Queer Aggression Reaps What It Sows

Support for Gays Is Down—Or Is It?

“Tolerance Takes a Hit: Americans Less Accepting of LGBT People.” Thus reads a USA Today headline from 2017. This represents a reversal from the “positive momentum” of acceptance observed during the four years prior, the piece states. Articles from 2018 and 2019 amplify the “alarming” trend. Since respect for human rights tends to increase over time, what's going on?

Perhaps a clue lies in what changed between 2014 and 2017. Anecdotally, many of us remember this as the time frame in which “queer” and trans politics began to overtake the gay rights movement with vigor. The belief in a sex “binary” began to crumble and the idea took hold that trans people were “literally” their chosen sex. Straight people (“spicy” ones, in the parlance of some) overran lesbian dating apps and the few remaining gay bars. Caitlyn Jenner (called “the most famous trans woman in the world”) transitioned in 2015, followed quickly by my now ex-husband Jamie. Many of those taking up the gay banner were wholly unfamiliar with same-sex attraction.

You'd hope, then, they at least empathized with those whose flag they stole and redesigned.

As it turns out, queer culture isn't merely unlike gay culture. Queer culture is hostile to gay culture. Lesbians, gays and bisexuals fought long and hard for the right to express their same-sex attraction. Queer theorists—who are guided by postmodernism, even if they don't realize it—want to dismantle sex. The claim that sex is a spectrum, for example, is a form of “language play,” thought by postmodernists to subvert illegitimate power structures. Under queer theory, sex is a “social construct” and gays' “genital preferences” are bigotry.

So it's possible those tolerant liberals from 2014 haven't mysteriously abandoned a community they once supported. Maybe they're disenchanted with this other community—this decidedly less gay, more hostile one. Maybe truly supporting the gay community means opposing those who attack it, however confusing their stated affiliations.

Queer theorists' hostility toward same-sex attraction is only their most important clash with the community they've overthrown. Differences between the two groups run deep and wide, affecting aesthetics and values as much as philosophical views. The gay culture within which I came of age was a culture of celebration, sensuality, glamour and humor, with bookstores and bars and real-life encounters—a far cry from the easily offended, perpetually online activists of today's queer movement.

The gay men and women I knew were eager to experience love and sex, after hard-won coming-out experiences that sometimes cost them family and friends. Men and women packed gay bars wall-to-wall, dancing in their underwear, making out in dark corners. Today's queer contingent, perhaps congruently with their age, are in no hurry for sex (and have rendered gay bars extinct). Asexuality has become a popular “orientation” and the ever-increasing trans contingent unworriedly pursues treatments that destroy sexual function and dating opportunities.

Back in the day, gay men told raunchy jokes and called lesbians “fish.” Drag queens with names like Magnolia P. Thunderpussy did “camp drag” in beards and heels. They'd have sooner stolen jokes from Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais than cancel them for insensitivity.

Gayness was a celebration of difference. Queerness is a complaint of oppression, an angry procession beating the unsubstantiated drum of suicidality, an arm of what some have dubbed the “grievance studies.” Gayness was embellished with rainbow suspenders and fun pins that said “Love is Love” and “Closets Are for Clothes.” Queerness covers itself with pronoun pins, unnatural hair colors and bodily modifications approaching self-harm. Gay pride meant accepting yourself as you were. Queer pride means crafting the self you want.

Importantly for the “tolerance” espoused by USA Today, gay activists have sought to assimilate with society: to marry, to have children, to work, to participate in the economy. But queer theorists believe society is beyond reform, exhibiting “systemic” bigotry, and want to “tear down the West by rejecting traditional language, received categories, cultural traditions, and individual rights.”

Maybe it’s patience with destruction that has declined, not respect for human rights.