Intro. "Us Is the New Them"
For quite some time now, a new type of public figure has become hard to avoid: someone whose entire job is to explain a group of people and their worldview to the rest of the nation — not as individuals, but as a community. They sit on panels, host podcasts, run seminars, write columns, give interviews. As intermediaries, they combine activism, organization, and commentary, and they make a living by turning ordinary life into a grander narrative.
Around the year 2000, I began to take notice of a shift in how people talk about society at large and about the loose, ill-defined groups within it. The language itself changed. Suddenly everyone started using "we" when referring to such entities — the nation, and sometimes even the entire world population.
Not "they," not "those people," but "we" as a default — we as gays, we as women, we as migrants, we as the marginalized, we as the community, even we the nation. On the surface this may sound warmer, more humane, more inclusive. At the same time, it changed the logic of all public speech. Not long after, I came across graffiti under a bridge that said it plainly: "US IS THE NEW THEM."
It disturbed me then, and it still does. I had just left school, where I had been taught that one refers to such groups in the third person — "they," not "we" — even the ones one thinks one belongs to. Intuitively, I felt this was more than a grammatical violation. Who do they mean when they say "we"? They cannot mean me personally — I don't engage in the behavior they describe, and I don't hold the views the so-called "we" espouses. To me, the word still carries the old meaning: everyone. For newscasters and professional commentators, it started to mean something else: a perceived statistical majority, an entire demographic, a set of trends — a strange and shifting composite. That was, and still is, the new "we."
This is the politicization of groups reflected in everyday language in its most popularized form. Feminists, for example, have long had the tendency to speak on behalf of all women as a collective — claiming, for instance, that progress is being reversed, that women as a group are losing ground, that "we" have been set back. The implied subject is always the same: not this woman or that woman, but women, a unified body with a shared condition and a shared enemy. That it became widely accepted — unremarkable, even expected — says something about how quickly the ground had shifted.
In Europe, the same expectation has been extended to immigrant populations, and above all to those of the Muslim faith — that they ought to produce spokespeople who could represent and explain them to the rest of society, in the hope one can integrate and probably manage these people better. The invitation has largely been declined.
What slowly crystallized over the years is that the moment public speech reorganizes itself around "we" and "us," it creates — or perhaps reveals, or even produces — a growing demand for interpreters: people who can define the "we" and sell it back to an audience.
One could call him the most modern form of representation — and in the more successful cases, that is exactly what he is. Yet he is something more than someone merely looking after the interests of certain people. He has to keep an audience, stay relevant, secure an income, and always keep his topic hot enough that he remains necessary — it is also a sales job. That is not his only motive, however. He wants to sell you on an entire worldview.
That is why the modern spokesperson is an odd combination of roles: part minister, part marketer. He delivers moral language and direction, then packages it as a product — a stance, a narrative, a cause, a list of approved phrases. He provides people with a sense of identity and belonging in a world that is becoming increasingly atomized.
In modern liberal societies, traditional religious faith has been pushed to the fringes; that does not mean, however, the religious instincts have disappeared. On the contrary. Pride parades everywhere, an entire season of Pride, a Pride month — an annual ritual of suffering, redemption and collective affirmation, with 'coming out' as its central sacrament. This is how the role of the modern spokesperson becomes something far more than merely looking after — or "fighting for" — the interests of certain people.
He needs to sell people on a certain way of life and the belief system attached to it — which is usually his own. He claims to speak for an entire "community," although he speaks the language of only a very small portion of it, and on the surface he sees no problem with that. He is the representative of the world he is trying to shape, and increasingly also its architect. First and foremost, he is a manager of the social order.
This essay is about that kind of person in gay life — not the person who merely offers venues and services that gay people need and enjoy: bars, clubs, bathhouses, parties, all the nightlife infrastructure. I mean the professional voice: the media figure, activist, adviser, consultant, and lately also celebrities — someone whose prestige and income depend on keeping gayness publicly alive as a topic, and on speaking in the name of his constituents. In practice, the two roles often overlap. Call him the professional gay.
The professional gay feels the need to represent the ideas of what is called "the gay community" — a construct he tries to cement as an integral part of wider society. He sells these ideas with a certain confidence, as if he simply knows what being gay is and the "community" is all about. Moreover, he turns a missionary impulse — not uncommon in gay culture — into a public program.
That zeal falls on fertile ground because his views and way of life resonate with the values of wider society. In liberal culture, homosexuality is not treated as a private reality but almost as a moral emblem — a sign of progress and emancipation, albeit a heavily tamed version of them.
Beyond that, the professional gay benefits from the way certain arguments are framed in contemporary culture. Questions that are, at bottom, moral and personal are increasingly presented as if they have already been settled elsewhere — by experts, by studies, by "what we now know."
Gay life, which exists in many different forms, is often narrated as if it were one coherent thing — with a historical narrative attached to it and one obvious direction. One hears it in the easy talk about "the community," "the gay world" — as if these were stable entities and a coherent realm, rather than shifting, contested labels. That kind of language makes representation easier: it turns a messy plurality into a collective body that can be spoken for. And once one can speak for such a body, one can also start prescribing what belonging to it is supposed to look like.
His message is no longer live and let live — rather: adopt the gay identity, and the vocabulary and story attached to it. Every homosexual man is supposed to become "gay" in the official sense — publicly, correctly, with the right attitudes and views — while those who refuse the sanctioned identity package are mostly ignored, at times slandered and even intimidated.
The professional's relentless need to stay relevant, advance his career and secure an income aligns perfectly with the emancipation narrative he sells to his audience — one that, by design, can never be completed, and neither, therefore, can the professional's relevance. It functions as a machine that must keep running forever — a machine that elevates a sexual preference to a higher, manufactured meaning, and must be kept alive at all costs.
In recent years, and especially in the English-speaking world, something has shifted. The acceptance of homosexuality into mainstream culture has arrived with a force — a speed and completeness that must astonish anyone from Western Europe, where acceptance was a slower, more reserved process until quite recently. And with that acceptance has come something else: an explosion of people wanting to take part in the prestige of speaking on behalf of "the gays."
The competition for such a position has become painful to watch. Where once there were a handful of serious voices — people who had actually done and accomplished something, paid a price, earned their platform — there is now a crowded field of aspirants, each trying to out-represent the other. The credential is no longer experience or substance; it is the identity itself and to what extent one is willing to embrace it. To be gay, a victim and visible is already enough. The rest follows.
