Being Queer in Public

Pete Buttigieg is getting the queers angry, again. This time, his sin is not being somehow expressive enough of his queerness despite publicly kissing his husband in public, posing with his adopted children in a proudly gay family, and telling supporters that Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage nationwide and is now under assault by the Republican Party, inspired his first presidential campaign.

There is clearly other stuff going on in this condemnation, much of which is perfectly valid. I have no interest in defending a stint at McKinsey (not McKinley), though people in their 20s often do dumb things and he worked for a pretty evil company. So have many people, because capitalism has a way of compromising us. Buttigieg has a tendency toward over-credulousness of right wing talking points I personally dislike, but he also speaks forcefully about the danger Republicans pose to the fabric of our society. People are complicated and none of that is a crime.

But, how else does a fairly normal, nerdy guy “express [his] queerness boldly and proudly” than by posing with his husband and talking about how being gay empowered him to run for office?

Queers can’t do anything right, it seems. CA state assemblyman Scott Weiner, despite a consistent, years-long record of advocacy for trans rights and an openness to changing his mind (he recently began admitting that Israel’s violent crackdown in Gaza and the West Bank amounts to genocide), was accosted at a transpride rally in San Francisco, shoved by a screaming heterosexual angry about housing policies, and forced to leave.

It certainly looks ugly. Matthew Vines, a gay man who seems to have no other beliefs or identifying features , is also upset at the queers. In column space generously donated by the queer-hating New York Times editorial page ( they really do just hate queer people , as an institution), he whines that even using the word is problematic:

[T]he broader trend of casting the queer net ever wider has muddled a once-clear public message about who gay people are. Being gay begins to look less like an inborn trait and more like a chosen ideology or aesthetic… Subsuming the fixed reality of gayness under the much more malleable banner of queerness undermines a core premise behind gay rights: that sexual orientation isn’t chosen.

Seriously, though, just for a second, fuck this newspaper.

Notice how even they use “gay” and “queer” interchangeably, even as they run piece after piece declaiming the word “queer,” because their goal is to dehumanize all of us, not just the trans ones. The game isn’t even well hidden. It’s just fucking gross.

Anyway, as an ideology, Vines is just doing a version of “LGB Without the T,” a hate movement organized around targeting trans people for exclusion in the belief that the right wing bigots will leave the rest of the homos alone if they just throw some trans kids to the wolves. It is historically ignorant, since trans people have always been central to the cause of gay liberation, from Marsha P. Johnson at the Stonewall Riots to Laverne Cox today (one cannot escape noticing how often Black trans women are consciously erased from our collective history).

But importantly, it is also self-refuting. By his own telling, gays and lesbians got marriage rights because “the message from leading marriage equality advocates was simple and clear: Being gay is neither chosen nor changeable, and gay people deserve the same legal protections and chance at happiness as everyone else.” Right after Obergefell, right wing hate groups openly shifted to problematizing trans people , which you can see through bathroom bills: in 2014, they led to state-wide boycotts , but in 2026, they elicit yawns from political elites. As a result, and aligned with what our trans siblings have said all along, now regular old marriage rights are in danger as well.

Which brings us back to Buttigieg. See, just existing as an openly queer person in the 2020s is radical in a way it was not in the 2010s. Despite being married, holding a mortgage, and raising children, Mayor Pete is still subjected to appalling acts of bigotry by the political right. His presumed respectability doesn’t matter. Vines chooses to blame queer people for this problem, not the right wing bigots endlessly pivoting to find new attack vector after new attack vector. The supposed distinction between respectable gays and unrespectable queers just doesn’t exist for the bigot. Vines is inventing a distinction to align with his oppressors, a story I wish was less common but which maintains a stubborn acceptability thanks to hateful substackers like Andrew Sullivan.

Vines props up his argument by invoking queer theory as a boogeyman to justify his dislike of queerness, quoting David Halperin’s most controversial argument (including polyamorous straight people as “queer” to highlight the word’s subversiveness). Much as his history is ignorant, Vines’ invocation of Halperin is ignorant as well: if he engaged with queer theory seriously he would know there is a strain of ideological queerness that sees most simulacra of heteronormativity — marriage, children, futurity — as inherently non-queer. Halperin isn’t one of the Queer Pessimists, as they’re known, but he is adjacent to the Antisocial Thesis, and shares an antagonism toward the idea of the kind of “normalization” Buttigieg engages with. It is an explicitly radical stance, one aimed at rejecting heterosexuality and the society it has constructed. I get it, I feel that at times, and I think it comes from a defensible place, but I don’t think that’s what the word “queer” does, and I find the efforts to police who gets to identify as it (only the transes but none of the gays, for example) really dislocating.

The entire purpose of queer rights is allowing people to live their lives without society imposing arbitrary norms and oppression on them, whether that’s gender expression, your sex life, or who you want to marry. Digging too deeply into queer theory without grounding oneself in the boundaries and paradigms of the field can very easily become a vector for policing someone’s right to identify as queer. Vines is engaged in this as a form of splitting, both rhetorically (he does not want to be associated with trans people, despite claiming some as friends) and politically (he wants to separate trans rights from his personal right to get married). One might say, generously, that under his definitions queer is a lumping term while gay is a splitting term, and he wants to split the movement.

Which brings us around to Weiner, who, despite being gay and consistently pro-trans was nevertheless hounded out of a trans rally for unrelated issues. If queerness is a meaningless lumping term, then even ostensibly queer people can be ejected from it. Buttigieg is too normative, so he’s not queer enough. Weiner may be queer and advocate for queer rights, but he has other views (in this case, housing policy) so therefore a heterosexual person can eject him from a trans rally. It is all forms of policing, of discipline in the Foucaldian sense of the word.

Underneath all of this is an effort to ignore what the far right is doing, and what motivates them, and I think this is bad. The far right scammed its way into a federal trifecta, but they conclusively lost on social issues: the vast majority of Americans do not agree with their bigotries, and having a husband in Ft. Worth will not prevent a Matt Walsh type from calling you a pedophile and fantasizing about genocide. The reality is that, despite Republicans following their leaders down an evil pathway full of hate , queer people are still mostly accepted by society, surprising organizations still declare themselves in support of us, and pro-queer progressive candidates consistently outperform anti-queer conservative ones. The anti-queer movement has the government and media as allies, but they are only slowly dragging us into the abyss. We aren’t there yet.

I noticed that Vines was born in 1990. He was 13 when the Supreme Court overturned anti-sodomy laws that made even his respectable form of gay marriage an offense worth years in prison. Even in his thirties, Vines was fortunate enough to escape the casual-but-brutal homophobia that infested American society like a hookworm for the 20th century. When a community is under assault it is tempting to retreat into a defensive crouch, to assume that if you just let your neighbors disappear you might be spared because you’re one of the good ones. That is cowardly and selfish and provably, consistently, wrong. But when elite society is rearranging itself to accommodate that assault, they extend incentives to get that community to sell itself out, which Vines embraced eagerly.

I’m sure there’s some grand point to make about how queer people are policed in America in the 2020s. We are subjected to extraordinary scrutiny, our murders waved away as unimportant, our mere existence plagued by vandalism and blood libel . Normal people have been forced to flee their homes, entire books and school programs are shut down to censor us . It’s bad, but it’s not hopeless, unless you listen to people like Matthew Vines. He has no positive vision for us, only diminishment, restriction, and yet more policing. His version of pessimism is demobilizing, whether intentionally or not — a surrender to the fascists. He is embarrassingly wrong, and I am angry that he is granted mainstream legitimacy because of it.