Why ‘Patriots’ Will Always Hate Queers Like Us
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Happy Pride Month? ?
This year, it’s more like Happy Wake the Fuck Up Month.
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Over the last few years, a lot of white, cisgender gay men like me have gotten pretty complacent. Sure, the Right was attacking trans folks and denying that systemic racism exists, but we seemed safe with our marriages, our civil rights, and our friends in high places. There are even gay Republicans. If anything, being gay is boring. Like, no one cares.
Well guess what: A lot of people still care. They are banning our books and drag performances. Their house goons are picketing and attacking our Pride celebrations. And in the states controlled by Republicans, they’re making it harder and harder to simply exist as a queer person.
Take the recent hubbub over Target, where right wingers aren’t just boycotting the chain because it dares to have a “Pride Collection” of books and t-shirts, but are physically intimidating Target employees. (Isn’t this what cops are supposed to prevent?)
And, at least for the moment, Target caved. They’ve taken some Pride items off the shelves and put others in the back of their stores, particularly, it’s been reported, in Southern states. That is despicable, cowardly, and ridiculous, but Target isn’t the real villain here. The villain is the mob. And there are a few important things queers and allies should learn from them.
1. Homophobia is Part of MAGA-Style Populism, and Always Will Be
First, let’s pay close attention to who that mob is. They’re not the Bible-thumping weirdos of Westboro Baptist Church anymore. They’re made up of right-wing extremists who, on the surface at least, aren’t focused on LGBTQ issues at all, like the Proud Boys, the Libs of TikTok account, White Lives Matter, and Patriot Front.
This is an important shift — or rather, an important revelation of what American homophobia has always been: An inextricable part of right-wing, ultra-patriotic nationalism, bound up with racism, sexism, and hatred of immigrants. There is a religious element to this far-right patriotism, as evidenced by the numerous crosses and other Christian symbols on Jan. 6, but the Christianity it promotes is more about white American nationalism than anything Jesus ever said. The people attacking gays right now aren’t religious fundamentalists as much as they are nationalists, “patriots,” and extremists — proponents of what some have called “White Christian Nationalism.”
As much as gay Republicans like George Santos and Milo Yiannapoulos want to deny it, hating gays is part of the MAGA package, the seething resentment that the still-dominant group of Americans have for everyone and everything that has eaten away at their hegemony, from the phrase “Happy Holidays” to Spanish-language tax forms, abortion pills to no-fault divorce (yes, they’re coming for that too), rainbow shirts at Target to the Black Little Mermaid. And while some gays have believed themselves to be exempted from this nationalist crusade, we never have been and never will be.
This isn’t a gay backlash, because among this segment of the population, we never had a frontlash. Adherents of this ideology never accepted the changes of the 2000s and 2010s, and arguably, they never will.
If anything, the relative peace we enjoyed over the last several years was due to – I hate to admit this – Donald Trump, who indulged his allies’ homophobia but is clearly not a homophobe himself. Gay men have long been among Trump’s inner circle, from Roy Cohn to Roger Stone. I mean, the guy partied at Studio 54 in the Seventies.
But Trump was an anomaly. And with his leadership of the MAGA movement now reduced in stature, all bets are off.
To be clear, all of this is a spectrum, not a binary. There are plenty of moderate Republicans more focused on tax breaks than transphobia. There are plenty of conservatives who may be, you know, a little bit racist or homophobic but aren’t on board with the whole anti-woke crusade. And there are even some MAGA sympathizers who have better things to worry about than what other people are doing in their bedrooms.
But there are enough Americans — based on recent polling data, around 30 to 40 million Americans – who regularly list same-sex marriage and the acceptance of gay people (let alone trans people) as the signs that America is headed for moral collapse. Intersectionality is real. If the Right is coming for one out-group, you can bet that sooner or later they’re going to come for others.
2. They’re Mad as Hell, and They Don’t Want to Take It Anymore
The second thing we should learn from this paroxysm of homophobia is how angry it is.
This isn’t a movement so much as a rageful, vengeful mob — part of the same constellation of wrath that includes the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, QAnon, the Covid-deniers (remember those?), “Moms for Liberty,” and fans of Andrew Tate.
You know these people. If they’re older, they show up at school board meetings, furious at ‘wokeness,’ whatever that means. If they’re younger, they post misogynist and anti-immigrant videos on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit.
