Intro: Heated Rivalry
As I write this collection of essays, I realize that I started going out in the gay world at the age of sixteen. That was in 1998, which means it is now almost thirty years ago—a fact I still find hard to believe, although I am now forty-four. That is long enough to have witnessed a profound shift in the public perception of homosexuality and the presentation of gay culture..
The atmosphere was different then: in tone, in style, in what being gay meant publicly, and in the sort of people who were visibly out. One of the things I liked about entering the gay world was precisely that it did not belong to mainstream culture. It existed at some distance from it and had developed a social character of its own. Not everyone wanted to enter it, and it did not ask everyone to approve. The excitement surrounding the hit series Heated Rivalry brought home to me how completely that has changed.
At its center were Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, two masculine young hockey stars whose public rivalry concealed a sexual relationship conducted over several years. They met in showers, hotel rooms, expensive apartments and, eventually, an architect-designed cottage. The camera lingered over shoulders, backs, buttocks, sweat, white sheets and discarded sports equipment. Their conversations remained sparse; sex carried much of the intimacy and much of the plot. Time advanced in captions as the men moved between matches, publicity appearances, girlfriends and hurried encounters with each other. Professional hockey supplied a world of money, competition, physical discipline and masculine display, while the secret affair unfolded inside it.
The most remarkable thing about Heated Rivalry was not the series. It was the response. Rotten Tomatoes called it a “steamy, dreamy love fest of true queer intent.” RogerEbert.com declared it revolutionary simply for existing and described it as the most significant queer show of the year. Gay influencers were less restrained. They offered gratitude, tears, excitement, little speeches about visibility and the breathless assurance that something momentous had happened. The series was treated not merely as entertainment but as a historic event.
The professional reviews were more divided. The New Yorker called the series “deliciously enjoyable” and located much of its charm in the “inevitability” of the romance. In The New York Times, Wesley Morris described it as a “tidy, giddy period piece,” praised its “delicacy” and eventually called it “a work of utter ardor.” The Guardian was far colder. One critic found the lovers “dreary, monosyllabic company,” the performances generally wooden and the dialogue “so banal” that an entire episode felt skippable. Another concluded that, once one moved beyond the novelty of the sex, there was “only just enough” material left for a rewarding story.
None of these reservations disturbed the online celebration. The series continued to circulate in clips and reaction videos, accompanied by tearful declarations of gratitude and speeches about finally being seen. Professional critics saw an enjoyable romance, an erotic curiosity, a flawed television drama or some combination of the three. Gay influencers responded as though they had witnessed an artistic and cultural revolution. That disparity could not be explained by the quality of the work alone.
Professional hockey matters here. It remains one of the last masculine worlds in which homosexuality is not yet fully visible in the approved public form. Two famous players do not merely have sex with each other. They occupy the center of that world: admired, rich, physically powerful and desired by women, while secretly belonging to each other. The old bastion is not attacked from outside. It is conquered from within. Its prestige is retained and placed in the service of a gay romance.
The hysteria surrounding Heated Rivalry reveals a culture in which the representation of gay life has become valuable independently of artistic quality. The series is celebrated less for what it achieves as art than for placing gay men at the center of mainstream culture. This marks the movement away from a culture that had more or less accepted homosexuality toward something more coercive: a culture in which gay representation is expected not merely to exist but to receive moralized acclaim. What unsettles me is not that gay men have become central characters. It is the suggestion that their presence settles the artistic question, and that hesitation before the work now requires a moral defense. That is a victory of ideology over art.
The response to Heated Rivalry is therefore not an isolated case. It condenses a wider transformation in which visibility has become an obligation, pleasure a moral good and the gay identity a claim to public authority. To understand how this happened, one has to return to what tolerance of homosexuality once involved, how it gave way to acceptance and why this new settlement eventually ceased to be enough.
2. What Tolerance Meant
For as long as I can remember, I have been a loner. From my early teenage years, I was sexually promiscuous. I could not socialize in the conventional way, or at least I did not know how. The ordinary sequence—meeting people, making conversation, becoming friendly, slowly establishing trust—did not come naturally to me. I did not find a place among people and then allow physical intimacy to follow. I entered the social world through sex. In fact, the sexual world was my social world.
Many of the people I surrounded myself with, or later became close to, lived in much the same way. Their sexual lives and their social lives were not separate spheres. One led into the other, and often they were the same thing. Promiscuity did not take place outside the rest of life. It was how people met, formed friendships and entered one another’s worlds.
Homosexuality served a particular function in my life, but it did not necessarily serve the same function in the lives of the people around me. I am often reminded of this in the locker room, where I meet young homosexual men whose desires are highly particular. Some are drawn exclusively to older men; others are interested primarily in looking, while still others are attracted to a particular physique, whether slim, chubby or muscular.
Some homosexual men build their lives around one partner and have almost no connection to the gay world. I have known men who would never have set foot in a gay bar or bathhouse, let alone attended a Pride parade. Others have no interest in relationships; for them, homosexuality consists mainly of brief or anonymous encounters.
A friend once remarked, rather crudely, “What does it matter where I put my dick? As if I care whether it is a man or a woman.” The gender of the other person seemed almost irrelevant to him. Same-sex attraction gives desire a direction. It does not determine what form that desire will take or what place it will occupy in a life. The fact of homosexuality does not produce a uniform experience.
Long before homosexuality was accepted, it could be tolerated: known about without being discussed, disapproved of without being prevented, and permitted in practice even where it remained condemned in principle. Under this arrangement, the differences between homosexual lives could remain unresolved. Society did not have to decide what it meant, what role it played, or which form of homosexual life was most authentic.
Nor did tolerance require us to pretend that every function homosexuality served was benign. It remained bound up with damage and the darkness of sexuality itself: appetite, exposure, power, humiliation, risk, and the possibility that what gives pleasure may also do harm. Tolerance could leave these questions open. It made a limited claim: people should be allowed to follow their desires and organize their private lives without interference.
In 1957, a British government committee chaired by Sir John Wolfenden recommended that consensual homosexual acts between adult men in private should no longer be criminal offenses. The report did not present homosexuality as admirable; it argued that there “must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business.” The sentence offers no recognition, visibility or pride. It establishes a boundary.
Tolerance did not make homosexuality innocent. It did not require homosexuality to be declared innocent. A society could protect homosexual people without settling every moral question raised by their conduct, and homosexual people could live freely without presenting their lives as examples for everyone else. Disapproval, unease and non-interference could coexist. That arrangement was imperfect, but it preserved a distinction that would gradually be erased: the distinction between allowing something and giving it an approved public meaning.
