In 2017, when I was 33, I finally enrolled at Columbia University to earn my undergraduate degree. After volunteering for Maryland’s marriage equality campaign and a subsequent transgender rights legislation campaign, I had become hooked on social justice and knew I’d be a more effective crusader with a college degree under my belt. When my first semester began in January 2017, the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration, I couldn’t wait to commune with like-minded, liberal people in the relative safety of an ultraliberal campus. But I had a hard time finding like-minded people because no one appeared to be thinking for themselves.
There was only one accepted (and very reductive) narrative: White men colonized, black and brown innocents suffered. And I also found myself alone because, at Columbia, the workings of one’s mind mattered little compared to the color of one’s skin, one’s sex, or one’s gender expression. It didn’t matter what I thought or why I thought it. I was reduced to my perceived identity, a “cisgender” white man who, it was believed, was only capable of thinking one way. Transgender people, Muslims, and so on thought other respective ways, but always in groups.
At first, it helped that I was gay, a qualifier I would dutifully disclose before speaking up in class, but before long, that stopped earning me any real diversity points. Somewhere, someone important had issued a new decree: White “cis” gays had never done anything to advance the cause of equality, that they had in fact trampled upon the queer black and brown bodies of purer activists to get where they are today. Suddenly “gay” was out. And forget “lesbian.” Everyone was queer, including, to my confusion, people who weren’t gay or lesbian, even though “queer” had long been a slur specifically aimed at homosexuals and was later reclaimed by gay activists as a source of pride. (“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!”)
During my last semester, I took a nonfiction writing workshop, in which students submit personal essays to their classmates for critique. One student, a young white woman, wrote about the demise of her friendship with her roommate. In the essay, the author mentions that, as a “queer” person, she feared the influence her roommate’s bigoted father might have on his daughter. The author, who was about as gender-nonconforming as Candace Cameron, repeatedly references her long-term boyfriend in the essay. I was befuddled. During the class, I shared my confusion. “As a reader, I’m just not sure what she means when she calls herself ‘queer,’” I said. Nobody made a peep.
It may sound like I’m acting as gatekeeper to the gay, or, if you prefer, “queer,” identity. That’s not my intention. I’m just having a hard time believing this young woman is queer. If she’s not actually queer, why would she say that she is?
Maybe the queer theory she was reading in her women’s and gender studies class had rendered sexuality, so visceral to ordinary human life, purely theoretical to her. More likely, it’s because, deep down, she was scared. She was about to graduate college, and having attended an elite university for four years, where she’d been battling it out for internships, fellowships, and jobs, she’d gotten a good measure of the economic landscape that awaited her outside Columbia’s gates. It would be difficult finding a job, now that intersectionality has captured corporate America via multibillion-dollar “diversity” initiatives, replacing merit-based hiring practices and allowing for open discrimination against whichever races, sexes, genders, and orientations have been deemed too privileged. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that my former classmate has since shaved her head and changed her pronouns to “she/they.”
“Queer” is a politics. To say you’re queer is to state your ideology. In fact, “queer” means “anti-capitalist” more than it means “homosexual” anymore, which, for someone who has a near-anaphylactic allergy to hypocrisy, is maddening. Calling yourself “queer” when you’re neither homosexual nor transgender is a purely capitalist reaction — in the sense that, as any good capitalist accepts, incentives matter. The real currency in this set is marginalization and victimhood, which is why everyone is suddenly “coming out” as “LGBTQIA+” or posting obscure ailments and mental illnesses in social media profiles — because that’s the only way to get hired. To adopt vague but useful outward identity characteristics for personal gain rather than as a way of expressing personal traits renders us mere walking avatars, simulacra of our social media personalities, not real. But it ensures one’s membership in an oppressed and therefore hirable, and immune to cancel culture, group.
Only it is more exploitative. Sure, corporate raiders might sound a little heartless about their economic outlook every now and then. But at least, as the saying goes, it’s not personal — it’s just business. They’re not sacrificing their entire identities.
What I’ve concluded from seeing my true, unchangeable identity used as politics is that identity politics is a dead end. “Demisexuals,” nonbinary people, straight guys who “dabble in gay stuff” here and there — you can have the “queer” identity. I don’t want to be part of a politico-religious group in which I must stop thinking for myself. I am a human, not a voting bloc. Queerness used to be nonconformity. Now it is the ultimate conformity.
Ben Appel is a writer living in New York City. He is at work on his first book, about his liberation from the church of social justice. Find him on Twitter @benappel and at benappelwrites.com.