"Not That There's Anything Wrong With That"

Tracing the paradoxical path from the acceptance of gay marriage to the demonization of trans people

In retrospect, it’s remarkable how quickly the sitcoms of the late ’80s and ’90s developed durable tropes related to gay characters. The simplest version has our straight main characters questioning whether a guest character is gay—though with the immediate clarification that this is a matter of idle curiosity, not judgment. This move was immortalized by Seinfeld’s variation on the theme, where all of our normally quite amoral heroes continually repeat the phrase, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” More fraught, but ultimately more satisfying, is when a main character is misidentified as homosexual. The misunderstanding creates fertile ground for that favorite sitcom technique, where two characters are having a conversation that means something completely different to both participants. In the end, the truth is revealed, preferably just before some meaningful sexual contact is about to occur.

We recently returned to perhaps the most accomplished variation on this trope, the Frasier episode “The Matchmaker.” The situation begins brewing when Daphne, the live-in caretaker for Frasier’s father, complains about her difficulty finding dates. When Frasier meets his new boss later that day, he seems like a perfect candidate, so Frasier invites him over for dinner. When Frasier leaves the room, the boss confides to his producer, Roz, that he’s shocked yet intrigued that Frasier would ask him out so brazenly. Roz, angry at Frasier about another matter, chooses not to reveal the misunderstanding to either Frasier or the boss. The resulting dinner party is a masterclass in double entendres, of which the Frasier writing room are masters—most memorably in the series finale, where Frasier delivers an extended monologue about taking a job in San Francisco that unintentionally but relentlessly confirms the other characters’ false belief that he is dying.

The episode works so well because there isn’t even a hint of homophobia—not even the panicked “it’s okay for you to be gay, but not for me” attitude that Matthew Perry or David Schwimmer exudes when they are inevitably put through this wringer. It’s so obvious that Frasier could come across as gay that he instantly sympathizes with the boss’s misunderstanding, with no desperate disavowal. There’s also no deception involved except for Roz’s witholding of information, and even there we don’t get the sense that she is picturing Frasier collapsing into a “gay panic.” She just enjoys the thought of him embarrassing himself, in a situation (someone thinks a social engagement is a date when it is not) that would be embarrassing regardless of the sexual orientation of those involved. In fact, I would say that this episode, though the contemporary viewer is tensed and ready for homophobic or otherwise “problematic” content, marks a moment when acceptance of homosexuality was beginning to be fully metabolized in mainstream culture.

Such acceptance is always too late. Too many lives were thwarted along the way, too much hatred treated as normal, too much violence, too many lies, for far too long. And as online correspondents have pointed out, the first draft of this essay was too sparing in its treatment of that persecution and violence—which was still ongoing in the ’90s, an extreme manifestation of a casual homophobia that I, like virtually all straight male teenagers, participated in. Sitcoms of course do not directly mirror society. Sodomy laws would remain on the books for over a decade after this exemplary Frasier episode, and it would take nearly another decade before gay marriage became the law of the land.

At the same time, though, compared to other historical examples, the turnaround on acceptance of homosexuality was relatively quick. This is particularly the case for gay marriage, an issue that I don’t recall being mentioned in any context (even negatively, in my religious context) until my early adulthood in the 2000s but that rapidly became accepted cultural common sense—to the point that a conservative Supreme Court justice wrote the opinion making gay marriage the law of the land in 2015. That achievement—one of only a handful of unambiguous progressive advances in my lifetime that weren’t almost immediately reversed—is now clearly in danger given the current composition of the Supreme Court, yet it’s remarkable that reversing gay marriage does not seem to rank very highly in their evil to-do list. It is weirdly possible to imagine a scenario where the United States becomes a violently misogynistic white ethnostate, but gay marriage still remains the law of the land.

The relative durability of the acceptance of homosexuality contrasts with other recent struggles for social justice. The demand of the Black community that they not be indisciminately gunned down by agents of the state—seemingly a much more basic and self-evident demand—did not get the same reception. And now, of course, trans people, who might have hoped for similarly rapid successes by analogy with the successes enjoyed by gays and lesbians, are being demonized and persecuted to an appalling degree.

