can do that work for him.
I do not object to people making unconventional lives together; a small circle can sustain experiments that would be difficult alone. My objection begins when that circle’s preferred account of freedom becomes the one everyone is expected to accept. Eccentricity, imagination and independence need not take a sexual form. Nor must every homosexual experience his desire as liberation, a public identity or membership in a movement. The freedom being promised should include the possibility of attaching less importance to all of it.
The queer movement and the right-wing gays react to the same development. One extends the gay identity beyond homosexuals; the other resists the expectations attached to it. By the end of their conversation, White and Odom’s advice seemed to point beyond reclaiming the movement: sexuality and the difficulties surrounding it need not be made into questions of identity.
That possibility matters beyond the individuals who decline the invitation. Other societies may also understand sexuality, discretion and family differently. What began as a way of escaping convention can become a standard against which entire cultures are judged.
I reject the idea that sex and hedonism are the natural antidote to a conformist, boring and oppressive society. The gay world had already shown me people who were sexually extreme and conventional in almost every other respect. Queer culture inherited the confusion. Yet this particular version of freedom is now offered to the rest of the world as freedom itself. Why should an identity need everyone else to agree with it?
RETURN OF THE CIVILIZING MISSION
An identity that rests on a tangible fact can stand still. Homosexuals are a small minority; their number does not grow because someone campaigns for it. An identity that rests on declaration has no such limit, and no reason to accept one. It is closer to a creed than to a constituency, and creeds are missionary by nature.
Behind the mission lies insecurity. A person who is certain of how he lives does not need converts. The missionary does. Every new believer quiets a doubt he cannot admit. That is why indifference is harder to bear than opposition. The opponent at least takes the identity seriously; the indifferent man suggests that it may not matter at all.
The insecurity takes a familiar form. I have heard it in bars, on podcasts and from people I knew well: I live like this, so everybody else has to live like this. The open relationship becomes the model for all relationships, the circle of friends becomes the community, the city becomes the world. It is tempting for any homosexual to take his own life as the measure of homosexual life.
The identity turns that temptation into a principle. If the way one lives is one’s authentic self, and the authentic self is the same in everyone, then whoever lives differently is not living differently; he is denying himself. Live and let live becomes betrayal. The man who lives otherwise must be brought into line, and so must the society that lets him.
At home, the homosexual who lives without the identity is recoded as ashamed, closeted, unfinished. Abroad, a society in which homosexuals are neither celebrated nor persecuted, simply left alone, is recoded as backward. Both reveal the same thing: homosexuality can be lived without the identity. Both must therefore be converted.
Did turning homosexuality into an identity help homosexuals or hinder them? At home, the answer is less simple than its critics, myself included, would like it to be. Coming out made homosexuals visible to their families, colleagues and neighbors, and that visibility made prejudice harder to sustain. Collective organization played a role in decriminalization. For a while, the identity, built around political activism, was the instrument through which homosexuality came to matter less.
But an instrument can outlive its purpose. An identity that helped secure rights becomes a way of being that must be affirmed, celebrated and finally exported. What served homosexuals as a means becomes a burden once it is treated as the goal. That burden is heaviest where the identity arrives as a foreign flag.
One reason for the outward expansion, I suspect, is that the identity remains controversial at home. Abroad, its promotion is presented as helping people become more tolerant, as though tolerance were all that was being asked of them. But what is being sold is an identity and a new religion.
Abroad, the identity meets societies that never asked for it, and they receive it less patiently than people at home. In the West, resistance to it produces commentary, a few dissenting organizations and men like Farrell and Lennard explaining themselves on camera. Elsewhere, it produces laws, raids and prison sentences.
I imagine myself living in a more traditional country and watching what arrives from the West under the banner of “queer rights.” I might oppose the imprisonment or mistreatment of homosexuals while also taking issue with the celebration of sexual hedonism, prostitution and the public display of fetishes. If I said, “I do not want that here,” would this make me an enemy of homosexuals? I do not think it would.
Many people in such countries respond in precisely this way. They may be rejecting not the freedom of individuals but the culture presented alongside it. Queer-rights discourse leaves little room for that distinction: a society is asked whether it is for or against LGBTQ people, as though homosexuality admitted only one public meaning.
People can think very differently about homosexuality without wishing to persecute homosexuals. It may be understood as a sexual preference, a private fact, a form of conduct, a social identity or a moral question. None of them need determine how a homosexual is treated. Human rights should already protect him from violence, imprisonment and arbitrary discrimination. He should not have to understand himself as gay or queer before he becomes eligible for that protection.
Nor should the identity alone make him eligible. Listening to some human rights groups, one could get the impression that anyone who feels persecuted because of his identity can claim asylum. But neither the identity nor the feeling of persecution can settle whether someone qualifies for protection.
The formula “Queer Rights Are Human Rights” appears merely to restate this principle. In practice, it introduces something else. Human rights organizations present themselves as protecting a sexuality: the freedom to desire and sleep with someone of one’s own sex without being punished for it. What they promote is an identity, which they believe to be the same in Kampala as in Amsterdam. Decriminalizing a sexual act asks a society to leave people alone. Recognizing an identity asks it to adopt a new understanding of who people are.
