One of the most peculiar developments in my lifetime has been the direction gay rights has taken (and if we want to be cynical, which I think is warranted, LGBTQIAABCDEFGH+ rights) and the social conception of sex in general. At the same time that the basics of gay rights achieved the mainstream, people have had less and less sex and (although I could not find studies quantifying it) the availability and prevalence of porn among the general population seems to have increased dramatically. People in 2023 conceive of not just sex but this totally new thing “sexual identity” in a way that would be almost totally unintelligible to someone from 1960.
Depending on one’s hobby horses, these changes are good (increase in porn use is almost certainly related to the concomitant decrease in teenage pregnancies) or bad (it exploits women in the porn industry and sets up unrealistic expectations for sex); they are related (acceptance of gays caused acceptance of porn) or they are independent (it’s all about the Pentiums, baby).
I’m going to mostly reserve my moral judgments here. As someone somewhere once said, “You had some very fine people on both sides,” and I don’t think that jumping to judgment is the best way to understand most social transformations. I am more interested in how certain concepts have evolved. A series of decisions made in the early days of gay rights helped pave the way for Pride, which helped pave the way for sexless sexual identities, and even sexless sex (which I have not-so-cutely abbreviated as “OnlyFans”).
Different paths to gay rights
Especially in America but also in the broader developed world most people today can remember political fights in the 2000s over gay rights. In the end gay rights won out in these places, but under the radar a subtler political fight was going on about why gay rights should be granted, and on what grounds. Anti-gay rights groups claimed (correctly!) that homosexuals had the same rights as heterosexuals to marry someone of the opposite sex: society just did not believe in allowing same-sex unions (or, in some jurisdictions, even same-sex sex). So why was it that gays needed anything at all?
There were two answers to this which came from very different philosophical places:
Homosexuals desire to do this thing, and it is between two adults. Liberal contract theory thus cannot prohibit it.
Homosexual unions are a better way for homosexuals to live and allows them to be integrated into society. Extending this social structure to homosexuals will benefit them directly, and because most of the virtues present among heterosexuals can be present among homosexuals, extending these rights, expectations, and obligations will benefit wider society as well by removing a source of social chaos. This was, in very broad terms, the argument of Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal and people of that ilk.
To label them, (1) is the liberal contractarianist position (for lack of a better term), and (2) is the social integrationist position. One can of course hold both of these beliefs at the same time and they are not necessarily in conflict with each other. But they do reflect very different types of political and social reasoning. As gay rights — first, with the removal of anti-sodomy laws and then with civil unions and marriage — gained traction, it became clear that the most widely accepted reason for it was (1), rather than (2).1
Different paths to “gay”
It should go without saying (but it does need to be said) that “gay” is a socially-constructed identity. People with same-sex desires (and people who have acted on those desires) have almost certainly always existed. It is written about in all eras and from around the world. You can even find it in the animal kingdom, although the consistency of the behavior is highly variable and not very well understood (the animals refuse to sit down for interviews). For unknown reasons, this mismatch between sexual reproduction and desire/behavior seems fairly baked in to the biology of several evolutionary clades (at low levels of occurrence in the general population), and seems to have always occurred among humans as well. Though what to do about it (if anything) has varied by society, in this sense there have always been “gay” people.
But in another sense, “gay” means a grouping together of people according to those sexual desires, and this categorization is not at all transhistorical. People walked around with homosexual desires and behaviors, but men who slept with men and women who slept with women did not necessarily conceive of themselves as part of a larger collective of “gays”. Even if the underlying forces lurking in the brain are constant, the social conception of them as category-forming is not.
In this way, “gay” is a lot like racial categories. So far as I can tell, no one anywhere in the world in the 13th century (or the 4th century) had a category of “black” or “white” people, even if people noticed that some ethnicities were full of darker or lighter skinned people. Pigmentation just wasn’t considered a trait by which one could meaningfully create groups. For most of history, the only meaningful grouping of people was by cultural/ethnic affiliations, not “light-skinned” (what, all of the Celts and Scythians and Germans?) or “dark-skinned” (what, all of the Nubians and people in the Niger?).
So it is with “gay.” Categorization per se isn’t good or bad — it can be meaningful or it can be meaningless — but it has consequences for how society is structured. Homosexuality as we conceive of it today was initially a psychological category created to describe patients who were believed to have a maladaptive set of traits that needed medical treatment. In World War II, the United States implemented psychiatric screening for military fitness and one of the unfit qualities a soldier might have was homosexuality. Those who got into the army and were later discovered (typically because they slept with someone or made an unrequited advance) would be discharged, not with a note that explicitly said “a dirty homosexual pervert” but one that was close enough to that that it could follow them around. (A lot of these men were discharged in San Francisco, and this is why the gay movement in the US was so centered on that city.)