All my life I have felt a certain aversion to these people. I often find their behavior deeply unsettling, and that hasn't changed much over the years. I keep wondering: why do they bother me so much? Their behavior always struck me as extremely presumptuous — speaking on behalf of all people who share a certain sexual preference. Some may not be aware of it, though most seem to sense it — and are constantly trying to explain it away. There is more going on here.
The Professional at Work
The gay professional advances a simple but powerful idea: that to be homosexual is to have suffered in an exceptional way, and that to adopt the gay identity is to transform that suffering into something noble. Victimhood is the foundation; virtue is the reward. Without the injury, there is no story. Without the story, there is no community. And without the community, there is no gay professional representative — no one to sell its nobility to the world, and no one to police it from within.
He is usually not simply a well-known person who happens to be gay. Being gay is central to him — a major source of his authority, his aura of activism, and his claim to speak for others. The need to constantly justify that position, and to deflect what is inherently problematic about speaking on behalf of others, produces deformations in his thinking — sometimes even a corruption of character. The professional gay has to mislead people, at least to some extent.
One striking example is Jack Guinness, who compiled, fairly recently, a collection of essays and profiles under the grandiose title "The Queer Bible." The title does the work before you've opened the book: it signals full alignment with the identitarian politics of the moment, inflates what is essentially an anthology into something canonical and sacred, and positions its editor as an authoritative voice of gay life. It did land him a string of interviews. To me, he is the picture-book example of the type.
Guinness is not a prominent public figure in any conventional sense. He is mainly known within British fashion, not as a household name. And that is precisely the point. It is rarely the truly established figures who make the identity their whole platform. It is the second tier — the moderately known, the aspirants, the ones still scrambling for position — who trade on it most heavily. For them the gay identity is not incidental to their public role. It is the whole of it. The credential, the authority, and the career all become the same thing.
Every professional gay who positions himself as a visible public figure is, whether he says so explicitly or not, also positioning himself as a role model. Guinness is refreshingly candid about this: "I want young people growing up knowing that they walk in the footsteps of the bravest, most incredible human beings to walk the face of the planet." Visibility in this world does not merely mean being seen — it means being exemplary. It means saying: this is what a gay man looks like, this is how he speaks, these are his values and his attitudes.
On the podcast "All Out with Jon Dean" he was asked about his time at Cambridge, and specifically about having had a girlfriend. His response was telling — and it is essentially all you need to know about him: "I feel weird talking about it because it's kind of not my thing to talk about because it involves someone else." If you position yourself as a role model, and partake in the privilege of speaking on behalf of the gays and their causes, a girlfriend is an inconvenient fact. It is not cool to have had one. It means you are not a true faggot. Being in denial is one thing — having actually had a girl is another matter entirely. The excuse — protecting others — is self-congratulatory. Thank God, he is honest about his sexual preferences now.
Listening to Guinness is an education in the language of the professional gay. The language of difference and victimhood runs through everything he says. He speaks it fluently and without apparent irony. The word queer , he explains, is "a way of approaching the world — a way of saying that you reject the patriarchal norms of society." His life's work, he tells us, is "amplifying marginalized voices and telling queer stories." And of course, "everyone should be in therapy — especially queer people. Not because we've done anything wrong, but because we live in a traumatizing world."
That trauma, in his telling, is not merely personal or specific, but inherited — passed down through the AIDS epidemic, through bullying, through a society that has apparently never stopped persecuting its gay members. Like original sin, it is transmitted by definition, and the only question is how to carry it. "We have to look at our elders," he says, "and connect up to their lived experience and the trauma they went through — that I went through — and the kids are still going through now." It is a thin foundation for such a grand spiritual claim — that a sexual preference can generate this kind of inherited suffering, binding generations together in a shared wound.
The source of all this damage is not hard to identify, at least not for Guinness: "The majority of the toxicity in the world — the hate crimes — are perpetrated by white straight men. So instead of us having to do all the labor and work of unpicking why we're so damaged, why don't the perpetrators of that violence do the work." He says all of this with the calm certainty of someone reciting bible verses. There is no hesitation, no qualification, no apparent awareness of how it might sound to anyone outside the congregation. He is, in the fullest sense, a true believer.
In another interview — on Times Radio — he is introduced as "author, model and activist" — the dishonesty is apparent from the first slightly awkward exchange. The courageous interviewer notes, almost in passing, that Guinness didn't so much write the book as edit it. Guinness corrects him without missing a beat, then moves on. It is, in miniature, the whole enterprise: fake it till you make it .
The interviewer does his best — his questions are sharper than most. "Why do we need a flag?" he asks. "Has the battle not been won? Maybe we don't need any of this anymore." These are reasonable questions. Yet notice the "we." He is not asking from the outside; he is asking from within. He means "we gays" — and that single word already concedes the central premise: that there is a community, that it has a shared cause, and that he is part of it. For him, as for all of them, there is only the "us." Any reasonable distance has disappeared.
Trans people, by contrast, are addressed in the third person throughout — "the trans community," "trans friends," "trans women" — as if they belong to a different category entirely, one that the "we" does not quite cover. The distinction is telling. For those for whom the gay identity matters most, activism is not a choice but a duty. The "we" is the sound of that duty — unreflective, assumed, already in place before the conversation begins. Even the interviewer, for all his nuance, cannot escape it.
The interview teaches us something about the games many professionals play when asked serious questions. The interviewer sets the scene at home: "There's been some political movements in Britain. Reform UK, the party are opposed to pride flags on council buildings." He asks directly: "Has the battle not been won? Maybe we don't need any of this anymore." Guinness's answer is immediate: "The battle has absolutely not been won." Watch what follows. He concedes — almost accidentally — "for privileged white, cis, non-trans men like myself, the battle feels like it has been won." A moment of honesty. Then the pivot: "We're seeing in America, even this very privileged group potentially have their rights rolled back." And then, further: "We're seeing in America, on government websites, on the Stonewall memorial, they've removed any reference to trans people." The question was about Britain. The answer is about America. The question was about gay men. The answer is about trans people. Neither evasion is accidental.
The interviewer, to his credit, presses further — raising the question of asexuality. Does including asexuals not stretch the whole thing beyond credibility? It is the right question. Guinness defends it by drawing a parallel: just as gay people were once medicalised for their desires, asexual people are medicalised for the absence of them. The victimhood is the same; only the diagnosis differs. The interviewer senses that asexuality cannot be an identity in any meaningful sense, or at least not one like the gay identity — not wanting sex was, if anything, closer to the approved virtue that homosexuality transgressed. To claim the same victimhood for its absence exposes the whole logic. Still, the question is off limits, and he backs down.
