I have several gay coworkers and our main topic of conversation is....yardwork and other trevails of homeownership. Because they're middle aged or approaching that age, normal boring people. Which was the goal of acceptance--normal life. It strikes me that a lot of the activist noise is from people who can't accept that at some point you have to grown up and become a self-supporting productive adult. And yeah, sometimes that's boring. But stable boring is good. A perpetual angry teenager is not.
I didn’t work for the right of men to wear dresses. I worked for equality and to blend in as “normal.” And when SSM became the law of the land, a lot of gay advocacy groups turned to “trans” because they had no more mission.
I am a gay man. I’m attracted to other men and married to one. Call me a queer only if you have a good reconstructive dentist on retainer.
And since the TQ want to replace sex with a fictitious “gender identity,” they would end same-sex marriage and so they are not my allies; they are my enemies and I do not recognize “trans” as anything other than a cult of victimization and attention-seeking. To hell with them.
Excellent article. I'm a heteronormie but I can clearly see that the trans activism of the past few years, which is eroding women's rights and children's rights, is not what gays, lesbians and bisexuals fought for. The whole idea of being gay or lesbian is also under attack by trans activism because now, if you're confused about your sexuality, you must simply be in the wrong body - it's basically a form of conversion therapy in many cases. Kudos for speaking up. Hopefully, more voices will join yours.
Appreciative of this post, articulates well my own detachment and isolation from all things rainbow-ed. My neighborhood in Chicago has replaced all national flags with the abomination of the Progress flag ( has there ever been an uglier flag? I thought the gays were known for their aesthetic discernment). This Sunday, the second weekend in a row , all manner of rainbow alphabet soup mania will descend upon my street ; I will , from my upper floor be rereading this article , grateful I am not alone . Thanks
That's the understatement of the century (to borrow a line from "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert"). The original rainbow flag was meant to symbolize unity and inclusion across a diverse grouping of human beings who happened to share a single, outlying trait -- a feature, not a bug. It was never about race, gender identity, socio-economic status, or faith. Those were non-issues as they were irrelevant.
The ever-more-defiled horror that has become the "diversity" flag is a complete inversion. Its clear intent is to promote Balkanization and shamestorming, sanctioning all who wave it with not only the power but the duty to embrace their own contrived victimhood while calling out any who dare even question their motives or version of history as simply haters who must be silenced.
As the author points out quite eloquently, once upon a time we were better than this. And we faced very real discrimination and actual, sometimes murderous, hate. But we never hated back.
But when do we get to human beings month where we just celebrate being alive and don’t give a shit or need to be pegged in a group? Try just living life and stop worrying about being special or seeking validation from others. That’s called freedom. IMHO that’s better.
It was 55 years ago next week that we first began to discuss a commemoration of the events during the Stonewall uprising. Had we the benefit the foresight that young people often haven't the experience to possess then, I'm sure that we would have written our proposal for a march to and Gay-In at Central Park the following year much differently.
You might appreciate GBNews presenter Andrew Doyle's thoughtfully reasoned, coherent take on the whole matter of Pride. It really is broken beyond repair.
Fred! Thank you so much for creating an event that was very meaningful to me at a time in my life when I very much needed to feel I was not alone. I had many years of wonderful Pride experiences in NYC in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. You are a hero! Hopefully what’s happening now is temporary and as a society we come out of this era wiser than we were before because people like you and Andrew Doyle had the guts to speak their mind when the powerful tried to silence dissent. Thank you from the bottom of my heart Fred! ❤️❤️❤️
Yes we will come out of it, surrounded by variously ruined lives. Bodies destroyed by hormones, with fragile bones, reduced intelligence, and cancers; eunuchs; and after "be kind" has faded out, unwelcome freaks still gnashing teeth around neologisms ("transphobia!!") that are as worn out as bald tires.
But those who went along and encouraged this monsrtous cult won't be shamed or chagrined.
