The Struggle for Gay Rights Is Over

Gay Rights Have Already Been Won

"In January 2018, the National LGBTQ Task Force held its annual Creating Change conference at a hotel around the corner from where I live in Washington, D.C. Creating Change, which bills itself as the “foremost political, leadership, and skills-building conference for the LGBTQ social justice movement,” brings together thousands of activists from across the country. Yet surveying the various panel discussions left me confused. “Elephant in the Waiting Room: Self-Love, Health, Queering Fat Acceptance” was the title of one workshop. “The Politics of Colony and Post-hurricane Politics in PR and USVI” was another. Most puzzling for a gathering ostensibly dedicated to the political interests of people discriminated against because of their same-sex attraction was the discussion simply entitled “Asexuals.”

As the topics of conversation at America’s largest assembly of gay activists suggests, America is rapidly becoming a post-gay country...

After the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was repealed, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a group that represented gay soldiers discharged under the directive, merged with OutServe, an advocacy group for gay military personnel. (That amalgamation has itself since been fused with a group representing the families of LGBTQ soldiers.) Not long after the Supreme Court delivered its decision recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in 2015, Freedom to Marry declared its job finished and wound down operations. Later that year, the Empire State Pride Agenda, the major gay-rights organization in New York State, declared that it, too, would disband after 25 years of work. A host of other federal and state-level organizations have followed suit.

Despite evident progress, however, many gay-rights activists are hesitant to exult in their victories. To listen to some movement grandees is to think that the situation has actually never been worse. “The coordinated, systematic onslaught of attacks on L.G.B.T.Q. civil rights has been unprecedented in scale and scope,” Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said of the Trump administration in an interview with Benoit Denizet-Lewis for The New York Times Magazine this past January. “For Gays, the Worst Is Yet to Come. Again,” declared the headline of a characteristically pessimistic Times op-ed by the legendary gay activist and playwright Larry Kramer...

At a time when Americans are riven by tribal differences related to politics, race, gender, geography, religion, and other factors, it is hard to find another issue around which there is so much consensus as basic fairness for gay people. Writing recently in The New York Times about a road trip through red-state America, Samantha Allen, a self-described “queer transgender woman,” observed that in “what is ostensibly Trump country, I met many L.G.B.T. people who saw no need to flee their conservative home states for the coastal safe havens of generations past, thanks to local progress.” The headline read in part: “In the heartland, it’s never been a better time to be L.G.B.T.”

If only the people running America’s gay organizations would listen. “The Trump administration’s anti-LGBTQ policies are bad enough,” read a 2018 fundraising email from the Victory Fund, an organization committed to electing LGBTQ public officials. “But his vile rhetoric—as well as that of his allies—could be even more dangerous.” As an example of the president’s “vile rhetoric,” the organization cited a private comment he reportedly made about his vice president, Mike Pence, wanting to “hang” gays (which the White House summarily denied). It was an obvious joke about Pence’s religiosity and social conservatism, an example not of Trump’s purported homophobia but the lack of respect he has for even his most loyal followers, up to and including his own vice president, whom he is apparently willing to mock before a group of White House visitors. No matter. Not to be out-outraged, the Human Rights Campaign called Trump’s sarcastic comment about Pence “evil.”

Perhaps fearing that few beyond their perpetually infuriated base of die-hard supporters will listen, some gay groups have reached for dubious statistical evidence to back their claims of a Trump-induced homophobic backlash...

As for the report on LGBTQ homicides, it is unclear how many of the murders included in the report were actually motivated by antigay animus. According to Walter Olson of the Cato Institute, who researched the individual incidents, “it is hard to see any evidence at all that the perpetrators were motivated by such bias” in 16 of the 20 slayings of gay men. “In two cases, it’s mentioned specifically that police don’t attribute the killings to hate.” Using such specious data to claim a “massive increase in anti-LGBTQ violence since Trump took office,” as the Victory Fund did in a fundraising solicitation, is irresponsible.

Nonetheless, hysteria about America’s supposedly deepening homophobia flourishes. Earlier this year, an academic journal quietly retracted a study by a Columbia University professor purporting to show that living in areas with high levels of antigay sentiment reduces gay people’s life expectancies by a dozen years. Before it was withdrawn, the paper was cited 141 times in other academic publications. More infamously, the gay actor Jussie Smollett claimed that Trump supporters yelling “This is MAGA country” assaulted him at 2 a.m. on a Chicago street in the middle of a polar vortex. That so many people initially believed his story reflects the pervasiveness of the sentiment that a tide of homophobia descended upon America in the time since Trump became the 45th president.

The picture is different for transgender Americans. They have seen some of their progress curtailed, in the form of the Trump administration’s ban on (most) transgender military service and some administrative rulings that remove gender identity from federal antidiscrimination regulations. But it is the conflation of transgender issues with the gay rights movement, a recent development and not one undertaken without some controversy among gays and lesbians themselves, which accounts for much if not most of the evidence cited as representing regression on gay rights...

