There was a time when I was dismayed to discover that people thought I was LGBT. Today, these same assumptions don’t bother me at all. Clearly, I changed. But so did everything around me. We tend to measure LGBT progress by legal protections, public acceptance, and political, civil, and human rights. But these milestones are only the foundation that allows us to build the kind of society where doing the right thing is incentivized. Progress, in its deepest, most enduring sense, is when society helps everyday people to do what’s right; when doing what’s right becomes commonplace, humdrum, and bereft of all glory. That’s what happened to me. I am no moral trailblazer. My story is not one of heroism — but it is one of progress.

In my junior year of high school, in 2003, one of my closest friends, Robbie (not his real name), came out as bisexual. This made him the only openly LGBT student in our small private Jewish high school — and the only openly LGBT person I had ever known. It took real courage to come out of the closet in the culture of the early 2000s, especially in a conservative, religious setting. But Robbie did so with a preternatural cavalierness that was incredible to witness. He was so palpably confident and comfortable in his own skin, so unconcerned with what anyone else thought, that no one bothered giving him a hard time. Robbie was one of those unflappable people who could effortlessly shrug off all of life’s troubles. He was a natural social butterfly. He was also an incurable prankster.

As his closest friend, Robbie’s coming-out spun the school’s rumor mill into action with whispers that we were boyfriends. Sensing my unease, Robbie thought it would be funny to fan the flames of these rumors. When he told people behind my back that we were a couple, nobody caught the mischievous twinkle in his eye. When he grabbed my hand as we walked beside each other in crowded corridors, everyone caught the image of our momentarily clasped hands, not his barely stifled laughter. When he leaned his chin on my shoulder at the last moment before someone snapped a picture of us, the photograph captured only the pose, not the intent.

All of this made me deeply uncomfortable, and more than a little angry. I was a 16-year-old boy in 2003, influenced by the culture around me, still clinging to the last wisps of my pre-adolescent religiosity, and a self-identified Bush-supporting conservative. Despite all that, I never cared about Robbie’s bisexuality. We enjoyed each other's company, shared the same absurdist sense of humor, played the same video games, and both loved skateboarding. Nothing about that changed because I discovered he liked guys too. But I found it distressing to be seen by my peers as someone I wasn’t. I was not gay or bisexual. I was straight.

Wasn’t I?

During one of the more surreal periods of my life, I spent a month in 11th grade questioning my sexuality. When enough people were convinced I wasn’t straight and treated me as though that were the case, my insecure teenage mind began having doubts. Maybe they were right. Maybe I was gay or bi.

After weeks adrift in what felt like a sort of existential limbo, gravity kicked in and pulled my feet back to solid terra firma. The thought of having sex with another guy — even just kissing — did not remotely turn me on. I am straight. It was as simple as that, even though it took weeks to arrive at that simplicity. Human psychology is fascinating, though not always from the first-person perspective.

I emerged from this soul-searching more sure of myself, and everything eventually ran its course and blew over, but Robbie’s elaborate prank caused a lasting rift in our friendship that never truly healed. I felt he’d crossed a line. Intentionally generating a school-wide rumor designed to make someone uncomfortable is no way to treat a friend, however unenlightened the attitudes behind the discomfort may be. In 2003, queerness was stigmatized. It was, at best, tolerated, but rarely celebrated, and never aspired to. I went on to mature and grow as a person, and so did society. We are both still works in progress.

Today, two decades later, I find myself in a similar situation to that month in 11th grade. The difference is that I am no longer that 16-year-old, and our culture is no longer that of 2003.

If someone would have told me 20 years ago that in two decades, I would be the Managing Editor for a magazine called Queer Majority, I’d have asked what they were smoking (and, considering my politics at the time, I’d have wanted that substance kept illegal). Given my editorial position at an explicitly queer publication, I am once again assumed to be gay, bi, or at least queer-identified. Haters have referred to me as a “faggot neckbeard” and an “out-of-the-closet William F. Buckley.” The difference is that today, not only don’t these assumptions bother me, they benefit me. I will answer questions honestly, and correct any inaccurate presumptions people may make about me. To do otherwise would be dishonest, and constitute a kind of stolen valor. But for the thousands of people who read my work, or see me on social media, I am perfectly content to have them assume that I am bi or gay, because, well, it means that my words will be taken more seriously.

On the one hand, none of this should matter. Sure, it would be a little strange if a queer publication had an all-straight staff, but one need not necessarily have to walk in another’s shoes to understand and write knowledgeably about the issues that concern and matter to them. Before the industry was hijacked by identitarianism in the early 2010s, journalists used to be generalists who covered areas they had no personal connection to because it allowed them to be more objective and prevented many of the mistakes that can crop up when one is too emotionally invested in something. Queer Majority is a steadfastly liberal publication. Not only do we employ a universalist conception of queerness that encompasses anyone who diverges, even slightly, from society’s sexual, romantic, and gendered norms, but we evaluate arguments by their merits, not the group category of individuals making them.

The dynamic that has people assuming I am LGBT — and regarding me more favorably because of it — is a symptom of society’s identitarian regression over the past decade. We are still judging people not by the content of their character, but by immutable attributes over which they have no conscious control. It shows that we still have a ways to go. But it also demonstrates how astoundingly far we’ve come.

Queerness has, in many areas of society, blown past the stigma and taboo of yesteryear and gained a kind of cultural cachet. LGBT young people are now not only more comfortable than ever embracing who they are, but non-LGBT young people feel an increasing desire to identify out of being straight with unintentionally amusing Tumblr identities like “sapiosexual” and “demisexual.” Among the intelligentsia, being anything other than a cis heterosexual, far from being a mark of shame that people go to extraordinary lengths to hide, now lends an added gravitas to their thoughts and words.

In the span of 20 years, queerness went from something people wanted to run away from to something people seek to position themselves closer to. Queerness has become aspirational. Yes, this isn’t the case in every corner of society, much less the world, but it’s fantastic progress in such a short period of time, and it’s something worth cheering. My own personal journey mirrors the evolution of societal attitudes and norms over this span. In a sense, that means I cannot take credit for becoming more open-minded, because I was just going with the flow. But it means that the river of progress is running in the right direction, a fact infinitely more consequential than my ability to command personal praise.

The LGBT community had been stigmatized, shunned, and mistreated for so long, that an overcorrection in the other direction is understandable. Queerness used to be shameful. Today, it is cool. Eventually, it will become commonplace. The pendulum has swung away from centuries of oppression into celebration. With a little luck, it will, in time, reach equilibrium in true equality, where one’s sexuality, gender, and romantic preferences are no more interesting than the color of our eyes or the way we take our coffee.

Not everyone looks forward to such a sexually free and individualistic future — and it’s not only bigots who object. To those who have tethered their sense of self-worth to the ethos of being an underdog or the glory that comes with fighting for justice in an unjust society, the temptation to deny the progress we see all around us, or to move the goalposts, is strong. The prospect of a future where queerness is neither frowned upon nor remarkable is one that strikes an existentially bittersweet note in these people. The antidote to the crutch of identity is what has taken us this far, and what will eventually bring us home: viewing everyone as an individual. Celebration is not the last stop on the road to true equality — integration is. While history isn’t linear, nor does it reliably follow clear patterns, the process goes something like this: First they oppress you, then they tolerate you, then they celebrate you, then you become boring, and then you win.

Published Apr 5, 2023
Updated Feb 5, 2023