We’re a Coalition, Not a Community
Gays, It’s Time to Reclaim Our Voice
Categorizing LGBTQ+ people as a single community, rather than a broad coalition of diverse groups, is paralyzing the advancement of services, spaces, and political outcomes most of us want.
Recognizing our coalition-ness would allow for a greater diversity of thought and, more importantly, more resources for the goals we all agree on.
This gay man would rather defeat MAGA authoritarianism and celebrate gay male culture than land a painful blow to any of the other letters in the rainbow alphabet coalition, but the TQ+ letters of our coalition are making that difficult.
So, I’m writing this essay.
Little, if anything, is being done within the LGBTQ+ Community to further the development of gay culture. Bringing that up is one of the many things that’s unpopular within the current rainbow alphabet zeitgeist..
Differences of thought are simply not allowed. The rainbow alphabet is “all in” on the needs of TQ+. The rest of you need to not only chip in and help, but you also need to accept LGB invisibility. We’re all Queer now. End of story.
Only a heretic would share any comment on “gender affirming care” or "puberty blockers” outside of the approved ideological orthodoxy, which is “I agree with anything and everything the TQ+ activists say.”
As an LGBTQ+ “Community,” currently dominated by the TQ+s, we are forming circular firing squads, performing purity tests, and then eliminating people, their talent, and their resources rather than building things.
We Need To Talk
After my last Substack post, "On Edge" (a poem about my political angst), a friend who has always been real with me texted to see if I was okay. I told him about sitting on an essay instead of publishing it because I didn’t want to add more heft to our frighteningly polarized, burn-it-all-down community conversation. But I had to say something, so I wrote the poem.
He replied, “I am frustrated with the politics of our community as well. Not sure what the answers are, and it is hard to discuss.”
It really is hard to discuss.
My friend and I saw each other at two parties soon after that. We didn’t discuss it. The gays I tried to bring it up with quickly changed the subject or excused themselves from my presence.
The meta‑message: Only one sanctioned script is safe. Say it wrong, and you’re out!
Having any opinion other than “Anything the TQ+s want is what I want” is queer heresy.
We Can Share
There are enough resources for each letter of the rainbow alphabet coalition to focus on the needs of its own group and then bring those needs to the community conversation.
A coalition allows each group (L, G, B, T, Q+, etc.) to:
Identify its own authentic specific needs without apology.
Build its own cultural confidence, spaces, and support structures.
Bring clarified priorities to a central table, like delegations to the UN, where we can collaborate on overlapping agendas.
That’s the work our modern LGBT Centers (and allied institutions) need to lean into: conveners, translators, mediators. NOT enforcers of a single orthodoxy.
Let’s work together on the things we agree on and let people have diverse opinions.
All of us working together on the goals we honestly believe in will result in things being created rather than watching things fall apart as we entertain endless “ouch” sessions that go nowhere.
Disagreement ≠ disloyalty.
Debate ≠ bigotry.
Silence out of fear ≠ solidarity.
Need permission?
Hey gay!
Yeah, I’m talking to you; you have a difficult time asking for anything gay.
I understand.
During the short time I ran for a seat on the West Hollywood City Council, I quickly learned (in a city that is 40% gay men) that gays don’t give themselves permission to talk about or prioritize gay stuff.
Don’t worry, we can do gay stuff while simultaneously working on broader, alphabet coalition stuff as well.
Consider this your permission slip!
You have permission to use your agency to advocate for your gay self.
Let’s Do It!
Let’s celebrate the freedoms our hard-won civil rights victories afford us.
Let’s build physical spaces for gay men to drop into and discuss the realities of being homos.
Let’s work towards opening European-style bathhouses.
Let’s host annual gay men’s conferences to develop strategies on everything from coming out to dying with dignity.
Let’s change the laws that make that possible.
Currently, we are not working towards ANY of those goals.
Just Gays and LGBs are Talking
Some gay, lesbian, and bisexual people (same-sex attracted people) are already talking about it.
If you look beyond polite silence, there’s a growing set of LGB‑forward or gay‑led platforms wrestling with these tensions: The Queer Majority (Substack), HumanGayMale, Just Gay Germany, and the various LGB Alliance orgs (UK, USA, Australia, Germany, Norway, Ireland).
Unfortunately, a lot of their conversations focus on TQ+ issues they believe are at odds with LGB issues. I want more strategy sessions on building LGB infrastructure that celebrates and preserves LGB cultures.
Many in these groups are quite angry–like I was when I wrote the piece I didn’t post.
I’m doing my best to keep most of my attention on creating things for gays and less on calling out the negative impacts of TQ ideologies on LGB people. But I am writing this essay, so I obviously think there are things wrong with our current political and operational configuration.
I listened to Andrew Sullivan on The Queer Majority podcast with Ben Appe and found it enlightening. It dives deep into the problems of TQ ideology. Here’s a taste: “We have little in common. LGBs love their own sex while TQs are in conflict with their own sex.”
