The gays are at it again. They want to be rid of the tail end of the letters in ‘LGBTQIA+’. The term ‘queer’, especially, has become quite a problem.
In an opinion piece in The New York Times on 30 June, author Matthew Vines tried to distance himself from queerness. ‘I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters,’ read the headline.“‘Queer’ carries an adversarial charge that ‘gay’ does not, and that charge has a specific intellectual lineage,” Vines wrote. “And in that difference lies a danger for our hard-fought equality.”
He means marriage equality, of course. It’s the apex of the homosexual political ambition, of late increasingly harassed by gender trouble. Why do trans women need to compete in women’s sports so bad? Why do genderqueers have to shove their pronouns in the face of the good, kind god-honouring straight folks? Why do they want gender-affirming care at the cost of my two dogs, three kids, white picket fence life?Western culture wars have two active battlefronts. When the colonisers aren’t panicking about an ‘Islamic colonisation’ of British Whitelands, they’re celebrating each new state-sanctioned attack on trans women. And as Republicans in the US gear up to tear down the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling, White gay ‘activists’ are offering up trans queer ‘radicals’ as a peace offering. As if the Right-wing ever cared to differentiate between categories of queerness. Who will tell Vines that no matter how hard he clings to god, he will remain a slur for the conservatives?And as with anything that starts in the US, the ripples eventually reach India, too.“As a gay man, i want equal rights that uphold our human dignity, not a revolution that risks undermining it,” Ankit Bhuptani, founder of the Queer Hindu Alliance, posted on X Thursday.Last year, when I wrote about whether Indian queerness is Right or Left-leaning, I was surprised to find how vociferously Right-wing gay men distanced themselves from minority, caste, or trans issues. Their fight is not for the upliftment of all queer folk, but for assimilation into the folds of power. It’s a single-plank bridge to the rainbow lands of blessed gay monogamy.
