I’m a Queer Gay, Not Gay. It Matters.

Matthew Vines’s recent opinion essay for The New York Times, “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters,” struck a nerve. And rightly so.

Vines reduces gayness to a sexual orientation and gay politics to marriage equality. It’s a standard gay identity politics argument.

The illiberal aspect of Vines’s argument is that it stigmatizes people—queers—who live out their erotic lives, even their married lives, in non-normative, rebellious, or non-straight ways. According to Vines, queers are threats to the fragile and precarious support of straight Americans for marriage equality.

Vines either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that gayness is not one thing. That is hardly a theoretical observation. It’s a historical one, patiently made by David Halperin in essays like “Small Town Boy Neil Bartlett Learns How To Be Gay” (2008) and books like How To Be Gay (2012).

In my ongoing work on gay desire and gay theology, I summarize three of Halperin’s descriptions of gayness. First, gayness refers to an identity, to the idea that gayness is merely a sexual orientation like any other and not a distinct way of relating to women, men, and the world. Second, gayness refers to gay culture, to how gay men have lived and now live, to the historical continuity and discontinuity of gayness itself.

Finally, gayness refers to gay desire or gay subculture, to a unique, non-normative way of relating to women, men, and the world fashioned by gay men but not essentially about gay men. This is queer gayness; it includes non-normative ways of relating to sexual objects (like male homosexuality), but it is not reducible to sexual practices. It also includes cultural practices, the main one being identification with certain non-gay, feminine figures (e.g., Joan Crawford and Judy Garland). So, queer gayness is something anyone, at least in principle, can feel and embody.

Vines claims that gayness is reducible to the first description above, a virtually normal identity. Everything else is anti-gayness, according to Vines. That’s simply false; it’s an ahistorical claim.

Even the factual claim Vines makes, that support for gay marriage has fallen among Republicans, doesn’t justify his argument; namely, that we should denigrate queerness to win the approval of normative straightness. As I argued elsewhere this week, following Martha Nussbaum, love of country means fostering concern for all of our fellow citizens. And if all it takes to give up on the struggle for justice and mercy for all is a few polls indicating straight dissatisfaction with gayness, just how committed is one to equality under the law in the first place?

Thankfully, there are reasonable, non-stigmatizing alternatives to Vines’s constipated illiberalism, ones that pinpoint the real problem the struggle for queer dignity and freedom faces, namely a self-obsessed, fundamentalist politics.

Vines partially cites Halperin’s in/famous definition of queerness. “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.” Halperin, in Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1995), continues, “There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence” (62, emphasis original).

That’s bad news for Vines. Queerness is not confinable to one form of life or certain forms of behavior. In fact, Vines’s argument, as self-obsessed as it is, is nonetheless an instance of queer rebellion, a form of resistance to what he imagines is a powerful force constraining and threatening the way of life he cherishes.

I am a queer gay white cis male, so I both understand and support Vines’s desire to have the life he wants for himself, but I obviously don’t think queerness is the problem Vines thinks it is. The problem is a politics that seeks to achieve entitlements at the expense of the dignity of others. Or so I think.

Rather than attacking queerness and participating in the kind of politics he apparently loathes, a politics that seeks to deprive fellow citizens of their dignity, Vines could have made the argument that sexual minorities, including him, deserve equal protection under the law. He could have argued that minority rights should not depend on the whims of the majority. In this way, Vines could have defined the political problem clearly: the anti-queer forces that seek conformity as the price for life, liberty, and happiness.

Queerness—at least as Halperin defines it—is not the problem (for more on queer definition, see my recent post, Queer 101: What Does ‘Queer’ Actually Mean?“). The problem is identitarian politics, and had Vines realized this, he could have made another valuable and helpful point: fundamentalism, even in queer form (queers can be dictatorial scolds, too), is a genuine threat to reasonable pluralism (Rawls), and one that warrants robust, sustained resistance (Halperin makes a similar point in, for example, What Do Gay Men Want: An Essay on Risk, Sex, and Subjectivity [2007]).

I became a queer gay later in my life, in my thirties. Before, I was likely more aligned with gayness as culture. I was curious about (and still am) how gay men lived and now live, in the historical continuity and discontinuity of male gayness.

I am a queer gay—not gay—not because gay signifies something bad to me. To the contrary!  I am a queer gay because I now realize that gayness informs my entire life and not just one part of it.

It matters that I am a queer gay because gayness has attuned me to the diverse and legitimate forms of human desire. I want you to have the kind of life you desire for yourself.

Queer gayness is demanding. It asks all of us to allow others to pursue and enjoy the life they want for themselves. Straight normativity need not remain the (or even a) criterion of our politics.

That’s an obvious point, and one that Vines fails to make in his opinion piece. Prioritizing his desire at the expense of the dignity of queer others is the unfortunate, unforced, illiberal error at the heart of his essay—and the reason it has more than earned the ire of queer people in the struggle for justice and mercy for all.