Another (!) brilliant article in the New York Times - How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way

[ProfesoraLou]

How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way

If the New York Times was captured (and I really thought it was), it has broken free.

This is rational, balanced and personal. Really important writing.

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/gay-lesbian-trans-rights.html

Archive link:

archive.is/CKaLx

"“Queer” was a way of summing up the new regime, a clear sign that this really was a different movement than the gay, lesbian and transgender civil rights movement of the past."

Even the Simpsons were mocking social conservatives like this nearly 30 years ago 😂

When I got repeated kicked in the head and chest for being a "gay fucking fa**ot", weirdly enough I wasn't fussed about the colourful language, but about the fact my mouth was caving in, that I couldn't breath and if I was going to die. We reclaimed queer and other slurs as a resistance..as a 'fuck you' to those who hate us and those who wish to legislate us out of existence.

Also, this ridiculous man doesn't even know that we reclaimed queer long before we got marriage and before we even equalised the age of consent.

Good article, thanks for sharing.

I am sorry to hear you were beaten up for being gay. There are some really unpleasant people around

While this article has lots of trenchant criticism of gender ideology, I expected it to be about how the 'Gay Rights Movement' had been infiltrated and hijacked - it did not 'radicalise' itself and lose its way, the movement was appropriated, used and abused by the trans juggernaut.

Sullivan doesn't problematise at all how the lesbian and gay movement became the LGBT movement. He complains that ' L.G.B.T. became L.G.B.T.Q., then L.G.B.T.Q.+,...' but he is silent on the bolting on of the T in the first place, which happened without the permission of lesbians and gays - we never had an EGM where we said 'Yes of course let this group that is not about sexual orientation at all tag along with us! They seem like nice people! What could possibly go wrong?'

'The greater acceptance of trans people is a huge step forward for all of us.' is not a statement that women, and in particular lesbians, would agree with.

So what he seems to disapprove of is the proliferation of identities under the 'queer' banner, rather than the appropriation of identities under the trans banner.

I’m inclined to agree. Missing that important first step.

Excellent article. Thank you.

I saw this stuffed up with a yay Pride month message the other day- there is not even the faintest pretense any more of this having anything to do with gay people as well as trans.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/15340454976629318/

the advances in trans rights that he applauds are workplace protections. I think most people would agree that that was positive progress.
he is very clear that transwomen shouldn't seek to impose themselves in women's single sex spaces or women's and girls' sports.
I strongly disagree with him that gender affirming care should be provided to adults via MedicAid, however I think his position is pretty balanced and middle ground.

I get where you are coming from, but I do feel like he pulled a few punches - as @MarieDeGournay says, was it really the addition of the Q+, or rather the addition of the T (+) that set former LGB rights advocates on this weird path? He clearly wants to talk about the harms to LGB people from trans ideology, but he also keeps talking about LGBT people. It feels like the other recent NYT piece - a bit fence-sitting-y. In terms of getting the usual readers of the NYT thinking, though, perhaps this is the way to go, though.

Sullivan is staking out a position in which he has zero problems with trans people personally, has trans friends who he wants the best for, and because of his personal irl observations of trans acquaintances and friends and his philosophy of live-and-let-live (people know what's best for themselves), he believes that there is an (at least in some instances) essential trans-ness for whom transition is the best possible treatment. I used to have roughly the same position, but I've since moved to the Helen Joyce camp - that trans-ness can't be separated from GI; transition should be allowed as a basic right of personal autonomy and expression (as far as I know she is officially neutral on whether it should ever be funded by the NHS) but as an ideology and identity it is wholly pernicious and invalid, and in her informed (but not professional) opinion transition is never an appropriate medical treatment, even though the underlying dysphoria and distress is real and should be treated as a valid condition. The difference between the two positions really comes down to the question of whether trans-ness can be thought of as a valid identity whose nature sits somewhere between that of homosexuality and psychological pathology (Sullivan) or whether it's invalid. I think Joyce's argument is stronger, but a coherent counter augment can be made, I just find it less logically compelling (though more emotionally compelling).

