The self anointed are erasing gays and lesbians and replacing them with queer. SF pride theme was, "Joy of queer resistance". Newspapers do not refer to someone as gay or lesbian but only queer. Reclamation from "activists" is needed in so many areas in what was once "liberal".
They're getting closer. On June 26, the NYT published a long op-ed piece titled "How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way" by Andrew Sullivan.
Ten years ago Thursday, the movement for gay and lesbian equality scored a victory that only a decade before had seemed unimaginable. We won equal rights to civil marriage in every state in the country. In 2020 came another stunning win. In a majority opinion written by one of President Trump’s nominees, Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court found that gay men, lesbians and transgender men and women are covered under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and protected from employer discrimination.
In 2024, the Republican Party removed opposition to marriage equality from its platform, and the current Republican Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is a married gay man with two children. Gay marriage is backed by around 70 percent of Americans, and discrimination against gay men, lesbians and transgender people is opposed by 80 percent. As civil rights victories go, it doesn’t get more decisive or comprehensive than this.
But a funny thing happened in the wake of these triumphs. Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized.
In 2023, the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights group in the country, declared a “state of emergency” for gay men, lesbians and transgender people — the first time in the organization’s existence. It had not declared a state of emergency when gay men were jailed for having sex in private, when the AIDS epidemic killed hundreds of thousands of gay men or when we faced a possible constitutional amendment banning marriage equality in 2004. In fact, we found out, this “emergency” was almost entirely in response to new state bills proposing restrictions on medical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria; bathroom and locker room bans; and transgender issues in school curricula and sports.
Nonetheless, the money has poured into gay, lesbian and transgender groups in the past decade. Charitable funding for such groups totaled $387 million in 2012, according to the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s Equitable Giving Lab. By 2021, it was $823 million. L.G.B.T.Q.+ organizations also saw their assets grow 76 percent from 2019 to 2021 — around double the size of their increase in donations. A group like GLAAD — founded in 1985 to combat anti-gay media bias in the depths of the AIDS epidemic — saw its funding increase sixfold between 2014 and 2023. The Human Rights Campaign has also seen revenues soar in the past decade.
But this huge increase in funding was no longer primarily about gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights, because almost all had already been won. It was instead about a new and radical gender revolution. Focused on ending what activists saw as the oppression of the sex binary, which some critical gender and queer theorists associated with “white supremacy,” they aimed to dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society, to replace biological sex with “gender identity” in the law and culture, and to redefine homosexuality, in the process, not as a neutral fact of the human condition but as a liberating ideological “queerness” — which is then meant to subvert and “queer” language, culture and society in myriad different ways.
The words “gay” and “lesbian” all but disappeared. L.G.B.T. became L.G.B.T.Q., then L.G.B.T.Q.+, and more letters and characters kept being added: L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ or 2S.L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ (to include intersex, asexual people and two-spirit Indigenous people). The plus sign referred to a seemingly infinite number of new niche identities, and, by some counts, more than 70 new “genders.” The point was that this is all one revolutionary, intersectional community of gender-diverse people, and intertwined with other left causes, from Black Lives Matter to Queers for Palestine.
They needed a new banner for that. So the rainbow flag, invented back in 1978 at the request of Harvey Milk, was replaced over the last few years by a new “Progress” flag, representing intersectional oppression. Black and brown stripes were added to the rainbow — for Black and brown people (and the people lost during the AIDS crisis) — and pink, light blue and white for trans people. That flag now demarcates a place not simply friendly to all types of people, as the old rainbow flag did, but a place where anyone who does not subscribe to intersectional left ideology is unwelcome.
“Queer” was a way of summing up the new regime, a clear sign that this really was a different movement than the gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights movement of the past. It’s a word that can easily trigger gay men over 40 who remember it as the last slur they once heard before being bashed in the head. But one of the striking aspects of the younger queer generation is their disdain for those who came before them.
As I watched all this radical change, I wondered if I was just another old fart, shaking my fist at the sky, like every older generation known to man? Why not just accept that the next gay and lesbian generation has new ideas, has moved on, and old-timers like me should just move aside?
He does not pull his punches. The piece is a comprehensive statement of the principles and objectives of the gender critical movement. Since I last visited the piece at the NYT's website, the Times opened the column to comments. I will avoid them for the moment so I can savor Skmetti and other recent and unexpected advances in sex realists' fight against gender identity ideology.
