To the Editor:
Re “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters,” by Matthew Vines (Opinion guest essay, July 2):
In 1990, the year Queer Nation published the manifesto that Mr. Vines quotes in his essay, I was one of that group’s members. I was 19. That same year, the Boy Scouts of America expelled me for being gay, and two years later, I sued.
The case took eight years to reach the Supreme Court, which in 2000 ruled in favor of the Boy Scouts. My Lambda Legal attorney at the time, Evan Wolfson, went on to become a leader in the marriage equality movement that Mr. Vines credits with changing his life.
In his essay, Mr. Vines presents queer confrontation and mainstream acceptance as opposing forces. My life tells a different story. The welcome I found among queer radicals gave me the courage to fight for a place in the most wholesome institution in America. The people in the streets and the people in the courtrooms were the same movement. Often the same people.
I am 55. I survived the AIDS crisis and buried many friends. I have been queer all my life, in the streets and in the courtroom, and I never found those two fights as far apart as Mr. Vines suggests.
James Dale
New York
To the Editor:
Matthew Vines’s guest essay left me with one overriding thought: He’s looking in the wrong direction.
I’ve lived through the fight for marriage equality. The L.G.B.T.Q. community did not win those rights by being polished, restrained or always in agreement. People marched, protested, challenged unjust laws, came out publicly and refused to hide. Some were criticized for being too loud or too radical. History has a way of changing those judgments.
The danger, to me, is a political movement that opposed our equality long before most Americans had ever heard the word “queer.” It is also a movement that keeps finding new groups to target: immigrants, religious minorities, transgender people, people of color and anyone else who does not fit its vision of America.
That is why I struggle with Mr. Vines’s conclusion. Dividing our community into the acceptable and the unacceptable will not change the minds of people who have spent decades trying to roll back our rights. Those coming for us would do so regardless of how polished and restrained our community tried to be.
Garrick Spears
Canaan, N.Y.
To the Editor:
I grew up just south of Matthew Vines in a small town in Oklahoma. I intimately understand the comfort he found in the marriage equality messaging of the 2010s. As an associate legal director at the United Nations Human Rights Council, I wrote some of it.
We earned legal protections by arguing unthreatening sameness. It would be easy to attribute falling levels of public support to the abandonment of a streamlined gay narrative. But the language we use to describe our community is not the problem. We have hit the limits of legal equality while navigating fraying democratic institutions. The MAGA agenda has made L.G.B.T.Q. lives the villain in an old, predictable, antidemocratic story.
A healthy democracy depends on protecting individuality and expression. It does not prescribe a single vision for living, but rather a set of tools to live differently while thriving together. L.G.B.T.Q. people are beautifully and inescapably different. Queer lives are good for democracy. Our stubborn existence and demand for equal dignity are daily forms of democratic resistance.
Robin Maril
Portland, Ore.
The writer is an assistant professor at Willamette University College of Law and the author of “A Queer Guide to Saving American Democracy.”
To the Editor:
I recognize the shame behind Matthew Vines’s essay. It is devastating to be gay (or lesbian or queer) in a homophobic religious community. Yet Mr. Vines misses the profound connection between queer politics and robust Christianity.
Queer politics is, indeed, anti-normative. But the point is not rebellion for its own sake. Decades of queer scholarship and activism have understood the critique of social norms as a way of exposing systems (like gender and the tax code) that make some lives more livable than others. Questioning those norms allows us to be advocates for the people they harm.
Queer politics, like Christ’s teaching, reminds us that our responsibility is not to those with power, but to those who lack it — all those whom the community rejects. Both call us to support those who have less than we do — those facing violence, homelessness, the withholding of medical care or death. Queer politics asks this; gay identity does not.
Queer politics asks more of us than acceptance for ourselves. It asks us to stand with those who remain excluded. That is not a departure from Christian ethics but a reminder of them.
Shannon Brennan
Milwaukee
The writer is an associate professor of English at Carthage College and an associate editor at Edith Wharton Review.
To the Editor:
I am heterosexual, which seems to mean that Matthew Vines is worried I don’t like him. He avoids calling himself queer as a gay man because he finds the term too “adversarial” toward straight people. Indeed, in Mr. Vines’s eyes, offending heterosexual people — or simply confusing them — appears to be the worst mistake available to a gay person who likes having rights.
I was struck by how limiting Mr. Vines’s ideas are. He certainly did not choose to be gay, but in fretting that gay people will make straight homophobes too mad to stop being homophobic, he has certainly chosen to be fearful. If there is a solution to homophobia, it is not to enforce “clarity and moderation” in the ways that human beings are allowed to identify; it is to enlist straight allies to defend the human right to be fluid and radical.
Griffin Larson-Erf
Skokie, Ill.
To the Editor:
I owe a debt of gratitude for Matthew Vines articulating not only the differences between being gay and being queer, but also for reminding us, especially those who might have forgotten the fact, that being gay “is every bit as dignified and human as being straight.”
Like Mr. Vines, I consider myself to be gay and not queer. What’s more, I often bristle when I’m lumped into what often seems like an amorphous mass of nonheteronormative identities.
Admittedly — and now somewhat ashamedly — never having had a desire to be married, I selfishly considered the issues surrounding same-sex marriage as no concern of mine. With the far right’s onslaught against all manner of human rights, the urgency to fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights is palpable. I’m left thinking that perhaps it’s time to be a lot more vociferously queer than I’d have ever considered before.
(Rev.) Shaun S. Brown
San Diego
