Joyce activated, issue 111

On Saturday 31st I was delighted to be able to join the first conference organised by a group of young Irish LGBs who call themselves Not All Gays. As in, not all gays support gender-identity ideology and its harms; not all gays are keen on being force-teamed with every variety of kinksters; not all gays appreciate their sexuality being co-opted to groom school-children into self-harm and premature sexualisation. I hadn’t expected to be in Ireland this weekend, so when the organisers first asked me to join I had to decline – and then a family commitment in Dublin arose and I realised I was going to be in town after all. They generously tweaked the timetable and gave me a slot.

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The event was compéred by Mr Menno, who was excellent as always, and nicely teed me up by saying how great it was to be in a room with so many bigots. I was wearing one of my favourite t-shirts, which I’m not normally allowed out of the house in – I travelled with it inside-out and turned it right way out again after I arrived. If you want one, it’s from Angela Wild, at Wild Womyn Workshop – I have several of her designs.

Here are my tidied-up speaking notes.

What I want to do is riff a little on what it might mean going forward to be a “not all gay”. I’ll start by quoting from an essay published by the LA Review of Books in 2019 about Pete Buttigieg, who at the time was seeking the Democratic nomination for presidential candidate. It was about a Time magazine cover picture depicting Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten. The essay was entitled “Heterosexuality Without Women”, followed by the strapline, “This photo is about a lot of things, but one of its defining features is its heterosexuality.”

Ordinary people thought this was completely insane. LA Review of Books isn’t hugely well-known – not like New York Review of Books – so colleagues at The Economist hadn’t seen it, and it hadn’t been mentioned in any of the newsletters or papers that journalists covering America typically read. But I showed it to a few of them, and they thought it was as barking as I did. So much so they couldn’t even get their heads around it. 

They just thought – what could possibly make you more gay than being a man married to a man? Doing drag? Wearing leather chaps? Pretending to be a dog? Isn’t fancying, loving and marrying someone the same sex as you as gay as it gets? 

I thought it was as mad as they did, of course, but I understood it better. The point of the article was that the couple were looking low-key and normie, wearing shirts and their hair cut short back and sides. They were even photographed standing in front of a white fence – not quite a picket fence, but still. 

What this article was doing, I think, was unpicking homosexuality from “queerness”, for which the guiding principle is to be non-normie. “Queering” means destabilising definitions, denying the existence or meaningfulness of objective categories and preferring what is unusual, whether that is in the sense of minority or non-normative. Regarding any other racial identity as better than white, any knowledge system better than scientific rationalism, any society better than the one built during the Enlightenment. 

But most especially approving of things that have conventionally been regarded as immoral, perverted, distasteful or sinful. And that of course does include fancying, loving and marrying people of the same sex as you. 

I think what the author of that article saw in that picture is that Buttigieg and his husband didn’t see themselves as queering anything. They aren’t reclaiming immorality or sin; they are normies who happen to fancy people the same sex as them, but who have otherwise extremely mainstream beliefs, morals and attitudes. They’re just people who think: “What’s wrong with being gay? Nothing.” And then get on with their lives. They don’t give any impression of thinking they are any better or more interesting than straight people, or that their sexuality is about trying to overthrow anything. 

I looked up Buttigieg’s CV, and it’s abnormal only in the sense that he’s abnormally successful. He did PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) at Oxford – the course that a large share of the UK’s most successful politicians and journalists did. He deployed to Afghanistan and worked for McKinsey before going into politics. His husband is a teacher. They’re not “queer”, they’re “Institution Men” who just happen to be gay.

When people want to defend same-sex relationships the first thing they tend to say is that it’s their own business because it’s no skin off anyone else’s nose. The second is that it makes them happy without harming anyone. And that’s fine, as far as it goes. Negative liberties are the most fundamental ones, and if you don’t have negative liberties you sure as hell aren’t going to have positive ones. 

Now have a go at defending being gay with nothing more than those arguments, but also simultaneously condemning zoophilia or necrophilia or incest. It can’t be done.