This echoes what FAIR executive director Monica Harris recently dubbed “force-teaming.” I shared my own thoughts on this jamming together of disparate identity groups for political purposes here:
This is a sensitive issue that has been well-navigated. Sometimes those who care about these issues most need to have honest conversations with those with adolescent dispositions. This article does this bluntly, but also kindly.
This is all obviously correct, but I would argue that this weird abuse of the word "community" happens in tons of areas and is silly for all the same reasons. I'd love to see someone trace this back and find where the word "community" first started being used for an abstract collection of identities rather than an actual in person ecological interpersonal cultural sphere. It probably dovetailed with the elevation of ascribed or achieved states of being, or immutable traits of a person, being elevated from material facts about a person to metaphysical ones. When "a thing that describes me" became a "who I am".
It's a progressive coinage used (I now think) to help promote an agenda. I rrecently graduated from a very progressive theology school In an Old Testament class, the professor asked us what "community" we belonged to, so he could recommend readings which addressed that community. I was puzzled at first. He explained he meant the LGBT+ community, the animal rights community, the feminist community, the environmentalist community, the black community, the differently-abled community, and most of the students did strongly identify with one of these - except me. And yes there was apparently schools of Biblical interpretation addressing all these communities, with articles and books. But that was not how i wanted to read and interpret the Bible. My approach was more in the line of spiritual insights and universal truths. That stumped him.
Glad to hear you challenged that professor’s assumptions. It would be interesting to know if he come up with the idea to introduce “community” perspectives on his own or if he was told to do that by the school’s DEI administration as part of a “best practices” policy.
No, i think he did that on his own, trying to accommodate great majority of the students there, because most of them were very focussed on their community issues. It's a very progressive school. I think in fact, that was a big part of the reason a great number of them were there. To bring "Biblical perspectives" (sometimes a bit strained) to their community issues. And a lot of the writing they did was on these issues. Which i don't have an objection to, a lot of students had experienced trauma around these issues in their fundamentalist or evangelical religious upbringing and this was a kind of healing for them. Still, I wanted more from my study of the Bible. To his credit (after first questioning the idea of "universal truths"), the instructor did try to find something for me. The "theological" school of interpretation was too church -specific doctrinaire, the "Biblical" school of interpretation was too fundamentalist, but we finally found something called the "psychological" school of interpretation - which at least focussed on a more universal approach and explored psychological, if not spiritual truths.
Yes it would be interesting to know where this line of thinking came from. When I started writing the essay I thought I’d have to do some research and I pulled out books from graduate school - one by John D’Emilio is titled “Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970” and that book was published in 1983 so the thinking goes back quite some time. I imaging the source is somewhere between academia and politics mid 20th Century but who can say for sure?
I tend to think that, like many things DEI or whatever, it has some stealthy roots in the National Socialist playbook. Even before them, though, there was much musing in the pan-German sphere about Volkish communities which were loosely identified around race. Of course the German body (naturist) movement also used community, as did many of the youth movements.
"Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are a minority, and that comes with challenges. Facing obstacles and overcoming them gives me a reason to get up in the morning—it gives purpose and meaning to my life. It’s also true that most people have challenges to navigate, so those who are LGBT are not unique in this regard. A life well-lived is not one spent wallowing in identity grievance and pursuing revenge for injustices you did not directly experience."
The T (and all the Q+ alphabet after the LGB, of course, but especially the T) can't allow itself to be separated. It's drafting off the goodwill we LGBs now have after many decades of (sane) advocacy to "just" be normal. (And of course, as others have mentioned over and over, all those advocacy orgs had to do *something* after we got "just normal," and the T was all that was left. Oh, the irony.)
So true. Everybody sees history in, um, binary terms. Nation v nation. Race v race. Black v white. Christian v Muslim. Gay v straight.
History is nothing but internecine rivalries among people we label as groups now.