There is no pressing further. To do so would open a larger question — whether the gay identity itself is, at least in part, a construction built on contestable foundations. That would open Pandora's box. The line is never crossed. Guinness defends asexuality without hesitation, and the interviewer retreats. He cannot draw a line anywhere — and neither, it turns out, can his interviewer. The bias runs both ways.
The interviewer asks directly: "Do you ever worry that there's a certain naffness attached to something like the flag?" Guinness allows himself a small concession: "I will say this — I sometimes find the pride flag a little bit cheesy." Sometimes. Giving just enough to appear honest. Then the retreat: "and then I remember its origins and what it was for." The actual question — what it means when it hangs from government buildings — is never addressed.
It would reveal something Guinness cannot afford to admit: what he does, and what the flag now represents, can hardly be called activism. His entire new career depends on the fiction that he is still fighting something. The flag on the town hall is the proof that he has already won. Throughout the interview he answers questions he was not asked and avoids the ones he was — it is the politician's art, and he thinks it is a genuine form of militancy.
The stakes, in his telling, could not be higher. Remove the flag from a government building and civilization will begin to unravel: "If we start removing flags, it worries me that we're on a slippery slope. And the next thing we're going to do is we're going to end up pulling books out of libraries that people don't like and putting them in piles and burning them."
If it weren't for people like him, in other words, gay people would be on their own. It is an extraordinary claim — and a self-serving one. "Books like the Queer Bible telling stories, flying a flag, let people know that they're not the first," he says. He grew up, he tells us, thinking he "was maybe the first gay person that had ever existed." I and many others never thought that for a moment.
Guinness is a useful exhibit precisely because of his extraordinarily unguarded mind — his thinking is close to the surface, easy to read, and to me a mix of cringe and entertainment. The professional gay comes in many styles but unfortunately only one creed. More serious figures present themselves a little differently. The ideology, on closer inspection, is exactly the same. Where Guinness emphasises the identity, the more serious ones administer the suffering.
Matthew Todd, former editor of the gay rag Attitude , presents himself very differently from Guinness — measured and data-driven. In interviews he starts by citing numbers: "Statistics show a disproportionate number of gay people suffer from mental health problems," he says — "including anxiety, depression, addiction, suicidal thoughts and behaviour." It gives him an aura of seriousness that Guinness, for all his confidence, can never achieve — and with it, greater access to institutions, media, the cultural elites. His views, on closer inspection, are no less shallow.
Statistics, however, can only describe; they can barely explain, let alone understand. Higher rates of suicide and depression among gay men could have many causes — some external, some internal to gay culture itself, some entirely unrelated to sexuality. Todd never entertains that question. The numbers are fed directly into the victimhood narrative: society shamed us, therefore we suffer. The cause is assumed before the evidence is examined.
To his credit, Todd does not look away from the darker sides of gay culture — the addiction, the promiscuity, the difficulty sustaining intimacy. He sees them clearly. His explanation, however, is always the same: shame, trauma, the legacy of growing up in a hostile world. "It was very hard for me to grow up with a healthy sense of who I am," he says. "It's hard for anybody to grow up with a healthy sense of love and sex and relationships when you are constantly told that the way you are feeling is wrong." The shame, he insists, is still there: "You might think it's easy these days to come out and cast that off. But the sense of shame is still embedded in us."
Like many gay people, and professionals in particular, Todd reduces gay people to their sexuality, and the difference that came with it. It becomes the one explanation — the cause that accounts for everything. However, there are gay people for whom the sex part was never a source of shame or a personal crisis. Coming out was not a major event for them — perhaps it never took place at all. They were never particularly bothered by their sexuality. They may have their own problems, their own darkness — perhaps even contributing to the shadow sides of gay culture — but their sexuality was never the cause of it. Todd has no room for such a person. His framework simply cannot accommodate him.
He does acknowledge the reverse though — someone who did struggle, who had real difficulties around being different, and who still managed to build a life not defined by that struggle. In an interview he said: "I'm amazed when gay people manage to remain stable." He adds: "I haven't managed to do it, and neither have most of my friends." His framework requires the injury to be permanent.
There is a contradiction he never addresses: for years he ran a magazine whose best-selling issues featured bare-chested, muscle-bound bodies on the cover — exactly the culture he diagnoses as damaging. It is more than hypocrisy. It suggests that something else is at work here — something his framework was never designed to see.
He is probably right that many gay people are unstable. That is not the question. The question is where the instability comes from — and what it means to build an entire identity around one explanation for it. He speaks from his own circle and extrapolates to all gay people. His world is the world. His friends are the data. This is the other face of the us is the new them logic: a particular experience elevated into the universal one.
On the Lorraine show, he is more candid still. "I was in the shower thinking I am quite a damaged person and I can't do anything about it," he says. "I thought I was the most damaged person in the world." This is a man who was, by his own description, "42 and relatively successful" — editor of a national magazine, plays in the West End, meetings with the likes of Madonna and Elton John. The acceptance was there. The success was there. And yet: "I realized in the last 10 years that there was still some of that shame that had been put into me by society." The shame is always there. It can always be found.
His solution is always the same. It is not merely acceptance he demands — it is accommodation. "I want straight people to write to their kids' schools, to the headmasters and headmistresses, and say: what are you doing about homophobic and transphobic bullying?" Institutions must act. Policies must be put in place. The state must intervene. If the bullying at school stops, the suicide rates will drop and gay people and therefore gay culture will become more wholesome. It is a single lever for a deeply complex problem.
On the surface that sounds really nice. But does bullying have anything to do with being gay specifically? Children are bullied for being different, sensitive, awkward, for not fitting in — qualities that have not necessarily something to do with sexuality. Non-gay children are affected by bullying too, often for exactly the same reasons. And any school worth its name is already devoted to dealing with that. To frame it as a gay issue, and to demand specific policies around homophobic bullying, implies something even more troubling: that we should be identifying homosexual children at a young age. That is where the logic leads — and it is not a reassuring place to arrive.
The evidence bears this out. The Netherlands has traditionally been one of the most gay-accepting societies in the world. If Todd's framework were right — if shame and stigma explain the suffering — the mental health gap between gay and straight men should be closing there by now. It hasn't. Dutch research shows that homosexual men continue to have significantly higher rates of mood disorders, anxiety, and suicide attempts than heterosexual men, with no significant change over time. The researchers themselves call it a paradox. It isn't a paradox if the suffering has roots that school policies and institutional acceptance cannot reach.
What Guinness, Todd and many others share — beyond a certain belief system — is that gay life is not merely their subject. It is their entire world. Their professional careers, their social circles, their private lives all run through it. That kind of total immersion does not produce clarity; it produces tunnel vision — and a particularly insidious kind of groupthink. The framework confirms itself at every turn because there is no outside from which to question it. What troubles me most, however, is not them. It is that their ideas have become self-evident — absorbed into the general culture so thoroughly that most people no longer notice they are ideas at all.