Besides, I already know what the NYT's readership will say. Among trans allies, Andrew Sullivan is almost as toxic as Chase Strangio is to us. Sullivan elicits the same uninformed, knee-jerk reaction among liberals and progressive as J.K. Rowling. There's no point going into the mainstream Democratic position on trans. We've heard it all before. What's important is that for once America's newspaper of record has given our side a platform and let us speak freely and fully.
I am gay, not queer. That isn't a total surprise. Many gay men my age (I'm pushing 70) bristle at being called queer. On the other hand, I fear that the few gay friends I have who are in my generation are all-in on trans. Two are therapists, after all. To be anything but trans affirming would spell professional suicide. Queer and trans fit right in with another friend's New Age worldview. Unfortunately, it is a lot harder to express my gender critical views candidly when I am with friends than it is here.
I am a therapist and a lesbian in my 70's and I am not an affirming therapist. There is a group called Therapy First that has a membership of therapists who are "non affirming" or doing therapy which is not about affirming what someone believes but exploring where it might be coming from. Just FYI
Kudos! This is what must be done. Like bullies everywhere, those in the mental heath field who have been defending the indefensible will surrender when they meet determined and principled opposition.
This expresses how I've felt since I came out fifty years ago. "Queer" was a vile slur back then and it remains one today, even more when the so self-identified use it.
I never wanted to dismantle "power structures." I never wanted a face like an armpit. I never wanted to dismantle society and never saw biology as oppression.
And I never, ever, EVER wanted anything to do with the attention-starved.
I enjoyed reading this. I think tide is starting to turn.
Interesting when people say, “Queers for Palestine,” is like Chickens for KFC, what they don’t understand is that “Queer” has nothing to do with being homosexual but everything to do with being performative. It’s unimaginative and unoriginal and conformist.
Eventually people who go by that label will either grow up or just move on to some new fad being the straight poseurs they always were.
Thank you for this. I’m originally from a bit further South than Selma and ran for the hills when I graduated high school out of the conviction I could never “live authentically” down there. But so many people “who can’t live authentically in the South” DO!!!
I am so happy to read this. I am not gay but I do know many gay couples who have become nervous or afraid because they do not want to be redefined by the Queer/Trans ideology.
The word 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘦𝘳 did mean gay, in a sense. Since roughly forever, it was the preferred slur although
𝘧𝘢𝘨𝘨𝘰𝘵 and 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘺 were also available. Now, however, it seems to have lost any identifiable meaning. It's available to anyone who feels the need to appropriate some of the social cachet of being an oppressed minority. It's especially useful to any author or artist angling for favorable mention on NPR.
Often I get really angry, then sad, then disgusted, then ashamed at the failure of virtually all my friends and acquaintances, many of whom, like me, were on the front lines of Gay Liberation so long ago, to speak out WITH ME to save women and children from transgender madness.
Where are the voices, I asked, alone in a wilderness of silence, to defend us against the mania that threatens the very foundations of Feminism?
Then I read the brave writers of The LGB Courage Coalition and feel hope, if but for a few minutes.
To be fair, and despite any claims to the contrary, Strangio isn't (meaningfully) trying to dismantle capitalism, and communists who advocated for the end of capitalism weren't trying to dismantle the family.
The revolution of the superstructure of society that would likely follow any restructuring of social production is secondary, but the Strangios of the world just want the social revolution, and don't much care how they get there. If they can get their post-family trans-humanist future under capitalism (and they can), then they'll be happy with that.
Whether alienating or exciting, the economics is a red herring.
Thank you for writing this. I never appreciated having my sexuality appropriated for ideological purposes.
Well said. I am totally with you on this.
Beautiful, and true. THIS is the community to which I belong. Thank you for giving us such powerful words. I have restacked.
The self anointed are erasing gays and lesbians and replacing them with queer. SF pride theme was, "Joy of queer resistance". Newspapers do not refer to someone as gay or lesbian but only queer. Reclamation from "activists" is needed in so many areas in what was once "liberal".
This is what I wish the NYT would publish!!!
