[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

For those of us who, back in the day, were serious campaigners for gay rights, for the social acceptance of gay people, and for same–sex marriage, the larger objective was always clear: once gay people, after years of debate, disagreement, dissension, and discussion, managed to achieve our goals, we would drop politics, move on, and enjoy the fruits of our victory. In other words, we would happily take up our place as fully equal citizens and go on with our lives. Victory would mean no more need for Gay Pride marches or rainbow flags or for such phenomena as Gay Pride Month, which, as it happens, is now in its first days and which I, for one, am already sick of. (Somehow, it feels to me as if both Gay Pride Month and Ramadan come along every few weeks, not once a year.) The whole point of the gay movement was to reach a point at which we were no longer demonized, no longer subject to arrest just for being who we were, no longer exposed to public name-calling even when we were behaving ourselves in the most civilized manner possible, no longer singled out constantly in a multitude of unfair and unpleasant ways just because of our sexual orientation. The idea was for our identity as members of a despised minority to fall away as much as possible, and to be recognized – and either respected or disliked, based on our own merits – as individuals.

Many of us assumed that the Supreme Court’s 2015 verdict on same-sex marriage would mark an end to our efforts. Unfortunately there were career activists for whom that verdict wasn’t a victory but a threat. What now? Their whole lives were wrapped up in activism. Protesting was how they made a living. Gay people at large had won – but they’d lost. So in the most cynical way possible, they sought out, and found, a new cause – and dressed it up to look as much as possible like the old cause, even though there was no connection whatsoever between the two. In point of fact, they found several new causes. The main one was transgender ideology. But there were others. Suddenly drag queens, a tiny minority within a minority whose activities had previously been confined largely to gay bars and similar venues, and who had never really came up in serious conversations about gay rights, were the star attractions at school libraries, where for some reason there developed a great demand for them to give readings from children’s books – some of the material being innocuous and some not at all innocuous – to pupils and toddlers and their parents.

Many of these readings, moreover, were accompanied by physical gestures and other activities that had no place at all in such settings. Why is it that so many parents had become so keen, almost overnight it seemed, on exposing their children to sheer obscenities – or, at the very least, grotesqueries? Well, something was going on in the culture that made parents from certain backgrounds feel that they needed to expose their children to such phenomena in order to prove, to themselves and their communities, that they were on the right side of history. It was about diversity. It was about social progress. They’d been convinced that if they’d supported equal rights for black people, and women’s rights, and gay rights, then of course they also had to support this business, even though it really had nothing to do with rights at all. These parents provided the ultimate example of virtue signaling. The one thing that united them all was that they hated Donald Trump, and if they knew anything – or thought they knew anything – it was that Trump was all about the kind of ugly bigotry that they were told they were fighting against.

But even that wasn’t all. The other day, a friend of mine sent me a link to a new article in the Advocate, the gay newsmagazine to which I used to contribute a column but which I haven’t looked at in a long time, ever since – like every other gay establishment institution – it came under the control of the pro-trans, pro-woke, pro-drag-story-hour ideologues. The article was headlined “Three’s Company,” and it was a celebration of what, according to the author, Neal Broverman (the editorial director of both The Advocate and Out), is apparently the next stage in the endless revolution: the normalization, mainstreaming, and demand for acceptance of “throuples and other non-monogamous relationships.” At the center of the story were three young men who are apparently featured on a current reality show called Couple to Throuple.

Broverman reported on some developments that were new to me: several municipalities in Massachusetts and California have passed legislation “protecting” people in such relationships. Janani Ramachandran says that as “the first queer woman of color to serve on the Oakland city council” she’s especially proud to have authored one such law, which was passed in April, “because a lot of these multi-parent households and multi-partner relationships actually do have their routes [sic] in tradition, specifically in non-Western cultures.” The friend who sent me this article is a conservative gay man in his seventies who’s been involved in the movement for decades and who is as appalled as I am by such ridiculous new developments as this one. As I wrote to him in reply: “Instead of recognizing what an amazing and hard-won accomplishment gay rights (including marriage equality) was, these idiots think that the idea is just to keep pushing, pushing, pushing, as if normal people are just going to keep giving in and backing off. What’s the next step toward utopia – gaining acceptance and rights for parents who force their small children to have sex with farm animals?”