Gays economically outperform heterosexuals...

When I asked the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s leading gay-rights group, for statistics on the number of LGBTQ people annually denied employment, housing, or service at a hotel or restaurant due to their sexuality or gender identity, the group was unable to provide me with any. Most social movements are able to identify the extent of the problems they seek to address. Gun-control advocates, for instance, can readily give you the number of people killed every year by firearms. Anti-hunger campaigners can recite by memory the percentage of malnourished children.

Instead, HRC directed me to a poll in which 63 percent of LGBTQ people self-reported “discrimination in their personal lives.” Such language is sufficiently vague to encompass everything from a stray homophobic comment heard on the street to being fired, and is thus not a useful gauge of the extent of a problem remediable by government action. Blanket discrimination against gay people simply on the basis of their sexual orientation is not widespread. According to the gay legal advocate Andrew Koppelman:

Hardly any of these cases have occurred: a handful in a country of 300 million people... Even in the large number of states with no antidiscrimination protection for gay people, I am unaware of any case where a couple was unable to conduct a wedding....

Perhaps the most high-profile case of homophobic discrimination in recent memory was the one that led to last year’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision from the Supreme Court. In a 7–2 decision, all the more damning for having been written by the judicial hero of the modern gay-rights movement, Anthony Kennedy, the Court decisively ruled against a gay couple’s attempt to force a Christian baker in Colorado to make a cake for their wedding ceremony. The court assailed Colorado bureaucrats for running roughshod over the First Amendment rights of the baker, whose religious convictions forbade him not from serving gay people—he offered to make the couple all the baked goods they could ever wish to consume—but from expressing approval for something he considers sinful.

We gay people are expected to be grievously offended by the behavior of Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop. But many, if not most, of the gay people I know can live with the fact that a baker in Colorado does not approve of our relationships. America is a land of some 330 million people, and I do not require every small-business owner across the country to reject 2,000 years of religious teaching in order to pursue my happiness.

Guided by a moral absolutism resembling the religious zeal of those they oppose, some gay activists and their progressive allies have taken a zero-sum approach to the issue of antidiscrimination, seeking to punish and stigmatize people who hold the exact same view of marriage that Barack Obama expressed up until May 2012. One member of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission alleged that Jack Phillip’s invocation of his Christian faith was akin to Nazi justifications for the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the state of New York is threatening to close an evangelical adoption agency that refuses to place children with gay couples, despite the fact that the agency does not even accept government funding and that no gay couple had ever even complained about being denied service.

If you had told gay activists 10 or even five years ago that their energies would center upon campaigns related to various foods—forcing pious pastry chefs to make cakes and boycotting Chick-Fil-A, or “hate chicken,” because its Christian owner has donated money to efforts opposing same-sex marriage—most would have considered their missions complete. To understand why so many in the movement refuse to accept victory, it helps to understand the tensions that have long existed at its heart.

Since the emergence of “homophile” activists in the 1950s, the tenor and aims of the American gay-rights cause have alternated between two tendencies: integrationist and separatist. Broadly defined, integrationists have argued for the incorporation of gay people into all aspects of American society, while separatists believe that American society itself should be upended...

One of the first groups to emerge in the aftermath of Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front, adopted its name as an homage to the communist National Liberation Front of North Vietnam, derided marriage as “one of the most insidious and basic sustainers of the system,” denounced the “dirty, vile, fucked-up capitalist conspiracy,” and donated funds to the Black Panthers, an organization not exactly known for holding progressive views on homosexuality. “We are a revolutionary group of men and women, formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished,” the GLF declared in its founding manifesto.

By the 1980s, the deadly AIDS epidemic and resulting government indifference helped swing the pendulum back in the direction of integration. AIDS enforced a maturation on the gay community, and a tempering of the previous decade’s sexual excesses. This shift did not occur without controversy; gays who advocated closing down bathhouses and safer sex practices (like Larry Kramer) were derided as puritans and “sexual Nazis” by their liberationist brethren. But by the time the worst years of the epidemic were over, gays understood how much they had to gain from mainstream social acceptance in the form of hospital-visitation rights and relationship recognition—and had demonstrated that they had more in common with the straight majority than perhaps either side had recognized. “AIDS and its onslaught imposed a form of social integration that may never have taken place otherwise,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in 1996...

Dale Carpenter, the author of the definitive account of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case striking down sodomy laws, told me that the winning legal team “consciously eschewed argument rooted in sexual liberation in favor of arguments that emphasized commitment, love, and family—and especially the idea that lesbians, gays and bisexuals are ‘just like’ heterosexuals.” The integrationist lawyers had to overrule their separatist colleagues who had “urged that the final Supreme Court briefs mention BDSM and other sexual subcultures as deserving specific constitutional protection.” After the historic decision was handed down, many separatists objected that it didn’t go far enough. One Columbia University professor wrote a law-review article dismissing Lawrence as mere “domesticated liberty.”