The principle articulated by Wolfenden long predated its legal formulation. In Sodom’s Seed in the Netherlands, the historian Theo van der Meer describes homosexual networks that had formed before their discovery provoked the violent prosecutions of 1730. Church and state were forced to speak openly about practices that had long remained largely unspoken. The silence was not acceptance. It nevertheless left a space in which encounters, relationships and networks could exist.
George Chauncey found a similar contradiction in the New York of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The men he describes did not simply live as isolated individuals concealed in private rooms. They created bars, meeting places, neighborhood networks, codes and recognizable social types. Police repression was real, yet so were ordinary knowledge, selective accommodation and the ability of their world to exist within the city.
Wherever homosexual lives persisted, some form of practical toleration must also have existed: somebody knew, somebody looked away, somebody made room and somebody decided not to interfere. Formal condemnation and ordinary life were rarely identical. A relationship could be understood without being named. A meeting place could be recognized without announcing itself. Openness was selective, and secrecy did not always signify shame.
Privacy had a positive value within this arrangement. Containment was not necessarily oppression. It allowed homosexuality to occupy one part of a life without defining the person as a whole. One did not have to explain one’s desires to relatives, colleagues, neighbors or strangers. One could decide who needed to know. The fact that secrecy could be imposed does not mean that every form of privacy was oppressive.
It also protected a certain opacity. Homosexual life did not have to become intelligible to outsiders, and homosexual people did not have to agree among themselves about what it meant. No individual had to represent homosexuality as one singular experience. A promiscuous man did not make all homosexual men promiscuous. A domestic couple did not establish domesticity as the proper destination of homosexual life. People could remain particular.
That allowed a distinct culture to develop. People learned its codes in bars, clubs and bathhouses, as well as through friendships and sexual networks. Certain qualities were cultivated: nerve, humor, irony, style, independence, discretion, directness and, first and foremost, an ability to live with ambiguity. The gay world was shaped by personalities formed by these qualities, rather than by people appointed to represent it.
None of this made tolerance harmless. Homosexual people could still face rejection, humiliation, loneliness, danger and exclusion. Hostilities imposed limits on the gay world even as they helped give it its particular character. Without a general guarantee of recognition, one often had to cultivate the qualities needed to survive and construct a life. Personality drove the gay world because personality had to carry what collective rights and public approval did not.
The culture that emerged was not innocent. Its hierarchies could be severe, and its judgments merciless. Youth, beauty, masculinity, money and sexual reputation carried power. Secrecy could encourage discretion and also enable gossip or blackmail. Distance gave the gay world a character of its own. It did not guarantee that the character would be good.
It was nevertheless diverse in a way that the word “diversity” seldom captures now. The diversity did not consist of several approved identities displayed beside one another, nor was it reduced to the bodily and sexual types familiar from pornography—bears, twinks, jocks and the like. It came from people constructing radically different lives from the same sexual inclination. Homosexuality could be central or incidental, social or solitary, domestic or promiscuous. Nobody was required to arrive at the same conclusion, and nobody was required to represent everyone else.
Before the term “gay” came into fashion, the word “bachelor” could serve as a less explicit description of a homosexual man’s way of life. That figure left the variety—and, yes, the diversity—of homosexual experience intact. It described how a man lived rather than what he was. He might live alone, move between friendships and sexual encounters, remain unattached or maintain relationships that outsiders only partly understood. The reasons did not have to be explained.
In that sense, “bachelor” was a better description than either “gay” or “queer.” “Gay” turns a sexual inclination into a social identity. “Queer” tries to recover some of the older ambiguity: the refusal to settle into a fixed category, the freedom to remain sexually or socially indeterminate. Yet it restores that openness as an identity and a political program. It gives a name to the refusal of names. The bachelor could remain unexplained; the queer person must explain his indeterminacy in an approved language and follow certain scripts.
The bachelor belonged to a culture of tolerance because he was not required to stand for anything. Society could accommodate the way he lived without insisting on a full explanation of what it meant. He could keep his life private without having to justify the decision and live alone without being treated as damaged. He did not have to speak for anyone else, offer a defense of his sexuality, or make his life exemplary. That was precisely the point: tolerance left the meaning of his life with him.
I remember men living with their “brother” while also being heavily involved with the church. They would now simply be called gay. People often knew perfectly well what that meant. It simply did not have to be explained, declared, or turned into an identity. That was its superiority. The distance from the mainstream imposed costs, yet it also created the space in which different personalities and ways of living could develop.
That space has now almost disappeared. The homosexual is no longer merely one figure within society, partially known and answerable for his own conduct. He appears as the bearer of an identity that must be made visible, understood and affirmed.
What I loved about my homosexuality was precisely that it was not represented everywhere in the culture at large. That absence gave it something elusive, private and special. The variety of homosexual life is now compressed into a public image, and that image returns as an instruction to the people whose lives it claims to represent.
The distance between the bachelor and the queer person marks a broader reversal. What could once remain private and unexplained must now be made visible, narrated and given an approved public meaning. The other extreme can be seen clearly in Heated Rivalry.
An entire episode leaves the two main characters largely behind to tell the love story of Scott Hunter and Kip Grady. Scott knows that he loves Kip, and their relationship is no less real for remaining private. Because Kip lives openly, Scott has to acknowledge their relationship; that is the respectful thing to do.
Yet the series takes the recognition a step further. It brings their story to its proper conclusion when Scott wins the championship, calls Kip onto the ice and kisses him before the crowd and the television cameras. He does not merely reveal the relationship. He turns it into a public spectacle. It does not stop there, as one can increasingly see throughout popular culture.
The problem is not that Scott chooses visibility. It is that the series cannot imagine it as merely one choice among others. His relationship becomes complete only when it is transferred onto the most public stage available: center ice, after victory, before the crowd and the television cameras.
Privacy is left to signify fear and incompleteness; public declaration signifies courage, honesty and arrival. In that supposedly touching scene, Scott and Kip position themselves as role models for other gay people. They show Shane and Ilya the path they are expected to follow. A personal decision becomes an example, and eventually an instruction, for homosexual life more generally.
This is what visibility now means: not that homosexual life may appear in public, but that it must present itself publicly, attach a moral meaning to its appearance and demand recognition from everyone watching.
The world of Heated Rivalry has no use for the bachelor’s ambiguity. The lives it depicts must become exemplary and receive public affirmation. The series does not merely celebrate victory over homophobia. It celebrates victory over mere tolerance.
3. Age of Acceptance
By the time I entered the gay circuit in the late 1990s, homosexuality was already accepted to a degree I mostly took for granted. There were people who disliked it, of course, and families in which it could still create serious problems. Yet in the world in which I was growing up, open hostility had begun to look increasingly old-fashioned.
