The Problem With “Queer”
Thirty-two years ago, I wrote an article in Reason Magazine called “I Am Not Queer.” The movement then for gay, lesbian, and bisexual equality was maturing from its early activist days of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s — when coming out of the closet was perilous and you could still be arrested simply for seeming homosexual to a police officer. But in the 1980s, the movement’s work began its most fertile and successful period, achieving, year by year, lasting and substantial change. In government, sodomy laws were repealed; military service was openly debated, and ultimately permitted; and the first steps toward recognition of same-sex couples were taken, leading to same-sex marriage. In religion, gay-friendly churches, parishes, and denominations gradually began to emerge, some very publicly. In medicine, psychiatric care finally caught up with the 1973 removal of homosexuality as a “disorder.”
In 1993, I could see those changes taking place in my own large, Catholic, and mostly Italian family. Out of 14 people at one of our family dinners, five of us were openly gay men, and it was entirely unremarkable. It didn’t happen quickly, and it wasn’t without its bumps and bruises, but by the mid-’90s, for me, being gay had gradually become just part of the world. During that time, some activists were adopting the word “queer” to identify themselves, but I did not feel very “queer” myself, certainly not in the way the activists used the label. I did not feel unusual, rebellious, transgressive, subversive, or otherwise outside of mainstream society. My homosexuality was as integral and integrated a part of myself as my family’s heterosexuality was of theirs. I was a middle-class gay man from a middle-class family with middle-class American values that “queer” did not reflect.
I recognized that I was blessed in a way many others weren’t, people whose closeted lives were haunted by the epithet queer, and who couldn’t imagine coming out safely. A lot of other lesbian, bi, and gay people I knew — friends, colleagues, and acquaintances — weren’t feeling all that queer either. At the time, my choice not to call myself queer was mostly a personal preference. I didn’t like the term, but neither did I think it was doing much harm.
Over the years, however, I’ve changed my mind. “Queer” today seems to mean anything and everything. While dedicated activism is a necessary part of getting to a moderate, liberal policy, the current strategy of unyielding radical extremism distorts ordinary politics and creates unnecessary confusion in the public around our current discussions of rights and sexual freedom. And “queer” is at the heart of the problem.
Reason Magazine, August/September 1993.
QUEER TODAY
In the three decades since my Reason article, “queer” has become the default description in the mainstream press and other institutions to aggregate the constellation of what were once called “sexual minorities.” Since there is no broadly accepted criteria for what counts as a sexual minority, “queer” today is just a murky inclination rather than a clearly defined term. New entries are still being discovered for this category-ish conglomeration — or invented, or conjured up. With radical inclusivity as a guiding philosophy, it’s hard to reject new applicants.
This identity gold rush was already roaring by 2015. Wesleyan University offered special housing for the LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM community. And yes, that is real: it stands for the super-inclusive “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, flexual, asexual, genderfuck, polyamorous, bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism” community. And that whopper of a non-community only includes a few of the 88 or so gender identities, many of which were still in Research & Development at the time.
At that point, “queer” served as an end run around the awkwardness of the increasingly annoying, ever-evolving alphabet soup that started out as “LGBT.” The Washington Post did its best to explain its glossary of group language, adopting “queer” as “an overarching term describing “anyone whose sexual orientation isn’t exclusively heterosexual.” That’s pretty broad, but at least it’s coherent: two identifiable groupings. But then the Post goes on to say that “queer” is also a political identity “that challenges the ways LGBTQ marginalization and inequality are upheld by legal, political, and social systems. In recent years, some heterosexual people have also embraced this identity.” In an article written for the express purpose of clarifying their usage of language, the Post describes “queer” as those who aren’t exclusively heterosexual, and then includes heterosexuals.
