Worst. Pride. Ever.

Will mainstream gays please wake up from the Grand Privileged Delusion?

This is the worst Pride Month in twenty years.

All parts of the LGBTQ community are under attack. Trans people first and foremost, obviously; many of my friends are now in physical danger and unable to access medical care, while the “just asking questions” crowd sits by in silence, refusing to take any accountability for the horrors they helped to unleash.

And right alongside them, women of all kinds, but especially queer, feminist, and gender-nonconforming women, are facing an ugly ‘masculinist’ backlash that glorifies the absolute worst aspects of violent masculinity and promotes a brutish, bullying misogyny not seen in half a century.

But it’s even a bad time to be a boring, white gay man.

A Gallup poll released this month shows support for same-sex marriage and same-sex relationships of any kind dropping significantly, especially among Republicans. Today, only 37% of Republicans say same-sex marriage should be legal, and only 35% say gay and lesbian relationships are “morally acceptable.”

This animus has been, in some places, accompanied by erosion of the marriage right itself, with state legislatures in Tennessee and Idaho passing bills that would enable citizens and organizations not to recognize legally valid same-sex marriages. Other states have enacted a symbolic, literal erasures of queer people from public spaces, such as a nationwide initiative to erase rainbow-colored crosswalks pushed by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and enforced with glee by Florida Governor Ron De Santis.

Republican politicians are even snapping back at Pride Month itself, rebranding June as ‘fidelity month’ or ‘nuclear family month.’ This is not new; every Democratic president since Bill Clinton in 1999 has signed a Pride proclamation each year, while no Republican president ever has.

And then there’s the abandonment of the LGBTQ community by corporate America, which has proven that their early “support” was, as critics always said it was, political posturing. Terrified of appearing to support “DEI” (whatever the fuck that now means to the Right), and worried about misreading the “vibe shift,” corporations have pulled back from supporting Pride month financially or in the workplace. Corporations that have cut back or eliminated their support of Pride events include UPS, Pepsi, Nissan, Citi, Capital One, Loews, Disney, Door Dash, Live Nation, Anheuser Busch, Dyson, Deloitte, Accenture, Comcast, and Tiffany & Co.

Indeed, right here in my New Jersey suburb, the local Pride festival was canceled outright when Audi, a leading corporate sponsor, abruptly pulled its financial support, leaving the scrappy local LGBTQ organization without enough money. (Supposedly, that Pride ‘celebration’ will now happen in October, but there’s still not enough money to pay for it.) Ditto with my hometown of Tampa, which has canceled Pride outright.

So much for ‘rainbow capitalism.’ Maybe we should rename this year’s Pride Month Corporate Shame Month.

Created with Gemini

I’m not here just to kvetch, however, because this is a teachable moment not only for queer people but for all minorities, including my Jewish community. And that’s where I’m going to focus — and at the end, to offer a little bit of vengeful optimism.

Let’s start with the Grand Privileged Delusion.

Over the last few years, some rich gay men have gotten so comfortable, so integrated into American elite society, that many have deluded themselves into thinking that they are now, in fact, part of the elite itself. Many have become Republicans, or deserted trans people, or complaining more about the excesses of wokeness than about America’s march toward authoritarianism and theocracy. Well, dudes, you were all fucking wrong.

Sure, there are Peter Thiels and Tim Cooks at the highest levels of society. And fine, everyone says yass now and co-opts rhetoric and styles from queer Black culture, just as they’ve done for decades. But there are plenty of people who are still physically repulsed or theologically infuriated by our mere existence — and many others who, while not anti-gay exactly, still resent the changes that the last two decades have brought. We’ve never been as secure as we may have once imagined.

There is only one way for racial, sexual, gender, economic, and religious minorities to advance in America: in solidarity with one another. It’s been this way for two hundred years. Jews, queers, people of color (that includes you, conservative East Asians and South Asians!), immigrants, poor and working class people — we can get ahead and make it in this country. The American Dream is real, and it is what I’ll be celebrating in two weeks on July 4. But once we do “make it,” we’re deluding ourselves if we think we can’t lose what we’ve gained. We obviously can, and we obviously have. There will always be those who believe our gains are their losses. And they will always resent us, other-ize us, and regard us as something less than American.

Solidarity is the only way. If we sell out the immigrants or the trans people or whoever, the know-nothings will eventually come for us too.

I know, wokeness is annoying; the Left is often self-righteous, extremist, and bigoted in its own ways; and a lot of what progressives say is ridiculous. But fundamentally, broad coalitions for justice are necessary for our mutual survival. Corporate America and a Christian-dominated GOP do not have our backs, my fellow white cisgays. They never have and they never will.

