Independent essays and video commentary
The collection
Deconstructing Pride examines the ideas, institutions and habits that have shaped modern gay identity. Through personal experience and cultural criticism, the collection asks what was gained through liberation—and what was lost when homosexuality became a prescribed way of living, speaking and understanding oneself.
From the collection
The essay traces the shift from tolerating homosexuality to celebrating gay identity as a moral ideal. It examines what this shift has meant for privacy, individuality, and gay culture. Heated Rivalry serves as a striking exhibit of this glorification.
Gay culture promised freedom from shame, restraint, and fear, yet increasingly turned sexuality into something to display, rank, manage. The old world of nightlife gave way to apps, pornography, and chemically manufactured intensity.
The Sentimental Exhibitionist looks at the new culture of gay self-display on social media: the endless portraits, confessions, healing language, coaching slogans, and carefully staged vulnerability. What presents itself as freedom often becomes a performance of identity.
The professional gay is a recognisable contemporary type: a public figure who has turned his homosexuality into a career, a mission, and a claim to moral authority.
New essay
From my early teenage years, I had difficulty relating to other people. I did not know how to enter ordinary social life. Meeting someone, making conversation, becoming friendly and gradually establishing familiarity did not come naturally to me. Sexuality did. Somehow, I knew how to make it work. It gave me a confidence I lacked elsewhere. Through it, I could approach people in a way that otherwise seemed impossible.
In searching for sex, I became part of a network of people. We were not friends in the conventional sense, although I felt a strong connection to them. We had remarkably similar temperaments. We were loners.
Some of our encounters involved more than two people. Substances were not essential, though they often somehow appeared, albeit not in very large quantities. These things all felt natural to us, even at a young age. We did not feel that we were doing anything particularly unusual. We had a desperate need to escape ordinary life.
We were not criminals or prostitutes. We were reasonably educated, curious and ambitious, though not in the conventional sense. In a way, we looked down on the culture of social mobility and the careful and strategic accumulation of status. We did not want to spend the present preparing to become respectable later. We wanted a life that felt immediate and particular. We lived as though things were coming to an end.
Upcoming essay
Homosexuality was a sexual fact. Gay turned that fact into a collective identity. Queer retained the identity while making the fact optional. The expansion is therefore not the corruption of something once coherent. It is the completion of a separation already begun.
Gay identity was presumptuous, but it retained a boundary. Beneath its claims about community, liberation and special insight stood the identifiable fact of same-sex desire. That fact did not justify the cultural superstructure, but it prevented the category from becoming completely self-referential.
Queer expansion is both inheritance and capture. It takes possession of institutions and moral prestige created around homosexuality, but it also attempts to preserve outsiderhood, ambiguity, femininity, eccentricity and counterculture after the respectable gay world has become narrow and bigoted.
An outsider does not need an identity certifying that he is outside. Groups can demand protection against definite coercion; they cannot collectively possess originality, courage or moral insight. Those claims become real only in persons.
Pride and Other Problems
Over the years, I have watched with ever-growing astonishment how homosexuality is represented in culture and the arts. These pages are written for readers who notice, without quite being able to say why, that something is off.
Read the foreword
The words “homosexual” and “gay” are now used as if they meant the same thing, but they name different realities. Sex is not identity, and the loss of that distinction has allowed gay culture to become trapped in victimhood culture, which is flattening.
Special series
Personal experiences with next-level harassment, social control, and the consequences of sustained targeting.
Stay with the argument
No noise. One link. Unsubscribe anytime.