The gay places were there, people were openly homosexual, television had started showing homosexual characters and relationships, and none of this gave me the impression that I was entering a world that had only just escaped persecution. I was sixteen. I wanted to go out, meet men and have sex. The historical struggle that was supposed to have made this possible barely crossed my mind.
Only much later did I begin to wonder why acceptance had advanced so quickly. The explanation usually offered is a flattering one. Society learned. People were educated. Activists challenged prejudice, homosexuals became visible, and the wider population gradually discovered that its fears had been irrational.
One generation had been narrow-minded; the next became more enlightened. Much of gay liberation still rests on this idea. If hostility toward homosexuality can be explained primarily by ignorance, greater visibility and education should slowly remove it until the prejudice disappears. I have never quite believed that people themselves had changed so dramatically as to make one generation morally superior to the one before it.
What changed beyond recognition during the decades after the war was the material world in which they lived. Western Europe became enormously richer. Houses filled with things. Cars became ordinary. People traveled more, ate differently, bought clothes for pleasure rather than necessity, filled cupboards and garages, replaced objects that still worked and discovered that there was always something else to want. The possibilities of an ordinary life multiplied. So did the possibilities of living outside older arrangements.
The family had once carried functions that are easy to forget when looking at it only as a moral institution. People married not merely because a priest or a social convention told them to. Families organized labor, property, care, security and survival. Children were not simply a source of emotional fulfillment. They belonged to the economic structure of life and, in many circumstances, to the security of old age.
As societies grew richer, pensions, welfare provisions, healthcare, higher incomes and a much larger service economy gradually took over parts of what families had once supplied themselves. One could increasingly survive without constructing one’s life around marriage and children.
That change created room.
It created room for the unmarried person, the childless couple, the lifelong bachelor, the person who moved away from his family, the person who preferred friendships to domestic life, and also the homosexual. One did not need an enlightened theory of sexuality to leave such people alone. There was simply less material reason to force everyone into the same arrangement. A richer society could carry more deviations from the old pattern without experiencing them as a threat to its survival.
This seems to me at least as important as the moral story that later came to dominate. Greater tolerance did not necessarily prove that human beings had become kinder or wiser. They had become more secure. A society in which people possess a great deal, in which food is plentiful and individual survival no longer depends so directly on family, has the luxury of being permissive.
It can afford eccentricity. It can afford childlessness. It can afford people who organize their lives around pleasure. Homosexuality entered that space along with many other departures from older forms of life.
The culture surrounding this new abundance reflected it almost perfectly. I remember the arrival and expansion of commercial television as part of the atmosphere in which I became sexually active. Suddenly there seemed to be far more entertainment and much more competition for attention. One of the easiest ways to obtain that attention was sex. The logic was hardly mysterious. Sex sells.
Late in the evening, soft-core pornography appeared. Alongside it came documentary-style television programs about the variety of sexual behavior, often made with the slightly breathless seriousness television uses when it wants to present voyeurism as investigation. Cameras entered swinger clubs, brothels and fetish bars.
People explained unusual preferences and practices. Prostitutes talked about their work. Couples discussed what they did with other couples. Someone had a strange obsession; someone else liked being watched; another person lived some unconventional sexual arrangement. What had previously belonged to rumor, pornography or private conversation became television material.
Homosexuality appeared in that world as well.
That is important to how I remember its acceptance. It was not presented to me only as a respectable minority finally receiving recognition. Homosexuality was still widely understood as one form of sexual deviance among others, and it entered mass culture partly through the same opening that made other sexual behavior visible.
The response to that visibility was very different from what is demanded today. Nobody was required to admire what was being shown. The program itself often depended on the behavior remaining strange enough to attract an audience. The camera crossed a boundary and invited the viewer along.
Homosexuality benefited from this general expansion of what could be shown because repeated exposure made it less extraordinary. One could watch two men living together, hear someone describe a fetish, see the inside of a sex club and then move on to the next show. Familiarity arrived almost as a side effect of entertainment.
There is something wonderfully unheroic about that explanation. A considerable part of sexual acceptance may have advanced because television companies discovered that unconventional sex attracted viewers.
The commercial logic also fitted a wider change in the way sex itself was understood. In a culture increasingly organized around consumption, sexuality became another field in which more seemed possible. One could travel to more places, buy more clothes, eat more kinds of food, choose from more television channels and construct a life from an expanding catalog of experiences. Sex entered the same imagination. There were things one had not tried yet, things one might like, worlds one might explore. Sexual curiosity itself acquired a kind of prestige.
I do not know to what extent this sexualized me. From the age of twelve, I watched documentary-style shows about sex religiously. I distrust explanations that too readily attribute a person’s sexuality to what he sees on television or, now, on social media. I was already strongly sexual and attracted to men. Television did not create those desires. What it supplied was something less direct and probably more important: an atmosphere in which going far no longer seemed quite so extraordinary.
My sexual life began very early. I sought out slightly older guys, traveled to meet people I barely knew and entered situations that carried obvious risks. I also did these things with guys my own age, although there were very few of them. Some of this I would not advise anyone to imitate.
At the time, however, I did not experience myself as doing something tragically self-destructive. I was adventurous, intensely curious and increasingly convinced that there was an entire sexual world available to people who had enough nerve to enter it.
The culture around me gave that instinct a rationale. Sexual experimentation was presented as interesting. Inhibition looked increasingly quaint. Experience counted for something. I never talked about these things. Their significance lay partly in the fact that they remained mine. The documentary programs did not need to instruct anyone to imitate what they showed. The endless catalog of possibilities did the work more quietly. This existed. That existed. People did this. People did that. There was always another door.
For a homosexual adolescent, the effect could be especially strong. Conventional sexuality had already been ruled out for me in any meaningful sense. Once the dominant heterosexual script had lost its authority, why should the remaining rules carry much more weight?
If one had already crossed the central boundary, the others could begin to look negotiable. Promiscuity, older partners, anonymous encounters and practices that would have seemed extreme in another setting could be folded into the idea of sexual discovery.
That did not mean the experiences were false or joyless. Quite the opposite. I enjoyed much of what I did. Sex opened a social world to me that I otherwise had great difficulty entering. It brought excitement, companionship, confidence and access to people. It made my life larger. The mistake would be to clean up that history in either direction: to reinterpret it all as damage, or to pretend the risks were somehow ennobled by the fact that I wanted them.
The atmosphere of the time allowed both sides to remain visible. Sex could be exciting and dangerous, pleasurable and stupid. One could behave recklessly without converting recklessness into a political virtue. There was not yet the same need to bless everything through the language of liberation.