In short, the acceptance of homosexuality that reached its apogee with the recognition of gay marriage was not something that grew out of the fundamental decency of the American people or the inherently progressive trajectory of our history. I believe one would not go far wrong by reading American history as a repeated demonstration that we only ever do the right thing for the wrong reasons—abolishing slavery as a side-effect of preserving a supposedly sacrosanct “Union,” for instance, or advancing civil rights in the postwar era to deprive the Soviet Union of a potent talking point. In neither of those cases did the negative motives undermine the inherent rightness of the cause advanced. Rather, they provide a necessary explanatory context for understanding why an otherwise oppressive and corrupt society would deign to serve the cause of justice in these particular cases while allowing injustice to fester elsewhere. In other words, pointing out that context is not a critique of the movements that succeeded as being “secretly” conservative or oppressive, but instead a critique of the society that only lets itself do good things for bad reasons.

In the case of gay marriage, I suspect that it provided a temporary fix to the problem of gender identity. Within a few short decades, the traditional relations between the sexes were dramatically altered. Women gained control over their reproductive capacity, they gained the freedom to divorce largely at will, and they rapidly entered the workforce. Those same decades saw the slow decline of men’s prospects, as steady careers in traditionally “masculine” jobs—much less ones that offered the postwar “family wage”—became increasingly hard to come by. Iconic here is Who’s the Boss?, which pairs a high-powered professional woman (who in the premier episode becomes president of her ad agency) with a failed professional athlete who works as her housekeeper. You could explain a lot of online discourse today by simply pointing to Who’s the Boss? and declaring, “This is the future liberals want.” The show makes it fun and appealing, in part because Tony Danza comes across as a lovable cartoon character who sincerely and unregretfully embraces his diminished role. But it is not surprisingly that still a couple generations later, American men have continued to resist taking on even their own fair share of the housework, much less resigned themselves to being housewives.

In short, gender roles were becoming more fluid and uncertain, in ways that threatened the traditional gender hierarchy. Simply going back to the way things were before was not a viable option—any stabilization would have to include recognition of a change. Mainstream discourse on homosexuality provided that. It decoupled biological sex from the most important marker of gender performance (who you want to have sex with), but at the same time it fully stabilized the categories. Everyone simply is male or female and gay or straight, permanently from birth. As I point out in Neoliberalism’s Demons, the “born that way” argument was crucial for overcoming the traditional moral objections to homosexual practice—if everyone’s orientation is simply a brute fact, it is no longer morally relevant and hence it makes no sense to punish it (or, though this was implicit, to “reward” heterosexuality by according it more prestige). But from the perspective of this essay, I suspect that what made this point of moral leverage available was the appeal of a set of categories that was, while new in a sense, at least fully static.

Aside from the inherent justice of ending the centuries-long campaign of persecution against homosexuals and granting them the right for full recognition of their intimate relationships, the acceptance of homosexuality had several other positive side-effects. The notion that one simply is gay or straight at least potentially took some of the anxiety out of straight identity. Whereas a young man in previous eras—and even alarmingly deep into the ’90s—was constantly in danger of being identified as “queer” (or more likely, by harsher terms) for insufficiently vigorous performance of masculinity, now everyone came pre-sorted into “gay” or “straight” categories. This opened up a wider range of gender performance for men, including the effete performance of Frasier, who can react good-naturedly to his misidentification as gay without worrying that it means he somehow “is” gay deep down.

As a straight man myself, I’m obviously approaching this as a participant-observer and hence overemphasizing the male perspective—though I wonder if the widespread acceptance of lesbianism similarly smoothed the way for the normalization of women’s athletics (that most surprising of conservative causes célèbres), for example. But I would say that in this case my natural inclination actually matches up with the emphasis of mainstream culture, which was much more interested in the normalization of male homosexuality and the concomitant clarity it seemed to grant to straight male identity.

Similarly, we could say that the acceptance of gay marriage helped to stabilize and legitimize the model of a companionate marriage of equals that straight couples were struggling to figure out. Gay and lesbian couples provided a model for non-hierarchical marriages where the division of labor did not come automatically pre-sorted. Justice Kennedy’s impassioned declaration that we needed to grant people the right to “love” provided an alibi for imagining we’d achieved the full transformation of marriage from an economic arrangement between two unequal partners into a voluntary joining of equals driven by nothing but sincere romantic attachement.