I agree that Sullivan's command of the issue does not seem to be fully fluent. Perhaps he could be faulted for that. No one can be expected to match Joyce's brilliance - her intelligence and painstaking research are unsurpassed, but it's also no longer necessary to go through primary sources and battle against misinformation (as it stood in the 2010s) to be informed and he was after all at one time the editor-in-chief for a major current affairs magazine; so he's familiar with what's necessary to become fully briefed on a topic.

In any case, Sullivan's position is defensible and it's useful in the debate because it's maximally deferential to trans people and allows him to make a strong argument that trans people are working against their own best interests, as formulated by themselves.

As i mentioned on another thread, Sullivan's main theses is that the authoritarian, censorious nature of the trans debate is the original sin, and to that extent, [LGB]TQI+ activist behavior is an exemplar of the woke left and its threat to democracy, especially since the right is convulsing with it's own authoritarian impulses. Secondly, he makes the veiled threat to trans activists that it will soon be time for gays and lesbians (homosexuals) to demarcate themself from gender ideology and push back against their former allies with new institutions and public condemnation of excesses. Even though many gays and lesbians (i.e. actual homosexuals) feel this way, this is the first time that that threat has been made in the US from a prominent platform, with the NYT as prominent as it gets.

I'm not sure I entirely agree that this was entirely some kind of external issue.

Look at what Pride has become for example. It's more of a sex festival than anything else, for people who share certain politics. Men, who know they are men, in jock straps on floats. Other fetish stuff.

And some of the tactics the TRAs have used they have borrowed directly. Vilifying anyone who doesn't sign up to what the progressive agenda says, for example - there is total amnesia for most around the fact that quite a few people in the gay community weren't that keen on same sex marriage, now anyone who take a differernt view is immediately called a bigot.

Or the use of thought terminating cliches, often without really thinking through their larger questions. "Love Is Love being a prime example - really? No one thinks that is true. Or the insistence that it is a scientific fact that sexuality is inborn, and unhangable. That's not actually a scientific fact, it's a theory with middling evidence. Before it was popularised there were quite a few gay men who believed it to be a lifefyle issue. But these ideas are pushed now as if they are unquestionable and people who do question are shut down.

Similarly I have heard some real whoppers about Black history it was considered wrong to disagree with. From people who ought to know better

TRAs borrowed a lot from less honest elements of the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement. And people were primed to simply accept that stuff, they had been taught that to question these kinds of things is the worst kind of transgression..

Very few, if any, mentions of women's rights and protections in that piece.

The whole 'Queer' thing has become about adopting a very specific, minutely curated 'identity'; one tied up in the politics of radical social justice activism.

I have found the NYT articles seem to have these massive holes in them. It is like they are almost there but not quite. Such as the podcast ‘the Protocol’. It Valorised the Dutch Protocol, completely missing the issues with the research but the writers did understand the issues currently.

I can only assume that the NYT has decided as a publication to hang their hat on the ‘true trans’ concept that we have seen grow in momentum over the past year. It will grow ever louder until finally people strip away this emotional blind spot.

I think they have chosen the strategy where they recognise that people are responding to the over reach of transgender lobbying and the impact it had on the Democratic Party’s results, but it wants to portray itself still as some sort of supporter of this supposedly marginalised group. Therefore it will be weak on its reporting on this topic.

Indeed.

Very much agree with @GallantKumquat and it's really important to have Sullivan give this argument, because it's the NYT and because everyone knows he's the man who did more than anyone else to achieve gay marriage.

But it's very much a gay man's perspective. The arguments around women's spaces, sports etc are things that Sully can see in a second-hand way, but they'll never affect him, and I suspect won't affect many people he's close to. That's the dimension he's missing.

But he's got an extra dimension that women often don't have, which is a deep knowledge of how weirdos and extremists held the gay movement back. All the progress LGB people made was contingent on those people being marginalised, but as soon as all the key LGB demands had been won, back they came to undermine all that social acceptance. It's the difference between having an Andrew Sullivan as your public face and having a Chase Strangio as your public face.