To get out of this trap you have to have values – to say that some things are better than others, and that some things are actually bad. Then you can argue that stable, loving relationships between consenting adults increase the sum total of human flourishing. They’re an actively good thing. 

The Economist ran a cover story in 1996, “Let Them Wed”. The image of two grooms holding hands on a wedding cake generated more hostile correspondence than any cover had before – more even than in response to the paper’s call for the abolition of the British monarchy. It was written by Jonathan Rauch, a researcher and author who was on sabbatical at The Economist at the time. He's a gay man himself. In it, he said that he could no more imagine marrying a woman than marrying a toaster. At the time he thought that gay marriage would come, but surely not in his lifetime.

In a book he wrote later, he described a memory from childhood. “I am sitting at the piano daydreaming one afternoon, and it occurs to me that I will never get married… This was a discovery at first merely puzzling, but later, with adolescence and then into early adulthood, sickening. It pointed ahead to a life in which furtive sex and fleeting assignations might be attainable, but the enduring security and companionship of marriage would be forever out of reach.” He said the pain of this realisation meant he spent many years denying, even to himself, that he was gay. 

I’m old enough that people just a little bit older than me in this country never came out to anyone, perhaps not even to themselves. Some stayed at home with ageing parents who never understood why their lovely son or daughter had never shown any interest in marrying. Or, even though that wasn’t what they desired, they married people of the opposite sex – who surely, surely deserved better than that. 

So much shame and loneliness that could have been avoided. So many people’s lives that could have been richer and happier. 

In 2014 The Economist invited Rauch back to write another cover story. At that point, it was clear that America’s Supreme Court was going to legalise same-sex marriage at the federal level. And Rauch himself was already married, less than two decades after he thought that he would surely not see gay marriage in his lifetime. The two covers are pictured above.

In his article he pointed to three reasons why the Supreme Court judgment had become inevitable: one, a new generation seeing homosexuality as a normal human variation; two, that a majority of Americans now believed that being gay is “generally innate and not inherently harmful”; and three, underpinning both of those, greater visibility. As more gay people came out post the AIDS crisis, most Americans had discovered that people they knew, liked and loved were, as a matter of fact, gay. 

He wrote: “The emergence of a conservative narrative supporting gay marriage and families is a game-changer. It domesticates, quite literally, what was once seen as a threat…. Precisely the fear of being domesticated led many gay activists, at the time of The Economist’s cover, to support the idea of marriage equality warily, if at all.” He said that the people most sceptical of his support for gay marriage back in 1996 would say that, as a matter of equality same-sex couples should have that right, but that they shouldn’t actually do it. He summed up their position as: “Our movement is supposed to be about liberation from stifling sexual and social norms. And why would gay people want to emulate straights for whom marriage is so often a failure or disappointment?”

Well, whether or not you agree that gay people are “born this way”, we need to make a positive case for gay relationships, not just the negative “if it makes me happy what’s the harm, and anyway it’s none of your business.” It has to be that they’re good in themselves – that forming stable, supportive relationships is part of playing a full part as citizens; that those relationships are, in that important sense, normal. 

That’s the counter to queerness, which leans into being abnormal, defines you by what you oppose not what you are, and results in an endless process of pushing boundaries further and further in search of “liberation” – but from what? What the LGBTQ mob want is a bizarre situation where they are simultaneously marginalised and liberated from absolutely everything, in particular judgment – at the same time as culturally dominant and able to dictate to the mainstream. This is a recipe for permanent revolution. 

So, “Not All Gays” – not all gays support the harms done in the name of LGBTQ. And that’s absolutely the right point to be making right now. But I urge you to think ahead, and start thinking now about making the positive case – being, and being known as, upstanding members of society who contribute to the common good – not least in order to safeguard your reputation as the LGBTQ goes down the toilet, as it inevitably will.

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Postscript: When I wrapped up, before opening up for questions Menno said that he remembered the 1996 Economist cover well. He was not out at the time – not even to himself, though as he laughingly said, everyone else knew. When he saw the cover in a newsagent he was struck by the simplicity of the message, and immediately bought a copy. The image and the article had a big impact on him, he said – and nearly 30 years later, he still has that copy.