See the "African American community" - as if. The biggest threat to black life is black people. The biggest threat to gay rights or womens rights are other gay people or women.
And as others have posted, those of us who committed decades to gay rights, womens rights, or antiracism are kind of repulsed by the outcomes: excessive expectations toward sexuality/rights, over excessive endless prowoman antimale attitudes and over the fact black activists have taken decades of support from white people to now aim for complete payback.
Thanks you, I appreciate the reminder , I confess I have felt quite alone , especially in the Peoples Republic of Chicago . I've subscribed to your feed, lookin forward to reading your posts. Sincerely , Leonard Greco
I hear you - there have been times when I’ve also felt very isolated. FAIR in the Arts sometimes has meet-ups on Zoom and you can also see if Braver Angels has any events into Chicago or Zoom meet ups if you’re looking to connect with new people. Thank you for subscribing - independent artists who are not willing to “go along to get along” need support right now so I really appreciate it!
This message needs to be heard loud and clear everywhere. I felt like I was in church with all the Amens I was muttering! I don't like to be put in boxes, either.
Can we just ditch the acronyms? Prior to around 2006 we were simply gay, lesbian and sometimes bi. HRC went with the LGBT Acronym when it decided that it would not support the passage of ENDA without adding transsexuals(which was the most common term at the time). It was as political decision that not only failed, but it represented a forced teaming of groups with different objectives, lifestyles and yes even different histories. Ditch the acronyms...... all of them! Watching pandering politicians like Justin Trudeau trip all over themselves trying to spit out the latest incarnation is good for a laugh, but every addition adds more absurdity to ever expanding acronym from hell.
I have several gay coworkers and our main topic of conversation is....yardwork and other trevails of homeownership. Because they're middle aged or approaching that age, normal boring people. Which was the goal of acceptance--normal life. It strikes me that a lot of the activist noise is from people who can't accept that at some point you have to grown up and become a self-supporting productive adult. And yeah, sometimes that's boring. But stable boring is good. A perpetual angry teenager is not.
I didn’t work for the right of men to wear dresses. I worked for equality and to blend in as “normal.” And when SSM became the law of the land, a lot of gay advocacy groups turned to “trans” because they had no more mission.
That was a mistake.
Boring rocks.
We’re not freaks. We’re as good as anyone else.
Not “almost as good,” which is the message that “pride” sends.
Nothing after the B has anything to do with LGB.
I am a gay man. I’m attracted to other men and married to one. Call me a queer only if you have a good reconstructive dentist on retainer.
And since the TQ want to replace sex with a fictitious “gender identity,” they would end same-sex marriage and so they are not my allies; they are my enemies and I do not recognize “trans” as anything other than a cult of victimization and attention-seeking. To hell with them.
There is no “LGBT community.”
Excellent article. I'm a heteronormie but I can clearly see that the trans activism of the past few years, which is eroding women's rights and children's rights, is not what gays, lesbians and bisexuals fought for. The whole idea of being gay or lesbian is also under attack by trans activism because now, if you're confused about your sexuality, you must simply be in the wrong body - it's basically a form of conversion therapy in many cases. Kudos for speaking up. Hopefully, more voices will join yours.
Appreciative of this post, articulates well my own detachment and isolation from all things rainbow-ed. My neighborhood in Chicago has replaced all national flags with the abomination of the Progress flag ( has there ever been an uglier flag? I thought the gays were known for their aesthetic discernment). This Sunday, the second weekend in a row , all manner of rainbow alphabet soup mania will descend upon my street ; I will , from my upper floor be rereading this article , grateful I am not alone . Thanks
",,,abomination of the Progress flag"
That's the understatement of the century (to borrow a line from "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert"). The original rainbow flag was meant to symbolize unity and inclusion across a diverse grouping of human beings who happened to share a single, outlying trait -- a feature, not a bug. It was never about race, gender identity, socio-economic status, or faith. Those were non-issues as they were irrelevant.
