The concepts of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” didn’t actually come into being until the late 19th century. As soon as they did, people who were homoerotically inclined were compelled to consider the meaning of their desires, where earlier generations might have simply acted on them. For the followers of Der Eigene, who were predominately men, homosexuality was best understood not as an identity — as we now understand it — but as a form of refined taste, and an extension of male friendship. In a kind of “manifesto” for the journal, its founder Adolf Brand wrote that he strove for, “beside the sense of female beauty, also the sense for male beauty, and by again setting friend-love beside woman-love as having completely equal rights”.

As with later gay liberation movements, the first gay rights groups were motivated more by shared enemies than affinities. In Germany at the time, many widely different groups were united in campaigns to repeal Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalised sodomy. But homosexuals differed greatly in their conceptualisation of homoerotic desire. The intellectual strand most opposed to the ideas of Der Eigene, followed the physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee who pioneered the idea that homosexuality (and transsexuality) were an innate condition traceable to biological cause. Gay people, in Hirschfeld’s view, were a “third sex” whose hermaphroditic nature gave rise to unique differences in attitude and behaviour. While these ideas have evolved greatly over time, we can hear echoes of Hirschfeld in the supposedly progressive scientific obsession with biologically classifying those who are sexually diverse, leading to the questionable notion of “gay genes”.

For the homosexuals who wrote and contributed to Der Eigene, which included many prominent men of the day — including political journalist Kurt Hiller and the novelist Thomas Mann — all this talk of an inherent hermaphroditic soul was ahistorical and wrongheaded. From Greek antiquity to European aristocracy, they argued, sexual acts between men could be seen as a natural extension of passionate male friendship. To describe this worldview, artist and scholar Elisar von Kupffer coined the term “Lieblingminne” in Der Eigene, combining the virtues of Freundesliebe, love of friends, with Minne, chivalric love.

Many German homosexuals were inspired by von Kupffer’s collections of homoerotic literature, which highlighted that same-sex desires had been felt by many historically-significant figures, from Zeno of Citium to Alexander The Great to Michelangelo. Rather than supporting Hirschfeld’s theory of innate homosexuality, this was seen as key evidence against a medical model. As sexologist Benedict Friedländer, wrote in Der Eigene:

“[To accept Hirschfeld’s view] in ancient Hellas in particular most of the generals, artists and thinkers would have to have been hermaphrodites. Every people from whose initiative in all higher human endeavours every later European culture fed must have consisted in great part of sick, hybrid individuals.”

For the contributors to Der Eigene, it seemed only natural that strong male friendship would occasionally incorporate an erotic component. But for them, sexual desire was culturally contingent: homoerotic desire has waxed and waned over time, driven by the sentiments and spirit of the age. Dutch author Peter Hamecher wrote in the journal that, “I altogether hold the sexual instinct, in all its apparent determinacy, to be something very intangible, something swinging back and forth between extremes”.

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Male friendship was particularly sentimental in the 19th century. Expressions of love between friends bordered on the outright romantic — the letters exchanged by Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed being a prime example. Given the gender segregation in many aspects of life, and the strict heterosexual courting rituals, sexual contact between young men was also relatively common. It was in cultures which prioritised beauty, whether physical or spiritual, that the homoerotic sentiment was most cultivated in the wider population.

The decriminalisation of homosexuality, for Der Eigene, was therefore not about protecting a minority, but rather invigorating Germany’s potential for homoeroticism. The journal’s ideals were tied closely to naturist movements of the time — focused on nudism, bodybuilding, and co-existence with nature. Homoeroticism is presented as a way to raise oneself above the pedestrian, bourgeois ideals of industry and production.

Contemporary LGBT scholars are often quick to dismiss Der Eigene as “masculinist” in orientation and even “proto-fascist” in its aesthetics, despite the fact that the journal was a target of Nazi purges. Professor Andrew Stewart from the University of Toronto caricatures Brand’s ideas as calling for a racially pure, bisexual Ubermensch to replace the tainted, effeminate homosexual:

“The importance of physical health and fitness, hyper-masculinity, and white supremacy find modern parallels in the experiences of some queer people of colour, trans people, and others who do not achieve the standards of beauty as set by a white, cisgender, and masculine gay culture.”

These accusations aren’t entirely baseless. Brand and Friedländer were not what we would now call “intersectional”. They criticised early feminist movements, viewing women’s calls for men to take greater responsibility for family life as being contrary to the journal’s goal of re-establishing a homoerotic male culture. Further, unlike the early Swiss gay journal Der Kreis, which they inspired, Der Eigene rarely published lesbian writers.

Nevertheless, it would be unfair to throw out the unique perspective of early gay rights activists, merely because some prominent members had outdated views — especially because their views were not universal across Der Eigene. Frequent contributor Edwin Bab held strong feminist sympathies, writing:

“I assert that there is no difference between man and woman in the psychic and intellectual characteristics … only our customs, which make every productive activity highly difficult for the woman, are to blame for the fact that the number of productive women is relatively small.”

Attempts to connect the journal to National Socialism are even more spurious: Brand, who leant Left politically, was never a supporter of the Nazi Party and was highly critical of homosexual members such as Ernst Röhm, calling him a “hypocrite and a traitor”. However, as scholar Harry Oosterhuis has pointed out, Brand was not as discriminating as he should have been when publishing people who criticised Hirschfeld — who, it should be noted, was Jewish. He ran an article by Röhm’s friend, the Nazi Karl Günther Heimsoth, who gave us the phrase “homophile”. Heimsoth criticised Hirschfeld, Oosterhuis writes, by “asserting that the ‘homosexual feminism’ of the ‘Jewish Committee’ was dangerous to the ‘German eros’”. And, Oosterhuis goes on, “instead of refusing the article or expunging the anti-Semitic phrases, Brand only wrote a preface stating that he did not agree with all of the author’s views”.

Nevertheless, Der Eigene is forgotten today less because the original contributors are deemed “problematic” than their views on homosexuality running counter to how modern gays and lesbians have been taught to see themselves. That one is “born this way” is a key pillar of contemporary LGBT thinking. But in the pages of the first gay journal, sexual desire is better conceptualised as a taste — an appreciation of beauty cultivated through early experience and culture. One is not born homosexual (or heterosexual) but with a capacity to perceive aesthetics; over time, this capacity, combined with experience, shapes sexual preferences.

Despite now being lost to time, these ideas still had currency amongst mid-20th century gay rights activists both in the US and Europe. For example, American gay activist Carl Whitman’s influential 1970 “A Gay Manifesto” notes that:

“Homosexuality is not a lot of things. It is not a makeshift in the absence of the opposite sex; it is not hatred or rejection of the opposite sex; it is not genetic; it is not the result of broken homes except inasmuch as we could see the shame of American marriage. Homosexuality is the capacity to love someone of the same sex.”