This is made all the more confusing when we see how few people actually use “queer” as a primary identifier in real life. A Gallup poll published in 2025 found that 9.3% of respondents identified as “LGBT.” Of those, 56.3% said they were bi, 21.1% said they were gay, 14.6% said they were lesbian, 13.9% said they were trans, and 5.9% volunteered either pansexual, asexual, or “other LGBTQ+.” Bringing up the rear, half of a percent identified themselves as queer. To be fair, “queer”, like “asexual” and “other”, was not listed as an option and had to be volunteered by respondents, but if the Q in LGBTQ+ were as popular as the proliferation of its use suggests, you’d expect more rousing support among the people claiming it as their identifier.
Source: Gallup.
The eminently sensible gay journalist Jonathan Rauch made a more pragmatic case: Rather than “queer,” he treated the Q standing alone for all sexual minorities — not to signify queer only, but to replace the “acronymic acrobatics” people had come to grudgingly tolerate. Rauch’s political analysis is impeccable, but the idea just reiterates the problem: historically, Q points back to queer, but in our world, “queer” has no identifiable or even intended boundaries, so how could Q?
Queer Majority, in its “About” section, seems to have embraced a version of this thinking with its own unique spin:
“We employ the term ‘queer’ in an intentionally broad sense: to generally describe sexual, gender, relationship, and intimacy non-conformity. Implicit in this use is our recognition that a majority of individuals have at least one aspect of their lives that falls outside the boundaries of what is seen as ‘normal’ in a given society. And that such supposed abnormality or ‘queerness’ is not merely okay, but is worth celebrating.”
The approach is explained in more depth in one of QM’s essays, “Queerness is Universal.” In it, Editor-in-Chief Rio Veradonir explains that everybody, including heterosexuals, differs from conventions in certain respects, many of them related to sexual activities that can be odd or at least not widely practiced or accepted. Lesbians, bi people, and gay men don’t have any monopoly on being sexually outside the norm. Most, and arguably all people “have at least one characteristic that deviates from the norm,” and particularly our general sexual norms. It follows, then, that “logically, most or even all people are, in fact, ‘queer’ in some respect.”
“Queer” does indeed have a long history of describing peculiarity and outliers of all kinds. As Veradonir’s article goes on to say, in a modern, liberal society that prides itself on protecting the freedoms of all people, “it is acceptable, and arguably better rhetorical strategy, to use the word ‘queer’ in a much broader manner — one that returns to the original meaning of the term and celebrates the fact that all people, not just those of the LGBT community, benefit from the tolerance of sexual and romantic diversity.”
This is a sound political and rhetorical argument; however, it still relies on a hazy definition, and in so doing, helps clarify the real problem.
While QM’s use of “queer” is rooted in a liberal framework that values individual liberty without endorsing victimhood narratives or critical social justice, it remains nebulous. It echoes the cultural distortion that unbounded definitions of “queer” enable. The kind of difference that mattered for so long — romantic and sexual activity between people of the same sex — was, in many parts of the world, often historically regarded as criminal, sinful, sick, or worse. These attitudes drove the daily reality of same-sex attracted people, who were too often kept outside of respectable society, silent about this part of themselves. “Queer” meant something then, and it was bad.
New York City Pride, 1990. Source: Buzzfeed News.
The ‘90s brought about a revolution in perception, changing the negative views of non-heterosexual attraction. Slowly but certainly, society finally began to really hear a historically new message about what the world looked like to those who weren’t exclusively heterosexual. It was the result of over half a century of direct advocacy, along with the courage of millions to come out publicly. AIDS brought many people out against their will, but by the ‘90s, the closet doors and walls were coming down. And in the most important legal and cultural sense, that revolution in perception has taken hold.
Sexual Orientation Minus Judgement
What sex researcher Alfred Kinsey started and the US Supreme Court confirmed is that sexual orientation can be viewed as a neutral and natural variation of sexual attraction that need be of little or no social or legal consequence.