I've seen many of these professionals claim their right to speak for and on behalf of others with a claim to their own victimhood. A guy like Jack Guinness brought this idea to almost perfection by stating: "The queer community have suffered. So you don't have to." He presents the community's suffering as accumulated wisdom that can be passed on — a form of inherited moral authority.
What always struck me is how educated people like Guinness and Todd can take all of this so seriously — and sell it to the world with a straight face. They truly believe what they say, and that is more dangerous than cynicism. A true believer cannot be reasoned with, because the belief system is self-sealing. Every criticism becomes evidence of the persecution he is fighting against.
A homosexual who is indifferent to the official identity of late has no place in their world. Those who don't fit are excluded by default, and others are pressured into an identity that was never theirs. The professional gay is not merely the community's spokesperson. He is its ideological keeper — the one who holds the creed together and ensures it remains the only recognized version of gay life.
These people present themselves as helpers — advocates, healers, custodians of a community. But look more closely at the belief system they propagate. It reveals something darker. I remember a time when the gay world was more diverse — not only in people and styles, but in the ideas behind them. What is now called "the gay community" was treated with a form of distance and the ideas were taken with a grain of salt. The beliefs centered around victimhood are now far more accepted, uniform, yet remarkably thin. They conceal more than they reveal — the nature of the occupation of the professional itself, and what it is ultimately there to protect.
The Gay Community and Its Articles of Faith
All my life, and every once in a while, I met and dated men who were not entirely open and clearly had issues with the gay identity — not with the sex. Things were never discussed explicitly, but I could tell by their appearance and presentation: they did not look gay, although they were homosexuals, which means exclusively attracted to people of the same sex. I've known plenty of such people. None came from hostile backgrounds. One guy, I remember, had his mother ask him at twenty-five: are you gay? He responded: "That is an inappropriate question."
In today's world such a man would too easily be labelled as being in denial, or even as carrying homophobia — for resisting the identity and therefore the community. Which raises the question: who exactly constitutes the gay community? As the term grows ever more dominant, it will make things worse for such people, not better. A gay professional ignores and avoids this uncomfortable truth.
At a much younger age I thought of the community in a minimalist sense. I went out to find sexual partners, and preferred doing that alone, because going with others tended to complicate the point of it. Even though I had a few casual gay friends, this was the basic function of the gay community to me: providing a nightlife where I could meet like-minded men and have safe access to sex.
In those days the rainbow flag simply marked the venues — a signal, nothing more, at least not to me. It started to mean more, gradually. The political side was there, although not that large, not that loud. Later I understood that for gay activists, 'community' has not that much to do with a certain nightlife. It means a moral subject — a people defined by what they believe.
Back then, I barely took notice of the political side of it all. Whenever I did, I was skeptical and felt uneasy about it — mostly in the simple sense that I didn't take it very seriously. I didn't pay that much attention to activists and spokespeople, and I didn't feel the need to be represented. If anything, it all felt slightly inflated: a lot of talk built around something that, in my life, was mostly practical and personal.
I wasn't ashamed or fearful. The people around me didn't feel threatened either. The gay lifestyle felt safe. And I kept asking myself: what is the activism and its spokespeople still good for?
In retrospect, I can see why they mattered historically. In the older world, a lot of that infrastructure was precarious and entangled with a shady world — prostitution, backroom arrangements, and, in some places, outright organized crime. Making gay nightlife safer often meant dealing with exactly those practical issues: keeping venues legitimate, pushing out predatory figures, setting standards, negotiating with authorities, and making sure the scene didn't become a hunting ground for violence, extortion, or exploitation. In that older sense, a representative was a practical figure. He didn't primarily tell you what gayness "meant," or what your moral obligations were. He dealt with logistics: keeping venues open, safe, and lawful enough to survive — and keeping trouble away.
Once that very practical mission started to fade, the "community" ran into an existential problem: what is it still for? When windows are not being smashed or doors being kicked in — when the social and legal space is secured — the justification of the community and its representatives has to shift. That transition was accompanied by an ever-growing layer of slogans, rituals, and moral language — big words built around surprisingly little.
The way the term is used has traditionally been heavily informed by what political activists mean by "the gay community." In activist language it is not just a loose milieu, a set of venues, or a network of friends. It is treated as a coherent group with shared interests, shared values, and therefore a need for representation — something that can be spoken for, mobilized, educated, and addressed as a moral subject.
A complication is that the word itself is not as neutral as it may seem. In an American context, "community" often functions as a quasi-political category: a bounded identity-group or demographic with spokespeople, claims, and an assumed inner consensus — the immigrant community, the Black community, the Jewish community, and so on.
In much of Europe, the older meaning of community is more literal and local — neighbourhood, church, village, a concrete social world of mutual obligations — something organically grown, closer to the German Gemeinschaft than a branded constituency in the US. Importing the American usage creates oddities. The very phrase "heterosexual community" — which one does hear occasionally — should already sound absurd. It turns a description of social life into an americanized ideological container. That people utter it without irony says something about how far the American usage has taken hold.
In an American context, "the gay community" sits comfortably within a broader national framework, as one community among many under the umbrella of the American nation — alongside the Black community, the Jewish community, the immigrant community — each with its own identity, spokespeople, and claims, but all ultimately contained within a shared national project. The model was already there; the gay community simply took its place within it.
Things in Europe have been fundamentally different. There is no equivalent national umbrella — there are many different regional and national traditions, each with their own relationship to identity, belonging, and public life. When the American model is imported, it arrives without that national container. And so the gay community in Europe floats free — it becomes cosmopolitan and internationalist by default, not by choice. It has no nation to anchor it, and so it attaches itself to the nearest available framework: the universalist, open-borders outlook of the European progressive left.
This is not merely a difference in political preference. It is structural. The European professional gay is, almost by necessity, an internationalist. That structural internationalism shapes everything: the causes he champions, the language he uses, the threats he can and cannot acknowledge. Listening to these people, one sometimes gets the impression they are advocating for all homosexuals in the world to come and live here — as if Western liberal society were not merely one option but the only destination.
In many European countries, greater tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality have not traditionally been a left-right issue. Across much of Northern Europe, acceptance came from all parts of the political spectrum as a result of shifts in the wider culture. Those were embedded into regional and national traditions. The framing — homosexuality as a progressive cause, resistance as a conservative one — is itself an American import.