Michel Foucault also echoed the goals of Der Eigene in his comments during an interview with The Advocate 1984, where he notes: “I think what the gay movement needs is much more the art of life than a science … Sexuality is something that we ourselves create — it is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire.”

While some contemporary “queer” academics take up this anti-essentialist mantle, they do so without appreciating homoerotic desire as a beautifying force. Theorists such as Lee Edelman are quick to frame homosexuality as inherently “transgressive”: the Freudian death drive in opposition to procreative sexual desire. The contributors to Der Eigene, however, understood homoeroticism as constructive — a practice that encouraged healthy and flourishing individuals. Whereas today’s nihilistic queer theory is libertarian, Der Eigene’s was restrained. “Every sexual excess and every sexual dissolution is of course decidedly to be advised against,” wrote Brand in one of the journal’s early issues.

Rather than advocating a full liberation of desire, contributors to Der Eigene often expressed concern about, say, the effects of excessive masturbation, the spread of venereal disease, or the predatory behaviour of men towards young women. Homoeroticism was seen as a cure for the social ills of male sexual desire run amok.

It’s a shame that this view of homosexuality, as neither fixed biological orientation nor “radical” disruptive force, has been forgotten. Key victories in gay rights have not given way to a “post-gay” moment of self-reflection for those who feel predominantly same-sex desire see themselves not as “other” but as universally human. Instead, we see a doubling down of identitarianism, particularly online, where every kink, feeling and sexual experience is ripe for categorisation. The New Left notions of “authenticity” and “finding oneself”, which shaped early gay rights movements have evolved with the internet into what philosophers Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio call “profilicity”, where one’s identity is a process of obsessive self-marketing. There are now labels for those who want both love and sex (demisexuals), who prefer just masturbating to porn (technosexuals), and who don’t like having sex at all (asexuals).

The brilliance of Brand and the other contributors to Der Eigene was that they could move beyond the delusions of sexual identity, while advocating and defending homoeroticism. The group tackled moralist tirades that equated same-sex desire with degeneracy by pointing to the historical and aesthetic evidence that cultures of homosexuality and cultures of greatness were one in the same. It’s precisely at this current time of sexual hysteria, when intimacy has been declared dead and queer theory diffuse, that our current paradigms of homosexuality should be questioned — and we should look to the past to inform our sexual future.

For many women though, both in the UK and elsewhere, things are very different. Whether in Uganda, where same-sex encounters are a criminal offence, in Iran, where some lesbians have been threatened with state execution, or within the religious enclaves that exist in a number of US states and in which lesbian conversion therapy is widespread, being a lesbian can mean a hard, lonely life. I am keenly aware that 45 years after coming out, and despite decades of campaigning for lesbian rights, much remains to be done before lesbians can feel truly liberated. Which is why, with Kathleen Stock and Martina Navratilova, I have set up the Lesbian Project. The idea has been brewing for a number of years — ever since I began to realise that the word “lesbian” was yet again becoming a dirty one, as many gay men and trans activists accused us of bigotry for seeking out our own spaces and setting boundaries.

We want to explore why our needs and issues have been so thoroughly deprioritised that we are ignored, presumed indivisible from gay men and heterosexual “queer”-identified kinksters, and even — according to other “letters” of the ever-growing alphabet – the baddies?

The rot started to set in when the Gay Liberation Front split. Lesbians, despite having taken the lead in many ways, soon found that their own concerns were coming second to those of men. Sick of being marginalised and asked to make the tea, after three years the majority of the women walked out and began organising independently. These lesbians had become the stuff of legend by the end of the Seventies. And their struggle for liberation was indivisible from that of women everywhere: one of the seven demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement was “The Right to a Self-Defined Sexuality. An End to Discrimination Against Lesbians”.

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By Kathleen Stock

I was at the first autonomous public lesbian event — the Lesbian Strength March — in London, in 1981, and the exhilaration that my 19-year-old self felt is hard to describe. Back then we understood that the one thing we did have in common with our gay brothers was discrimination on the basis of our same-sex attraction. We also recognised that one common anti-gay trope, namely the suggestion that gay men were not to be trusted around children, was also said of lesbians. But we were also well aware that a number of gay male campaigns, such as those targeting the legal penalties against cottaging and cruising, did not concern us.

Our issues included resisting what the lesbian writer Adrienne Rich called compulsory heterosexuality. Many of us were feeling coerced into marriage with men. I know I was. As a working-class girl hitting my teens in the mid-Seventies, my life had already been mapped out. I was supposed to marry and have kids with one of the men on my estate, and stay with him regardless of how unhappy or unfulfilled it made me.

At that time, and indeed well into the Eighties, it was commonplace to hear of lesbians who, having split with their husbands, then lost custody of their children through the family courts because they were lesbians. At one stage, up to 80% of the women dragged through the courts by disgruntled ex-husbands lost their children this way. It was clear that the issues affecting lesbians were worlds apart from those affecting gay men.

Coming out as a teenager was not my choice. Every girl at my school was deemed either a lezzer or a slag. And because I had rejected the boys in my class, and was clearly more interested in my female friends, by the bullies’ logic I must be a lezzer, so they stared to call me it. For once, they happened to be right. I was bullied and threatened, until my older brother stepped in. But being a teenaged lesbian was also a joy: going to nightclubs with the gay boys and observing the older butch/femme couples was fascinating.

The Lesbian Project is seeking an amicable divorce from our gay brothers. Being lumped in with men is neither appropriate nor useful when it comes to our priorities, and we can no longer pretend that it is. We have only once been targeted by the same legislation — Section 28 — and as women we need to ask ourselves whether we are being afforded the same attention as our male counterparts.

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The return of lesbian pride

By Julie Bindel

Not that all the issues affecting lesbians are the same. We are not a hegemonic group. If I were cast away on a desert island, with 50 indiscriminately chosen lesbians, we would fight like cat and dog and agree on next to nothing. But we would still share something precious and fundamental: our resistance to the path set out for us by whichever community and nation we were raised in.

There are other things we share. We are all gender nonconforming (despite the fact that prior to queer theory and trans ideology we didn’t ever use that term). We have defied sex stereotypes, and all of us have been major disappointments to those hoping we would grow up looking to marry a handsome, successful man and produce a brace of children. We were supposed to behave differently, even if raised within liberal or socially progressive families. We weren’t supposed to wear scruffy dungarees and play pool in backstreet bars.

