Gay liberation in danger?
Radical hubris produces reactionary backlashes
We appear to be living in a moment of unprecedented tolerance. Pride marches have become the modern equivalent of church parades. Progressives attend to demonstrate their goodness and celebrate that, for the first time in history, we have a society that cherishes previously forbidden identities.
And not just gay and lesbian identities. A contact on the board of a public body told me that she was baffled that her managers were devoting time and taxpayers’ money to commemorating asexuals.
What is an asexual when it is at home, she asked.
The management told her they were committed to LGBTQIA+ equality.
By which they meant (deep breath) Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual or Aromantic equality, and as the + symbol indicates, all other diverse sexual orientations and gender identities not explicitly listed.
And for the record, asexuals “experience little to no sexual attraction”.
And yeah, and sure, and come on, everyone has made the joke “don’t you mean married people?”
But when the chortling has stopped, can we not say that this is a glorious time to be alive?
Within living memory equality campaigners fought queer bashers who wanted to kill gay men and police officers who wanted to arrest them. Now homophobia is history, and they can concern themselves with soothing the grumpy feelings of men and women with dreary love lives.
Or so it seems.
For into this woozy, self-congratulatory world steps Ronan McCrea, Professor of Constitutional and European Law at University College, London. Along with Andrew Sullivan in the US, and Robert Wintemute at King’s College, McCrae is part of a movement among gay writers and thinkers that is deeply suspicious of the LGBTQIA+ movement.
None of his contemporaries, however, have matched the force of McCrea’s The End of the Gay Rights Revolution. It hasn’t even been published yet, and already it is getting rave notices from Yuval Harari, Stephen Fry and Yascha Mounk.
I can see why. It is a grenade of a book that blows apart the pieties of our day.
He warns about the dangers of gay men and lesbians overestimating their strength.
They can look at all the people who call themselves queer or trans or non-binary and think there is a mass movement in favour of sexual liberation so vast that no reactionary politician would dare take it on.
Don’t believe that for a moment, says McCrea. Don’t confuse fashionable identities with biological facts. Actual gay men and real lesbians remain a tiny proportion of the population.
Meanwhile, it may seem as if gay liberation is an inevitable consequence of the triumph of “the right side of history.”
Don’t believe that either, says McCrea. History doesn’t have a side, and if it did it would side with tragedy. In Africa and Russia, among traditional believers in all the Abrahamic religions, in the migrant communities moving into Europe, and on the new right in Trump’s US there are fanatics who would reverse every hard-won gain.
Gays and lesbians “depend on the kindness of strangers,” McCrea says. They need to understand “how fragile our freedom is.” Particularly when liberalism is everywhere in crisis and the radical right is everywhere on the march.
To fight it gay men and lesbians ought to be building the widest possible alliances.
But the revolutionary turn queer politics took in the 2010s is destroying friendships as it abandons gay rights for novel causes.
I wrote recently about how the McCarthyism of the social justice movement has played into the hands of the radical right. McCrea agrees and says if the enemies of alleged progressives are feminists, they are in more trouble than they can possibly imagine.
Previous movements for equality wanted to extend rights. The anti-slavery movement wanted slaves to be free, not to abolish freedom. The suffragettes wanted votes for women. They no more wanted to abolish voting than campaigners for gay marriage wanted to abolish marriage. In its extreme form the trans campaigners of the 2020s wants to abolish the categories of male and female – and are empowering conservatism as they do so.
As McCrae says,
“If you insist that only a homophobe and social conservative would resist the presence of biological males in women’s sport, then you risk a significant section of the public backtracking on their acceptance of gay rights more generally, and responding, ‘Ok fine, I am a homophobe’.”
As you can see there is a great deal to unpack here. As always it’s best to begin at the beginning with McCrae’s warnings of liberal hubris.
Entirely straight people now give themselves a transgressive glamour by calling themselves queer.
But if you insist on arguing that same-sex attraction means what it says then gay men, lesbians and bi men and women with a significant same-sex attraction are tiny minorities.
McCrea uses a scene from Sex and the City to make his point.
In one episode Charlotte falls in with a crowd of lesbians.