Perhaps the biggest change began in the middle of the 20th Century in Bloomington, Indiana. Alfred Kinsey confirmed in his landmark studies of human sexuality in 1948 and 1953 that human sexual behavior could be understood as being on a spectrum. Kinsey developed his scale, ranging from 0 for those whose sexual behavior is completely heterosexual to 6 for those whose behavior is entirely homosexual, with everyone in between being bisexual. This forced a profound but initially subtle change to the dominant sexual paradigm, where everyone was essentially understood to be heterosexual, and where same-sex behavior was viewed as immoral or pathological. There was no such thing as “a homosexual,” just a heterosexual acting badly.
Kinsey’s reports rocked the nation. Knowing that so many men and women did, in fact, sexually engage with members of their own sex was at first shocking. In time, however, it gradually became a reality that couldn’t be pretended out of existence. The cultural superstructure that kept same-sex behavior sequestered and shunned remained in place, but the first cracks were showing.
Alfred Kinsey. Source: Chronicle of Higher Education.
A few giant steps between Kinsey and today need highlighting for the generations that didn’t live through them. In 1961, Illinois became the first US state to decriminalize sodomy — whose prohibition, assumed to be against homosexual acts, often also applied to heterosexual oral and anal sex (and in some cases even masturbation). Over the course of the 1970s, 19 more states followed suit. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality in itself as a mental illness in the authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. The US Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that laws criminalizing sodomy (or any private, non-commercial sexual activity between consenting adults) violated the Constitution. A dozen years later, the Supreme Court decided that the government could not prohibit same-sex couples from marrying one another.
Taken together, the monopoly that heterosexuality historically controlled was broken up. The sexual life of consenting adults was legally up to them. Whether homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual, the law, at least, must be neutral. The prejudices of the past about sexual orientation are not gone, but they have been moved to the margins where lesbians, bi people, and gay men used to be confined. Nearly all Western nations have adopted some version of this modern view of sexuality.
But that is exactly where the currently dominant, radical view of “queer” muddled everything. Activists and what remained of the Gay Rights Industrial Complex leveraged that victory but bent it in an entirely different direction — no longer about sexual orientation, but gender identity.
And Then Came Gender
“Gender” is fairly defined as being distinct from one’s sex — i.e., male or female. As Britannica puts it, “For most persons, gender identity and biological sex correspond in the conventional way. Some individuals, however, experience little or no connection between sex and gender.” In a near inverse of sexual orientation — the sex to which someone is attracted — gender is the understanding of how one’s own sex matches their internal sense of that sex and/or how they express it to the world. While there are definitely people of all sexual orientations who are sexually aroused by gender nonconformity, the core of sexual orientation is about physical signs of attraction and arousal that arise from features of biological sex. Vive la différence for heterosexuals, vive la même for homosexuals, and vive tout le monde for the bis.
Over the last few decades, a version of gender theory has insinuated itself into the legal and cultural transformation about sexual orientation, and has become a flashpoint in our culture wars. One factor that has acted as a conceptual emulsifier in the blending of gender, sex, and sexuality has clearly been the sloppy, unfettered use of “queer.” Acting as an amorphous umbrella that encompasses sexual minorities; gender-nonconforming people; a radical political worldview, anyone outside of the sexual or romantic mainstream; and anything anyone else wants to tack on, “queer” has smashed together too many disparate categories. This is not to say that such groups are necessarily opposed or at odds with one another, but they are, in meaningful respects, distinct categories, and merging them recklessly pits the gender queer against those who are sexually queer. It may not be their intention, but I believe QM’s use of “queer” contributes to this.
This mismatch between gender identity and sexual behavior negates or at least undermines the successes of the movement for equality based on sexual orientation. It led to the explosion of gender identities, including the curious case of non-binary people, who publicly identify as “none of the above.” That is clearly queerer today than sexual orientation. Non-binary, gender fluid, flexual, genderfuck — these ideations are challenging to the vast majority who still understand and appreciate the two sexes and their conventional expressions. They may have resonance for some individuals, but their defiance of biological sex seems to be a theory without much grounding in any broader reality.