They're getting closer. On June 26, the NYT published a long op-ed piece titled "How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way" by Andrew Sullivan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/gay-lesbian-trans-rights.html?searchResultPosition=1
It is paywalled, but here are the opening paragraphs:
=================================================================
Ten years ago Thursday, the movement for gay and lesbian equality scored a victory that only a decade before had seemed unimaginable. We won equal rights to civil marriage in every state in the country. In 2020 came another stunning win. In a majority opinion written by one of President Trump’s nominees, Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court found that gay men, lesbians and transgender men and women are covered under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and protected from employer discrimination.
In 2024, the Republican Party removed opposition to marriage equality from its platform, and the current Republican Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is a married gay man with two children. Gay marriage is backed by around 70 percent of Americans, and discrimination against gay men, lesbians and transgender people is opposed by 80 percent. As civil rights victories go, it doesn’t get more decisive or comprehensive than this.
But a funny thing happened in the wake of these triumphs. Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized.
In 2023, the Human Rights Campaign, the largest gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights group in the country, declared a “state of emergency” for gay men, lesbians and transgender people — the first time in the organization’s existence. It had not declared a state of emergency when gay men were jailed for having sex in private, when the AIDS epidemic killed hundreds of thousands of gay men or when we faced a possible constitutional amendment banning marriage equality in 2004. In fact, we found out, this “emergency” was almost entirely in response to new state bills proposing restrictions on medical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria; bathroom and locker room bans; and transgender issues in school curricula and sports.
Nonetheless, the money has poured into gay, lesbian and transgender groups in the past decade. Charitable funding for such groups totaled $387 million in 2012, according to the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s Equitable Giving Lab. By 2021, it was $823 million. L.G.B.T.Q.+ organizations also saw their assets grow 76 percent from 2019 to 2021 — around double the size of their increase in donations. A group like GLAAD — founded in 1985 to combat anti-gay media bias in the depths of the AIDS epidemic — saw its funding increase sixfold between 2014 and 2023. The Human Rights Campaign has also seen revenues soar in the past decade.
But this huge increase in funding was no longer primarily about gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights, because almost all had already been won. It was instead about a new and radical gender revolution. Focused on ending what activists saw as the oppression of the sex binary, which some critical gender and queer theorists associated with “white supremacy,” they aimed to dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society, to replace biological sex with “gender identity” in the law and culture, and to redefine homosexuality, in the process, not as a neutral fact of the human condition but as a liberating ideological “queerness” — which is then meant to subvert and “queer” language, culture and society in myriad different ways.
The words “gay” and “lesbian” all but disappeared. L.G.B.T. became L.G.B.T.Q., then L.G.B.T.Q.+, and more letters and characters kept being added: L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ or 2S.L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ (to include intersex, asexual people and two-spirit Indigenous people). The plus sign referred to a seemingly infinite number of new niche identities, and, by some counts, more than 70 new “genders.” The point was that this is all one revolutionary, intersectional community of gender-diverse people, and intertwined with other left causes, from Black Lives Matter to Queers for Palestine.
They needed a new banner for that. So the rainbow flag, invented back in 1978 at the request of Harvey Milk, was replaced over the last few years by a new “Progress” flag, representing intersectional oppression. Black and brown stripes were added to the rainbow — for Black and brown people (and the people lost during the AIDS crisis) — and pink, light blue and white for trans people. That flag now demarcates a place not simply friendly to all types of people, as the old rainbow flag did, but a place where anyone who does not subscribe to intersectional left ideology is unwelcome.
“Queer” was a way of summing up the new regime, a clear sign that this really was a different movement than the gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights movement of the past. It’s a word that can easily trigger gay men over 40 who remember it as the last slur they once heard before being bashed in the head. But one of the striking aspects of the younger queer generation is their disdain for those who came before them.
As I watched all this radical change, I wondered if I was just another old fart, shaking my fist at the sky, like every older generation known to man? Why not just accept that the next gay and lesbian generation has new ideas, has moved on, and old-timers like me should just move aside?
==================================================================
Sullivan continues for another 3,342 more words.
He does not pull his punches. The piece is a comprehensive statement of the principles and objectives of the gender critical movement. Since I last visited the piece at the NYT's website, the Times opened the column to comments. I will avoid them for the moment so I can savor Skmetti and other recent and unexpected advances in sex realists' fight against gender identity ideology.
