Who’s next?
For some time now, the media have been reporting that support for what they call “LGBTQ+ issues” is on the decline. In the latest issue of Newsweek, Mandy Taheri observes that this has been happening even as the number of Americans “who identify as LGBTQ+” has boomed, with California, for example, boasting more than 3.1 million “LGBTQ+” people.That’s a huge number. And a ridiculous one. It doesn’t have anything to do with the percentage of actual gays in California, which, as everywhere, is a constant. No, what it reflects is the rise in the number of people – mostly young people – who have embraced identity categories that didn’t even exist a couple of generations ago.
Any American of a certain age knows that being gay used to be anathema: gay kids were beaten up by their schoolmates and rejected by their parents; gay adults were evicted from their homes and fired from their jobs. But nowadays being “LGBTQ+” is – in many milieux, anyway – cool. Some kids call themselves “queer” – a way of bragging they differ from the norm without actually having to do anything impressive to set themselves apart. And some kids go with “trans,” indicating that they’re boys who were “identified at birth” as girls, or vice versa, or, alternatively, that they belong to a growing list of equally ludicrous categories that were concocted the day before yesterday – pansexual, non-binary, and so on.
If ordinary gay men and lesbians – people who aren’t obsessed with their sexual orientations and who want nothing more than to be seen as decent, normal Americans – have lost public support, it’s precisely because they’ve been yoked for several years now, under the preposterous label “LGBTQ+,” to these self-identified “queer” and trans” individuals.
Now, none of this silliness was on anybody’s radar in 1996, when I published a book entitled A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society. My message in that book was simple. Most gays didn’t fit any of the stereotypes: they weren’t politically radical and they weren’t particularly effeminate. Contrary to the PR put out by the gay-activist groups, they didn’t march in lockstep ideologically or in any other sense: they were individuals, like everybody else, with their own tastes, interests, beliefs, and ambitions
Not earth-shaking news in 2026, but at the time it made a difference. For several months, A Place at the Table was the #1 bestseller in gay bookstores. Countless gay men, seeing their own reality reflected for the first time in the pages of my book, credited me with helping them come out of the closet. So considerable was the influence that I was presumed to have over conservative and moderate gays that during the 2000 election cycle a gay Bush family intimate took me to lunch at some fancy place and urged me to throw my public support behind George W. Bush – who, he assured me, would, despite his campaign’s virulently antigay rhetoric, prove to be a champion of gay rights after taking office. I politely declined.
A year or so after A Place at the Table came out, I received an award at the convention of the Log Cabin Republicans, the national organization for gay members of the GOP. In those days, everybody in LCR knew my name, and I knew plenty of their names too, because everywhere I went on my book tours they showed up and introduced themselves.
Cut to many years later – specifically, 2023 – when a friend of mine pointed out that LCR, like every other national gay organization, had long since ceased referring on its website and in press releases to “gay men and lesbians” but had instead adopted the awful term LGBT. He told me that there was some disagreement among LCR’s board members as to this choice, and suggested that it might make a difference if I wrote them a letter.
So I did. I’ve published my letter in full elsewhere, but this time I’ll try to sum it up.
First, noting that the major gay-rights organizations were now focused mainly on “promoting transgender ideology,” and had accordingly started using the term “LGBT,” I pointed out that nobody had ever asked me or any other gay person, so far as I know, what we thought of this coinage.
Even worse than the coinage itself was that “LGBT” was often being used retrospectively, and trans-identified people were being inserted illegitimately into historical situations. For instance, some histories of the 1969 Stonewall riot described it as an action by “LGBT” persons and asserted that its leaders were all trans. Nonsense. In 1969 nobody had ever heard the term LGBT. And the riot’s leaders were definitely not trans.
Even in 1996, when A Place at the Table came out, transpeople were absent from gay political discourse. Back then, as I wrote in my letter to LCR, I traveled all over the U.S. promoting the book, “giving talks, interviews, and readings, having extensive conversations with hundreds of gay men and lesbians, and answering countless questions. Nobody ever identified as trans. Nobody ever mentioned transgenderism.”
Two decades after my book came out, the gay-rights movement’s efforts ultimately paid off. We won marriage. We won gays in the military. And what happened? Almost immediately, transgender activists piggybacked onto our success. Everywhere, the term “LGBT” replaced “gay men and lesbians” – even though transgender ideology had never been publicly explained or discussed or debated. In my letter to LCR, I went on:
The trans cause was and is not about rights. Trans people have all the rights everybody else has. One of the ugliest lies is that the Nazis sent “LGBT people” to death camps along with Jews and gypsies. No. Gays were sent to death camps. Transsexuals were left untouched.
No, the trans cause is of an entirely different category than the gay-rights cause. It is about pressing upon the general public a radical new view of human identity. Replacing biology with the notion of an “inner sense of gender,” it insists that a biological man is a woman not only from the moment he declares himself to be one, but is retroactively a woman going back to the moment of birth. Paradoxically, however, even as trans ideology insists on the immutability of this “inner sense of gender,” it insists on absolute fluidity, maintaining that a given individual can be a man on Monday, a woman on Tuesday, and “non-binary” on Wednesday, and can belong to some other, perhaps newly invented gender category on Thursday.
This foolishness, I wrote, had simply not been around back when some of us were campaigning for gay rights. Yes, there was something called gender dysphoria. It was vanishingly rare. A tiny number of men went around dressed as women and vice-versa. And it stopped at that. Famous M-to-Fs like the writer Jan Morris never claimed to really be women; nor did they spout gibberish about gender, or seek to use their trans identity to gain attention. If the number of trans-identified people has boomed in recent years, it’s partly because it’s a fad. And it’s partly, I wrote, because some young people would “rather be a straight trans person than a gay ‘cis’ person.”
That’s right – “gender-affirming treatments” are, for many, nothing but a newfangled brand of conversion therapy, an attempt to “turn physically healthy people who are attracted to members of their own sex into superficial simulacra of the opposite sex whose attraction has not changed but can now call themselves heterosexual.” This, I maintained in my letter, was damaging not only for young people who’ve been talked into undergoing “gender-affirming treatment” but also for gay people in general: --->READ MORE HERE
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