This also helps explain why gay culture became attractive in the 1990s without yet becoming sacred. It had a certain glamour precisely because it remained slightly outside the respectable center. Back then, I considered myself a really cool guy for being openly homosexual at a very young age.
Gay nightlife, fashion, sexual confidence and a cultivated disregard for ordinary expectations were easy for the mainstream to borrow. The heterosexual world could consume some of that atmosphere without becoming gay itself. A nightclub, an advertising campaign, a television program or a fashionable district could take on the look and the attitude.
Gayness acquired cultural prestige at the same moment homosexuality became less socially threatening.
I felt this very strongly when I entered that world. The people who impressed me did so for reasons that had nothing to do with victimhood or overcoming discrimination. The gay people I met did not talk about themselves in categories of victimhood. They had style. They knew how to behave in places I had only just discovered. They seemed less inhibited, more socially assured and harder to impress than the people I knew elsewhere.
Sexual freedom fitted the mood of a society discovering that it could have more of almost everything. The expansion of choice did not stop at the shopping center door. The body became part of the same territory.
This is where the relationship between prosperity and sexual liberation becomes less flattering. Once sex becomes another consumer experience, abundance begins to shape desire itself. More possibilities do not simply give one more freedom; they create the sense that possibilities ought to be used. One can begin to measure a sexual life through access, novelty and accumulation. The person who has done more appears freer than the person who has done less. Experience becomes a possession.
I recognize some of that in the person I was. There was pride in being able to go further. There was a feeling that a sexually adventurous life had more substance than an ordinary one. Risk itself could provide a charge. None of this required a gay activist to teach me how to think. The surrounding culture already supplied most of the ingredients: abundance, curiosity, individual freedom, sexual imagery and the idea that limitations were there to be tested.
Homosexuality fitted remarkably well into this emerging order. It was detached from reproduction by definition and already surrounded by worlds in which sex, nightlife and chosen social ties played a large role. What had once made it morally suspect could now make it culturally interesting. The non-reproductive character of homosexual sex no longer looked primarily like a failure to fulfill a social duty. In an increasingly affluent society, it could look like freedom from one.
Acceptance therefore arrived through several doors at once. Legal and political changes mattered. So did the work of activists. Alongside them were forces with much less noble intentions: prosperity, leisure, advertising, commercial television, pornography, voyeurism and the endless search for something new to sell. They widened the field in which homosexuality could appear without requiring society first to agree on its moral meaning.
That is closer to the world I remember. Nobody had to persuade me that homosexuality had become acceptable. By the time I arrived, much of the argument seemed already over. What remained was a culture learning how much could be done with the new freedom.
The strange part is that this relatively crude arrangement left homosexuality with more independence than the celebration that came later. It had entered mainstream culture without yet becoming one of its moral ornaments. It could be attractive without being virtuous, tolerated without being explained, accepted without being held up as evidence of social progress.
For a while, that was enough.
Heated Rivalry is situated firmly in the age of acceptance. Homophobia is spoken about far more insistently in the reception of the series than it is depicted on screen. Shane and Ilya are not ordered to conceal their relationship. Nobody threatens to dismiss them.
The possibility of disclosure barely crosses their minds, if at all. Secrecy is simply part of the lives they lead as famous athletes. A relationship with a fat older girlfriend would also have been concealed. She would have disturbed the image surrounding them in exactly the same way. Not every secret kept by a homosexual man is evidence of homophobia.
The hysterical reception converts this unexamined condition into oppression. Money, ambition, vanity and the management of celebrity disappear from view.
Within this logic, homophobia becomes impossible to locate because it no longer has to appear in any particular act, rule or threat. It is inferred from the secrecy it is then used to explain. The reasoning becomes circular: they conceal the relationship because the culture is homophobic, and the culture is known to be homophobic because they conceal the relationship.
I have encountered many situations in my own life in which I could point to something and say, “This is homophobia.” Yet I have always been aware that the reality was more complicated than the label suggested. Homophobia may name one element of what happened, but it can never provide a complete explanation.
In Heated Rivalry, acceptance is celebrated as a historical achievement rather than recognized as a present condition. The reception can preserve the story of liberation only by treating secrecy as evidence that oppression continues.
4. Mandatory Fun
In high school, parties were regularly organized at the local nightclub. Everyone went, everyone drank, everyone was supposed to have a good time. I always felt some unease about that. Going out was not merely something one could do. It was something one was expected to want. Fun had acquired the character of an obligation.
The culture surrounding me as a teenager in the 1990s did not merely permit pleasure. It placed pleasure at the center of a good life. One should go out, travel, experiment, meet people, have sex, become less inhibited and accumulate experiences. Someone who refused too much of this appeared narrow, frightened or unfinished. The old morality had demanded restraint. The new one demanded participation.
For people who experienced ordinary life as empty or constricted, the promise was enormously attractive. Drinking, going out and gaining sexual experience offered intensity, contact and escape. It made life happen. The new culture of mandatory fun converted that genuine hunger into the only apparent path out.
This coincided with growing prosperity. Cars, foreign holidays, restaurant meals, fashionable clothes and nicely furnished homes became ordinary. Wealth remained important as a marker of distinction, although it now needed an atmosphere. Transgression and vice supplied one.
The respectable man possessed the conventional signs of success: an apartment, a job and a steady income. What he lacked was a particular kind of access and prestige: the nightclub, the dealer, the hustler, the famous person behaving badly in a private room. Money paid for the evening. Proximity to danger made it worth describing afterward.
Over the past few decades, contemporary culture has romanticized crime and prostitution to a ludicrous degree. The gangster is stylish. The prostitute is independent and sexually knowing. The addict is wounded and intense. The nightclub habitué lives while everyone else merely works. Their proximity to danger supposedly gives them knowledge and prestige that ordinary people lack.
The gay world entered this fantasy with an advantage. It already had a history in places respectable society preferred not to examine too closely: bars, cruising grounds, bathhouses and nightlife economies where hustling, prostitution, drugs and criminal activity were never far away. Homosexual men looking for sex had learned to find one another wherever unofficial life collected.
That history left an image behind. The homosexual did not enter mainstream culture simply as a man who desired other men. He arrived as someone who knew another city after dark, who had contacts respectable people lacked, who could move between worlds and speak about sex without translating it into polite language. Some of this was real. Much of it was fantasy. It drew on something older: there had always been a trickster quality to gay men and the world around them.
Association with homosexuals could once damage a person’s reputation. In some circles it now improved it. Gay friends, gay clubs, sexual frankness, interracial relationships and familiarity with the right parties could all signal openness. The relationships themselves might be entirely genuine. They also decorated the person with the prestige of difference.