The Grand Privileged Delusion is also fragile because messaging — especially messaging based on fear and ignorance — works. Which means that when we join with the opponents of justice, we strengthen them.

When gays join in anti-scientific, hyperbolic, and dehumanizing criticisms of trans people, for example, we not only hurt trans people; we strengthen those who are trying to hurt us. Again, I understand that pronouns can be annoying, and that some trans advocates can be insufferable. But fundamentally, gender is a spectrum, gender dysphoria is a thing, and trans people should have the same rights to happiness and bodily self-definition as MAGA-faced Trumpists and GLP-1-and-botox-injecting Hells Kitchen gays do.

And the politicians weaponizing ignorance against trans people will do the same against gay people as soon as they have the chance.

(Oh, and while we’re at it, almost no trans teenagers get surgery; that’s just a lie; we’re mostly talking about hormone therapy. And overall, trans athletes have no statistical advantage over non-trans ones; that’s another lie. And no, trans women aren’t men pretending to be women so they can sneak into bathrooms; that’s another lie. Gays don’t groom kids either.)

Queer issues are not some anomalously wrong position on an otherwise sane conservative agenda. Disdain for gay people is woven into the conservative tapestry, along with restricting women’s rights (and humanity), antisemitism that dwarfs anything on the left, racist pseudo-science, lies about immigrants, and the entirety of the culture war. You can’t disentangle these knots — you can only delude yourself into thinking they aren’t there.

I do want to end with some vengeful optimism.

At least in 2026, the Culture War has become a kind of base issue for Republicans. Meaning, it fires up the true believers, but alienates independents and moderates. In Florida, voters are reportedly exhausted by the endless Wars on Woke, and would like to be able to afford to take a vacation instead. In Texas, Ken Paxton’s overcompensating attacks on James Talarico do not seem to be making headway, as Talarico sticks to the ‘affordability’ playbook that is working well for Democrats.

This doesn’t mean that average Americans support (or understand) trans people; they do not. It just means that they’re more focused on kitchen-table issues, as they were in 2024 when they voted Donald Trump into power. There never was a true mandate for tech libertarians, MAHA, or the Christian Right — those constituencies just allied themselves with a con man who won for reasons that had nothing to do with them, i.e., persuading moderates he’d do a better job with the economy than the old guy or his vice president. Anti-gay and anti-trans messaging can affect public opinion and can cause a great deal of harm, but it usually doesn’t win elections.

And this year, the wind is not at the bigots’ backs. Their chosen messiah is increasingly seen as a madman who has broken nearly every promise he made to voters: he has started wars, worsened the economy, and far from ‘draining the swamp’ he has become the most corrupt president in American history, by far. Republicans aren’t going to lose because of their attacks on queer people — they’re going to lose because Trump is wildly unpopular. But that’s fine. They are going to lose.

And we are keeping the receipts. We know who stuck with us, who opposed us, and who quietly slunk away, hoping we wouldn’t notice. Remember, there are people in positions of power who thought the cops were right to break into Stonewall.

I hope that we gays have learned our lesson. The Right will always come for us, and even moderate, sensible Republicans ultimately vote against us as well, because they are part of a political party. Corporations follow the money, and when the bad guys have it, they align with them — just ask Volkswagen, BMW, Opel, IG Farben, Krupp, and Deutsche Bank. This is what capital does. There is no rainbow capitalism anymore than there was Nazi capitalism. Though there are exceptions, mostly there is just capitalism.

Both/And is, in large part, about transcending binary oppositions in various forms. Lately, though, I wonder if there is a fundamental choice to be made between cruelty and compassion, one that animates all of what I’ve said so far. How that choice plays out in policy is another matter, and reasonable people can disagree. But the choice itself feels fundamental. And surely, anyone who has been at the receiving end of cruelty ought to know that there is only one moral one.

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Here’s some news links:

• I think the new government science funding ‘guidelines’ may be the most underreported story in America.

• Holy shit, Tulsi Gabbard really has been following her cult leader’s insane political dictates for years now.

• This article in New York Magazine about a person using AI agents to run her life has me shook. Am I falling behind?

• I was equally disturbed by this NY Times piece about a woman whose sons are really into UFC. Is this who my daughter will have to date someday?

• Let’s all take one guess which recently-79-year-old man got special FDA permission to try this experimental (in America) obesity treatment.

• Speaking of him, I loved this Paul Krugman piece about how Trump is now the world’s greatest booster of renewable energy. Unintentionally of course.

• Finally, I also loved this Jules Evans interview with a Catholic exorcism specialist. “I have a unique set of skills, he said.”

Strange days indeed. Happy Pride a/k/a Fidelity Month.