Despite the differences in how the word "community" is used — which is ultimately more than a difference in connotation — the Americanized version has successfully taken hold in Europe and other parts of the world. The decline in linguistic literacy is becoming hard to miss. It arrives through NGOs, media language, universities, corporate HR, and the latest policy talk, and it quietly changes expectations: a "community" is supposed to have official positions, approved phrases, and representatives who speak in the name of the group. The gay professional is clearly needed.
That these people and their entourage still present themselves as activists is, at this point, a bad joke. Activism implies resistance — fighting something that has power over you. These people themselves have power. Partly funded, instructed and protected by governments and the corporate world. They are not activists. They are state-sanctioned lobbyists and ideologues. You can tell by the way they present themselves: as the eyes and ears of the government in the queer community. We know what is happening on the ground, they say, and we report back — so that the right policies can be put in place.
The other day I watched a YouTube video of a pride march in Germany. One of the marchers posed a question: he couldn't wrap his head around the idea that there are still queer people sitting at home, lonely and lost. "Why, if they can march with us?" That any gay person might resist the rainbow frenzy is inconceivable to him. Their answer to everything: we need more of this. This is how a Pride day became a Pride week, became an entire month.
What they propagate is not a political movement but something closer to a religion: Pride as an annual ceremony of suffering and redemption, coming out as its central sacrament, visibility as a moral obligation. And like all religions, it has found a willing host in the state. The creed is taught in schools, embedded in HR departments, enforced through policy. The professional gay did not merely benefit from this. He helped build it.
What has also been imported from the US is the constant talk about "rights" gay people supposedly don't have — language that echoes the American civil rights movement. The comparison to the descendants of slavery, who still live with its consequences, doesn't hold and is insulting. Whenever I ask gay people in Europe which rights they don't have, the answer is invariably the same: the right to adopt children. In practice, that is the one legal matter that remains contested.
In many ways, this is not just one belief among others; it is the central one. It sits near the heart of the belief system. It is also their most preposterous — and at the same time sinister — article of faith, because it shows the naive and dark side of their thinking. The reasoning usually goes something like this: the evil "straight" oppressors are preventing us homosexuals from adopting children.
Now, nobody has a "right" to adopt children. A child has the right to proper and able parents. That sentence — "we don't have the right to adopt" — is not mere words; it reveals an entitled mindset. It treats children as a claim, a prize, an entitlement, a badge in an adult moral drama.
Nobody ever seems to wonder: the sex I have does not produce any children. Isn't that already a sign that I shouldn't have them — or at least a reason to pause? It may also simply not be okay to pay a woman a substantial amount of money to carry "our" baby and then take it away from its mother. The language makes it sound so clean and obvious — rights, equality, family-building — but the underlying act can look harsh: money, contracts, and a child treated as a consumer item, there for gay couples to play house.
My problem with the professional spokespeople is not so much that they have these stances, but that they refuse to face — or at least include — the moral and ethical implications of them. They simply don't exist to them. One can tell: these implications are always kept out of the public discourse.
There is a triangle at work here: the "gay community," its belief system, and the professional spokespeople. The community label needs a creed, because a "community" in the activist sense cannot remain a loose plurality; it needs official positions and a shared moral story. The creed then needs professionals, because someone has to repeat it, defend it, and translate it into the language that institutions and media recognize.
Once those professionals exist, they have every incentive to keep the creed intact — by smoothing over costs, reframing moral questions as settled, and treating dissent as pathology. The idea of emancipation is ideologically limiting — it pre-answers every question before it can be asked. To keep the triangle intact, the topic of identity must be kept tight enough to be managed. A whole range of ideas on homosexuality will have to be excluded from the outset. Each corner of the triangle reinforces the others.
The gay professional can therefore not afford to be openly critical of what goes on within the community he represents. He is under constant pressure to rationalize and justify every transgression, every detour. Under the pretext of authenticity — "being yourself" — a lot can be glossed over. The appearance of progress and emancipation must be maintained — how this is done becomes secondary. Over time he loses his sense of distinction: he can no longer tell the difference between what is edgy yet still meaningful, and what is simply tacky and degenerate.
What strikes me is how shallow — even cartoonish — the whole ideological side has become, and how out of step it is with the times. It still borrows its self-image from an older conflict, when visibility could plausibly feel brave and transgressive. But in a Western culture already saturated with sexual display, the old gestures no longer carry the charge they pretend to carry. The theatre remains, but the content is thin: recycled slogans, inherited poses, moral certainty where there should be judgment, nuance, and a sense of reality.
Next to adoption and surrogacy, visibility has become a duty — merged, in practice, with activism itself. It is something that must at least be applauded. "Sex-positivity" means not only displays of sex and nudity in public, but the constant talk about it, however vulgar it may seem — all framed as a form of political resistance. At the heart of it all is the idea that a homosexual is expected to align himself with liberal, progressive thinking.
In fact, being subversive today often means the opposite of what it meant fifty years ago: starting a family, committing to another person, having more than one or two children. That goes against the grain of a culture that is quietly anti-children, anti-continuity, and addicted to frictionless freedom and materialism. The professional gay, for all his talk of transgression, is perfectly at home in that culture. To some extent he is a product of it. He will not challenge it. He flatters it.
Gays in Liberal Society
Throughout my life I've witnessed a certain scene repeat itself: conservative-minded people morphing into hardcore left-wing activists in a matter of seconds when it comes to gay issues. Friends of mine, who truly believe in the emancipatory nature of the gay movement, have also observed this — and are equally baffled, albeit for different reasons. The explanation is simple: it is the only framework available to many. A homosexual person may resist the politics, but cannot fully reject the identity — even to him it is not that important, yet he has no alternative ground to stand on.
Gay culture has historically been one of the most potent Jacobin undercurrents in society — operating outside the respectable order with its contrarian morality. That is part of its allure. A conservative temperament sits uneasily with that history, yet is drawn to it. The professional gay has to ease that tension, some even aspire to resolve it — and he does so by making the transgression respectable. It is domesticated, some subversive elements are turned into state policy, the wildness is packaged as civic virtue. What remains is neither conservative nor genuinely radical. It is tamed. It is administered.
Liberal society does not reject the oppositional element — it absorbs it. Those who were historically seen as outsiders are turned into symbols of tolerance and progress — preserved and displayed like monuments. Those who were once a challenge to the respectable order become its ornaments.
Dave Rubin, political commentator on the conservative media outlet The Daily Wire, by no means a professional gay, brings this development to the surface in an interview from 2022 with Jordan Peterson about him becoming a parent. He is candid about his distance from the collective identity: "The gay community — I hate that phrase... it doesn't mean anything to me." He describes himself as having been caught between worlds: "Too straight for the straight community and too straight for the queer community."