Indeed, it’s already clear that the pushiness of these professional activists is having an impact on Americans’ acceptance of gay people. In March, PBS reported that for the very first time, support for same-sex marriage had dropped. Yes, it was just a two-point drop. But it was a drop, and it was accompanied by declines in support for other “LGBTQ+ rights.” The report attributed the decline to an anti-“LGBTQ” backlash by the Republican Party. Even though a great many more younger people identify as “LGBTQ” than was the case a few years ago, support for “LGBTQ” rights by the majority of young people is on the decline. Needless to say, the report didn’t make the obvious point underlying this change: millions of heterosexual Americans who are OK with ordinary gay people and even with same-sex marriage aren’t at all happy with the trans craze – especially with the routine placement of small children on the assembly line for transgender “treatment” – and because of the cynical way in which former gay-activist groups have sold acceptance for this medical abuse of minors as part and parcel of being gay-friendly, millions of Americans who are rightly disgusted by the transgender movement have also, in consequence, been turned off by gay rights.

And you know what? I totally understand it. I fought for years to get the government to stop criminalizing, and the public to stop demonizing, who I was; I didn’t fight so that I should be celebrated for an entire month every year just for my sexual orientation. It’s embarrassing. It’s stupid. Why not a month every year celebrating folks for being really, really tall? Or incredibly short? Or redheaded? Or bald? Or old? Or ugly? Or fat? Now, there’s a group of people who actually could use some positive attention – those who are old, bald, ugly, and fat. Why this outrageously selective yearly celebration of an artificially constructed group of people, some of whom are, quite simply, same-sex attracted, and others of whom, quite incredibly, deny entirely the reality of biological sex? Plainly, the two things don’t even belong together, for heaven’s sake. From the start, in fact, a big part of the goal of today’s trans movement has obviously been to convince homophobic parents that the sissyish sons of whom they’re ashamed are really girls and that the butch daughters who make them wince are really boys – and that their aberration can be cured entirely by means of a lifelong regimen of hormones and a type of surgery that should more properly be described as butchery.

Back in the day, some of us who fought for gay rights did get a tad too aggressive about it. One late friend of mine led a group of ACT-UP members – an organization I loathed – that notoriously disrupted a High Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. (He did it, believe it or not, not because he despised the Church but because, the contrary, he was a profoundly pious Catholic who, in his heart of hearts, felt cruelly betrayed by clerics who he thought were duty-bound to love him unconditionally – many of whom, he knew, were themselves closeted gays, drenched in hypocrisy.) But most of us carried out the struggle in a pretty civilized manner – to the point, I sometimes felt, of sheer masochism. I, for one, went on endless call-in radio shows and politely endured the nastiest kind of abuse while trying to make calm, logical arguments for my case, routinely answering vile insults (the most hurtful of which were from sweet-voiced women who described themselves as devout Christian mothers) with patient attempts at reason.

Today, by contrast, the public antics of the trans activist crowd can bring to mind the viciousness of the Nazis in the early 1930s. Their aggression and irrationality are a blight on society, and as far as I’m concerned they’re exploiting what I consider the just and beautiful triumph of the cause of gay equality in order to get the general public to buy into a preposterous and colossal lie – namely, that a man can become a woman and a woman can become a man. Or, according to some variations on the formula, a cat, or a tree, or a duck. A few years ago the social, political, and media elite began to accept this nonsense totally and reflexively, but my sense is that this acceptance is at least starting to wane, thanks in no small part to the gutsy pushback by people like – well, like the swimmer Riley Gaines, to name one, who after winning a women’s swim meet had to give up her trophy to a 6’4” man who identified as a woman, despite the evidence to the contrary that was bulging from his swimsuit.

People whom I respect have suggested that the widespread embrace of this idiocy, this utter deviation from reality itself, can’t last forever and has to go down in flames before very long. Other people whom I also respect have suggested that the elite’s determination to push the vast, mad, and ever-expanding claims of trans ideology will endure for a long time, and that when it’s finally brought down by the voices of reason it will bring gay people down with it. I hope not. I worked hard to be able to be treated with simple respect and to be able, among other things, to write for all kinds of places without having to be deceitful about my domestic life. People who once would have called me “faggot” now call me “sir.” Or at least they call me by my name, and do so with a friendly smile. I like it better this way. But human beings being what they are, it may well be the case that what I and other gay people have been living through during the last decade or so will turn out to have been a rare and precious exception, a set of remarkable historical parentheses, that is destined to be undone.