That’s NOT it. On why gayness is not only a sexual orientation.

Last Friday (9/25/26), while trying to make sense of the queer drama at the Last Ditch Bar, James Kirchick endorsed Matthew Vines’s constipated illiberalism. On Real Time with Bill Maher, the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of GAY Washington (2022) asserted, “To be gay or lesbian is a sexual orientation, that’s it. To be queer is to embrace a whole political orientation” (emphasis added—an excerpt is included below).

“That’s it” is doing a lot of work for Kirchick. I think “that’s it” means “I wish.”

In any case, the continued existence of gay subculture shows that Kirchick’s claim is a fantasy, not history.

Kirchick seems to be unaware that his assertion reflects a gay identity strategy initially elaborated in the twentieth century. To make sense of it, I offer a brief summary of a few chapters of How To Be Gay (2012) by David M. Halperin, largely lifted from my dissertation (which I am reimagining here):

How To Be Gay is Halperin’s analysis of gay “counter-acculturation . . . the exact logic by which gay male subjects resist the summons to experience the world in heterosexual and heteronormative ways” (7). Gay men such as Kirchick react negatively to an idea like “gay [sub]culture,” to the idea that “gay is something you do” or to the idea that gayness is “not a state or condition” but rather a “mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: in short, a practice.” History provides “the reasons why gay male [sub]culture constantly embarrasses its own subjects” (42).

From Gender Inversion to Homosexuality

Halperin observes that “homosexuality, as a distinctive classification of sexual behavior, sexual desire, and sexual subjectivity, was originally precipitated out of the experience and concept of gender inversion” (43). Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal referred to it as “contrary sexual feeling,” and Arrigo Tamassia called it “inversion of the sexual instinct” (43).

Gender inversion tended to emphasize a feeling of disidentification with one’s actual sex, “a transgendered psychological orientation” (43). Thus, same-sex desire “was not the essence but merely a further extension of . . . a more developed [Halperin now cites Westphal] ‘stage of the pathological phenomenon’” (43).

Nonetheless, nineteenth-century sexologists did view same-sex desire as problematic or “deviant.” “Homosexual sex might turn out to be bad,” Halperin writes, “without turning out to be sick” (44). Same-sex desire may be deviant without being sick if one expressed it in gender normative ways.

Why Gayness Became “Just” a Sexual Orientation

Kinsey, in the first “Kinsey Report,” strictly defined homosexuality as any same-sex sexual contact that resulted in orgasm (46). Homosexual men made surprising use of this new description of same-sex desire, putting it to work as a means of distancing themselves from gender inversion, conceiving their sexuality as “entirely compatible, at least in theory” with normative masculinity (46).

“Homosexuality now defined [the gay man],” Halperin observes, “it made him gay through and through—but it also left him completely indistinguishable in every other respect from normal men . . . . To be gay, according to this twentieth-century definition, was to have a sexuality, not a culture” (46). Hence the attempt(s) to rid consciousness of “the feminine identifications that had informed and defined much of traditional gay male culture” (50).

Given the history of the rise of homosexuality out of gender inversion, it is rather scandalous to inquire about gay male difference or gay male subculture. There is, Halperin contends, something backward about it:

It represents a reversal of previous, long-held convictions . . . . It violates, in particular, the official post-Stonewall creed that gay men are not different from anybody else, that sexual object choice has nothing to do with gender style, that gay sexuality has no relation to femininity, and that homosexuality is a sexual orientation, not a culture or subculture (56-57).

Why Queers Also Get Nervous About Gay Subculture

Gay men like Kirchick are not the only ones who think gay difference or gay subculture is an unwelcome historical fact. From the vantage point of some queer-identified theorists, the idea of gay subculture is mere essentialism, “the stubborn and ultimately untenable belief that social identities are grounded in some inherent property or nature or quality common to all members of an identity-based group” (63).

Halperin contends that

as queer theory has become institutionalized, the understandable reluctance to accept essentialist assumptions about lesbians and gay men has hardened into an automatic self-justifying dogmatism, a visceral impulse to preempt the merest acknowledgment or recognition of any cultural patterns or practices that might be distinctive to homosexuals (63).

Why a “visceral impulse to preempt the merest acknowledgment or recognition of any cultural patterns or practices that might be distinctive to homosexuals”? To answer that question, it’s necessary to take a slight detour through another of Halperin’s texts, What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (2009).

“The silence of queer studies on the topic of gay male subjectivity—the inner life of male homosexuality, what it is that gay men want—is no accident,” according to Halperin (1). Lesbian and Gay Studies intentionally avoids the issue of homosexual subjectivity, the inner world of homosexuality, because of a homophobic tendency in the history of psychology and psychoanalysis to associate homosexuality with pathology.