Many lesbians will disagree with, even actively dislike, my views on certain issues. Some lesbians won’t be feminist. Others might prefer the term “queer” or “gay” — terms I won’t use to describe myself. But like it or not, we are a tribe. Our enemies are not discerning. We are bound together by our refusal to play by the rules. Every out lesbian has defied sex stereotypes and taken a huge risk in being public. Heterosexuality is not just the norm — it is also the method by which patriarchy flourishes. Whether or not we are conscious of it, lesbians are both a threat and a direct challenge to men’s superiority over women.

Today, I live a privileged, middle-class life, with a media career and a supportive family and friendship circle. Although I am relatively safe from bigotry and violence, I still feel that knot in my stomach when asked by a stranger, “What does your husband do?” Then there are the times I hear direct anti-lesbian sentiments expressed by colleagues, neighbours and others, and I can’t keep quiet. If we can come together to fight the oppression that affects us all, our differences will matter less than they otherwise might. A few weeks ago I was walking my dog in the park when a man, resplendent in tattoos, biker jacket and shaven head, approached me. For a split second, I wondered if he was friend or foe. But as we stood face-to-face, he broke into a big smile, and told me he recognised me “off the telly” and that “my mum loves you! She’s a lesbian too.” I was walking on air for the rest of the day.

Everyone involved in this project has their own history and perspective on what it means to be a lesbian. Joanna Cherry, one of the Scottish National Party’s most high-profile MPs, has been treated appallingly within her own party over her views on single-sex spaces (not just for lesbians but also for women facing domestic and sexual abuse). And Lucy Masoud, a former firefighter turned barrister, has spoken out about biological men identifying as lesbians on online dating apps, for which she was labelled a “bigot” and a “transphobe”.

These women join a long list of those who are fighting back against the new bigotry that has rebranded lesbians as irrelevant or not deserving of attention. Our enemies are the same as when I came out decades ago: misogynists. Above all, men who hate the fact that we reject them sexually and get on just fine without them. Some of our enemies are, unfortunately, young women, although we would never condemn or reject them. Having spoken to dozens of them, I fear these women are motivated by a desire to stay on the right side of the men in the LGBTQ+ rainbow, so they put their own needs aside in order to be accepted. One day they may come to us older lesbians for advice and support. We are here for them if they do.

The Lesbian Project will put us back on the map. Lesbians who are able to be out and proud share bravery, tenacity — and enemies. Whatever our differences, we all want things to be better for future generations of girls. Being a lesbian is to refuse to bow to convention. It is an act of resistance and resilience. And I for one am proud to use that label.

Today, he’d be left with nothing to write about: everybody wants a slice of the gay pie. You can’t get an invite to the rom com prom  without a sexual quirk or kink. LGBTQ is now recognised as a mainstream genre, something that caused Netflix considerable online grief when they put their Jeffrey Dahmer drama into it.

Along with this ubiquity arrives the accusation of “queerbaiting”. This weird little expression means either luring in the gays with the promise of something gay, and then not delivering, or using a “queer aesthetic” without being “queer” enough, or — horrors! — even at all. Dr Justin Bengry, lecturer in “Queer History” at Goldsmiths, recently told Euronews in fluent boilerplate: “We, as queer people, are right to demand ever more representation and celebration of our existence and the incredible variety and diversity within our communities.” He went on: “When we critique someone’s behaviour as ‘queer baiting’… we are accusing that they are wilfully misusing their privilege and even deceiving us about their own understanding of themself to attract attention and even benefit socially and financially.”

A confession. I think Channel 4’s Cucumber was a masterpiece. I enjoy the books of John Rechy. I think Frasier writer Joe Keenan’s novel trilogy beginning with Blue Heaven is sublime. But I find most gay culture, and nearly all “queer” culture, excruciatingly bad and frequently embarrassing. I have a theory that more gay teen wretchedness is caused by “empowering” gay culture, supposedly uplifting but horribly depressing, than anything else. I bought a book called How To Be A Happy Homosexual when I was 16 and it drove me to the outer edge of despair. The mere thought of The Communards, even now, makes me look hungrily towards the medicine cabinet.

The current craze for “representation” is nothing more than hollow fetishism, with all the vacuous, rictus-grinning “celebration” of an office party. It has not widened or improved gay culture, but simply bloated it. In fact, I often prefer it when straight people do the job: Bowie and early Suede, Marty Feldman and Barry Took writing for “Julian and Sandy” on Round The Horne, Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina in Prick Up Your Ears. Mary Renault and Barbara Pym wrote great books about gay men.

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What's wrong with being straight?

By Gareth Roberts

It is very strange to think that only homosexual artists can produce art that includes homosexuality, that only gay actors can act gay parts. When it happens the other way round, nobody even notices. Legions of lesbians and gaggles of gays have written hetero stories. Noel Coward wrote plays where young male characters have non-gay secrets — heterosexual affairs — and they function perfectly. James Baldwin wrote about white heterosexual people in a world where his gayness and his race were considerably more of an issue than they would be today, and he did it brilliantly.

I’d suggest not that there is no difference, but that good writers and good actors can traverse these boundaries in their stride. It is a strange criterion to be asked to judge art on its author’s characteristics, particularly as it has followed on from the same strain of cracked academia that gifted us “the death of the author”. As for queerbaiting? I’d suggest that like most things, sometimes it’s bad, and sometimes it’s good, depending on whether the artist is an astute observer and a natural empath — by which I don’t mean the modern version of empath, the loopy “be kind” TikTokker with mad staring eyes. A smart outsider can see things insiders miss and make great art from it.

Surely the right question to ask remains not “is this authentic?”, but “is this any good?”. I don’t care if I’ve been “baited” if what I’ve been baited with was worth it. Harry Styles is, of course, the baiter supreme, being coy about his incredibly obvious heterosexuality and sporting accessories from someone’s nan who passed away in 1973. In My Policeman, out couple of weeks ago, he plays a gay character who marries a woman to conceal his secret. But his work is offensive not because of this but because it is so bad.

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A little example of my own. I wrote a TV script about lads playing football and a heterosexual romance, and people were surprised. I found this very odd, as I had written about distant planets without having visited them and alien beings without having met any, and nobody had expressed the slightest surprise. It’s ironic that “queer” — something supposedly all about breaking categories, we are told — is so tight-arsed about people staying in their lane. But then, of course, queer isn’t actually about breaking down categories at all, but about inventing tons of new ones for status, goading people, and having big squabbles on the socials.

Gay men have certainly always been pretty good at self-baiting. Until fairly recently, gay magazine Attitude nearly always had a front cover of a semi-undraped young straight male starlet, often from Hollyoaks, with a teaser quote — something along the lines of “I’ve often wondered what it might be like to be taken suddenly from behind by a big old leather bear” — and a hint that this dreamboat might possibly flash their scrotum on page 53. This was supposed to act as gay catnip, and presumably did.