The mainstream began to consume the outsider and has continued to do so ever since.
Refusing to condemn people had turned into admiration. Vice acquired flattering descriptions. The hustler became entrepreneurial. The prostitute became empowered. The addict became a survivor. Promiscuity became confidence. Exhibitionism became visibility. The refusal of restraint became the ultimate form of authenticity.
The removal of restraint came to appear virtuous in itself. The person who had overcome shame and convention appeared closer to his true self. Free him from the church, the family, sexual morality, economic dependence and the pressure to conform, and something better was expected to emerge.
My experience of people has never given me much reason to believe this. Freedom releases generosity, courage and creativity. It also releases vanity, greed, cruelty and stupidity. A person freed from sexual restraint may have wonderful sex. He may also become compulsive, careless or predatory. Freedom removes obstacles. It does not decide what comes through.
In gay life the pressure worked through prestige. Nobody ordered anyone to have sex. Nobody issued a required number of partners. The person who had done more appeared experienced. The person who discussed sex without embarrassment appeared sophisticated. The person willing to try almost anything looked open-minded. Restraint required explanation.
Fun became mandatory without ever becoming compulsory.
One is free to stay home, although one becomes the boring person. One is free not to drink, although someone asks why. One is free not to have casual sex, although restraint may be interpreted as inhibition. One is free to dislike something, provided one does not judge.
Eventually non-judgment becomes its own form of judgment: the snobbery of the supposedly open-minded.
That sense of superiority requires someone to despise. Gay culture therefore continues to feed on the idea that it exists within a deeply moralistic society governed by outdated values. It imagines the church, the family and respectable society standing outside the nightclub, waiting to condemn whatever happens inside.
That world has lost much of its authority, yet gay culture needs to keep it alive. Without the old morality, sexual openness and promiscuity lose its rebellious meaning. It becomes merely something people do. It becomes ordinary.
Throughout my life, I’ve met some people who converted to Islam, including women whose reasons were not particularly mysterious to me. They looked at the life around them and did not want it. They did not want to drink every weekend. They did not want sex with a succession of people simply because their peers regarded that as normal. They did not want every social occasion organized around alcohol, drugs, dating and the obligation to appear carefree.
Islam supplied limits.
Modern secular culture finds this difficult to understand. The church has been blamed for repression, hypocrisy, shame, guilt and intolerance for so long that the opposite package now carries moral prestige: experiment, express yourself, make your own rules.
A strict religion may offer something liberal culture has stopped valuing: permission not to participate.
The culture that fought religious morality in the name of freedom has become so certain of what a free life should look like that people begin searching for freedom from liberation itself.
This tension appears in Heated Rivalry in a more attractive form. Shane and Ilya meet repeatedly for sex over several years. Their relationship is neither anonymous nor conventionally romantic. Something accumulates between them: familiarity, jealousy, trust, affection and a bond nobody else shares. It becomes special without becoming a partnership.
Many homosexual men I have known, including myself, have had some version of this. There is often one person, sometimes several over the course of a life, whom one meets every once in a while for months or years. He disappears and returns. The relationship lasts partly because it remains incomplete.
Many relationships between men contain an element of rivalry. That rivalry can become sexualized. Desire does not necessarily remove the competition between them. It may intensify it. Sex becomes another way of testing strength, withholding affection, establishing control or forcing the other man to reveal what he wants.
The rivalry took a different form in each of my three relationships. In every case, it contributed to the relationship’s failure. Neither man wanted merely to surrender to the other. Affection existed alongside competition, and intimacy did not bring the competition to an end. It gave it somewhere else to operate.
Heated Rivalry understands this. Shane and Ilya do not simply move from rivalry toward sex. The rivalry enters the sex and supplies part of its force. Each man desires the only person capable of challenging him. Their encounters allow them to submit to one another without admitting defeat, then return to separate lives in which the contest can begin again.
The reviews largely overlooked this aspect of the relationship—and of relationships between men in general. So did the self-appointed gay experts on social media. For them, the series was almost entirely about the representation of gays.
What the relationship revealed about rivalry, desire and intimacy between men scarcely mattered. The presence of the homosexual relationship had already determined the meaning of the work. The work was no longer judged by what it revealed, but by what it represented.
Distance has an erotic function. One does not wake beside him every morning, negotiate groceries, clean the bathroom or watch him become familiar through repetition. Sex remains the concentrated center of the encounter. Anticipation returns because the person himself disappears.
Shane and Ilya’s rivalry, separateness and secrecy are not inconveniences surrounding the sex. They contribute to its charge. The series gradually reveals that the sex was really moving toward love. The recurring encounter becomes an unfinished romance. The men acknowledge what they mean to each other. The relationship acquires a name and then a moral direction.
At the same time, the sex loses some of its force. The danger decreases. The uncertainty recedes. The men acquire trust, intimacy and security. The sexual bond loosens precisely when the relationship becomes whole.
In my relationships, sex felt beneath the dignity of the relationship. The bond seemed to contain something that sex could only reduce. This points toward another difficulty. Many homosexual men desire men without quite seeing them as romantic partners. They can give another man sexual access while resisting the emotional position a partner would occupy in their lives.
Distance, interruption, secrecy and the continued separateness of two men are not always defects waiting to be corrected by intimacy. They can be part of the erotic structure itself. Acceptance removed the prohibition. Prohibition had supplied part of the excitement.
Human beings eroticize boundaries. The hidden place, the person one should not be seeing, the possibility of discovery and the temporary suspension of ordinary life all become part of pleasure. Once the boundary disappears, the sex changes with it.
This leaves contemporary culture with a problem. It wants homosexuality completely accepted while retaining the glamour of the forbidden. It wants the outsider without exclusion, the rebel without consequences, the criminal aesthetic without the crime, the prostitute without degradation, the drug culture without addiction and the dangerous lover without danger.
It wants transgression made safe enough to consume.
The modern romance manufactures temporary obstacles. The lovers hide, suffer, resist themselves and live beneath the gaze of an apparently hostile world. The audience enjoys the prohibition while knowing what judgment the story will finally deliver.
The transgression supplies the fun.
Recognition supplies the ending.
Heated Rivalry carries this logic almost perfectly. Its relationship acquires its erotic force from secrecy and prohibition, then reaches its approved conclusion by leaving both behind. Sex becomes love, love becomes a relationship and the relationship becomes visible. The culture enjoys the forbidden and celebrates its disappearance at the same time.
The same culture cannot accept that liberation might eventually be enough. Once an experience becomes ordinary, another boundary must be found. One must keep experimenting, displaying, crossing, consuming. Freedom must constantly prove itself.