At this point, I need to address an objection that has doubtless occurred to many readers: namely, that the mainstream view of sexual orientation is false. I should rush to clarify that I agree that it is false. Sexual orientation, like all aspects of sex and gender expression, is indeed a spectrum. Bisexuals exist. There are also people who can and do in some sense change or otherwise choose their sexual orientation. Despite the fact that most human beings are, for obvious reasons of evolutionary history, basically heterosexual and many homosexuals do indeed experience their orientation as fixed, the notion that literally everyone is born “locked into” one of two fully binary orientations is fanciful and absurd.

The first and most common reaction to the spectrum concept has been to multiply stable identity categories. There might be a wider range of options than we thought, but everyone is definitely in one particular one. This multiplication of categories has been pushed to a characteristically extreme degree in online subcultures, where we learn that there are dozens of distinct types of asexuals, for instance. If people find those categories clarifying and helpful for their own lives, I guess I’m happy for them. But my inclination is to say that the entire enterprise is a blind alley and the ultimate goal should be to get people to be comfortable with fluidity and ambiguity instead of trying to help them find the unchangeable “right answer” out of 1000 ultimately arbitrary options instead of 4.

We as a culture do not seem likely to get to that utopia of sexual fluidity any time soon, though, as the differential reception of homosexuality and gay marriage as compared to trans issues vividly illustrates. By analogy with mainstream discourse on homosexuality, trans activists have embraced a “born this way” approach. In this discourse, trans people were “always” the target gender and the gender assigned at birth was equally “always” wrong. In some cases, this has been politically helpful, because it allows people to enter into familiar mental grooves when listening to trans narratives. In other cases, the “born this way” framework has unfortunately fed into the attacks of bad-faith actors, as when trans activists conclude from the notion that one was “always” inherently trans from birth that progressively younger and younger people should be allowed to transition, even surgically. It is not, in my view, an obviously transphobic position to observe that all aspects of sex and gender expression are a spectrum and that all adolescents experience some degree of body dysmorphia due to puberty and thus conclude that one should be cautious about doing anything irreversible until the individual has reached adulthood. In this case, the “born this way” paradigm shuts down a legitimate conversation and provides an opening for bad-faith actors.

But in any case, the “born this way” paradigm was never going to work, because trans experience requires something to change. Even if the mismatch was “always” there and the individual was in some sense “always” the target gender, actualizing that truth requires more than just recognizing that it is the case. Behaviors, names, and pronouns change. In many cases, it means changing your body! I’m very glad that people have the ability to change their bodies in this way. I revile the fact that it is controversial at all, much less that there are people passionately committed to blocking access to trans treatment. Yet the fact that the reaction to trans activism has been so different from the reaction to gay and lesbian activism was predictable from the very terms of the acceptance of homosexuality, which relied on the “born this way” framework to stabilize a crumbling gender paradigm.

The confusion that trans experience has introduced into this mainstream discourse comes out forcefully in the funhouse mirror of right-wing anti-trans discourse. One of the most hateful claims in this discourse is that teachers, by introducing students to the idea of transness, are “grooming” children to make them trans. There is a similar accusation related to introducing concepts of homosexuality, but that is a more subordinate theme—the notion that children are being hoodwinked into switching genders is much more prominent. And I would suggest that the idea of “grooming” a child who is not trans to become trans makes no sense. If the teachers are supposed to be pedophiles, surely enough children of the desired gender are available for them to molest without needing to transform them into the opposite gender. Within this demonizing discourse, then, these teachers are presumably getting off on the violation of gender as such, “mutilating” children as a form of gruesome trolling.

In every demonization campaign, of course, the demons are ultimately doing evil for its own sake—that’s what demons do. But the unique incoherence of the “groomer’s” supposed motives here seem to me to point to a unique unthinkability of trans experience within the dominant gender paradigm, including the augmentations therefore that allowed for the acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage. What this hateful and nonsensical rhetoric expresses is a profound desire for sex and gender identity to be static and unchangeable—in short, “natural”—and an accompanying paradoxical demand that we must act in such a way as to make it so. As with all appeals to “nature” in human politics, the claim undermines itself. What is natural should require no enforcement, and that is why we must imagine supernatural agents—the demonic “groomers” who just love “mutilating” children for its own sake—to explain how violation could even be possible.

Meanwhile, the option of simply not stressing out so much about sex and gender identity and letting people live their lives remains available, if seldom considered and even less often taken.