Besides, I already know what the NYT's readership will say. Among trans allies, Andrew Sullivan is almost as toxic as Chase Strangio is to us. Sullivan elicits the same uninformed, knee-jerk reaction among liberals and progressive as J.K. Rowling. There's no point going into the mainstream Democratic position on trans. We've heard it all before. What's important is that for once America's newspaper of record has given our side a platform and let us speak freely and fully.
Link that bypasses the paywall:
https://archive.ph/qStUt
Thanks!
Kudos! This cannot be said enough.
I am gay, not queer. That isn't a total surprise. Many gay men my age (I'm pushing 70) bristle at being called queer. On the other hand, I fear that the few gay friends I have who are in my generation are all-in on trans. Two are therapists, after all. To be anything but trans affirming would spell professional suicide. Queer and trans fit right in with another friend's New Age worldview. Unfortunately, it is a lot harder to express my gender critical views candidly when I am with friends than it is here.
I am a therapist and a lesbian in my 70's and I am not an affirming therapist. There is a group called Therapy First that has a membership of therapists who are "non affirming" or doing therapy which is not about affirming what someone believes but exploring where it might be coming from. Just FYI
Kudos! This is what must be done. Like bullies everywhere, those in the mental heath field who have been defending the indefensible will surrender when they meet determined and principled opposition.
This expresses how I've felt since I came out fifty years ago. "Queer" was a vile slur back then and it remains one today, even more when the so self-identified use it.
I never wanted to dismantle "power structures." I never wanted a face like an armpit. I never wanted to dismantle society and never saw biology as oppression.
And I never, ever, EVER wanted anything to do with the attention-starved.
Great essay. Brava!
I enjoyed reading this. I think tide is starting to turn.
Interesting when people say, “Queers for Palestine,” is like Chickens for KFC, what they don’t understand is that “Queer” has nothing to do with being homosexual but everything to do with being performative. It’s unimaginative and unoriginal and conformist.
Eventually people who go by that label will either grow up or just move on to some new fad being the straight poseurs they always were.
Thank you for this. I’m originally from a bit further South than Selma and ran for the hills when I graduated high school out of the conviction I could never “live authentically” down there. But so many people “who can’t live authentically in the South” DO!!!
It has changed a lot in the last 30 years. Are there still bigots, of course but there are bigots everywhere but we too are everywhere!
Thank you LeAnne for that clear and easy to understand idea. It’s exactly how I feel as well. Excellent!
I am so happy to read this. I am not gay but I do know many gay couples who have become nervous or afraid because they do not want to be redefined by the Queer/Trans ideology.
I thought I was queer when I thought queer meant gay. Now I realize that it means something totally different.
The word 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘦𝘳 did mean gay, in a sense. Since roughly forever, it was the preferred slur although
𝘧𝘢𝘨𝘨𝘰𝘵 and 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘺 were also available. Now, however, it seems to have lost any identifiable meaning. It's available to anyone who feels the need to appropriate some of the social cachet of being an oppressed minority. It's especially useful to any author or artist angling for favorable mention on NPR.
Often I get really angry, then sad, then disgusted, then ashamed at the failure of virtually all my friends and acquaintances, many of whom, like me, were on the front lines of Gay Liberation so long ago, to speak out WITH ME to save women and children from transgender madness.
Where are the voices, I asked, alone in a wilderness of silence, to defend us against the mania that threatens the very foundations of Feminism?
Then I read the brave writers of The LGB Courage Coalition and feel hope, if but for a few minutes.
Thank you, LeAnne Owen.
Thank you, this made me smile.
To be fair, and despite any claims to the contrary, Strangio isn't (meaningfully) trying to dismantle capitalism, and communists who advocated for the end of capitalism weren't trying to dismantle the family.
The revolution of the superstructure of society that would likely follow any restructuring of social production is secondary, but the Strangios of the world just want the social revolution, and don't much care how they get there. If they can get their post-family trans-humanist future under capitalism (and they can), then they'll be happy with that.
Whether alienating or exciting, the economics is a red herring.
I hope you both have long, fulfilling, loving lives. Enjoy!!
This is wonderful. So many thanks.
I am almost 70 and gay. I too am NOT anyone's or anything's political experiment.