The distinction matters. Same-sex desire exists in societies that have never produced the Western gay identity. Gender-nonconforming people may understand themselves through local customs, religious roles, family relations or categories for which LGBTQ provides no exact equivalent. Translating them all into the acronym may make them legible to Western institutions, but it also replaces their interpretation of themselves with a Western one.
It can make them legible to hostile governments as well. Once the flag, the vocabulary and the organizations appear as parts of an international movement, local homosexuals can be portrayed as representatives of a foreign political project. Visibility then becomes vulnerability.
Russia provides an unusually literal example. In 2023, its Supreme Court did not merely prohibit particular conduct. It declared an “international LGBT movement” extremist. The rainbow flag became evidence of affiliation; people were prosecuted for displaying it, organizations closed and gay venues were raided. The state took the idea of a transnational identity supplied by activists and turned it into a transnational conspiracy. Russia is not alone. Uganda, Ghana, Georgia and Hungary have all presented new laws as a defense against Western imposition.
This does not excuse the repression. Some governments would have found a pretext regardless; anti-gay campaigns have been launched where hardly any visible movement existed. But a pretext works best when it contains some truth. The Western campaign describes LGBTQ as a global movement with shared symbols and objectives; the hostile state accepts that description and reverses its moral meaning.
Transnational LGBTQ politics can therefore become a threat to fragile regimes of tolerance. In some societies, homosexuality is not fully accepted, yet people are largely left alone. The arrangement is imperfect, inconsistent and easily disturbed, but it can still permit lives that open confrontation would make impossible. By treating tolerance as inadequate and demanding visibility, recognition and public affirmation, Western institutions may unsettle that arrangement. The movement raises the symbolic stakes while remaining far from the people who will pay them.
There is a peculiar historical reversal in this. Postcolonial thought taught that the West should stop telling other peoples who they are. Queer thought taught that identities are fluid, constructed and culturally contingent. Abroad, however, the same identities become permanent human types whose recognition provides a measure of civilization.
The scholar Jasbir Puar described how Western states use gay rights to present themselves as civilized and others as backward. She called it homonationalism. Joseph Massad criticized what he called the Gay International: the export of Western sexual categories to societies that had never asked for them. The critique of the civilizing mission did not begin on the right.
This is colonialism of a different kind: ideological rather than territorial. What is exported is not simply a Western view of homosexuality but an American one. Europe had its own traditions, pragmatic and discreet, more concerned with privacy than with celebration. The American vision, modeled on the civil rights movement, sees homosexuals as a minority with its own culture, history and community. It has gradually absorbed those older traditions. Pride month commemorates a riot in New York. European teenagers come out in the vocabulary of American television. Europe did not invent the identity it now promotes abroad; it imported it first.
The European Union now presents LGBTQ rights as “European values.” In 2020 the President of the European Commission declared that “LGBTQI-free zones are humanity-free zones.” When Hungary restricted the depiction of homosexuality to minors, the Commission took it to the European Court of Justice for violating Union law. A vision of homosexuality shaped in New York and San Francisco has become the measure by which Brussels decides whether Budapest or Warsaw is sufficiently European.
The civilizing mission no longer begins at Europe’s borders; it begins within them, against member states whose traditions are older than the Union itself. Russia, for its part, presents itself as the defender of the traditions Europe has supposedly abandoned. Both sides agree on one thing: a society’s attitude toward the acronym reveals which civilization it belongs to. A continent unsure of what it stands for has found something to stand against.
The West is waging a culture war abroad, and it needs no army to do so. It works through soft power: films, series and pop culture that travel further than any diplomat. A young man in Lagos or Jakarta can learn what being gay is supposed to look like from Netflix and Drag Race before he has ever met another homosexual. Behind the entertainment stands a network of NGOs, funded largely by Western governments and foundations.
They translate local lives into the vocabulary of the acronym, train activists to speak it and report back to the institutions that pay for them. Their intentions may be sincere. The structure, however, is familiar: the money, the categories and the measure of progress come from the West, and local people are expected to adopt them. Whoever controls the vocabulary decides what counts as freedom.
The old civilizing mission exported Christianity, marriage and European manners. The new one exports the acronym, the flag and the coming-out story. Its missionaries are no longer priests but diplomats and diversity officers. The content has changed; the presumption has not.
The queer expansion is therefore more than an increase in the number of people included. Identification no longer requires homosexual desire, yet its authority still rests on sex. The distinction between sexuality and identity becomes harder to make just as the two grow further apart. Feeling supplies its own proof, and an objection to the belief is received as an attack on the believer. The identity takes on the force of a faith: it offers belonging, gives suffering a purpose and seeks converts.
Abroad, that confusion has consequences: accepting the identity is presented as accepting homosexuals, and resistance to its worldview becomes evidence of intolerance. What expands is its claim to determine what other people’s lives mean.
None of this requires indifference to persecution. One can oppose violence and imprisonment, offer refuge and defend freedom without asking people to adopt that collective meaning. The right-wing gays want the flag returned to the homosexuals. But changing who holds it does not settle who may speak for whom. The freedom at stake includes deciding how much one’s sexuality matters and what to make of it, without having its meaning settled at the collective level.