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So what’s wrong with the gays acting as catnip for straights? Consider Heartstopper, a TV series about a gay male romance written by Alice Oseman, a woman who styles herself as “aromantic”, but who feels confident enough to churn out complicated tales of other people’s romantic lives. Good for her. It is notable that she is not lambasted for inauthenticity, but then she is fully signed up to the prevailing ideology, so she’s safe. But here is where fetishism comes in.

Writing about gays isn’t the same as seeking them as an audience. There is a small area of publishing — often self-publishing — full of erotic novels about gay men written by and, crucially, for straight women. (And of course a much larger, less delicately-presented, slab of it dedicated to straight men writing about lesbians.) This, and Heartstopper, is not a million miles away from Jackie magazine stories of yore. When something is an elevated masturbation fantasy, it is probably best to keep that in mind and not raise it above its lowly cultural rung. But where is the harm in it?

We often hear that the age of deference is gone. But this is not so. We just defer to different people. At the moment, for reasons unclear, we defer to American teenagers with peculiar ideas. When we emerge from this cultural tunnel we will hopefully be able to flit freely again around stories and people, whatever their sexual preferences. Yes, there might well be some terrible clangers and some unpleasant wanks out there. But these are the price we pay for approaching art with generous hearts and open minds.

Generous and open are two things that American teenagers trumpeting accusations of queerbaiting are not. And even the most progressive corners of the “LGBTQ” cultural establishment are starting to realise it. After Heartstopper star Kit Connor claimed, earlier this week, that queerbaiting allegations had “forced” him to come out as bisexual, even PinkNews took his side. This is a U-turn for a site that ran an explainer in 2018 about why queerbaiting was a “problem” — and hints that better days are to come. Days in which audience and cast alike don’t have to worry about who the other likes fucking.

Dr Jacob Breslow was a graduate student at the London School of Economics when he gave a presentation at an event for the US-based non-profit B4U-ACT in 2011. According to its website, B4U-ACT promotes services and resources for people “who are sexually attracted to children and desire assistance”. In his 2011 paper, Breslow compares a child to a shoe — which, in case you weren’t sure, is an inanimate object. He stated:

“Just as the desire to and the act of cumming on a shoe requires a rethinking of the shoe and how it comes into being, I want to now argue that the desire to and the act of cumming on, or possibly even with, a child requires a rethinking both of the child, which we just begun, and of the person for whom the child is a sexual fantasy or partner.”

Breslow wrote in the same paper that “allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it potentially creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars and clinicians can begin to better understand minor-attracted persons [MAPs].”

Beneath the usual academic gobbledygook, this statement is clear: the intention is to ally those who identify as “MAPs” — who others would rightly label as adults that desire sex with children — with the rest of the rainbow community, including lesbians, even those who campaign to expose the atrocity of child sexual abuse.

This scandal might date back 11 years, but there is ample evidence that Breslow has only strengthened his views rather than backtracking from them. He is, for example, writing a book on “the queer lives of children’s desires”. Five years after his presentation for B4U-ACT, having argued in his PhD thesis that some kids were “queer”, Breslow defined this as “the queering that ‘queer’ does to the child, is one of resisting the child’s alleged asexuality and heterosexuality; allowing for the child’s pleasures, desires, and perversities…”

Mermaids, clearly, did not check Breslow’s suitability as a trustee prior to him being appointed in July this year, or surely they would have rejected him as unsuitable? Or maybe they do not consider his beliefs to be in any way problematic. He is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality (what else?) at the London School of Economics, and his profile on the university’s website revealed how wedded to trans ideology he is. This thread by feminist barrister Anja Palmer lists some of the other easily-available clues that Mermaids either missed or ignored. The charity Sex Matters also picked apart the crazed beast that is the LSE Gender Studies Department, by exposing an article by one of Breslow’s students, Matt Thompson that was peppered with sexualised threats against women in public life. Thompson wrote that he would “take my knife to your throat” in response to perceived transphobia — from women, of course.

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Perhaps they were keen to appoint Breslow as a trustee because he appears to be a virulent critic of so-called TERFS, and has practised castigating academics who defy trans ideology — such as Professor Jo Phoenix ,who was hounded from her job at the Open University following accusations of transphobia. In the spirit of “your enemy’s enemy is your friend”, Mermaids recruits all the support it can get on its mission to discredit anyone that exposes its dangerous practices and belief system.

Mermaids, had they responsibly scrutinised Breslow prior to inviting him to become a trustee, would have seen that his child abuse apologism was neither hidden nor obscured. In January this year, in an article on feminist website 4W, Dana Vitalosova wrote: “Jacob Breslow … does not only rally against women critical of faux feminism. Despite his young age, he has already established himself as a prolific campaigner against child safeguarding. Last December [Breslow said] during a launch of his book: ‘Is it really that children or young people having sex is the problem? Or is it [the problem] the conditions under which that sex happens?’”

Any minute now, an apologist for Mermaids will start arguing that it’s wrong to dig up comments made 11 years ago to discredit a person who has doubtless redeemed himself. The apologist will remind those of us who are deeply critical of Mermaids, and the trans ideology that props it up, that we have railed against similar tactics against us. After all, I have been targeted and vilified since the publication of a 2004 Guardian Weekend article that saw me eternally labelled as transphobic. Almost 20 years later, that article regularly gets wheeled out as evidence for why I should be de-platformed and publicly condemned as soon as I am invited to speak at any event in universities.

So why does it matter what a Mermaids trustee said 11 years ago?

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Scotland's Tavistock must fall

By Julie Bindel

Any charity that focusses on children should — and I can’t believe I have to spell this out — make it their business to avoid any association with advocates of sex between children and adults. But unfortunately, Mermaids has a history of disregarding the safety of children — and promoting an ideology that sexualises them, as well as “affirming” absolutely anything a child says they want, however vulnerable and mixed-up that child might be at the time. It has continually argued, despite reems of evidence to the contrary, that puberty-blocking drugs are perfectly harmless and totally reversable. It promotes disturbing gender ideology to young children in schools across the UK. And it justifies sending breast binders to 13-year-old girls without their parents’ consent, despite being fully aware of the damage they can cause. This is dangerous stuff because it presupposes the “agency” of the child — which may then absolve the responsible adult of any wrongdoing in relation to it.

Mermaids is lauded by those who adhere to queer theory. This rainbow alliance first emerged in the Eighties, when the National Council of Civil Liberties caused a scandal by supporting the inclusion of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). There was much dissent among feminists and lesbians, who were appalled that PIE was looking to join hands with those who were sexually “non-conformist”. Many gay men did not see that those lobbying for the normalisation of child sexual abuse had misappropriated their legitimate fight for equality, protection and rights.