The ever-more-defiled horror that has become the "diversity" flag is a complete inversion. Its clear intent is to promote Balkanization and shamestorming, sanctioning all who wave it with not only the power but the duty to embrace their own contrived victimhood while calling out any who dare even question their motives or version of history as simply haters who must be silenced.
As the author points out quite eloquently, once upon a time we were better than this. And we faced very real discrimination and actual, sometimes murderous, hate. But we never hated back.
Thanks Leonard! You are not alone my friend ❤️
thank you
Wish you luck.
But when do we get to human beings month where we just celebrate being alive and don’t give a shit or need to be pegged in a group? Try just living life and stop worrying about being special or seeking validation from others. That’s called freedom. IMHO that’s better.
It was 55 years ago next week that we first began to discuss a commemoration of the events during the Stonewall uprising. Had we the benefit the foresight that young people often haven't the experience to possess then, I'm sure that we would have written our proposal for a march to and Gay-In at Central Park the following year much differently.
You might appreciate GBNews presenter Andrew Doyle's thoughtfully reasoned, coherent take on the whole matter of Pride. It really is broken beyond repair.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/25/its-time-for-gay-people-to-turn-our-backs-on-pride/
Fred! Thank you so much for creating an event that was very meaningful to me at a time in my life when I very much needed to feel I was not alone. I had many years of wonderful Pride experiences in NYC in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. You are a hero! Hopefully what’s happening now is temporary and as a society we come out of this era wiser than we were before because people like you and Andrew Doyle had the guts to speak their mind when the powerful tried to silence dissent. Thank you from the bottom of my heart Fred! ❤️❤️❤️
Yes we will come out of it, surrounded by variously ruined lives. Bodies destroyed by hormones, with fragile bones, reduced intelligence, and cancers; eunuchs; and after "be kind" has faded out, unwelcome freaks still gnashing teeth around neologisms ("transphobia!!") that are as worn out as bald tires.
But those who went along and encouraged this monsrtous cult won't be shamed or chagrined.
The 2SLGBTQIA+ Guardians strongly disagree with such sentiments. Consider yourself warned! 😉
This echoes what FAIR executive director Monica Harris recently dubbed “force-teaming.” I shared my own thoughts on this jamming together of disparate identity groups for political purposes here:
https://therootsofliberty.substack.com/p/political-playthings
This is a sensitive issue that has been well-navigated. Sometimes those who care about these issues most need to have honest conversations with those with adolescent dispositions. This article does this bluntly, but also kindly.
This is all obviously correct, but I would argue that this weird abuse of the word "community" happens in tons of areas and is silly for all the same reasons. I'd love to see someone trace this back and find where the word "community" first started being used for an abstract collection of identities rather than an actual in person ecological interpersonal cultural sphere. It probably dovetailed with the elevation of ascribed or achieved states of being, or immutable traits of a person, being elevated from material facts about a person to metaphysical ones. When "a thing that describes me" became a "who I am".
It's a progressive coinage used (I now think) to help promote an agenda. I rrecently graduated from a very progressive theology school In an Old Testament class, the professor asked us what "community" we belonged to, so he could recommend readings which addressed that community. I was puzzled at first. He explained he meant the LGBT+ community, the animal rights community, the feminist community, the environmentalist community, the black community, the differently-abled community, and most of the students did strongly identify with one of these - except me. And yes there was apparently schools of Biblical interpretation addressing all these communities, with articles and books. But that was not how i wanted to read and interpret the Bible. My approach was more in the line of spiritual insights and universal truths. That stumped him.
Glad to hear you challenged that professor’s assumptions. It would be interesting to know if he come up with the idea to introduce “community” perspectives on his own or if he was told to do that by the school’s DEI administration as part of a “best practices” policy.