He describes a tension a lot of gay guys feel: living a purely hedonistic lifestyle, only suspended by work, or leading a more purposeful life. "You're gay, so you can either just endlessly have sex or endlessly disregard every norm known to man." He had seen what the first path looked like — older gay men in West Hollywood, spray-tanned, with little dogs, chasing the same sexual escapades forty years on. "It's not a full life," he says. And then: "I could have been left to a life that would have been sort of purely narcissistic or self-destructive. I don't see how there can be any alternatives to that if there isn't another pathway forward."
Rubin presents himself as someone who once embraced a certain gay lifestyle but chose to leave it behind. Material wealth and professional success, he suggests, were also not enough for a life of meaning — and so he marries a man and has children by way of surrogacy.
The way he goes about getting children is revealing. Adoption was considered and set aside — the genetic component felt important. So they found an egg donor online — "it's sort of like Tinder," he says — selecting a woman who "looked like the type of girl we might be with." Each fertilized his own egg. Two surrogates are now carrying the children simultaneously.
Feminist and lesbian activists have long called gay men out on their misogyny — and this is its most blatant form. He is aware of the criticism — "you're buying the egg and you're renting the woman" — then deflects it by insisting the surrogates are not doing it for the money, that they have their own reasons. Peterson presses on what a motherless household actually means for the children, noting that the data on fatherless families is "crystal clear — it's not good," and that there is no equivalent data on motherless children raised by two fathers. Rubin acknowledges it — and moves on. The moral questions are raised and set aside.
For all his distance from the identity and the community, Rubin cannot fully escape being a liberal and benefiting from the fruits of activism. Gay marriage, surrogacy rights, the legal and social infrastructure that makes his current life possible — all of it was built by the movement he keeps at arm's length. The language of family-building makes it sound somehow conservative. It isn't.
Rubin is not an exception. He is an illustration of the dilemmas gay men face and how deep the liberal framework runs. Even those who reject the community, the identity, the politics — end up inside the structure the professional gay helped build. The choice he made — leaving the hedonistic life behind, building a family — is presented as a free one. In a sense it is. The options were set in advance, however: endless sex, or the domesticated programme. Liberal culture offered him two exits from the same building. That is by design.
Not everyone is willing to give up so easily and end up inside the framework, however. To find better reasons for rejecting gay culture, one has to look elsewhere. Douglas Murray, in a 2023 Spectator TV interview, says he objects to Pride “mainly on taste grounds it has to be said.” He doesn’t begrudge anyone a party. What he begrudges is “people mistaking their sexuality for some massively important signifier” — and he is not gentle about it: “Sorry love, you’re not a celebrity, you’re just gay.” Elsewhere he has been more direct: “Being gay is a morally neutral fact. Neither pride nor shame. Just being. Like everybody else.”
The taste objection turns out to be the whole point. What Murray refuses is the demand that a private fact become a public performance — that a sexual preference be elevated into a collective identity with an audience. What it has been turned into is mass culture: tacky, vulgar, drenched in victimhood. A mass identity, like any other.
That identity does not emerge by accident. It is what liberal culture requires — and what the professional gay exists to produce, manage and maintain. He can thrive because he has become indispensable in it. Homosexuality has come to stand for something larger — modernity, tolerance, emancipation, cosmopolitan decency — and that symbolism also helps set Western liberal values apart from the rest of the world. It becomes a badge: proof that "this is what civilized societies look like." No culture in history has been quite so proud of having domesticated its own transgressors.
COC, the Dutch LGBTQ+ advocacy organisation, and Germany’s LSVD both frame their work in the language of emancipation and equal rights — and both operate in explicit cooperation with their respective governments and the EU. COC: “Together we achieve a lot in emancipation, acceptance, equality, and equal rights.” LSVD: “LGBTQ* being accepted and recognized as a self-evident part of social normality.” COC describes its work as explicitly international: “We support LGBTQ+ activists in more than 35 countries,” with the support of the Dutch Foreign Ministry and the EU described as “indispensable.”
These organisations are the original habitat of the professional gay — where the type was first cultivated, and where it still feels most at home. This is what the domestication of gay culture looks like in practice: state-funded, institutionally embedded, and flattering to everyone involved. It allows spokespeople to speak with borrowed importance and moral authority, and it allows institutions to feel not merely tolerant but superior — less like a society with its own compromises and blind spots, more like an enlightened model meant to instruct others.
In that context, treating the gay experience as a lesson for wider society and the world at large mirrors the West’s own impulse to export its morals and declare them universal. It is an expression of soft power imperialism and a redress of the civilizing mission.
Gay issues have another important function in liberal society: they serve as a convenient diversion. Sexual identity politics is emotionally intense but politically safe: you can signal virtue, administer moral tests, and "do something," without touching the harder questions of economic inequality and injustice. A society can congratulate itself on being enlightened and progressive while leaving its material and hierarchical order largely intact. In that sense, homosexuality has become a convenient stage for moral political drama — high in emotion, low in cost.
What Rubin and Murray share, despite their differences, is a refusal to be politically instrumentalised by the wider political project of the moment — as well as a distaste for the homogenization of gay life that it brings with it. There are also people who hold almost the opposite position. They welcome the acceptance of homosexuality and the gay identity into wider culture not as an end point but as a platform — a basis from which to push the boundaries further than liberal societies currently allow. The embodiment of that is one of the profession's most successful practitioners: Dan Savage.
The Master
If a contest were held to find the most accomplished professional gay of our time, Dan Savage would probably win it. If I were a judge he would be assured of my vote. He came up through activism and an advice column on sex and relationships, built his audience the hard way, and has never pretended to be something he isn't. There is a bluntness to him which has become rare in that world. He seems aware of that: "I write Savage Love and run my mouth and run myself into ditches sometimes running my mouth."
From his column and podcast one can tell he enjoys giving advice, which he doesn't always dress up in the most fashionable language. Among the gay professionals, he is one of the very few whose honesty seems genuine to me. He truly believes what he says, and he doesn't strike me as someone who hides bad behavior behind the façade of the benevolent helper.
Besides that, there is a real courageous boldness to him. He belongs to an older generation of gay men coming out of an era when saying it out loud carried real weight. "The stakes are so high," he recalls, "it could be so consequential saying that out loud to your parents, especially in 1981." He is from the tradition in which homosexuality becoming visible was an open refusal: I won't lie about myself, I won't live as if I'm guilty, I won't let you define me as something unspeakable. That older context gave visibility a limited and defensive meaning.