This is a movement of grievance, part of the “paranoid style in American politics,” which sees America both as God’s chosen country and as threatened from within by rootless cosmopolitans (often real or symbolic Jews) who don’t share its core patriotism. It’s been this way since the Red and lavender scares of the 1950s, through Anita Bryant in the 1970s, the Moral Majority in the 1980s, the Tea Party of the 2010s, and MAGA of today. It’s not even unique to America: Similar forms of angry, macho ethno-nationalism are found throughout the world, and in the governments of Russia, Hungary, Israel, and, until the last election, Brazil.
And, in a sense, these people are right. Straight white Christian men still control most of the resources in America today, but their hegemony is waning. As of 2020, roughly 64 percent of Americans identify as Christian. Fifty years ago, that number was 90 percent. And with America’s white population down from 87.5 percent in 1970 to 61 percent today, and with Disney a global brand in a world that is 85 percent nonwhite, Halle Bailey’s Little Mermaid isn’t about wokeness, it’s about capitalism.
Of course, for most people, diversity of all kinds is a welcome part of the human experience. But for fascists, nationalists, and populists around the world, it threatens their power, their sense of belonging, even their sense of self.
3. It’s Stochastic Terrorism, Plain and Simple
Finally, as much as MAGA homophobia is the populist rage of a furious mob, it is aided, abetted, and encouraged by elites.
The Supreme Court, for example, now has a majority of members who have said that same-sex marriage should be either overturned or severely limited — two have said that not all marriages are created equal, and that gay ones can be a kind of second-class marriage without the rights that straight ones possess.
And the federal court system, stacked with Trump appointees hand-picked by the right-wing theocrat Leonard Leo, has distorted the meaning of “religious liberty” to include everything from discriminating against gay couples who want to adopt a child to opting out of public health regulations. All this while claiming, as Justice Alito’s and Gorsuch’s have done repeatedly, that Christians are being discriminated against.
Meanwhile, right-wing media routinely distorts and misrepresents LGBTQ lives and the laws meant to protect us. This isn’t just on Fox, Newsmax, and OAN. Just last week on CNN, I sat next to a moderate Republican who repeated the false right-wing talking point that trans kids can undergo hormone therapy without parental consent. Elites who should know better are terrifying parents who are worried about the safety of their children, and that fear is then weaponized against innocent gay and trans people.
In national security circles, the term “stochastic terrorism” refers to the demonization of a certain group of people, inciting violence against them — and then letting the most unhinged carry out attacks on the targeted however they can. That’s pretty much what’s happening here. Political, religious, and moral elites spew hatred against queer and trans people. And then, inevitably, someone inspired by them — maybe someone lonely, or mentally ill, or red-pilled too many times on 4Chan — goes out and shoots people. The same elites which, five minutes ago, were calling gay people groomers and child molesters then fall over themselves to condemn this shocking, completely unforeseeable act of violence, thus evading all accountability.
When some “disturbed individual” threatens a Target employee just trying to do their job, that’s stochastic terrorism. When a friend of mine walking down the street in NYC gets called a faggot, that’s stochastic terrorism. And the people responsible are the people at the top.
So what does all this mean?
First, while I’m sorry to be partisan about this, there is no way a queer person or ally can ethically support Republicans right now. Again, I know that many Republicans are not bigots, and maybe one day the sane people will take control of their party. But right now, the nationalists have the upper hand. To empower them is immoral.
Second, as the scholar Timothy Snyder warns, “do not obey in advance.” Do not self-censor, do not diminish yourself, do not preemptively comply with what you think those in power want you to do. As Snyder writes, “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” Don’t do that.
Finally, there’s a lesson here about solidarity. Privileged gays like me need to stand together with others being targeted by the people now targeting us: Trans populations first and foremost, but anyone the MAGA crowd sees as not American enough. At the root of populism, and its cousin, fascism, is the demonization of the other. ‘We’ are the real Americans, ‘They’ are the bad people who have no morality and want to destroy everything good. That ‘They’ may be George Soros, Black Lives Matter, or Alaska Thunderfuck 3000. But at the core of the problem is the grammar of populism which divides people in this way. When the know-nothings come for “Critical Race Theory” (which, like “woke”, now seems to mean anything that upsets fragile white people), they will come for my marriage soon enough.
So, let’s do the moral work. If you have some measure of privilege, use it to stand up for those who are threatened. Vote your values, not your convenience. Speak out when you see someone dehumanizing someone else. As mushy as it sounds, this is what it means to combat hate with love. The logic of hate is that people unlike me are not as human as I am. Love is the recognition that this is not the case.
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