The old morality told people to control themselves. The new one tells them to free themselves. Both can become oppressive.
5. Gay Identity Hits Celebrity Culture
The online hysteria surrounding Heated Rivalry was filled with little games of identification. Are you a Shane or an Ilya? Shane offered discipline, beauty, professional success and emotional control. Ilya offered danger, charisma, sexual confidence and the promise of something less manageable. The question allowed viewers to place themselves inside the image.
Most of them were neither.
The lives of Shane and Ilya did not resemble those of most of the people claiming to recognize themselves in the characters. They represented the people those viewers wanted to imagine themselves becoming: beautiful, rich, physically exceptional, sexually desired and important enough for the world to watch. Gay men had not merely appeared in popular culture. They had entered its celebrity fantasy.
That helps explain the excess of the response. They call it representation. What they received was confirmation that their identity was real, desirable and important enough for the world to watch.
The modern gay identity lends itself naturally to celebrity culture. It is neither homosexuality itself nor gayness in the older sense: a cultivated character marked by style, irony, outsiderhood and distance from ordinary moral seriousness. It is instead a public interpretation attached to homosexuality—a story about authenticity, visibility, liberation and belonging. It tells the homosexual what his sexuality means, how he is expected to narrate it and what kind of person he becomes by declaring it.
The gay man in this story does not merely desire other men. He has discovered himself. He has overcome shame. By appearing publicly, he demonstrates courage. By speaking about his experience, he creates visibility. By succeeding in life, he is a role model for other homosexuals. A private sexual reality is turned into a personality, a social role and eventually a moral achievement.
Celebrity culture gives the identity a face, a body and a life to imitate.
Gays are known to have a certain fascination with celebrity culture. It contains something they have always understood: the possibility of leaving one life and constructing another. One could leave the town, change one’s clothes, build a body, acquire new manners, enter a different circle and become someone who would have been impossible in the place one came from.
That affinity with the culture did not depend on seeing oneself reflected in the star. One could admire glamour, performance and self-invention without expecting a famous person to represent homosexual life. The star offered an escape from the ordinary, not a template every gay person was expected to recognize as his own.
Much of what later appeared to be natural gay behavior was drawn from that world: the mannerisms, the voice, the theatrical gesture, the eye for clothes and the pleasure of making an entrance. These qualities did not simply emerge from homosexual desire. They were borrowed, practiced and refined. Celebrity culture offered forms through which one could stand against the manners expected by ordinary society.
One can now watch gay identity fuse with celebrity culture in real time, adding something else to the older fascination. The openly gay celebrity no longer offers only mannerisms, styles and fantasies to borrow. He is presented as an image of gay life itself. His appearance, career and public story become proof of authenticity, evidence of progress and a template for others to follow.
Celebrity culture is misleading by design. It presents exceptional privilege as a life one might choose simply by becoming confident enough. It displays a shallow, hedonistic existence far beyond what most people can afford. Most gay men are not wealthy. They work ordinary jobs, live in ordinary homes and face the same financial limitations as everyone else. They are invited to feel represented by lives they could never imitate. What appears as liberation is often purchasing power.
Tom Daley offers one version of the template. The diving career supplied the medals and national fame. He has since turned that fame into another kind of career. On social media, one sees him knitting sweaters and baking cookies with his son. Beside him is his American husband, Dustin Lance Black, a screenwriter and self-appointed gay activist.
Daley is no longer merely a famous diver who happens to be homosexual. He is in the business of establishing and maintaining himself as a gay celebrity. His private life supplies material, his homosexuality supplies public meaning and the completed image can be offered to others as a model to follow.
The familiar story of gay liberation reached completion in him. The frightened young homosexual had supposedly become the visible, successful husband and father. Society had changed. The life could now be shown. Daley no longer represented only excellence in diving. He represented what the openly gay person could become.
Troye Sivan offers another face. Around him are music, fashion, beautiful men, stylized sexuality, nightlife, expensive clothes and the careful looseness of someone whose appearance has been worked on until it seems effortless. The body is slimmer, the masculinity less conventional, the atmosphere more erotic. Where Daley supplies completion, Sivan supplies possibility. One reassures. The other attracts.
Sivan’s gayness does not remain a fact beside the work. It enters its imagery, reception and public meaning. Desire becomes aesthetic material. Sexual display becomes confidence. Fashion gives homosexuality form. The songs, videos, bodies and clothes assemble a world in which gay identity appears beautiful, cosmopolitan and culturally ahead.
An award is then no longer merely an award. Sivan has described such a moment as “so much larger than me,” attaching it to visibility and representation. The sentence gives away the whole arrangement. His success belongs to him, yet its moral meaning is said to belong to everyone.
Sivan once told a story about a man he had dated who continued to describe himself as straight. His response was essentially: all right, whatever. The amusement is revealing. The man’s description of himself was treated as a delay, a label his conduct had already made absurd. For Sivan, homosexual desire is expected to culminate in the gay identity. He does not merely embody that identity; he promotes it as the only destination of homosexual life.
The famous homosexual becomes public property.
For such a figure, privacy has almost ceased to be a legitimate choice. Once his sexuality becomes known or suspected, silence is interpreted as shame, fear or dishonesty. He is expected to “come out of the closet,” explain himself and turn a private fact into a public story. The celebrity cannot merely be homosexual. He must speak about it, give it meaning and accept the representative role waiting for him.
The performance is still described as courageous. In contemporary celebrity culture, the claim that revealing one’s sexual preferences is heroic has become absurd. The announcement is anticipated, professionally managed and greeted with praise, publicity and institutional approval. The celebrity is applauded for doing what he is no longer permitted not to do.
Daley and Sivan offer contrasting versions of homosexual success. Daley represents discipline, competition, marriage and family; Sivan, music, fashion, erotic display and nightlife. One domesticates homosexuality. The other restores its glamour. The gay identity needs both.
The contrast creates an illusion of diversity. Shane, Ilya, Daley and Sivan appear to offer different answers to the question of what a gay life should be, but all four embody the same identity. The difference between homosexual desire and the gay identity disappears. The one follows naturally from the other. What varies is merely the style in which that identity is performed.
The new gay celebrities create the illusion that one can become whoever one wants to be, provided someone has already created the image. The admirer cannot possess the life. He can belong to the identity represented by it.
Christopher Hitchens understood the peculiar intimacy on which celebrity culture depends. In his attack on the public response to Princess Diana, he examined a spectacle in which millions of strangers were encouraged to behave as though they had known her. They watched the wedding, children, endless interviews, unhappiness and death. Repetition created familiarity. That supposed closeness was mistaken for intimacy.