With the later movement for gay rights, there was a choice about what “gay” meant, much like the reasoning for why gays should be granted rights. This choice was heavily influenced by the psychological history that led to the modern category in the first place. Simplifying somewhat, the options for the category “gay” came down to:
Gays are those who engage in sexual acts with members of the same sex.2
Gays are those who have desires (or exclusive desires) for sexual acts with members of the same sex.
Those who held to (1) could say things like, “He has homosexual desires/temptations, but is not gay because he does not act on them.” Those who held to (2) could say things like, “He is gay, whether or not he engages in specific behaviors, because his desires are the same as those who do engage in them.”
The concept of sexual desire directed toward members of the same sex was extremely bizarre to most heterosexual people in the 1990s and early 2000s. A common assumption (helped along by Christianity) was that homosexuals started off their lives as heterosexual, but had grown bored of it and started exploring stranger and more depraved activities (or perhaps they had been damaged sexually and “turned”), an idea which is consistent with definition (1). Gay rights advocates in response said that this exploration-into-homosexuality was a very rare group of horn-dogs and did not represent the typical gay experience, and stressed definition (2) instead. They insisted that the desires of this group of people were different from heterosexuals from the start of their sexuality. (Eventually this went to the extreme of born-this-way.) Ultimately, (2) won out as the meaning of “gay” in the culture, quite in keeping with the original psychological understanding as an internal mental state or condition.
By the end of this period, the agreed-upon cultural understandings were: Gays are people who have a particular set of desires for members of the same sex (regardless of whether they have engaged in same-sex intercourse); Gay rights are grounded in liberal contract theory, i.e. adult desires should not be impeded by social constraints.
Sexual identities without sex
Since being gay was a matter of internal desires, it was definitionally impossible for anyone outside of the self to ascertain if someone was gay. In the absolute extreme, someone in a lifelong loving relationship with a member of the opposite sex could in fact be gay, and someone could engage in homosexual relations without being gay at all (because it wasn’t his true, innermost desires).
Ironically, this idea of “gay” as an internal discovery or self-conception inaccessible to the outside world was readily embraced by the ex-gay movement, which was growing at the same time as the gay rights movement. These groups were attempting to treat homosexual desires (i.e., the cultural definition of gayness) by removing them through therapy, in their goals if not their methods quite similar to earlier psychologists (who by this point had started to give up on the clinical mutability of what they began to call “sexual orientation”). But at the same time, these groups were very concerned with rejecting homosexual identity — that is, one's internal self-conception, which was just as important (if not more so) than the homosexual actions themselves. This all operated under the same cultural idea that gay rights activists had of gayness as an internal property that was at least partially independent from behavior. By this understanding, ex-gay members could (and frequently did) “fall” to their temptations, have homosexual intercourse, and yet insisted that they were not “gay” because they did not self-conceptualize this way. Indeed, they knew they couldn’t truly be gay, deep down, and no one lacking access to their internal experience possibly gainsay them. On the individual level, the ex-gay movement (and the few scattered ghosts of its contemporary remnants) was sharply focused on the interior realm of a person’s self-conception. On the societal realm of legal rights, they were invariably against gay rights,3 the arguments for which focused on rejecting the liberal contract theory of law (the alternative reason, that homosexuals could be integrated into societal structures to the benefit of all, was almost never considered, usually for religious reasons).
In the gay rights movement, the concept of gayness as a sexual self-conception evolved as well. Legal battles and political lobbying relied on the argument that one ought not to impede adults from doing as they wished in a contract. But in the social realm of what “gay” meant, after winning the argument that there was something meaningful about internal desires, the first glimmer of an internal contradiction arose. If gayness resided in an inaccessible internal state, how exactly was this subjective thing supposed to be part of a society and granted rights? One way of course was to have social institutions in which expectations and demands are made of gays (such as marriage), but this veered away from liberal contractarianist view in which rights were being articulated. How do you have a movement centered around something that is definitionally subjective?
For a long time I was confused by the allure that “Pride” and its associated public dry humping held for many people. Sexuality seemed to be something fairly intimate and publicly flaunting it was both gauche and against any possible goal of integration.4
However, I now see Pride as a way of externalizing the inaccessible internal property of being gay. “Gay rights”, outside of its reference to specific legal demands, was fairly abstract, all the more so because of the difficulty in determining who was “gay”. Pride took this subjective experience and made it objective (or at least visible) through performance. Mercifully, it stopped short of public intercourse, but the hypersexualization of the various parades was driven directly by this need to reify an inner and unobservable property. It was a downstream consequence of the cultural definitions and the basis on which gay rights was being demanded.