Gay and lesbian politics has tended to advocate for a kind of “collective identity,” membership within an unjustly stigmatized group of people, a group of people that, save for its marginalized status, is like everyone else (2). This strategy has the merit of having (for the most part) worked, and so “[w]e are still, understandably, reluctant to abandon that political strategy, and we get nervous when anyone departs from it” (3).

An unfortunate consequence of lesbian and gay identity politics is that it denies specificity; it overlooks gay subjectivity or “pass[es] over what homosexuality feels like to us” (71). Gay identity enables, in other words, safer politics. Citing Michael Warner’s in/famous book, The Trouble With Normal (1999), Halperin observes: “‘Identity . . . allows us to distance ourselves from any actual manifestation of queerness’” (73). Take, for example, the word gay.

“When I say that I am gay,” Halperin writes, “I adopt an identity-based strategy, generated by gay identity politics itself . . . I avail myself of a positive, non-phobic, non-pathological term provided for me by a multi-generational political movement for lesbian and gay liberation, pride, and dignity” (75).

The term gay allows me to identify my sexual difference without calling too much attention to anything about it that may be disturbing to others. Gay identity politics tends to “de-gay” gayness, to erase the specifically erotic or sexual dimension of gay life.

It also tends to erase all those “especially non-sexual dimensions of [the inner life of homosexuality] that gay people are still unsure or nervous about. Gay subjectivity, and the distinctive cultural practices that manifest it, may now have become just as disreputable, just as taboo, as queer sex” (77).

Same-sex sexual practices are themselves, Halperin argues, manifestations of a queer sensibility: “homosexuality itself, even as an erotic orientation, even as a specifically sexual subjectivity, consists in a dissident way of feeling and relating to the world” (12-13). Yet even the politics of gay identity, for all of its obvious limitations, does call attention to gay sexuality, to “same-sex sexual attraction as the defining feature of gay identity” (77). This is why Halperin emphasizes, in How To Be Gay, the non-sexual forms male homosexuality takes.

How To Be Gay constitutes, in other words, an inquiry into “queer sensibility, style, emotion, or any specific non-sexual form of queer subjectivity or affect or pleasure,” which is precisely what Kirchick, Vines, and their followers don’t want to acknowledge even exists (77). Instead, they claim gayness is “a sexual orientation, that’s it.”

But, as I point out in my analysis of Vines’s illiberalism, that’s not it.

Three Definitions of Gayness

In How To Be Gay, we encounter three specific definitions of historical gayness, and one is queer.

First, gayness refers to gay male 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 male culture, to how gay men have lived and now live, to the historical continuity and discontinuity of gayness itself.

Finally, gayness refers to gay male desire or gay male 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 itself), but it is not reducible to sexual practices.

Queer gayness includes cultural practices, the main one being identification with certain non-gay, feminine figures (e.g., Joan Crawford and Judy Garland). Queer gayness is something anyone, including straight people and lesbians, can—at least in principle—feel and embody.

Reasonable Pluralism, That’s It 

It’s perfectly fine with me, and I assume with you, if Kirchick (and Vines) prefer a different “whole political orientation,” like gay male identity politics. There are perfectly good historical reasons for doing so. Perhaps Kirchick (and Vines) can extend the rest of us the same courtesy; namely, to situate ourselves in the strands of gay history that make sense of our gayness.

That’s all I am asking for; that’s it.

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Excerpt of James Kirchick’s ahistorical definition of gayness on Real Time with Bill Maher—Ep. #743—with Andrew Huberman and Jonathan Swan—September 25, 2026 (28:16–26:26 remaining in podcast). Lightly edited for clarity; emphasis added:

“More importantly, I think the mask has become for certain segments of the left, their version of the MAGA hat. It really is exactly that. But this story, as much as we want to make fun of it, there’s plenty to make fun of, it actually speaks to a growing divide between gay and lesbian people and queer people, okay?

To be gay or lesbian is a sexual orientation, that’s it. To be queer is to embrace a whole political orientation.

There are straight people who identify as queer. It’s about deconstructing gender, which is how you get, in that story, a lesbian who uses he-him pronouns. Explain that to me. How does that work?

And so the example of this, you mentioned Scott Wiener. What was also said to Scott Wiener, who’s gay and very left-wing, even after he started using the word genocide, it wasn’t enough.

And what did they scream at him in the park in that video? Since you supported Israel, you’re no longer queer. . . . .

I appreciate the honesty of that sentence, because that’s what it means to be “a queer.” To be a queer is to support the Palestinians over Israel, which as a gay person makes, of course, no sense.

And there was a poll done two years ago, and it was a poll of the LGBT community. Who identifies as what within the LGBT community? About 15 percent identify as lesbians, about 21 percent identify as gay, 56 percent identify as bisexual.”