Sexual libertarianism is the backbone of queer theory and is often promoted by gay men. Look at staunch supporter of Mermaids, gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, who recently appeared on TV in order to defend Mermaids over the breast binding scandal. He has long campaigned for lowering the age of consent for all to 14.

Trans ideology, part and parcel of queer theory, also legitimises the prostitution of children. For example, Janet Mock, a male-to-female transgender activist, appears to celebrate it, writing: “I was 15 the first time I visited Merchant Street, what some would call ‘the stroll’ for trans women involved in street-based sex work. At the time, I had just begun medically transitioning and it was where younger girls, like my friends and myself, would go to hang out, flirt and fool around with guys and socialise with older trans women, the legends of our community.”

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Mock goes on to explain how they “idolised” the prostituted trans women in the area. “These women were the first trans women I met and I quickly correlated trans womanhood and sex work,” says Mock, explaining that they came to understand the role of the sex trade as a “rite of passage” for “trans girls”.

The link between queer theory, transgender ideology and child abuse apologism has never been clearer. The recent revelation that German sociologist Rüdiger Lautmann, a board member of the Gay Counselling Service in Berlin, authored a book entitled The Lust for Children: A Portrait of Paedophiles is further evidence that this is a widespread and increasingly normalised phenomenon. Pro-paedophilia is the latest ideology included in the LGBTQQIA+ acronym.

This latest scandal should be the nail in the coffin of Mermaids, which is a danger to children and should be immediately shut down. Perhaps the many celebrities, corporate entities and high-profile individuals who have passionately defended and supported it — such as Emma Watson, Jameela Jamil, Little Mix, Harry and Meghan, Starbucks and Wagamama — will now publicly denounce the charity. Perhaps those of us condemned as bigots for raising red flags about Mermaids over a number of years will receive abject apologies.

Even if we do, the fight must go on. Queer theory still dictates the mission of far too many charities and institutions that are supposed to protect children. This ideology tears down boundaries between the adult and the child, and dismisses safeguarding put in place by those of us who fight night and day to end child sexual abuse and exploitation. It cannot be allowed to corrupt all of society.

In recent years, queerness has also become a fascinatingly multifunctional symbolic object in the psyche of the nation, simultaneously representing both sexily avant-garde transgression and fully paid-up membership of the British establishment. Compelling new evidence of the latter is provided by the opening this week of a museum celebrating “LGBTQ+” history in central London. Entitled “Queer Britain”, the venture is financially supported by M&C Saatchi, Allen and Overy, Levis, and Coutts, and lists partnership with the V&A, the National Trust, the Tate, the British Library, and English Heritage on its website.

In stentorian tones more reminiscent of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee than Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, we are told that the museum “will be an essential place for all regardless of sexuality or gender identity, to find out about the culture they have been born into, have chosen or seek to understand. It will help complete the Nation’s family tree.” Online events in the run-up to its opening included partnering with a wine company to run a competition asking what “queer creativity” means, and a celebration of the launch by the Bank of England of what’s surely the least visible banknote in its history to date — a £50 note featuring Alan Turing, unlucky in his timing once again.

A project on the history of the gerrymandered categories of “LGBTQ+” and “queer” is, of course, a fantastic idea; were it done properly, it would be genuinely exciting. Ideally such a museum would interrogate the sociological and historical conditions of its own movement. It might ask, for instance: what economic forces have shaped its transition from the gay rights movement of 20th Century to the present rainbow soup, in which many lesbians and gays feel they are not waving but drowning? Who gains and who loses from this radical reorientation?

Relatedly, a serious historical inquiry might ask: how did Stonewall move from defending the rights of homosexuals in the Nineties to arguing in 2022 that lesbian women should date members of the opposite sex — that is, males who identify as women — or else be judged as motivated by “social prejudice” and even “sexual racism”? And while historians were at it, they might also consider how our society has moved from the laudable aim of depathologising homosexuality, to a now fairly widespread acceptance of the chemical castration of confused gay youth, under the guise of “transitioning” them — a fate horribly reminiscent of the one meted out so vindictively to Turing. All fascinating historical questions, none of which are remotely likely to be asked within the glossy corporate-friendly walls of Queer Britain, I predict.

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In truth, queerness as framed by its most culturally powerful representatives has absolutely nothing to do with the average gay man, lesbian, bisexual, or adult transsexual in the UK. For most of these, their sexual orientation or feelings of gender identity are not the chief source of meaning or motivation in life, and hence they are not particularly politically engaged in activism nor in posturing online about queerness. This leaves the field clear for rather more self-interested people to take both the mic and the money. The fantasy conjured up by the overused phrase “LGBTQ+ community” might suggest a cohesive group with genuinely shared interests, if not some sort of glittery high-camp version of the Bruderhof, but in fact the term is a shiny carapace shielding the eyes of straight people from big underlying divisions.

Though you’re unlikely to see an exhibit about it at Queer Britain, at the top of the pile sits an uneasy coalition of two radically different factions, each indifferent to the interests of many for whom they jointly claim to speak. The first of these factions is the sexual libertarians, mostly accounting for what remains of the avant-garde reputation of queerness in the public mind. Broadly speaking, this group wishes to erode most prohibitive sexual norms in society, considering them as pernicious curbs on individual freedom. Some are gay men, some are transwomen, and some are — as the lingo goes — “cis-het” but overcompensate for it by means of elaborate tattoos, the sort of facial hirsuteness last seen on a Victorian parson, and an ostentatious interest in pornography. All have a strong theoretical interest in sex (perhaps not so much in practice, given the amount of time spent talking about it, but who knows?).

What unites this group is the conviction that there’s no sexual act between adults that cannot be redeemed through the magic of “consent”. A significant number of them are to be found in universities, opining scholastically about chemsex, BDSM, furries, sexual choking, or whatever the latest and hottest transgression is supposed to be. Another notable presence is in the creative arts. In terms of concrete political projects, they mostly nick ideas from the instinctively libertarian youth culture currently going haywire on the internet. Indeed, a lot of unthinking public support for sexual libertarian projects comes from the merging of those projects with those of more idealistic and naive teenagers, doing their best to piss off their mothers by talking loudly on the internet about sexual deviancy.

Meanwhile, to situations where consent is obviously absent — as in the large number of sexual offences against women — the response from sexual libertarians is mostly studied indifference. These people are not in the business of public sexual disapproval, after all. Yet despite being norm-averse in sexual matters, they are often happy to enforce social sanctions against those who they consider political enemies, tending to be highly censorious about speech they perceive to threaten their own interests. They like to call themselves feminists, though only on the understanding that Judith Butler has definitively shown that women don’t really exist. Though a few pay surrogate “birthing bodies” to produce Insta-friendly babies, most don’t have children; but this doesn’t stop them having very confident opinions on the rearing of “trans kids” or on sex education in schools.