He is unmistakably, a fighter. "We fought for marriage," he says, "and we made denying us the right to marry a bigger pain in the ass than just letting us fucking get married." That tone — combative, uncompromising, utterly unadorned — runs through everything he does.
Savage is a representative and defender of domesticated gay life in urban centers. He believes in marriage between same-sex couples — not despite his advocacy of promiscuity, but as part of it. The two things go together. He is constantly talking about "my husband" — and I cannot help but flinch a little whenever I hear a gay man utter that phrase. Marriage between two men is something I will probably never fully understand. Yet he lives it and takes it seriously.
His attitudes toward relationships and sexuality are remarkably close to the ones I held for most of my adult life. In his writings and podcasts he advocates for living a promiscuous lifestyle with a sense of decency and respect. I like that about him. That is what he wants to remind people of. If you want to live that life, have some decency! That is not my issue with him. He takes it a step further: he wants to convince people that the sexually promiscuous lifestyle is the superior one.
This is the heart of his thinking and ambition: the promiscuous lifestyle is already how people actually live — so let's learn to do it well. He says: "I think really good relationships are broken up because two people can't imagine being together without it being sexually exclusive." The point, in his own less guarded formulation, is simpler: "you will still desperately want to fuck the shit out of other people." In that sense he is a consolidator of gay life: he wants to preserve the open, promiscuous culture and instruct people on how to simultaneously maintain a healthy relationship with a same-sex partner.
At the same time, he takes that conviction outward to heterosexuals, apparently surprised to find himself in such a role: "I'm going to be a gay guy telling straight people what to do…" His ending up in that position is explained, in his own telling, by a sort of mysterious coincidence, which he keeps repeating in several talks and interviews: "I sort of stumbled into this job being a sex and relationship advice columnist by accident." That one lucky mishap gave him a new mission in life.
There is a belief, widespread in gay culture, that the community occupies a particular position in society — on the fringes, where certain developments manifest first. The community functions as a warning system and at the same time an advanced sensorium — detecting shifts in sexual mores and other cultural currents early on. A homosexual, in this view, is someone who senses where society is heading. He has a built-in antenna for progress, authenticity, and liberation.
From that special gift Savage derives a duty: "I think our acceptance and the truth we're telling about our lives and our experience are changing straight people." The density of such preposterous claims one finds in his talks and interviews is breathtaking: "the redefinition of monogamy," he says elsewhere, "is one of the most important things that straight couples can learn from gay couples." He promotes that belief with conviction — and that conviction is not just his own. It is the community's mission, and he is its most eloquent carrier.
This line is taken from the 'Big Think' format, where scientists, experts of all kinds and public intellectuals talk about their findings and ideas and what these mean for individuals and wider society. Savage was given an hour to air his main ideas. In the format he was asked questions like: "Does society need to rethink its views on love and commitment?" To me, his answers all sound like adolescent moralism presented with smug confidence: the sense that the world can be improved by the attitudes and slogans of gay culture.
Big Think seems built for exactly that: adding scientifically approved nuances to the self-improvement ideology of a liberal-minded culture. It turns moral posture into "insight," and then sells the insight back to you with the glow of research — education as entertainment, virtue as content. The fact that this gets framed as "Big Think" tells you what kind of thinking liberal elites and mainstream media have started rewarding: the juvenile, as long as it flatters their self-image.
The religious fervor with which Savage advances his ideas can partly be explained by his background: "My parents ran Catholic marriage encounter for the tri-state area," he recalls, "and I went to a seminary and I was thinking about becoming a priest." He also made the point that a priest did help him come out. What his upbringing taught him about how to live, he says, "was on a collision course with who I was" — and yet the formation never left him. Although he never became a priest, he became something remarkably similar.
He takes the old gay-world logic — sex as the ultimate form of freedom, sex as honesty, sex as antidote to hypocrisy — and tries to translate it into a general rule for everyone, gay or "straight." He firmly believes that sexual monogamy is an outdated practice, harmful to lasting relationships, and therefore society at large. In doing so, he ends up constructing something that looks very much like a religion — with its own commandments, its own congregation, and himself as its prophet.
The whole public debate he wants people to engage in — promiscuity versus monogamy — strikes me as endlessly silly, because he treats what is essentially a personal dilemma as both universally desirable and neatly solvable. It isn't. These are not questions that can be settled by a columnist, because in the end they don't have one correct answer. Even more importantly, they are not a societal problem in the way he keeps framing it. They are highly individual problems, negotiated between two people, with their own histories, desires, fears, and temperaments. They belong not to public doctrine but to the tragicomic mess of private life.
The reasons people are promiscuous are wildly diverse — loneliness, thrill-seeking, self-hate, self-love, boredom, trauma, curiosity, narcissism, rebellion, or just habit. To turn that into a public moral program is already a mistake. It is what modern celebrities and media professionals often do when they need content: they take something unresolvable and private, and pretend it is a collective and political issue that requires guidance.
Savage is well aware of his influence. He knows he has considerable authority over giving license and setting the terms: “I get in trouble sometimes because I am perhaps the most prominent sex advice columnist that will give people permission under certain circumstances to have an affair or to cheat.” He doesn’t just comment on what people do; he names it and frames it. In one talk he boasts when asked about a sexual practice called “pegging”, without blinking: “I didn’t invent the act. I named it.” It is the gay professional’s view of himself in a nutshell: language-maker and permission-giver.
He is well aware of the danger. “If I get it in my head that I’m Moses coming down off the mountains with the tablets,” he says, “I can’t write. It’s not a conversation anymore.” The warning is sincere. Whether he heeds it is another matter.
Savage has developed a few moves to downplay his power and pre-empt criticism. He frequently reminds people that he “gets into trouble” — often implying there are many voices and that his is just one among them. The effect is to suggest a lively, diverse debate within gay culture. There isn’t. He is the embodiment of the dominant voice, and the debate exists largely on his terms.
His most important shield in fending off his critics, however, is what he keeps calling "the science." In practice this mostly means data gathered from surveys and studies — numbers used to back up all his moral claims. He keeps saying things like "Because the science has shown…" In the liberal world that is the equivalent of "because the scripture says…"
Statistics can be useful. However, they can never provide final answers on how a life ought to be lived. They can describe certain patterns; they can tell you how people think they feel; they can't settle questions of meaning, dignity, and the price of certain lifestyles. The gay professional heavily leans on "the science" because it allows him to dress up contested moral preferences and present them as settled questions.
