The Demonization of the ‘Cis White Gay’

To some, we’re the scourge of the earth

This essay was originally published in a slightly different form as “The Re-Demonization of the Gay Male” by Queer Majority in December 2023.

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In 2021, Harvard evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven stated on a television news program that there are “two sexes” and that “those sexes are designated by the kinds of gametes we produce.” She added that “understanding facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect” when it comes to “their gender identities and use [of] their preferred pronouns.” Afterward, a Harvard graduate student, in her official capacity as director of the Human Evolutionary Biology Department’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Task Force, tweeted that Hooven’s “dangerous” and “transphobic” remarks made the department unsafe for transgender people. The Graduate Student Union took out a petition against Hooven, and, since no one would agree to serve as her teaching assistant, she had to discontinue her popular lecture course. This past January, under duress, Hooven retired from her position at Harvard.

More recently, I heard Hooven speak at a conference in Denver. She talked about academic freedom and her dedication to creating a just society. She said something I believe: that the truth is the way toward true social justice, and that the truth is what ultimately alleviates human suffering. After Hooven left the stage, I tweeted my thoughts about what she said, concluding, “Yep, I’ll die on that hill.” A Twitter user, in a now-deleted series of replies, responded, “Wish you would then. And quickly.” Later, this person elaborated, “Cis white conservative gays can all d*e. Please do, no one likes you.”

This might be the first time I’ve been called “conservative” for voicing my support of the truth and social justice. Right-wing homophobia is nothing new, though the enmity for “cis white gays” like me from the other side of the aisle has sadly also become widespread online. Here’s a very small sampling:

“[C]is white gay men are the weakest links and idc who knows it.”

— @ann_forcino.

“ur rave wasn't ‘100% queer joy’ it was a warehouse party full of white cis gay men who want to dance and fuck each other lmfao [...] “that's not queer joy, that's f^g joy.”

— @Maxies_back

“Chelsea and Hells Kitchen, more so than other neighborhoods in New York, produce nothing better than prissy, entitled cis White Power pretentious gay men, who don't respect diversity, or the rule of law.”

— “LGBT for Change”

“Maybe they were right all along and white cis gays really do go to hell.”

— Jerry Falwell @obssdwmlp

“Behind every bad man there is an even worse cis gay white man.”

— @ANIMETWTDNI

“We need to realize that gay cis white men are still cis white men.”

— @pettypiedpipertake

“Maybe homophobia against cis white gay men is valid.”

— @heartIwin

“Noah Schnapp is also evidence that gays will truly go to h£ll. especially a cis white upper class gay like i genuinely, genuinely mean that and i’m sorry if that comes off as problematic.” [Schnapp is a 19-year-old Jewish gay actor who has spoken out in support of Israel in the wake of the October 7 2023 terrorist attacks.]

— @brat6z

“I love it when white gays erase the trans and black side of this flag [...] You faggots deserve to get hatecrimed to death.”

— @daredevilshill_

Writing for The Nation in 1994, the gay playwright Tony Kushner argued that homosexuality and socialism are intrinsically linked. Homosexuals, he wrote, “like most everyone else, are and will continue to be oppressed by the depredations of capital until some better way of living together can be arrived at.” Kushner lamented the growing number of gay activists, like Andrew Sullivan and Bruce Bawer, who advocated a more pragmatic approach to equal rights. The radical contingent of the LGBT community has long pejoratively described these types of gay people — those who prioritize marriage equality, the right to serve openly in the military, and peaceful inclusion in Western society — as “assimilationist.” Real gay liberation, the radicals argue, will result from razing Western civilization and its capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal system and rebuilding it in their utopian vision. Like the gay journalist Donna Minkowitz once said to Charlie Rose, “We don’t want a place at the table — we want to turn the table over.”

The thing is, the pragmatic approach won. Today, gay people get married, serve proudly, have jobs, own homes, and raise families. Like black civil rights leaders who preached nonviolent protest and a politics of respectability, discerning gay activists took the long view. We don’t want to exist on the margins of society, they insisted, we want to participate in it. Gay people, just like black Americans, are a vital part of the fabric of this nation.

But the radicals haven’t taken this defeat lying down. After the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which made marriage equality the law of the land, the radicals pounced. “You got what you want,” they seemed to say. “Now it’s our turn.” LGBT rights organizations, either under the influence of impatient extremists or in an attempt to stay relevant (i.e., donor-worthy), refocused their missions to a form of revolutionary activism that purports to fight on behalf of trans people but in practice agitates for a revolt against Enlightenment ideals, liberalism, capitalism, and even basic biology.

Every LGBT organization seemingly became an extension of a university Gender Studies department, whose purpose was not to produce new knowledge but to interrogate — or, in their academic lingo, queer — existing knowledge which they spuriously associate with “whiteness”, colonialism, and Western patriarchy. Alongside this, a new social hierarchy of disadvantage was erected, where everyone was in competition to be the most “marginalized” — and therefore deserving of resources, a voice, and power in the revolutionaries’ value system. According to that value system, being gay seemed to matter far less if one were also white, cis, and male, and therefore deemed to be in cahoots with the oppressors.

In 2017, while I was a student at Columbia University, I interned for GLAAD, one of the largest LGBT organizations in the US. Not only had their mission absorbed this new orthodoxy, it had filtered down to the interpersonal level. On campus and at GLAAD’s offices, I was regularly called “cis” in a kind of sneering, vitriolic tone that reminded me more than a little of the bullies who called me “fag” in middle school. The oddest thing was that much of the vitriol was coming from people who didn’t seem to be LGB, or even T, but who identified only as nonbinary or “queer.” Many of the people I encountered seemed to be profoundly homophobic. Any gay man that didn’t at least adopt he/they pronouns, especially if they were white, was considered assimilationist, right-wing, traitorous upholders of the evil sex binary.