One could then have Pride in one’s gayness without even being particularly gay in the old-fashioned sense of some kind of relationship. Especially as Americans had less sex and married less (a rate still declining), claiming a sexual identity did not necessarily go together with anything sexual — just the idea that one might do it, or might want to do it (and no guarantee that one ever would). I remember the first time I encountered a man in a long-term heterosexual relationship (who had never been with a man) claiming he was bi, or certainly not heterosexual, because on the inside he knew he was different and he might do those things, one day, though he loved his girlfriend and soon thereafter married her. I thought I had been transported to Mars, but in fact his self-conception was entirely consonant with the broader concept of “gay”!
In the end, this worked strongly against the second idea of gay rights (the integrationist model). Instead, it pushed “gay” in two directions at once: inward as primarily belonging to the realm of an individual’s thoughts and feelings, and outward as a kind of public performance. This is a strange place for a sexual concept to live, as it has everything in it except for sex.
Monadic sex
I am not so much of a social conservative that I will say that this all led to too much porn, and if only we had kept those damned homosexuals at bay then porn websites wouldn’t be among the most visited sites in the world, and cats and dogs wouldn’t be living together, and all the rest. These things are driven by multiple factors: The sex drive is really powerful, visual input through screens is highly stimulating, everything is easier to find via the internet, and so on. However, a sexual identity based on an internal subjective sense and a public (sex-like but not exactly sex) performance is highly compatible with a porn-mediated sexuality (and this may partially explain the relatively higher use of porn by gay as opposed to straight men).
Angela Nagle in Kill all Normies briefly mentions Tumblr as a left-wing reflection of right-wing 4chan, but I think the full book about the influence of Tumblr has yet to be written. Tumblr became famous for its porn, but it was also a place of early alternate identity exploration (including non-binary and other non-traditional trans identities, spoonies, and furries), and these were frequently presented right alongside left-wing political positions. A blog focused on communism may post a naked black transfemme (don’t say woman, it's xe/xer) as part of a trans awareness week and in solidarity with struggling theysters, and a blog focused on posting pornography may take a break to alert its, well not its readership but perhaps viewership, about the importance of fighting the Republican candidate in the Western Pennsylvania election. To some extent, this stuff later moved to Twitter,5 but Tumblr was the incubator.
None of this is unique to the left, as Nagle documents 4chan had much more horrifying and personally cruel imagery than anything on Tumblr and the site overall leaned far-right. However, the equivalent concept of a subjective sexuality was not as prevalent on the right as it was on the left. A sexual identity based around one’s internal state is a sexual identity that finds its full expression naturally through porn, as there’s no second person to get in the way of the full experience. Most porn is of course directed toward heterosexuals (the largest consumer base, after all), but there is no larger cultural understanding there (at least not widespread yet — this may differ in, say, South Korea or Japan) that this sexuality is inherently monadic. A straight man doesn’t perform his straightness by reblogging or enjoying porn content, he’s just horny. The real deal for him is somewhere else. But the gay “real deal”, as it was articulated in the cultural definition of gay as being an internal experience of desire, has no need for a second person.
Porn is really only incidental and diagnostic here. To a considerable degree the pathway I have outlined of sex becoming identity becoming individualistic is something present in all of contemporary Western (and most potently, American) society, and it only happens to affect homosexuals more than other populations at the moment. But looking at why this is so is still illuminating. I don’t imagine that any of the early pioneers of gay rights wanted to get here, but through a series of social changes that are currently most strongly associated with gays, society has finally reached the point where a sexual identity requires no sex and no life partner at all. The greatest point of adult human connection can be turned entirely into a solipsistic exercise. Gays aren’t unique. Through a series of historical accidents, they are just at the bleeding edge of this dubious kind of progress.
This can be seen in the (what I consider to be very tragic) low rates of gay marriage.
There was quite bad terminological confusion which continues to this day, with “gay” sometimes referring to both men and women, and sometimes just men. The term was really chosen because “homosexual” was seen as too clinical and, probably, too judgmental. Now we are cursed with the infinitely worse and meaningless term “queer” which causes me to briefly see red whenever I encounter it.
An interesting exception is that some groups were ambivalent about or even in favor of removing sodomy laws, as these laws would end up targeting many members who inevitably would “slip up,” impeding the therapeutic mission they saw themselves on.
Briefly stepping back to moral judgment, I find the more of keeping sex itself private, while the consequences of it are public — children, cohabitation, public acknowledgments of who is with whom — a notable social good.
The merging of Tumblr with Twitter has led to astounding outcomes, where high-placed journalists have “liked” risqué content, not knowing it was visible to everyone, a comedic tragedy which befell the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman. In the earlier days, journalists confused their porn habits with their political posting habits, the most incredible example of which was probably Kurt Eichenwald posting a screenshot showing himself browsing tentacle porn.