There’s Good News and Bad News
The air is coming out of the Rainbow balloon. Pride parades and festivals have suffered budget deficits, bled corporate sponsorships and had poorer attendance since 2023, the year of peak Pride.
More Americans, and especially conservatives, are skeptical of Pride. Support for same-sex marriage has dipped. More people are willing to boycott companies that support Pride. As people bristle at woke propaganda, support for gay rights, which rests so much on elite and government power, suffers. Pride depends on endless propaganda to support its endless claims. More people are now noticing and acting accordingly.
Part of this propaganda is that the arc of history is supposed to bend toward ever-more tolerance for queerness (by which I mean doing LBTQ+ things). According to Gallup, Americans identifying as queer increased from 3.5% in 2012 to over 9% in 2024. Support for same-sex marriage exploded from around 30% in 2001 to 71% in 2022. Other evidence for liberalizing views on queerness is not hard to come by (see David Ayers, “Homosexual Acceptance among Evangelicals,” 2022).
Yet the arc has so far yet to bend! Things could get so much queerer! In America, a pretty stable minority of 25-35% think same-sex sex is always wrong, roughly double the percentage seen in Western European countries like Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Germany and Great Britain. Support for same-sex marriage is dipping. Think of all the people who are not queer because of our heteronormative culture. When will the queer revolution be over? When 50% of people are queer? When 50% of marriages are same-sex?
Whether America becomes ever queerer seems to depend on the continued ascendancy of Pride in people’s hearts. The Pride gambit wins public acceptance and affirmation for all manner of sexual queerness through a defense of individual autonomy, dignity, and choice. Pride stands for the proposition that queers must never defend or even describe what they do; they just defend their sacred right to do it.
Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen laid out the Pride gambit in a crucial, neglected book, After The Ball: How American will Overcome its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 1990s. For Kirk and Madsen, winning the public for queerness is three parts public relations and one part quasi-moral reform. On the public relations front, Americans will overcome their fear and hatred of gays if the perverts, screamers, pedophiles, and other weirdos within the queer movement are silenced and marginalized, while only normal gays are platformed.
Gay rights win by making queerness bourgeois, ordinary, and American, by making queers into virtually normal Prouds. Whereas queers of the 1970s did not want to serve in America’s supposedly fascist military, the Prouds wanted to serve openly and patriotically in the military. Queers from the sexual liberation thought marriage was an iron-cage of capitalist tyranny, while the Prouds wanted in on marriage.
The Pride movement embodies a narrative, as seen in Pres. Bill Clinton’s declaring June Pride Month in 1999. Gays are virtually normal, bourgeois American citizens. People who deny the normality of queerness are discriminatory, haters and despicable homophobes. Embracing Prouds fulfills the American promise.
Kirk and Madsen knew their strategy faced a few problems. First, queers really are abnormal. “Straights hate gays not just for what their myths and lies say we are,” Kirk and Madsen wrote, “but also for what we really are.” Keeping the abnormals out of the public sphere would help Americans overcome their fear and hatred of gays. Second, Kirk and Madsen thought message discipline required that gays never exchange public displays of affection like holding hands, kissing, or anything else and that the abnormals should be sidelined until further notice.
Effective propaganda would be helped by self-policing and moral reform of a sort among queers. Prouds could, Kirk and Madsen argued, be less sexually compulsive, narcissistic, nihilistic, self-indulgent. Their interest in having sex with children should wane (or recede into private) and fewer should have sex in public parks, bathhouses, or gay bars. Less flamboyance. No public displays of affection. The movement would platform sympathetic Prouds like the Tom Hanks character in Philadelphia. Gay rights would be about hospital visitation and inheritances rather than bathhouses, pedophilia, and sodomy.
The Pride gambit contained serious ambiguities. Kirk and Madsen imagined a time, after Americans came to love the Prouds, when the cross-dressers, drag queens, pedophiles, and other weirdos would be brought back from exile. “In time,” as Kirk and Madsen wrote, “as hostilities subside and stereotypes weaken, we see no reason why more and more diversity should not be introduced into the protected image.” Or: “gays must, at this moment, prefer reveille to reverie” (emphases added). Would Queers have to hide public displays of affection forever? Would they ever be free if they could not hold hands in public? Would Americans embrace Dylan Mulvaney, RuPaul, and Bruce Jenner as they embraced Tom Hanks in Philadelphia?
Thus the long term problem for Prouds: After their victory, queers would act and dress like it was 1975, but they would talk like oral arguments from Obergefell.
When the arc of history seemed to bend toward normalizing the Queer, connecting the trans cause to same-sex marriage seemed like a sure-fire win for the trans. Hard and soft power went all in on this strategy. What happened is different. Transing kids, platforming drag queens, and grooming children with comprehensive sex education have tainted same-sex marriage and the Gay Pride gambit among many. We are passing Peak Pride as a result.
The Hegelian synthesis of Proud acceptance and affirmation does not easily mix with the Queer reality of trannies, pedophiles, drag queens and the rest. The synthesis can only be maintained through ever more severe propaganda–hard power of cancellation against some, soft power against others. As the propaganda gets turned up, more people notice and get turned off by the propaganda and the Pride. Every aspect of the Queer and Pride synthesis is disturbed by its relationship to regime propaganda. In fact, they come to associate Pride with propaganda as such, to the detriment of Pride.
Those celebrating Pride today are resuscitating a corpse, practicing empty rituals. Passing peak Pride does not, however, mean we are passing peak Queer. Efforts to win greater acceptance and liberation for more queers will be weirder, departing from the Kirk and Madsen playbook. Just as the civil rights movement was followed by Black Power, so the normalizing Pride movement will be followed by a return to more in-your-face, raunchy queer activism. Passing Peak Pride will, most likely, make the queer movement more offensive and grotesque to bourgeois sensibilities. Its appeal will be narrower and more violent, but its claims broader and more real.