Her death completed the performance. The public was not merely informed. It was instructed to grieve. Flowers, tears, queues, television presenters and trembling voices established the proper response. Indifference appeared inhuman. Doubt became cruelty. Celebrity had created an imaginary relationship and then imposed the obligations of a real one.
Gay celebrity culture adds political representation to the same machinery. One is not merely invited to admire Daley or Sivan. One is asked to recognize what they mean. Their visibility is supposed to matter, no matter how silly the performance. Their success is supposed to encourage other gay people. Their disclosure is supposed to help. Gratitude becomes the proper response.
The audience enters a relationship with the image and is assigned a moral duty toward it.
Hitchens made a related point in his assault on the public image of Mother Teresa. He invoked an old quote from H.L. Mencken: “Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and that man can sleep till noon.” Once a public figure acquires a reputation for goodness, the reputation begins to interpret everything he does. Evidence no longer creates the image. The image controls the evidence.
Gay identity supplies celebrities with the same kind of credit. Once a public figure has been declared courageous and authentic, his self-display becomes gay visibility. His publicity gives hope. His commercial success demonstrates progress. His career serves the community.
This makes criticism increasingly difficult. To criticize the celebrity is no longer merely to dislike his work, appearance or public behavior. Criticism can instantly be labeled homophobia because it is treated as an attack on what he represents. The admirer does not defend only a singer, athlete or actor. He defends the image through which he has learned to understand himself.
The place celebrities occupy in modern culture resembles the place the gods occupied in the imagination of antiquity. The ancient gods were not admired for humility, restraint or moral purity. They were beautiful and powerful, yet also petty, jealous and promiscuous, free from the limits imposed on ordinary people. They seduced, quarreled, betrayed and punished. Their appetites did not diminish their stature. They confirmed their power.
Christianity placed another figure above the crowd. The saint acquired authority through humility, sacrifice, restraint and service. He renounced the things other people desired. The celebrity is admired for possessing them more completely.
Modern gay culture presents the reversal of Christian values as moral progress. At its center stands the virtue of honesty, understood above all as the refusal of hypocrisy. Pride appears more honest than humility, visibility more honest than privacy, and open sexual expression more honest than restraint. The person who displays his appetites and puts sex at the center of his life can therefore claim moral superiority over the person who professes restraint and sometimes fails.
The celebrity lends this reversal a public and dignified form. At the same time, however, he continues to speak the language of helping others, giving hope and serving a community. He keeps the moral authority of the saint while assuming the privileges of a god. What presents itself as progress is, in this sense, moral regression toward the values of antiquity.
Whatever reservations appeared in the early reviews of Heated Rivalry have disappeared from the public treatment of the series and its actors. The men who play Shane and Ilya now arrive at public appearances in increasingly contrived and ridiculous outfits. In interviews they say the most ridiculous things. Under ordinary circumstances the clothes would invite mockery, especially from gay commentators. Here they are received with reverence. Every appearance becomes another occasion for excitement and admiration.
Their immunity has little to do with the quality of the acting or the vibrancy of their personalities. It comes from the version of homosexuality they have been chosen to embody. That nobody dares laugh shows how thoroughly homosexuality has been glorified. It permits only applause.
6. The Moral Style of Decadence
The elevation of a sexual inclination into a moral good does homosexuals no good. It replaces the individual with an identity and then glorifies the image created in his place.
The hedonistic life is not merely shallow or self-indulgent. It has a dark side and a violence of its own. A life organized around self-gratification inevitably turns other people into objects of pleasure, instruments of power and obstacles to satisfaction.
Over the past few years, I have encountered many gay men who, without prompting, felt compelled to point out that they worked. They would say things like, “Yeah, but I work.” I gradually came to understand what they meant: yes, I live a purely hedonistic life. At least I still go to work.
Labor and consumption have become two stages of the same process. One goes to work in order to consume, then returns because consumption never lasts. Seen in that light, “Yeah, but I work” is less of a defense than it first appears. Work does not stand against the hedonistic life. It finances it.
The display of gay culture on social media shows the cycle in its finished form. Almost everything one sees consists of endless talk about sex, sexual innuendo attached to everything, two guys kissing, and an entire barrage of holiday pictures and videos from exotic places and luxurious hotel resorts.
The gym body is constantly shown off. Many of the men seem to walk around in underwear all day. When they do wear clothes, they arrange them so that the jockstrap remains visible. There is also a great deal of self-help, centered on how to maintain a healthy promiscuous sex life and how to be gay properly.
Since gay liberation emerged as a political movement in the 1970s, gay culture and identity have combined ideas that do not naturally belong together. This combination drew much of its style from homosexual hustlers, prostitutes and other figures living outside respectable society. At the same time, it became attached to social mobility, self-help, professional success and the promise of personal fulfillment.
Holding these elements together was the belief that every person is fundamentally good, provided he is free to express himself. Appetite could therefore be treated as a buried truth, and the removal of restraint as moral progress. The hustler acquired the language of self-realization. The outsider became a model of success. Gay identity retained the glamour of decadence while giving it the reassuring language of personal growth.
Serious content about gay life is surprisingly difficult to find. One of the few exceptions is the podcast Bad Gays, presented by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. They examine evil and complicated homosexual and queer figures from history, including the darker and more sinister sides of gay life.
Apart from some of Robert Hopcke’s work, it is practically the only serious material I have found that explores what being gay might mean without glorifying it and attempts to understand its moral ambiguity.
Its seriousness lies partly in its willingness to admit that homosexuality has a dark side. Homosexual people are not made innocent by having suffered, and a culture formed around sex, freedom, beauty, appetite and transgression will develop its own forms of corruption. Contemporary gay culture seldom examines that darkness directly. It turns it into a style and thereby tries to salvage it.
By contrast, All Out with Jon Dean illustrates the prevailing tendency. Jon Dean himself is a serious person. A lot of his guests are not. In one program about non-monogamy, he visits couples, including three gay men in a relationship. One of them says, “People always think we have sex all the time.” These middle-aged men come across as juvenile. My immediate thought was: no, you think everybody thinks you have sex all day. Identifying as gay is in many ways about being a teenager for the rest of one’s life.
Madonna, the quintessential gay icon, shows how this works. Her music never rose far above the level of silly pop songs. She is traditionally compared with Michael Jackson, although there was nothing revolutionary about her music in the way there was about his. Madonna caught on for what she represented. The image became more important than the songs.