Like the African American civil-rights movement (which had its own separationist analogue in the form of black nationalism) before it, the cause of gay equality has been most successful when its spokesmen and women addressed the American majority as fellow citizens seeking the same rights and responsibilities they take for granted.

Now that it possesses cultural and political power, the gay-rights movement is reverting to the control of its radical element, with many in the vanguard bent on upending the American social order that only recently accepted it. Success has lowered the stakes; responsible leaders (including many of the moderate and conservative gays who played an unsung role in the movement’s success) have retired from the fight, clearing the field for the sort of culture-war topics roiling the left at large.

Under Trump, the gay-rights movement is beset by mission creep. Just what are we trying to accomplish anymore, and on behalf of whom? The ever-proliferating set of sexual and gender identities one encounters is a direct result of the radicals’ hold over the movement. Take, for example, the Wesleyan University Open House, which once described itself as “a safe space for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderfuck, Polyamourous, Bondage/Disciple, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism (LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM) communities and for people of sexually or gender dissident communities.” Gay is passé.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the prevalence of the word queer...

And again, there’s the uncomfortable merger of sorts with the transgender movement. As a demonstrative example, the most recent Pride edition of the pioneering gay magazine Out is devoted largely to transgender issues and doesn’t featuring a single living lesbian within its pages...

Even if the connection to the transgender cause makes a certain sort of sense, left-wing activists are also exploiting the gay-rights movement to push agendas utterly extraneous to gay equality. Twice in the past three years, anti-Zionist activists have hijacked the stage at the Creating Change conference to attack Jewish delegates and Israel, the only country in the Middle East that even remotely respects the dignity of LGBTQ people. Meanwhile, it has become an annual ritual for followers of the Black Lives Matter movement to halt gay-pride parades in major cities across North America to protest the very presence of uniformed police officers, despite a recent survey finding that 79 percent of LBTQ people (and 77 percent of nonwhite LGBTQ people) support a police presence at Pride celebrations...

Starved of real enemies, many in the gay community are turning on their own. Among many queer types, the three words gay white men have become a euphemism for all that’s wrong with the world. Them, the LGBTQ web channel launched two years ago by Condé Nast, is a stew of resentments against this entire demographic group. Some sample headlines from a recurring column: “Dear White Gay Men, Black Panther Is Not About You,” “Dear White Gay Men: Stop Turning Yourselves Into Heroes,” “Dear White Gay Men: Labeling People of Color ‘Divisive’ Isn’t a Critique – It’s Racism.”

With his unabashed religious faith, military service, and bourgeois domesticity, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is the political embodiment of gay integration. For precisely this reason, the separatist, “queer” left despises him... A culture that once preached individuality and personal freedom has become conformist and hectoring, its self-appointed queer commissars constantly policing the language and bringing pressure to bear on those who run afoul of their ever-evolving standards...

California now bans taxpayer-funded travel to any state that “authorizes discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression,” a list that includes Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Texas. Who does that help? Not gay people in red states. But it does boost those political forces bent on convincing Americans that the gay-rights movement will only be satisfied once every individual citizen agrees with its precepts (a tough proposition in a religious country), and that gays will use strong-arm tactics to achieve this goal.

Trump’s promise to protect religious liberty from a hegemonic secular left is one of the major reasons why so many evangelical Christians supported a thrice-married sexual reprobate in 2016... The illiberal queer left and the illiberal religious right exist in a mutually reinforcing, codependent relationship.

From a legal standpoint, the movement has achieved nearly everything it needs for gay people to prosper as equal citizens. Instead of fighting this pointless war over wedding cakes, it should declare unilateral victory. Of course, it’s unreasonable to expect this to happen. For many of those whose political identities have been shaped by crusades against government discrimination and pervasive societal ignorance, victimhood is too essential an identity to be so easily discarded.

But there might not be many people left willing to foot the bill. As gays grow more comfortable with their place in America, it’s going to be harder and harder to sustain gay organizations...

Perhaps this is why so many gay activists have resorted to alarmist rhetoric, fanning the flames of hysteria to scare donors into opening their wallets. Devoid of genuine bigotry to condemn and substantive assaults on equality to resist, they resort to ever more desperate accusations and pettier concerns, complaining about a directive from the State Department prohibiting embassies from flying the rainbow flag (but not from displaying it on embassy walls), or cynically misconstruing a presidential joke told at the vice president’s expense as a wish for gay people to be lynched. Each of these contrived outrages is presented as a terrifying blow against gay equality, when they are nothing more than blips.

The smallness of the American debate over these issues does not really strike you until you’ve spent time overseas in places where it is truly dangerous to be gay. Across wide swaths of the planet, homosexuality itself—or even the advocacy of equal rights—is criminalized, and societal acceptance lags far behind that found in the liberal democratic West. The money and resources poured into suing bakers and florists would be far better spent on these genuine fights for human liberty...

For those born into a form of adversity, sometimes the hardest thing to do is admitting that they’ve won."


When power relies on pretending that there is a problem...