I’ll let Sullivan parse out those issues while I keep my focus on gay stuff.
His interview is particularly compelling because Sullivan is speaking publicly with another gay man on these heretical issues.
So far, the only gay on gay conversations I’ve had on these issues have been well hidden from public view. One was with a massage client in my studio after his massage. He works at the LGBT Center in Los Angeles and can not speak his mind at work about the dearth of gay offerings. Others have occurred with acquaintances in one-on-one conversations in the sauna at the gym or with fuck buddies in the sanctum of a bedroom.
So far, here in Los Angeles, every gay-gay conversation I have had on these issues has been in the shadows.
These conversations shouldn’t feel rare in 2025, but they are. Let’s change that.
Most But Not All
I have always supported non-discrimination in public accommodations for TQ+ people as outlined in Title II Of The Civil Rights Act.
Let’s get LGBTQ+ folks included in that law!
I support TQ+ people on most of their issues, but our issues are sufficiently dissimilar to require different lobbying groups.
Things I will fight for alongside every letter of the rainbow alphabet:
Non‑discrimination / civil rights inclusions.
Protection from violence and harassment.
Mental health support and suicide prevention.
Youth safety and anti‑bullying measures.
Accessible evidence‑informed healthcare free from political distortion.
Let’s Talk: Invest In Gay Culture
We can keep policing language and reciting scripts, or we can mature into a coalition that trusts its authentically expressed parts to flourish and then collaborate.
Differentiation plus solidarity is a strength formula, not a weakness.
Let’s evolve from performative unanimity to productive pluralism (a fundamental liberal idea), and start building the things we still need.
Let’s talk about gay stuff.
I’ll host.
Small groups, Zoom salons, in-person meetups, something.
If you’re game, feel free to drop a comment, forward this to a friend, or reply privately. Let’s sketch out what a functioning coalition looks like in practice.
Because if we don’t build it, we’ll just keep fighting over words like, community, while the spaces we’ve already built continue to fade into nothingness.
Mike, thank you for raising a difficult and necessary conversation. I appreciate your argument that our LGBTQIA+ coalition contains diverse identities, interests, and needs that aren’t always well served by an assumption of uniformity. Framing us as a coalition rather than a monolith resonates deeply.
Still, from my vantage point, primarily among gay and bi men, I don’t see the dominance of TQ+ interests in quite the same way. Instead, I see a disproportionate targeting of TQ+ individuals by political and cultural forces that aim to dismantle protections for the entire queer spectrum. In my view, TQ+ folks haven't "taken over" the movement, they've taken the brunt of the backlash. That doesn't negate the need for space to develop and honor gay culture; it just shifts the urgency of our resistance.
We're not just dealing with internal fragmentation; we're up against a rising tide of external threats. If we allow ourselves to fracture under the pressure of difference, we’ll lose critical ground for everyone in this coalition. The loss of protections for one segment makes it easier to erode rights for the rest.
That’s why your suggestions, to celebrate gay culture, open physical spaces, and amplify gay men's voices, are powerful and timely. But they shouldn't come at the expense of solidarity. If we frame our efforts as parallel growth rather than opposition, we may find more allies than adversaries.
I believe the solution lies in pluralism with purpose: each group should be free to articulate and pursue its specific goals, but always return to a shared table for collective strategy. Let’s be unapologetically gay while remaining vocally united against discrimination, violence, and censorship that targets any part of our spectrum. Let’s build coalitions where collaboration is our strength, not our compromise.
Thanks again for starting this discussion. I still feel heard and included as a gay/bi man, but I agree with you, it's time for more visible leadership, more creative space, and more open dialogue across our beautifully complicated spectrum.
I'm as supportive of trans rights as anyone--and I suspect more so than you--but there needs to be some space among us queers for gay men to meet as men. It's a cultural problem more than a political one.
In the past fifteen years, we've seen a move away from the idea of gay male culture centering around men loving men, in favor of an idea of gay male culture centering around defying masculine gender norms. (David Halperin's 2012 book "How to be gay" is a prominent articulation of such views.) Masculinity is no longer a source of erotic attraction, but the source of all evil, to be extirpated as much as possible from our imaginative life. In practice, this means a gay male culture centered almost entirely on fabulousness and diva-worship. It's pretty much the sort of gay male culture now celebrated by mainstream media.
In this culture the sort of gay men who are simply looking for connections with other gay men--or who want to articulate their experiences with such connections in some sort of culture--come off as sexist (not in touch with their feminine side), assimilationist, and worst of all, old-fashioned. It's an idea of gay male experience that rejects the bulk of gay male experience as insufficiently queer (and I'm not sure it does much better with trans experience). Personally, I don't know how to deal with it; the more I read the queer press, the more I think of Elizabeth Bishop telling Randall Jarrell, "After I go through one of the literary quarterlies I don't feel like reading a poem for a week, much less like writing one."