What he is actually defending, in the end, is his own way of life — his city, his circle, his class of domesticated urban gays. He can't admit that, so he presents it as if it were the gay life. He often speaks as if there is a "gay world" and a "straight world," and as if his job is to translate between the two. That's claiming jurisdiction. It only works if the audience forgets how narrow that world — his world — really is, and how much of what he defends is, ultimately, a particular lifestyle dressed up as a model for everyone else. Perhaps he is not as comfortable with the life he is living as he would have us believe.
This shows itself most plainly in a side to Dan Savage that is a little harder to excuse. His bluntness can easily turn into a form of bullying — especially coming from someone with a platform and an audience trained to treat him as an authority. His tone is not simply "I disagree." It is: this is what decency looks like, and if you don't see it, something is wrong with you.
You see it most clearly when he talks about gays who don't subscribe to his liberal-leftist political worldview. It isn't merely that he dislikes conservative politics and Trump supporters in particular. He treats deviation as the ultimate proof of betrayal. He cannot imagine that there are gay people who are at least habitually conservative-minded, or who simply don't fully adopt the gay identity and the entire belief system that comes with it.
In one interview with a German podcaster, asked about gay Trump supporters, he reaches for the heaviest historical weapon he can find and turns it into a warning label: "some gay men are… attracted to fascism… as Ernst Röhm was." The instruction that follows isn't even subtle: "I want all these motherfuckers to Google Ernst Röhm every morning."
The Röhm exhibit has the tone of a lecture, but the historical understanding behind it is thin. He calls Röhm, leader of the SA Stormtroopers that helped bring the Nazis into power, “openly gay” as if “open” meant then what it means now. In reality, his sexuality was widely known in the circles he moved, but it belonged to a different era entirely — not the world of coming out, public identity and pride. Röhm was not killed because of his homosexuality. The purge was a political operation: Hitler consolidating power, neutralizing the SA, appeasing the military and conservative elites. Sexuality was merely a convenient pretext.
The historical analogy doesn't educate anyone; it disciplines them. The comparison is not analysis; it is intimidation. It signals: you are not just wrong, you are dangerous; you are the kind of person history has already condemned. That is the bully move: not arguing, but placing someone beyond the moral boundary of the group. And that is exactly how the "gay community" line is enforced: not by persuading, but by assigning shame, danger, and historical guilt — until the dissenter has nowhere respectable left to stand.
Röhm is not just a historical reference for Savage; he is the doorway into a broader claim he keeps returning to: that fascism is born out of sexual repression. This is not an innocent idea. It turns his sexual politics into an anti-fascist duty: if you are against repression, you must be for sexual liberation; if you are for that liberation, you must applaud any form of visible nudity and public pornographic display, and the tearing down of all sexual taboos. That, it seems, is the historical role gay people like him have been assigned.
When asked by his interviewer whether Pope Leo is gay, Savage answers without hesitation: “I don’t get a gay vibe from the current pope. He doesn’t have that Benedict swish.” It is a throwaway line, but it implies everything. The church — centuries of Christian moral teaching, of theology, of social order — is reduced to a closet. The past is not complex, not worth understanding; it is simply a long history of suppression. Our ancestors were bigots and fools, not yet enlightened enough to see what Savage sees. The question of why homosexuality was so consistently condemned across so many cultures and centuries is never seriously asked. The answer, when it comes, is always the same: they wanted to stop us from existing.
You can hear the same logic when he talks about Berlin and praises the city's open sexual culture — the clubs, the measured shamelessness, the spectacle, the feeling that everything once hidden can finally be lived more or less openly. Public sex treated almost as political medicine: the cure for hypocrisy, the cure for repression, the cure for the darker past. What makes this revealing is that he also acknowledges the tension. He admits that "a little stigma, a little shame is… the animating force" behind any sexual desires, and that "if you normalize the transgression away, you ruin kink." In other words, he frames visibility as virtue, yet at the same time is very much aware that it can destroy what it claims to liberate.
He talks as if society were still sexually repressed, as if people were trapped in the 1950s and needed a professional to teach them how to have sex without shame. Sex is everywhere. People experiment. They have language for it, images for it, apps for it, a whole public culture around it. What survives is not repression in the old sense, but something else: confusion, loneliness, detachment, the inability to make intimacy work. Yet for the gay professional, "repression" is the more useful story. It keeps the mission alive. It allows him to pose as liberator and educator even in a world that has already been sexualized to exhaustion.
Savage stands for a belief system that many gays have absorbed as if it were simple common sense. At its core is a tight knot: victimhood and sexual liberation are inseparable. The wounding comes first — shame, repression, denial — and the hedonism follows as its logical cure. The need for sexual transgression is a result of a repressive system and society. Transgression is not just about pleasure; living it out is a form of protest and proof that one has broken free.
The untraumatized and unbothered homosexual becomes suspicious, because he can't be used as evidence. And that is exactly why more conservative minded gays — or simply private, non-ideological homosexuals — provoke such hostility. They don't just disagree. They undermine the creed by existing. Their indifference is the most devastating critique of all.
There is nothing innocent or modest about what Dan Savage believes. He embodies the narrow-mindedness of the little world he inhabits — completely and without remainder. There is a common misunderstanding among gay people — and about them: that their sexuality and lifestyle have made them more enlightened, more attuned to human complexity — that it grants them a kind of moral clarity. The opposite is often true.
It is a narrow, insular world, and it can be a dangerous one. Savage must be aware of that — it is precisely why he keeps trying to impose rules of conduct. I highly doubt that bad faith and maliciousness will simply disappear. The attempt to salvage the promiscuous lifestyle from its own dark sides is a lost cause. You cannot have the freedom without the damage.
The professional gay is not a marginal figure. He sits at the centre of a belief system that has become, in certain circles, almost impossible to question. Savage is its most candid embodiment. He is the consolidator of the dominant views and way of life of gays in liberal society: the open relationship, the urban domesticity, the missionary conviction, the science as scripture, the historical guilt as discipline. He didn't invent any of it. He inherited it, systematised it, and broadcast it — with more honesty and more force than almost anyone else. That is his achievement. It is also his limitation. For what he consolidates is not the gay experience. It is one version of it — particular, located, and increasingly used to shut down all the others.
He serves a function in the broader liberal order. Gay culture — its visibility, its narrative of repression and liberation, its missionary zeal — has become one of the central exhibits of liberal society's self-image. The professional gay is its spokesperson, its validator, its proof of concept. He is not just tolerated. He is needed. And in being needed, he is also, in a quiet but unmistakable way, instrumentalised.
What is lost in all of this is not just the diversity of gay experience. It is the possibility of a more honest discourse — one that doesn't require victimhood to begin, and doesn't need enemies that no longer exist to continue.