No, i think he did that on his own, trying to accommodate great majority of the students there, because most of them were very focussed on their community issues. It's a very progressive school. I think in fact, that was a big part of the reason a great number of them were there. To bring "Biblical perspectives" (sometimes a bit strained) to their community issues. And a lot of the writing they did was on these issues. Which i don't have an objection to, a lot of students had experienced trauma around these issues in their fundamentalist or evangelical religious upbringing and this was a kind of healing for them. Still, I wanted more from my study of the Bible. To his credit (after first questioning the idea of "universal truths"), the instructor did try to find something for me. The "theological" school of interpretation was too church -specific doctrinaire, the "Biblical" school of interpretation was too fundamentalist, but we finally found something called the "psychological" school of interpretation - which at least focussed on a more universal approach and explored psychological, if not spiritual truths.
Yes it would be interesting to know where this line of thinking came from. When I started writing the essay I thought I’d have to do some research and I pulled out books from graduate school - one by John D’Emilio is titled “Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970” and that book was published in 1983 so the thinking goes back quite some time. I imaging the source is somewhere between academia and politics mid 20th Century but who can say for sure?
I tend to think that, like many things DEI or whatever, it has some stealthy roots in the National Socialist playbook. Even before them, though, there was much musing in the pan-German sphere about Volkish communities which were loosely identified around race. Of course the German body (naturist) movement also used community, as did many of the youth movements.
This is my favorite part ...
"Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are a minority, and that comes with challenges. Facing obstacles and overcoming them gives me a reason to get up in the morning—it gives purpose and meaning to my life. It’s also true that most people have challenges to navigate, so those who are LGBT are not unique in this regard. A life well-lived is not one spent wallowing in identity grievance and pursuing revenge for injustices you did not directly experience."
Thank you Sharon. Endings are hard to write so I’m glad to know it resonated with you.
The T (and all the Q+ alphabet after the LGB, of course, but especially the T) can't allow itself to be separated. It's drafting off the goodwill we LGBs now have after many decades of (sane) advocacy to "just" be normal. (And of course, as others have mentioned over and over, all those advocacy orgs had to do *something* after we got "just normal," and the T was all that was left. Oh, the irony.)
So true. Everybody sees history in, um, binary terms. Nation v nation. Race v race. Black v white. Christian v Muslim. Gay v straight.
History is nothing but internecine rivalries among people we label as groups now.
See the "African American community" - as if. The biggest threat to black life is black people. The biggest threat to gay rights or womens rights are other gay people or women.
And as others have posted, those of us who committed decades to gay rights, womens rights, or antiracism are kind of repulsed by the outcomes: excessive expectations toward sexuality/rights, over excessive endless prowoman antimale attitudes and over the fact black activists have taken decades of support from white people to now aim for complete payback.
We don't have to care about any issues.
Thanks you, I appreciate the reminder , I confess I have felt quite alone , especially in the Peoples Republic of Chicago . I've subscribed to your feed, lookin forward to reading your posts. Sincerely , Leonard Greco
I hear you - there have been times when I’ve also felt very isolated. FAIR in the Arts sometimes has meet-ups on Zoom and you can also see if Braver Angels has any events into Chicago or Zoom meet ups if you’re looking to connect with new people. Thank you for subscribing - independent artists who are not willing to “go along to get along” need support right now so I really appreciate it!
This message needs to be heard loud and clear everywhere. I felt like I was in church with all the Amens I was muttering! I don't like to be put in boxes, either.
Can we just ditch the acronyms? Prior to around 2006 we were simply gay, lesbian and sometimes bi. HRC went with the LGBT Acronym when it decided that it would not support the passage of ENDA without adding transsexuals(which was the most common term at the time). It was as political decision that not only failed, but it represented a forced teaming of groups with different objectives, lifestyles and yes even different histories. Ditch the acronyms...... all of them! Watching pandering politicians like Justin Trudeau trip all over themselves trying to spit out the latest incarnation is good for a laugh, but every addition adds more absurdity to ever expanding acronym from hell.
Well done!!