The Gay Civil War is Heating Up

The performative loathing and contempt for LGB Alliance is just the latest expression of a long-festering conflict between two wings of what used to be the gay rights movement.

This is a longer version of an article I wrote for The Critic this week.

I’ve combined it with the thread I put out making similar points on Twitter last night. Martina Navratilova retweeted it. Not that I’m boasting or anything.

Remember the bad old days when homosexuals had to meet in secret in case we were outed and lost our jobs? If you’re too young to remember them, don’t worry. Up and down the country those scenarios from the past are being re-enacted, as gay events are picketed by thugs who hound attendees and try to identify them online in order to get them fired.

It’s not wild-eyed Calvinists doing the bullying now, though. It’s trans activists and their “allies”, usually angry straight men who identify as queer, whatever that means. In the past it meant “homosexual”. Now self-identified queers are often in straight relationships and hate the word “homosexual” as well as, it seems, homosexuals themselves.

A prime example of this new but rather old bigotry was in full view last weekend when LGB Alliance held its third annual conference in central London. As in the two previous years, an all-day picket harassed and cat called those attending. Loudspeakers blared and placards declared that LGB Alliance was an evil Hate Group. In the days leading up to the picket, the organisers urged protesters to wear masks, no doubt to add to the friendly atmosphere. LGB Alliance’s crime is to argue that same sex attraction might have something to do with biological sex. And as we all know to suggest that sex exists in any meaningful way has become akin to a hate crime. How did our ancestors manage?

From the day LGB Alliance first met in October 2019 —at a secret venue, lest the event be disrupted — the woke left and wider LGBTQ+ lobby have been gunning for it. There have been petitions, attempts to remove its charity status, trolling of journalists who dared to interview its members, and its founders have been defamed as everything from neo-Nazis to … part of a Christian fundamentalist conspiracy. In 2021, the SNP’s John Nicolson MP even claimed LGB Alliance was behind a secret attempt to swing the elections for his party’s national executive. Like anyone would want to sit on that accursed body.

So what gives? Why are people who think of themselves as progressive so unhappy about an organisation that has the audacity to argue for gay rights?

One reason, by now familiar and well-rehearsed, is that around a decade ago, the worldwide gay movement, flush with success after winning all the rights we’d ever thought we were likely to get, realised it needed a new high-profile cause to raise money for. Come in the …Trans umbrella…with your non-binary illusions, madey-uppy pronouns, gender spectrums and all the other BS…. your time has come.

The problem is that in a world cluttered with LGBT+ and LGBTQ+ etc ….the very name of LGB Alliance strikes some as a reproach. In a speech last year the writer Russell T Davies even claimed that by leaving the T off its name, LGB Alliance was killing trans people. Think of that next time you donate to the RSPCA or Childline, who have yet to add the letter T to their names.

There is another reason for the dispute though. It’s the re-emergence of a longer, deeper and more existential argument that has been bubbling ever since the birth of the modern gay movement; one that has erupted again and again over the years as the supporters of two very different strategies have done battle. At its heart, it’s a dispute over the very purpose of a gay rights movement.