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The second significant influence on contemporary queer culture could not be more different. These are the rainbow bureaucrats: the charity workers and trustees, managers, PR specialists, lobbyists, and equality advisers who keep the whole corporate-friendly show on the road. In contrast to the sexualised norm-busting swagger of the libertarians, the dominant idiom here is completely asexual and intensely moralised. The self-appointed role of the rainbow bureaucrat is to educate, to sooth, to care, to “manage difficult conversations”, to protect, and to inspire. The tone is comforting, homely, and eminently responsible. It’s time for tea and biscuits, not for chemsex. And as with bureaucrats everywhere, there is also a positive relish for rules and norms: what words to say and not to say, what badges and lanyards to wear, what Stonewall holy days to mark, what petitions to sign, what bake sales to have, what mantras to chant, what merchandise to buy. There is also a strong legislative instinct — as soon as there is a norm they approve of, there probably ought to be a law or a policy to help it along.

An illustrative example of this side of the queer coin is the Mermaids website, where a basic aim of the charity — lobbying to make medical and social transition easier for minors — is placed within a miasma of cooing, caring, supporting, “affirming”, and consoling. Colluding against potentially protesting parents, the site even tells kids that “if you are nervous about visiting our site then you can click on the arrow over on the right-hand-side of the screen and it’ll take you to another page”. (The arrow takes you to Wikipedia.) So much for out and proud.

These, then, are the two signatories to the exceptionally weird pact underpinning queerness as a contemporary cultural phenomenon in the UK — between one side who believes nothing and one who believes everything; between the icily cold and the warmly caring; between those who say fuck the police, and those who want to call the police (in Mermaids’ case, quite literally, as was revealed last week). The sexual libertarians steal their ideas from youth cultures online, while the rainbow bureaucrats operationalise those ideas, earnestly selling them back as identities to the next generation of young consumers, as well as selling on the victimhood tropes that will keep the cash flowing from corporates keen to have a socially responsible-looking brand.

Perhaps it won’t have escaped the reader thus far that there’s a biological element to all this too. The sexual libertarians are mostly men; the staff and trustees of Mermaids are nearly all female — no matter how they identify — and, in my experience, so are most other rainbow bureaucrats. Despite foundational intellectual myths, it turns out biological sex matters in the queer world too. And though they won’t like it, it’s tempting to see these two factions as part of a tediously conventional nuclear family, with rebellious jack-the-lad Dad and solicitous stay-at-home Mum, and with many confused children shunting between the two.

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Between them, these two symbolic parental figures allow queerness to be all things to all (non-)men, depending on what the interest is at the time: sexily threatening or passively threatened; thrillingly disruptive or reassuringly conventional; cynically nihilistic or earnestly idealistic. Their joint influence explains why the adjective “queer” might as easily be added to a Brighton nightclub flyer as to an NHS pamphlet or an article in the Women’s Institute magazine. It also explains why the whole “LGBTQ+ movement” remains so impervious to criticism. Should a sexual libertarian ever go rogue and overdo the transgression (say, by claiming that “children have sexual desires at an early age”), or should a rainbow bureaucrat ever get sloppy with procedure (say, by committing a massive data breach), other bureaucrats will instantly appear in reassuring mummy-mode to steady the horses, talking soothingly about best international practice and strong safeguarding policies.

If a back-up is needed, a pre-digested narrative stands ready for employment at any time, which says that any criticism must be motivated by phobia. And since victimhood sells these days, both to troubled kids looking for a spiritual home and to corporates looking for a progressive brand image, a crisis is thereby neatly turned into an opportunity for growth. Truly, when they called this whole racket queer, they weren’t wrong.

At the time, in Noughties London, I really believed that what I was doing was radical and creative: embracing fluidity, self-construction and impermanence, against the rigid constraints of a single-sex environment and the gender binary.

I blame some of this insufferability on queer theory, whose ideas I absorbed as an undergraduate. From (among others) Judith Butler I learned that the identity categories of sex and sexuality are imposed on us by oppressive outside forces, while (confusingly) also being open to constant individual reinvention.

In this worldview ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ aren’t stable categories, and neither are ‘man’ and ‘woman’, except inasmuch as they’re imposed by un-hip Forces of Bad: the oppressive ‘cisheteropatriarchal status quo’. And the only way to stick two fingers up at this dread hegemon is to mess about with the categories. Hence feeling so pleased with myself, 15 years ago, for doing something as ground-breakingly subversive as calling myself a lesbian, moving in with a bunch of lesbians and then hooking up with a man.

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I share this not especially stellar episode not just as belated apology to my ex-housemates, but because since then queer theory has eaten culture. Everyone’s subverting identity categories now. The abbreviation ‘LGB’, which seemed more than expansive enough in the late nineties when I started university, has ballooned to ‘LGBTQQIAAP’ with activists still pushing for further inclusions. Facebook offers an ever-lengthening list of genders to put on your profile (71 at the last count). And the rainbow flag associated with the Pride marches has multiplied, with at least 24 different ones now available to wave, including a ‘Pup Pride’ one for people who like to roleplay as dogs.

Anyone boring enough to simply accept the identity assigned them by the ‘heteropatriarchy’ is marked with the (supposedly descriptive but really derogatory) epithet ‘cishet’. This is a mark of ignominy, as one Reddit user made clear, asking: “What is a ‘cishet’ and why is it bad?’. “I keep seeing the word cishet in the context of tumblr and my SJW type acquaintances,” the post explains, “usually with them saying that the cishets cause all of their problems and need to die.” One reply cuts to the chase: using cishet is “like derisively calling someone else a ‘normie’.”

In this ‘anti-normie-ism’ we hear echoes not just of the name, but also the ideas, contained in the Reformation-era Christian heresy of ‘antinomianism’. This doctrine held that salvation is available solely through faith and divine grace, and true believers are under no obligation to follow rules, laws or traditions. While antinomianism was rejected by mainstream Protestantism, it ended up having the last laugh: for today the heretics are those who resist the wholesale attack on rules, norms and traditions that characterises anti-normie-ism.

Far from being condemned as heresy, like antinomianism, anti-normie-ism is celebrated in the annual festival of Pride Month, during which millions join in a peculiarly modern ritual of simultaneously celebrating and subverting shared identity. Big brands fall over themselves to monetise the festival.

This moment, and movement, has been some time in the making. In 1793, having defeated the Ancien Régime, the victors in the French Revolution set out to sweep away all the irrational and traditionalist remnants of reactionary Catholicism in favour of a new, atheistic religion of rationality. To this end, they held a Festival of Reason in Notre Dame; where the altar had stood, a papier-mâché mountain was raised on which an actress dressed as Liberty bowed to the flame of Reason.