There's a right wing YouTuber who coined the phrase "back to Fresh Prince" as a well-meaning but possibly naive impulse in US racial politics - let's get back to a Bill Clinton type culture where racial problems weren't solved exactly but they were diminishing and there was optimism that they were on the way to being solved. I think I see a similar impulse with Sully - let's get back to when we were equal and accepted, before the Q+ started to ruin it all. I think he believes the Q+ has to be thrown overboard, and he's genuinely conflicted about the T (because of people he knows in the T category who have a genuine affinity with the LGB)

I thought his main point - that the trans agenda has moved away from rights for trans people to changing society - was spot on but a bit hidden in a lot of extraneous info.

I did like the part where he detailed how well funded trans organisations are. One to remember when they accused gender criticals of being funded by the far right.

Interesting, I agree w a lot of that. Can I ask what whoppers you've heard about black history?

Also, Sully likes to posit himself as the saviour of the gay rights movement but in some ways he's more of a liability. During the marriage campaign he promoted gay male open marriages as a good thing, somewhat discrediting his claim to respect marriage, and advertised for sex w other HIV positive men. The second was unfairly leaked, but I does seem to show a reckless & unhelpful attitude, esp for someone who claims to be a conservative Catholic....

I say that as a woman who aims to marry another woman. Sullivan promoted a dangerous type of gay male sexual liberation whereas a monogamous controlled approach would have been far better to encourage. He means well but even before the T issue he didn't always behave helpfully & the more out-there things he supported are partly at the root of the issues today w T & inappropriate Pride & DQSH.

Good follow up article to this one by Jesse Singal:

Logic Trips Up the Trans Movement

archive.is/2025.06.26-162858/thedispatch.com/article/transgender-court-skrmetti-argument/

The return of 'capacious' 🤣

"concepts of gender were becoming dizzyingly capacious, even confused. Challenging the idea of a rigid male-female binary, academic theorists detached gender from sex entirely, then reimagined it as an infinite spectrum."

For reference - The Critic (Victoria Smith):
https://archive.ph/9AJGI

Yes, I would agree with that. I actually really like Sullivan as a writer, though I disagree with him about a lot. Despite his blind spots, and we do all have them, he is generally pretty willing to engage with others who disagree with him robustly and I have a lot of time for that.

Your observations about his views on gay sexuality made me think of when he had Rod Dreher on his podcast, and Rod basically told him that in his view, Sullivan's views on sexual morality were not formed properly by his Christian belief because he'd allowed his lust to influence his thinking. I think he's smart enough to see that might possibly be a valid observation and it must have been hard to hear, and I have to respect someone willing to put that discussion out for the public to make their own judgements, I don't know if I could do it.

To me, the most significant argument around same sex marriage is that in a most basic way, it is a social institution meant to mediate against the natural excesses of male sexuality primarily for the good of children, and their mothers - not just for their individual well being but because it is good for society. And I think you are right, Sullivan saying, well, we should allow gay men to marry, but accept that open marriages make sense for them - that does undermine the concept of what is not often called "equal" marriage. Because a straight man is going to say, well, it doesn't seem so equal when Andrew is allowed to go on shagging who he wants as a married man, but I am supposed to sacrifice my libido for the sake of my wife and children. Surely if marriage isn't fundamentally requiring that sacrifice I should be allowed an open marriage too.

Or to put it another way, it's clearly NOT equal if you are insisting the rules are differernt for heterosexual marriage.

The thing is though, it might have been better for the movement for him to be quieter about it, but, arguably he is saying the quiet part out loud - for a lot of gay men, the rules are differernt, and the stakes are differernt.

Interesting, I agree w a lot of that. Can I ask what whoppers you've heard about black history?

Well, there was the whole Cleopatra thing, which is ubiquitous. And also that black soldiers were denied antibiotics in WWI. Queen Charlotte being black.

Both of which I think are mainly a bit confused and ignorant rather than anything more serious. All from the same guy who was as a school board member especially elected from the local black community.

But he also told our class that Aristotle had stolen all his ideas from the library of Alexandria, which was in Africa, therefore full of books by Africans. Ergo - Aristotle stole all his ideas from Africans.

Even at 17 I knew that was quite far out, but I was more shocked that the teacher, who was an ancient history person, seemed to totally accept it.