By the time I was eighteen, she already seemed outdated to me. She continued to have commercial success, yet that is not the same as producing good music. Her reputation survived because she stood for sexual freedom, provocation, self-invention and gay culture. The meaning attached to her protected the work from ordinary judgment.
Her cosmetic procedures and much younger partners reveal the darker side of the image. She cannot relinquish youth because youth is tied to sexual status and power. She still has to appear desirable, transgressive and surrounded by young men. What might otherwise look like vanity and an inability to grow old is presented as liberation and resistance to ageism. The style salvages the deterioration it has produced.
I was always aware that, as a homosexual, I lived in many ways a privileged life. In today’s culture, the hedonistic life is not only lived; it can and must be shown off. In recent years, it has been actively promoted as the superior way of life.
This new shamelessness in gay culture is especially visible on social media, where it presents itself as newfound confidence. Pleasure that remains private cannot provide status, demonstrate liberation or become part of an identity. The display is no longer separate from the pleasure. It has become part of it.
Gay men are portrayed as exemplary figures of this life. They lead the way in turning pleasure, consumption and self-display into a complete way of living. The successful gay man does not merely participate in that. He appears to have brought it to perfection. In a hedonistic culture, gay people are positioned at the top.
I have heard women around me say quite openly that they enjoy watching gay male pornography. A similar pleasure helps explain the female fascination with Heated Rivalry. Its explicit sexual content is not incidental to the story. Sex narrates the relationship. Each encounter reveals another change in power, trust, jealousy or attachment. Two beautiful men having sex become both the spectacle and the narrative device.
The fantasy is then turned into an instruction for heterosexual men: become more like the gays. Be more sexually open, more emotionally expressive and less restrained. I find this deeply disturbing. A homosexual relationship, formed between two men and shaped partly by the absence of women, is presented as a lesson in how men should relate to women. An exceptional erotic fantasy becomes a model for ordinary male life.
There is something of a sinister fag-hag fantasy in this: the woman places herself beside homosexual men, consumes their intimacy and then uses it to judge heterosexual men.
The fantasy depends on treating homosexual men not merely as different, but as morally exemplary. The same assumption now shapes gay liberation. Its demands are no longer confined to equal rights. They increasingly extend to privileges and exemptions. We are said to be so different from ordinary people that ordinary judgments should not apply to us. Even sexual exploitation and human trafficking can be defended as part of our culture.
Substance use can be treated as liberation, and involvement in the world surrounding the drug trade as part of the larger nightlife. What would be condemned elsewhere is explained, aestheticized or protected when it appears under the guise of gay identity. The right to live freely becomes a demand for a free pass.
Victimhood gives this life its moral meaning. The gay man is not merely drinking, doing drugs, traveling, spending money and constantly pursuing sex. In doing so, he is overcoming shame. He is living openly after generations were forced to hide. He is reclaiming the pleasure once denied to him. What might otherwise look shallow or self-indulgent is presented as recovery from centuries of repression.
The hedonistic life can therefore appear both enviable and innocent. The body, freedom and experiences invite admiration; the history of suffering forbids judgment. Pleasure becomes compensation. Excess becomes evidence that oppression has been defeated. The bill is paid by the job. The lifestyle is justified by the victim.
The gay world stands for moral regression in another sense. It is a culture organized almost entirely by men, for men. Sex is intertwined with raw power. Beauty, youth, physique, masculinity, money and social position determine who is desired, who is admitted and who is permitted to set the terms. The same man may be a sexual object, a rival and a source of status.
The absence of women does not produce equality among men. It leaves male hierarchy unusually exposed. Desire follows rank, while rank is confirmed by who one can attract. The language is one of freedom, yet the underlying world is governed by competition, domination and submission. Gay liberation did not remove power from sex. It allowed a culture organized around power to present itself as morally advanced.
In the Greek and Roman world, sex was closely intertwined with status and power. These were societies organized around rank, conquest and slavery. The decisive sexual distinction was often not between homosexual and heterosexual acts, but between the man who penetrated and the person who was penetrated.
The free adult male was expected to occupy the first position. The second frequently belonged to women, slaves, boys and men of lower status. Sex between men was not necessarily imagined as a relationship between homosexual equals.
A great deal of modern gay culture represents a return to that moral world, though in a different configuration. Sexual position, beauty, youth, physique, money and access again become markers of rank. Sex and power cannot be separated because sexual access confirms one’s position within the hierarchy. The language is modern and emancipatory. The underlying structure is considerably older.
Gay liberation nevertheless presents sexual expression as an alternative to violence. Therein lies its deception. Sex and violence can be two sides of the same coin. Yet that does not mean that more sex produces less violence. Gay liberation continues to suggest that repression produces aggression and that a society having more sex would become gentler and less dangerous.
Christianity is oriented toward peace in its ideals: meekness, mercy, forgiveness, sacrifice and the refusal to answer violence with violence. Gay liberation rejects its sexual restraints while claiming that sexual freedom will achieve the peaceful world Christianity failed to produce.
The possibility it cannot admit is that sex may itself become an expression of domination. A culture of sexual permissiveness creates new forms of oppression and sexual violence. Sexual liberation does not necessarily overcome the morality of power. It may provide that morality with another form.
This helps explain why Christianity remains the principal enemy of gay culture, even in societies where the churches have lost much of their authority. The conflict is not only historical and not only about homosexuality. Christianity treats appetite as morally ambiguous.
It places value on humility, restraint, sacrifice and, most importantly, the willingness to renounce what one desires. Gay identity has increasingly organized itself around the opposite ideals: pride, visibility, sexual expression and the public affirmation of the basest human desires.
In this respect, it represents a return to something closer to the morality of antiquity. Beauty, appetite, power and self-display recover the prestige Christianity tried to take from them. The reversal is presented as moral progress because it takes place under the name of honesty. The person who restrains himself appears hypocritical; the person who displays his appetites appears truthful. Christianity remains the enemy because it preserves the possibility that honesty about a desire does not make the desire good.
This idea has entered modern politics. When politicians are asked what European or Western values consist of, they increasingly point to LGBTQ rights and the treatment of homosexuals and gender-nonconforming people. These have become shorthand for freedom, tolerance and civilization.
The reception reveals something more than a hunger for acknowledgment. Gay viewers did not merely want homosexual men to enter the masculine world of professional hockey in Heated Rivalry. They wanted the most beautiful, successful and desirable men within that world to be homosexual. Homosexuality was not to occupy one place within the hierarchy. It was to possess the men at its summit.
The movement ends in a reversal of moral authority. The homosexual was once a morally ambiguous person whose conduct remained open to judgment. He is now presented as uniquely qualified to explain love, sex and masculinity to everyone else. The morally ambiguous person has become the morally superior one.