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In that moment, anti-normie-ism dispensed even with the polite antinomian fiction of having God on direct-dial as justification for binning the rules. The Catholic political theorist Adrian Vermeule characterises the subsequent history of our fight against normie-dom, and in favour of individual freedom and self-expression, as continuing the tradition of that 1793 Festival. The Festival of Reason is ongoing: the old must be smashed, traditions swept away, sacred items burned and the march of progress celebrated, a dynamic and relentless drive which “constantly, and at an ever-increasing tempo, disrupts deeply-cherished traditions among its subject populations”.

But over time, as once-edgy positions become mainstream, the Festival’s appetite turns cannibal. Having solidified into social norms, progressive victories become in turn targets for demolition. And this is the position in which many formerly progressive gay and lesbian people find themselves today.

The onward march of same-sex equality has been steady over the last half-century: gay sex was decriminalised in 1967, when the Conservative peer Lord Arran explained that his reason for sponsoring the Sexual Offences Act was his two life goals “to stop people buggering badgers, and to stop people badgering buggers”. The same-sex age of consent was 21 when I was a teenager in the Nineties, and is now equalised at 16 with the heterosexual one. Thanks to another Conservative, David Cameron, same-sex marriage today has the same civil standing as the heterosexual sort.

But the march of progress hasn’t stopped. The word queer, once a term of abuse, was first reclaimed by gay and lesbian people — and is now the territory of anyone, including heterosexuals, who don’t want to be shamed as cishet.

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The actor Nico Tortorella, for example, has been in what to me looks suspiciously like a heterosexual relationship for some 14 years, with the ‘lifestyle entrepreneur and LGBTQ activist’ Bethany Meyers. The couple even married in 2018. But Tortorella identifies as non-binary and prefers to be referred to as ‘they’ and ‘them’, while Meyers identifies as a lesbian. Thus despite having an (in the biological sense) entirely ordinary heterosexual relationship, Tortorella and Meyers are celebrated as a ‘queer couple’.

And their embrace of polyamory means that Tortorella and Meyer arguably are more anti-normie than of those stodgy gay people who prefer dull old monogamy. And Meyer’s re-interpretation of ‘lesbian’ is expansive enough to survive a 14-year relationship with a biological male, a fact that surely queers our understanding of sex and gender far more radically than those reactionary homos who insist on excluding people from their pool of potential partners on the grounds of anatomy.

Thus, by queering ‘queer’, the new heteroqueers have wrestled the baton of queerness from those lesbian and gay people who might once have been targeted for ‘queer-bashing’. And thanks to the ongoing Festival of Reason, the exclusively same-sex-attracted sexuality that launched the whole ‘queer rights’ enterprise has in turn come to seem conservative, if not outright bigoted.

My late great-aunt epitomised this kind of non-queer gayness. She was a staunch Tory and local councillor, wore trouser suits and kept her hair short, and lived her entire adult life with the same ‘friend’, in a relationship that was indistinguishable from any other petit-bourgeois marriage except that both of them were women. They went on cruises, finished each other’s sentences, were pillars of the local community — and didn’t have a ‘rainbow’ bone in their bodies.

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She died around the same time as I was misbehaving in houseshares, and I never discussed my own reflections on queer theory with her. I wish I had, as it would have given me much to think about. For my great-aunt was many things: a public servant, a citizen, a lesbian (though I don’t think she would have used that word) but one thing her devoted relationship absolutely wasn’t was ‘queer’.

And this in turn gives us a clue to the nature of ‘queerness’ as it’s celebrated today. “Love is love”, claims the Pride slogan, merrily sweeping aside millennia of philosophical and theological thought on the ways love may in fact differ from love. In his influential 1936 theological work Agape and Eros, for example, the Swedish bishop Anders Nygren unpicks the distinction between eros, the ego-centric, acquisitive and desire-based version of love first delineated in Plato’s Symposium, and agape, the Christian understanding of a love based in self-giving and a willingness to sacrifice self for others.

To complicate things further, the ancient Greeks had three words for love: eros, agape and philia, love for friends and family. Nygren argued that over time, even in Christian theology, agape became subordinate to eros — that is, to desire; while Nygren was criticised by other theologians for himself ignoring philia. But today, the juggernaut of Queer Theory, for all that it claims the mantle of ‘love’, ignores both philia and agape. Instead, ‘love’ in the queer theory sense is pure eros: desire.

And this is the bait-and-switch at the heart of queer theory. Decent, compassionate mainstream people hear ‘love’ and think of those same-sex couples they know whose lives embrace all three — the passionate eros, the sociable philia and selfless agape. Few in modern Britain would disagree that these can and do flourish just as well in same-sex as opposite-sex partnerships. Having won sympathy by gesturing at philia and agape, though, the juggernaut of queerness aggressively promotes only an eros increasingly impatient of any constraint.

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This means monogamists of all orientations go under the bus: for inasmuch as monogamy constrains desire, it’s by definition un-queer. We see this reflex, for example, in the brickbats flung at too-monogamous-to-be-queer Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg; or sneery terms like ‘homonormativity’. And all such jibes share the same loathing of any social structure that calls not for unchained desire but fellow-feeling (philia) or self-sacrifice (agape).

And in this way, the political campaign for gay acceptance has been colonised, cannibalised and ultimately displaced by a consumer marketing campaign for the limitless expansion of desire. It was 2004 when the Pride march in London stopped being classified as a political protest and became a ‘parade’; that change, questioned by many LGB people at the time, marks the decisive shift in balance of power from gay acceptance to anti-normie-ism. And this is a problem for gay normies.

For as Vermeule points out, the Festival’s inexorable appetite foments “unrest, animosity, and eventually political reaction and backlash”. And indeed, evidence suggests that support for LGBTQ rights has peaked and is now falling again. The marketing campaign for unchained eros is today actively undermining public acceptance of same-sex relationships.

The campaign to de-stigmatise same-sex relationships was a huge gain for human dignity. I don’t want to see that reversed by the oncoming reaction against our now established religion of anti-normie-ism. The only beneficiaries of the takeover are brands selling rainbow leisurewear in Pride Month. But the front-line casualties, when the reaction begins in earnest, will be those gay normies who only ever wanted to be left in peace.

If your answer is “no”, it’s probably because you’re straight.

It happens to homosexuals, though. What makes you gay? Even now, in these supposedly enlightened times, there is a body of scientists spending time and money trying to find out what it is that makes a minority of humans same-sex attracted. The latest study was published earlier this year, and I constantly wonder why it is a subject of such interest among the scientific community.

It’s the gay gene they’re after. It’s much like the search for the Loch Ness monster, as they cling on to the fantasy that a biological basis for sexual preference does exist.