While there are many contradictions between sexual orientation and gender, the conflict is at its most intense when it comes to medical, hormonal, and surgical treatments for minors. What happens when kids who lack the life experience to truly comprehend the enormity of the decision to undergo medical interventions later realize they aren’t truly gender dysphoric but were just going through puberty? And what about the questions regarding the efficacy and long-term results when minors are subject to these interventions? Not to mention the considerable concern about the possibility of children misinterpreting their same-sex attraction as gender-nonconformity and thus as gender incongruence or dysphoria.
Homosexuality/bisexuality and transgender identity are fundamentally different. The writer Andrew Sullivan makes the point clear:
“The difference between the gay and trans experience is vast, especially when it comes to biological sex. [...] Gay people have had to struggle to own their own sex and their own bodies; while trans people have had to struggle to disown theirs. On this core question, our interests are, in fact, diametrically opposed.”
All of this and more has led some organizations to “divorce” sexual orientation from gender-related issues. The LGB Alliance in Great Britain, for example, dropped the T and the Q. It was formed in 2019 in England and Wales to reaffirm the issues of lesbians, gay men, and bi people, while making room for organizations whose mission is to focus solely on this unique approach to gender. The LGB Alliance has taken quite a lot of flak, but the substance of their organizing argument is sound: biological sex is central to the definition of sexual orientation, as every heterosexual has always known. The conception of oneself as someone of the other sex, or of no sex, or of a fluid conception of sex-as-gender raises important but quite different issues legally, socially, and for some morally. Unsurprisingly, the LGB “divorce” movement is now bubbling up in America too.
Because the term “queer” comes so strongly tethered in the minds of many to extreme politics among a restless, rebellious, overeducated milieu, it conveys an understandable sense that trans rights stand at zero-sum odds with gay or bi rights, when that needn’t be the case.
I do not want to be misunderstood. Trans identities and transsexuality are real phenomena, and for many, transition improves lives. I support the effort of trans people to make such a highly personal and adult decision with their medical team, unhampered by the government. And I see no reason why trans rights cannot be advocated for within a perfectly liberal framework that seeks to protect the rights of all. But I also know that sexual orientation and gender presentation are different, and I want to maintain those important distinctions.
Where Do We Go From Here?
So, where does that leave those of us who don’t see ourselves as defiant outsiders and who fought in our communities, legislatures, and courts specifically to bring us inside the law and integrate us into mainstream society? I don’t want to interfere with activists who have come to rely on the victimhood narratives they define themselves with, but I also don’t want to be inadvertently drawn into their battle.
Whoever the queers are, I would hope they can come to some agreement with what that means specifically, who is and who isn’t included, and why. If and when they have a particular argument with law or culture, I will take it as seriously as it is framed.
I am honored and grateful that a magazine with “queer” in its name is publishing this critique. This is why I believe so strongly in classical liberalism. By the same token, I am willing to accept critiques of my position and will do my best to defend it or think it through more carefully. Full and free expression is a liberal value that works both ways, and we should all treasure it as much as Queer Majority does.
Same-sex marriage was once among the most incomprehensible and controversial issues. Today, it is not only legal across the Western world, it’s accepted by 70% of Americans. And yet, ironically, after our greatest legal and cultural success, there is broad support among elites for referring to us, with the best intentions, using an imprecise and confounding word that still invokes deviance and eccentricity. We never got a vote about this patois, and the recent polls discussed above suggest pretty strongly that a lot of us aren’t content with “queer.” Against the best advice from those who claim to represent us, a lot of us are happy being incorporated into the culture, happy to be normal. Some will opt to embrace “queer”, but it should not be the default under which all same-sex attracted people are lumped.
I was not queer 30 years ago. And I’m still not queer today. For all of our sakes, we need a clear, moderate, liberal debate. And that will require language free from confusing, extremist baggage. “Queer” has shown itself to do the exact opposite.
Published June 15, 2025
Published in Issue XIII: Heretic
