Gay and Lesbian are realities. Not Labels

A response to Peter Tatchell's incoherent call for a bisexual utopia

This is an open letter in response to a piece by Peter Tatchell you can read for yourself here

19th April 2022

Dear Peter,

1.       I’m writing an open letter to you in respect of your piece “Sex Beyond Labels” published in the suitably offensively named journal “Queer Majority”. Given how lost you appear to be to your vision of a forthcoming bisexual utopia (which seems to me not to have much existential use for us pesky gay men who insist on calling ourselves gay men), I suspect you won’t respond but that’s no matter. Frankly it’s far more important that gay people see those we’ve lost to gender challenged. I begin by cautioning you that those who most yearn for utopias of one sort or another have a very poor historical pedigree typically ushering in the diametric opposite.

2.       Your piece reads like an eccentric manifesto for bisexual supremacy which I have thankfully yet to hear a single actual bisexual in the real world endorse or support. Primarily, should you read this, I want you to understand how alarming and offensive your piece is to us regular homosexuals, you remember, the people you and your friends at Stonewall used to campaign for back before that charity started equating lesbianism with an attraction shaped by “societal prejudice”.  

3.       Your central premise is that bisexuality is now more prevalent in the West and that the terms heterosexual and homosexual will eventually fade from use which seems to me the logical precursor to the same happening to the political structures associated with homosexual activism. You go further, of course, and make the case against the categories themselves saying “This conception of human sexuality is much more complex, diverse, and blurred than the traditional simplistic binary image of “hetero” and “homo” so loved by straight moralists and — often — by many lesbians and gay men.” Forgive me for being a simplistic gay man Peter, but I have a few things to say about this.

4.       In the first place the existence of a category of bisexuals (who you seem to approve of telling us they’re “complex and diverse”) is not logically disproof of the category of homosexual or heterosexual in the same way that the existence of dogs is not proof that cats are made up mythical creatures. Further, Homo and heterosexual are orientations and they are not complex matters. To pretend otherwise it to connive at their existential deletion. Now you may not personally regard them as sufficiently “diverse” and you may (eccentrically) associate the existence of these categories with “straight moralists” but know this – to quote a former gay charity “Some people are gay. Get over it”. I am one such person, never so much as kissed a girl, I am exclusively same sex attracted, I stand at one end of a spectrum and I’m proud of who I am and I’m proud of people like me and what we’ve achieved. I add only that what you say here is, of course, contradicted some paragraphs earlier where you pray in aid the work of Dr. Alfred Kinsey thus “He found that human sexuality is, in fact, often a continuum of desires and behaviours, ranging from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality.”

5.       These categories matter in legislation and policy. All categories and definitions are in fact important as an elementary protection for the vulnerable against anarchy which only ever benefits the powerful. That which lacks definition and certainty is that which you have utterly no hope of protecting. Ask women. See what a making a battleground of the word “woman” has done to female sports, prisons, single sex spaces or the rape shelters where users objecting to mixed sex staff provision are told to “reframe their trauma”. It is of course no coincidence that your eccentric bisexual mandate comes from the same stable as these gender-related matters, “queer theory” from which this all springs is like a digestive acid which functions only to compromise and remove all logical boundaries, often it seems solely for the sake of doing so.

6.       It matters of course to same sex attracted persons that we are accurately defined in law as we are via s.12 of the Equality Act 2010, without that definition we have no protected characteristic or legal “cause of action” from which to base discrimination or harassment claims. Similarly, it matters in health policy so we can do things like track HIV or problem drug use in gay male populations, or employment so we can measure how lesbians are doing in the workforce, in short it matters across all areas of policy. So please don’t disparage my accurate recognition that specificity in legislation and policy is somehow the ethical equivalent of concerns held (apparently) by “straight moralists”. Being able to accurately define who and what we are and politically organise around commonalities reflected in legislation is one of the greatest achievements of, and foundational principles of gay activism.

7.       You say of people in the future that “They won’t feel the need to label themselves (or others) as LGB or straight because, in a future non-homophobic civilisation, no one will care who loves whom. Love and desire will transcend sexual orientation. The demise of homophobia is likely to make the need to assert and affirm gayness (and straightness) redundant - or at least much less common.” Gender is your brain on paradox and here we see a prediction that a social movement which does nothing only produce labels and endless dreary flags might once and for all case the practice which seems to me the definition of naïve. Gay identities, spaces, friendship groups, political movements are the necessary indicia of membership of a minority community. We will continue to be a minority community and as such will plainly require such, further, it is our fundamental right to call ourselves what we are. This is not a mere label, it is a fundamental part of our political struggle. The fact you regard LGB as labels an no other letters in the increasingly absurd alphabet is a telling one and it tells me the gravity of the threat posed by gender to homosexuality is existential in nature.

8.       I add this. The entire premise of your piece is that gay rights movements have essentially achieved such successes that a bisexual utopia for those who might previously have been exclusive heterosexuals now beckons. I disagree and take the view that the homophobia of gender is now reaching dangerous levels in the West. The gender movement, which you appear to support, offers only the existential threat I have described and remains the only political movement outside of organised religion to construe the phrase “same sex attraction” as hateful. It is the only movement where the safeguarding lead at the Tavistock had to bring a whistleblowing case because she formed the view homophobia was driving referrals. It is the only movement that calls lesbians “sexual racists” or gay men “genital fetishists”. It is the only movement that cannot accept the sexual autonomy and boundaries of lesbians and invented the term “cotton ceiling” to describe them. It is the only movement that cannot accept the sexual autonomy and boundaries of gay men and invented the term “boxer ceiling” to describe them. It is the only movement I’ve seen in my lifetime that has led to the UK’s premier formerly gay charity ending up in court accused (on plausible evidence) of trying to adversely affect the employment status of a black lesbian. It is the only movement where a biology denial charity tries to remove the charity status from a charity devoted to same sex attracted persons – not even religions tried that one. In short, it is the only movement that cannot accept same sex attraction and seeks to shame, compromise or convert those who are same sex attracted. It seems to me that one has to speak from a position of enormous privilege to take the view, as you seem to, that broadly speaking matters are well for politically for those of us who are same sex attracted. They are markedly not. I would also urge you to examine statistics regarding acceptance of what the public are told is the “LGB..etc..” community, they are headed in the wrong direction, particularly in respect of the young mostly, I suspect, entirely due to the excesses of gender.      

9.       You end your piece hopefully describing the appalling homophobia of a world where homosexuality was criminal when you were younger by saying in the future “we will no longer feel the same need to define our sexuality so rigidly and exclusively. Bravo!” I ask only this. Where do exclusively same/opposite sex attracted people fit into this? We who have no choice but to describe our sexuality in such terms? We who aren’t engaging in the practice of “defining” but simply accurately telling people the truth about our sexual orientations? Is it your view we are being impermissibly rigid? Where’s our “Bravo!” Peter? Do we matter in any of this?  

Dennis Noel Kavanagh