The history of the search for the gay gene is not a comfortable one. One of the most controversial studies was conducted by gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay in 1991, who claimed that gay men’s brains were “more like women’s”. Then there was the study suggestion that boys with older brothers are 33% more likely to be gay because of occupying a womb where a male foetus has already been.

Appallingly, the then Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Immanuel Jakobovits reacted to news of LeVay’s research by saying: “If we could by some form of genetic engineering eliminate these trends, we should — so long as it is done for a therapeutic purpose.”

In 1993, American geneticist Dean Hamer was purported to have finally discovered what was nicknamed the “gay gene”. In a study of 40 gay brothers, Hamer found that two-thirds shared a distinctive pattern of DNA at a particular point on the X chromosome, which men inherit from their mothers. The gene was labelled by Hamer as “Xq28”.

The response to Hamer’s study was largely that of horror. Alarmists said the discovery would be used to try to “cure” homosexuality, ignoring the fact that Freudians, fascists and supporters of eugenics alike have been trying to eradicate homosexuality for decades on the assumption that it was something that could be “fixed”. Yet gay rights activists in the US and Britain were, on the whole, delighted at the discovery of the “gay gene”, seeing it as ammunition in the war against homophobia. To them, the gene proved that their sexuality was instinctive and inevitable, not perverse.

As a consequence of Hamer’s study, researchers at the National Cancer Institute in Washington DC said their findings would help prove that sexual orientation could be inherited, and that it would be possible to predict whether a baby would be gay and give the mother the option of a termination.  “Abortion hope after gay gene findings” read the headline in one newspaper — and yes, as recently as 1993.

But closer inspection showed that Hamer had not in fact identified a definite genetic basis to same-sex attraction. In 1999, researchers from the University of Western Ontario, who repeated the experiment with a larger group, failed to find the same link. The study, reported in the American journal Science, found there to be no more DNA match-ups than would have been expected by chance.

A further analyss in 2003 led researchers to say that they had found persuasive evidence to support the theory that a person’s sexuality is developed before birth. They had measured the “eye-blink reaction” of straight and gay test subjects who were subjected to sudden loud noises, finding significant differences in the response between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual participants which, they said, could be linked to the area of the brain which determined sexuality.

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To many people this is more than dry scientific study. I came out aged 15 and was told I was a freak of nature, something I believed until I met other lesbians and gay men who had a sense of pride in their identity. This was the end of the 1970s and the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) were in full swing.

Both groups understood sexuality as a social construct, rather than something innate. For women it was about allowing ourselves to dare admit our attraction to other women and throwing off the shackles of what the lesbian writer Adrienne Rich  called “compulsory heterosexuality”. Rich argued that heterosexuality for women is a subtle yet forceful psychological prison from which most women could break free if they wanted.

The booklet Love Your Enemy? picked up on the debate in the UK, the central argument being that heterosexuality might well be enforced as a tool of patriarchy. “We think serious feminists have no choice but to abandon heterosexuality,” the manifesto reads. “Only in the system of oppression that is male supremacy does the oppressor actually invade and colonise the interior of the body of the oppressed.”

Many feminists considered sexuality purely a matter of innate desire, and the idea that lesbianism could be in any way a choice crazy. I understood that one did not “choose” to be gay or lesbian as such, more that if true choice for women existed, we may well be open to act upon our desires.

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In her 1999 book Generations of Women Choosing to Become Lesbian: Questioning the Essentialist Link, Australian academic Lorene Gottschalk interviewed three different generations of lesbians, asking whether or not they believed in biology as the root cause of sexual attraction. Gottschalk found that those who became lesbians in the 1970s believed they chose their sexuality, but those who became lesbians in the 1990s thought it was biology.

I can see why today young lesbians are far more likely than their older counterparts to insist that being gay is biologically determined: feminism in its heyday provided women with the vision that it was possible to leave a miserable heterosexual existence, and many of them did. By the 1990s, however, the development of queer theory led many lesbians to identify more with gay men than with second wave feminists, and thereby adopt the “please tolerate us, we can’t help it” line.

The men of the 1970s-era Gay Liberation Front understood that homophobia came out of a desperation to maintain strict gender roles, and many believed that heterosexuality was oppressive to women and that all anti-sexist men worth their salt should be gay. But to say, as did the singer Tom Robinson in 1978, that we were “glad to be gay” invoked horror from many gays, and terror from straights. After all, many gay men wanted to be “tolerated” and believed they would illicit sympathy if they could convince people that they “could not help” how they were.

Heterosexuals on the other hand were comforted by the idea that we did not “recruit”, and therefore their offspring were safe — unless, of course, they happened to be born with the rogue gene.

Unfortunately, immutability has never helped black people, Jews or women escape bigotry and oppression, and it won’t save us, either. The determinist case is often used to argue against Christian gay conversion therapy, in which so-called therapists “pray away the gay”, the logic being that if we have no control over our sexuality, what’s the point of trying to change it?

But as I know only too well from my undercover investigation into the practice, which goes on in Britain as well as the US< the bigots who promote conversion therapy neither know nor care whether we are born or choose to be gay — they just want us to live a heterosexual lifestyle, or failing that become celibate and remain in the closet.

It is also argued that some of us only “realise” we are gay later in life, while others remain in the closet through fear or shame. For instance, Sex And The City actor Cynthia Nixon came out as lesbian in her 40s, having previously been in a long-term relationship with a man, and she was vilified by a number of gay men. “I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better,” she said, invoking the wrath of the biological determinists.

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Nixon, despite being an excellent role model for young lesbians, was accused of playing into the gay-hater’s hands. If you can choose to be gay, they said, homophobes will argue that we can choose not to be.

Most recently un 2019, the largest ever study of its kind examined data and DNA information of 500,000 people and found there were thousands of genetic variants linked to same-sex sexual behaviour, most of the them having a minor impact. There is no “gay gene” as such, but many different mutations might play a small role — yet the researchers said that non-genetic factors, including upbringing, personality and nurture, had far more influence on a person’s choice of sexual partner.

I appreciate that scientists have instinctive wonder as why things are as they are, and to seek answers. But I cannot deny that the incessant search for the gay gene offends me, because of the underlying and unspoken implications. My sexuality is not a problem waiting for a cure, and nor is it an oddity which needs explaining. Lesbians and gay men should not have to rely on (slim-to-non-existent) evidence that we “can’t help it” in order to be tolerated.

Knowing there are scientists spending huge amounts of time, money and effort in an attempt to ascribe a biological basis to our sexual orientation makes me, and countless others, feel like a specimen under a microscope as opposed to a person deserving of rights and respect. To the governments and other bodies funding such research I say this: pour that money into challenging anti-gay prejudice and support for young people struggling with life. As the Alix Dobkin song goes: Every woman can be a lesbian.