I never quite got used to being eyed with suspicion by other activists for my normative, gender-conforming appearance, or the constant bad-faith interpretations of anything I said. The only cis white gays spared this unfairly cold treatment were the ones who made a public show of being self-hating — the ones who renounced their “cis white gayness” and frequently apologized for their white privilege.

It was alarming to be on the receiving end of such vitriol simply for being myself — for not shaving one side of my head, painting my nails, piercing my septum, and adopting plural pronouns. It was alarming especially because so much of the hate I received when I was young came precisely because I was way too gender-nonconforming (in fact, in middle school, my classmates would often ask me if I was a boy or a girl). I wondered if my peers cared that I had been mercilessly bullied as a gay kid, or that I had worked on a trans rights anti-discrimination campaign when they were barely teenagers. I knew that my volunteering for marriage equality wouldn’t earn me any points, since marriage was to them an antiquated Western institution and part of an “assimilationist” agenda. This attitude has become so entrenched in LGBT activist spaces, I suspect it partially explains why support for same-sex marriage among Gen Z Americans has dropped from 80% in 2021 to only 69% in 2023.

Last year, I got a little more clarity about this issue when I came across an article, also written in 1994, by Stephen H. Miller. The publishing journal, Heterodoxy, titled it “Gay-Bashing by Homosexuals,” although Miller’s original title was “Gay White Males: PC’s Unseen Target.” In the late 1980s and early 90s, Miller chaired the media committee of GLAAD’s New York chapter. In fact, Miller came up with GLAAD’s mission statement, which was to “fight for fair, accurate and inclusive representations of gay and lesbian lives in the media and elsewhere.” In the article, Miller wrote that he was “purged” from GLAAD in 1992 because he objected to the rising political correctness and censoriousness in the gay and lesbian movement. Similar to the cultural shifts of the past decade, Miller recounts how activist organizations began prioritizing race and gender (and of course, the Correct political views) over individual merit. New staff members had to attend “endless sensitivity sessions” which “identified white men (whatever their sexual orientation) as the oppressor class.” Suddenly, it seemed like there was more antagonism towards the “white males” within the LGBT rights movement than without. Miller, who described himself as a “political moderate who believed in dialogue with the straight world and a good-faith search for common ground,” found himself “shunned.”

The race and gender quotas that LGBT rights organizations began adopting, Miller wrote, included weighted voting that favored women and people of color. For example, after regional delegations of organizers for the 1993 March on Washington for gay rights failed to achieve their quotas, it was decided that women’s votes would count for three votes apiece and non-white votes would count for two votes apiece. That decision — and the many others that have since followed in LGBT activist spaces — calls to mind some dark and creepy moments from American history best learned from rather than imitated.

Of course, this also raises the question: Who decides who is a person of color and who is white, and how? Will they apply the one-drop rule, the early 20th-century legal principle that deemed any American with even one black ancestor (“one drop of black blood”) as black? I suppose that would be illegal since the Supreme Court outlawed the one-drop rule in its 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision. And yet, I’m not surprised by these backward tactics. It was Ibram X. Kendi who recently wrote, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Around and around we go.

Then as now, as Miller wrote, anyone who challenged this illiberal orthodoxy was “deemed racist and sexist” and accused of harboring the belief that “white men are the main victims of discrimination.” Naturally, Miller notes, such accusations serve to discourage people who sense this hostility toward gay white men from voicing their dissent.

Then after AIDS decimated gay male activist communities, lesbian radical feminists moved in, and a “critical attitude toward men, male sexuality, and ‘the patriarchy’” became the norm. “Male solidarity, once a hallmark of gay liberation, is now anathema.”

A direct line can be drawn from this upheaval in the early 1990s and the divisiveness in today’s LGBT activist spaces, where “cis gays” — and, in particular, “cis white gays” — are seen as upholders of villainous Western cisheteropatriarchy and its henchman capitalism. These modern activists are sure to include “white” not only out of an animus against white people, but because they assume that all people of color are helpless victims of Western capitalism who, because of their oppression, invariably hold the “correct” far-left politics. In his aforementioned article, Kushner invoked Oscar Wilde, quoting “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.” He added that he is “always suspicious of the glacier-paced patience of the right.” Writing for The Advocate, the gay writer Bruce Bawer responded that he and so many others are “impatient with models of activism that involve playing at revolution instead of focusing on the serious work of reform.”

This anti-“cis white gay” attitude proliferates in LGBT media as well. “White Gay Men Are Hindering Our Progress as a Queer Community” was the title of an article published in the magazine Them. “You had your time — now, we have other things to fight for,” read the subhead. “Let's Talk About People That Aren't Young Cis White Gay Men,” a HuffPost article was titled.

I could go on and on.

A few years ago, I attended a conference for LGBT journalists. There, I met a young, white, gay writer who would go on to work for a progressive news outlet in New York. He said his upbringing in a Southern state had made him racist, but since then, he has “trained” himself to be attracted to black and brown people, and now black and brown people are the only types of people he wants to sleep with.

If this is the “progressive” strategy for combating racism, I want no part of it. And any liberal white gay person who opposes racism won’t either. This is racism, operating under the guise of “anti-racism”, plain and simple. It attempts to end inequality by inverting it and, in the process, is attacking the foundations of the principles that have enabled the remarkable progress our society has made in transcending bigotry and prejudice. I only wish more people who saw this dogma for what it is were unafraid to voice the truth about it.

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Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic publishes on Nov. 4 and is now available for preorder in hardcover and eBook editions. Go here to purchase your copy.