I think there's a lot of truth in that - NAGMALT, obviously, but some of the stereotypes about gay sexuality are rooted in reality. It's not exactly straight male sexuality without the moderating influence of women, but there's an element of that.

At the risk of stereotyping, if we see marriage as a long-term monogamous commitment that's normatively (though obviously not always) centred around mothers and children, same-sex marriage makes much more sense for women than it does for men.

We all know the phenomenon of the late-blooming lesbian, who finds herself single at 40, goes back on the dating market and somewhat to her own surprise hooks up with another woman, where she'd been completely heterosexual up until now. Maybe she was latently bi all along, but the point is that there's no male equivalent. Show me a straight man who comes out as gay in middle age, and I will show you a man who's been shagging other men all along.

(There's an obvious parallel with another thing men come out as in middle age.)

Now of course society has been moving for decades towards companionate marriage rather than a lifelong commitment based on raising children, and there are legal protections that go with marriage that gay men shouldn't be excluded from, and there are plenty of gay men who do want to be monogamous - it's just that the stakes are quite different.

The heart of the Dreher debate is that Rod sees marriage as a discipline, and specifically a discipline on the man. Sullivan has enough residual conservatism to see the point, but I think he's also realistic about gay sexuality. He wants Adam and Bruce to have the respectability and protection of marriage, but he knows there's a significant chance that Adam and Bruce won't allow marriage to get in the way of their swinging sex life. Whereas for Cathy and Diana it very probably will be a monogamous commitment.

I think Sullivan has a strong tendency to cakeism - in the case of marriage, he wants access to the institution but not at the cost of a discipline that many gay men will struggle with.

And I think his cakeism is on display too on trans. Of course he has trans friends he cares about, probably quite a few because he goes back to when T was mostly a subset of LGB, he wants acceptance for them, he probably accepts that transitioning was the right thing for them, he would like to think that the gay and trans orgs just need to ditch Strangio type extremism.

But he's smart enough that, on another level, I think he realises the cat is out of the bag on trans.

Oh dear, yes.. Afrocentric theories did a lot of damage,

Sionnach, I see what you mean & agree somewhat. But I would argue that gay men w kids need the discipline of marriage just as much, for the kids' sake. Even if they don't have kids, couples of amy kind are happier & more productive than singles, easing the burden on society. I'm sure nonmonogamy is not the best way to ensure partnership stability. Just bc it may on the surface be OK for them to play away, does not mean there are not serious consequences. It's also worth noting that many casual partners may be on the down low (ie. Married 'straight' guys).

Stats show between 30-50% of gay men are non-monogamous. That leaves at least half who aren't, so it's not fair to generalise. I don't think it should be accepted, either. Gay men are no weaker than straight men. Accepting them as equals means criticising bad behavioural standards, which leave their community w hookup culture dominating, eating disorders, emotional cruelty, and underreported DV & rape. (A standard MRA talking point is that gay men having the least DV & divorce shows how chill men are when women aren't around. Low divorce is probs due to nonmonogamy..DV tho I think is underreported)

Obvs many gay men do NOT have these issues, but it's unhelpful if it's just seen as unchangeable & just how men are when women aren't around. They're not uncontrolled wild beasts, and there's no reason they can't rein it in.

To me the worst aspect of Sullivan's behaviour is his promotion of sex between HIV positive men as a way to lessen risk. This isn't just something he did himself, but something he promoted as a good idea. Many gay writers at the time were furious about this bc they knew v well how dangerous it was.

I don't mean to imply that gay male sexual culture is unchangeable, but I think it's going to change generationally. There's some anecdotal evidence of that with young gay men who never grew up with being part of an underground culture. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the stats gradually converge with straight men.

But I think there are peculiarities that will stick around. The chemsex party scene is definitely a minority pursuit among gay men, luckily because of the danger involved, but it's got no equivalent I've heard of among straight men. Straight men generally are amazed, and probably a bit envious, about gay men's very efficient hookup culture.

This is an interesting thread which tears a strip off Andrew Sullivan's article. Says that no, the community never agreed to leave children alone, which is a bold positioning but instructive https://x.com/ZJemptv/status/1938574588222292309

"Queer and trans kids are the LGBTQ community's children, much more than they belong to their assigned families"

💀