After all, I had my rights-the right to marry, the right to serve openly in the military, the right to assimilate into this oppressive, 'cisheteronormative,' patriarchal society. I was, I quickly learned, not the right kind of 'queer.' I was just another 'cis' (short for 'cisgender,' a word I had never even heard until it was assigned to me, typically as a slur) gay male-in other words, a privileged and unevolved relic of the past. My excitement about the internship quickly gave way to a nauseating mixture of fear and shame. After volunteering for Maryland's marriage equality campaign and a subsequent transgender rights legislation campaign, my aspiration was to become a social justice writer and activist.
That January, I had enrolled at Columbia University to complete my undergraduate degree, a goal I had been postponing for over a decade. I first became aware of this new homophobia in the summer of 2017, when I interned at a major LGBTQ-rights organization.
In fact, it is threatening our very existence. For adult gay people like me, it's clear that this activism does not advance our equality, but in fact compromises our ability to live peacefully in society. There is a frightening new version of homophobia pervading the U.S., disguised as, of all things, 'LGBTQ' activism.
