Cis Gay Men and the LGBTQ+ Movement

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This is long but thoughtful piece by Ben Appel that hits home on several points about gay people and what’s happening now. On the Facebook site I highlighted this excerpt:

For years, I feared homophobic right-wing evangelicals. But these days, I’m equally wary of the progressive activists who push a distinctly homophobic agenda that denies the biological reality of sex—and who claim that what we are attracted to isn’t male or female bodies per se, but rather male or female gender identities. This outlook effectively imagines away the existence of homosexuality, which, in the real world, is of course rooted in physical attraction based on biological attributes.

These ideas also serve to instruct gender-nonconforming children (as I once was) that their uniqueness indicates they may have been born inside the “wrong body,” and so will likely have to commit to a lifetime of medicalization if they want to be happy. … By means of this “progressive” ideology, we regress to a time in which the categories of “boy” and “girl” were defined in a narrow and reactionary manner.

But there are many other insights in Appel’s essay. Here’s another:

The summer after my first semester, I landed an internship with the LGBT-rights organization GLAAD. … It was also at GLAAD that I first heard the terms “nonbinary” and “cisgender,” and, before I knew it, “cis-supremacy.” And it was the first time that I was pejoratively referred to as “cis.” It’s a nominally neutral term used to describe a person whose gender identity aligns with their biological sex. But it’s also an implicit slur, often directed at gay men with traditionally masculine—thus, “assimilationist,” toxic, and regressive—traits. … Since that time, I’ve noticed that enmity toward “cis” gay men (which often seems a lot like straight up homophobia) has begun to permeate LGBT publications and social media, without any sort of consequences. …

This attitude … offers one explanation for the sharp uptick in the number of gay men and women who now identify under the umbrella of “trans/nonbinary.” As I’ve told friends over the last few years, were I to dye my hair purple, start painting my nails and wearing eyeliner, and change my pronouns, I would experience less anti-gay hostility in the “queer” community, since I would have visibly rejected “cis-heteronormativity.” In fact, my change would also be taken as a signal that I’d adopted a whole set of acceptable politics and beliefs, including the belief that people are attracted to others on the basis of their internally felt gender, as opposed to their biological sex.

You hear this a lot these days from “cis gay men.”

In the Quillette comments, “Beowulf_Obsidian” shared:

Less than a year after homosexual marriage was legalized, gay friends of mine openly lamented how they fell from their super hero status to becoming part of the condemned ‘normative’ crowd. They weren’t celebrated for being gay, they were blasted for not wanting to have sex or date heterobodied trans. … Congratulations, they have marriage equality and equality in condemnation. Welcome to the world of privilege.

I think that provides some insight into the current cultural moment.

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The Progressive Death of Religious Liberty

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When basic constitutional rights conflict, as they often do, it’s vital to work out common-sense accomodations. Historically, civil rights laws have allowed for these, based on evidence of deeply held moral or religious beliefs. Using the power of the state to force a devout women to violate her beliefs by engaging in expressive activity to support same-sex marriage, and, in fact, advocating the repeal of religious and conscious protections, is the extremist position that progressive LGBTQ+ activists have embraced. Rights for we, but not for thee, is their position.

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Act Up and How We View Our History

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Specter writes that:

Instead of a colossus run largely by a small cohort of white men, [Schulman] argues, it was more of a loose confederation of affinity groups. … When we think of ACT UP, Schulman wants us to think of the fight for universal health care, racial justice, and radical democracy—and to recognize that “a few committed activists, when focused on being effective, can accomplish a lot.” …

She assails David France, whom she accuses of using her research to “nefarious ends” in his powerful documentary “How to Survive a Plague.” It won mainstream approval, she thinks, precisely because it promotes a “heroic white male individual model” of activism, in contrast with the “diverse grassroots movements” revealed in the less celebrated documentary “United in Anger,” which she produced with its director, Jim Hubbard.

He notes, however:

Yet there were reasons for ACT UP’s prevailing image. A 1989 survey of the New York chapter showed that more than three-quarters of participants were younger than thirty-five and that eighty per cent were white gay men. Many were well educated, even well-off. …

“ACT UP was predominantly white and male,” she acknowledges. “But its history has been whitened in ways that obstruct the complexity.” [Larry] Kramer, she thinks, “never really understood the wide range of people who were in ACT UP, where we were coming from, and what we were doing.” …

He further observes:

ACT UP certainly contained affinity groups, including the Majority Action Committee, for people of color, and the Women’s Caucus. But did members who were white and male have an advantage in swaying a bureaucracy that was also overwhelmingly white and male? That’s what Kramer implied, and, though Schulman doesn’t dispute the point, she thinks that the group’s true power lay in a concerted display of strength through diversity. …

[Schulman’s] insistence on ACT UP’s diversity is important and correct. Still, the group’s most famous image—the inverted pink triangle of the “Silence = Death” logo—didn’t just link AIDS and the Holocaust; it was also an assertion of a gay identity, as not incidental but integral.

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World of Sports

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A Victory for True Liberalism (Not Leftist Progressivism)

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Progressives are (mostly) hesitant to denounce a 9-0 decision in favor of a Catholic social service agency’s right to not include same-sex couples when placing foster care children, pointing out that the decision was made on narrow grounds while at the same time calling for passage of the Equality Act to ensure that religious exceptions are prohibited under federal law.

Some of the more perceptive commentaries follow below.


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The Non-Gay Movement

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Bruce also writes that during the height of the gay rights struggle when “far-Left gay activists — most of whom preferred ‘queer’ to ‘gay’ — who didn’t want a place at the table but, as one of them told me on the ‘Charlie Rose Show,’ wanted ‘to turn the table over.’ Meaning what? Meaning that they weren’t in it for reform but for revolution.”

And now, “Add it all up and it’s hard not to see it as the beginning of a sweeping set of revolutionary, society-wide changes of precisely the kind that the queer Left wanted to achieve with the gay-rights movement, but never did.”

Fighting back:

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