I recently came across an old tweet, posted in 2020, by transgender ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio. Strangio tweeted that after he asked a man to move his SUV that was blocking Strangio’s driveway, the man called him a “faggot.”

“At the time it was mostly embarrassing,” Strangio wrote. “I felt that deep pang of self-hatred (and a tiny bit of gender validation for being called a faggot — since yes, accurate).”

Now, basically anything Strangio tweets bothers me, since I, like a lot of other LGB (and some trans) people, believe that many children and some adolescents presenting at gender clinics today would likely desist and grow up to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual if they were given proper emotional support. In other words, in many cases, the medicalization of “trans kids” might actually be the medicalization of homosexuality. This puts me at odds with Strangio’s apparent mission to make puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries (which lead to infertility and, for males especially, lack of proper sexual function) more accessible to vulnerable youth who might be struggling with internalized homophobia. In this particular case, I found Strangio’s admission that he felt validated by a vile antigay slur extremely callous and no different than if Rachel Dolezal claimed she felt validated in her black identity because someone called her the N-word.

It’s the sheer insensitivity of Strangio’s tweet. As a gender-nonconforming gay kid, I was repeatedly called a faggot by my peers. It was hurtful, frightening, and humiliating. So, for someone who is not a gay man to claim he felt validated by a slur that has been spat at me and so many other gay men is outrageously obtuse. You see, Strangio doesn’t know the gay male struggle. I’m sure he has experienced hardship, discrimination, intimidation (like in the experience he shared on Twitter, for example), and mental anguish regarding his identity — haven’t we all? — but again, not the type that is specific to homosexual men. That struggle is a diverse one, and certainly not the same for all gay men, but I would argue there is a common thread running through each individual experience, one that is conspicuously absent from Strangio’s.

However, here’s what I’ve been asking myself ever since I read Strangio’s tweet: Is one of the reasons I’m angry because it threatens my ability to claim exclusive ownership of a specific experience of victimhood? Which leads me to an even more troubling question: How much of my identity as a gay man is built upon grievance?

In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about “The slave revolt in morality”, that is, the inversion of values that occurred when the modern Judeo-Christian (egalitarian) morality replaced the Classical Greek and Roman aristocratic morality. This process, Nietzsche believed, was brought about by oppressed peoples’ resentment — their grievance — towards their oppressors, which, in their powerlessness to actually defeat their oppressors, they sublimated into a project of establishing a new, inverted value system. What was once “good” (aggressiveness, strength) was now devalued as not only bad, but “evil”, and what was “bad” to the aristocracy (weakness, passivity) was now “good.”

The dynamic that Nietzsche wrote about is replicated in modern identity politics. Just as identity politics were essential to the Civil Rights Movement, so they were to the Gay Rights Movement, which earned me legal protection from discrimination, the right to serve in the military, and the right to marry my husband. The movement did something else for me, too: it inspired my own version of a “slave revolt”, in which I sublimated my resentments against my oppressors and challenged (or inverted) the value systems that had been imposed upon me by antigay religious dogma and heteronormativity. Now they (e.g., Christian conservatives, straight people) were evil, and I was good. The revolt was liberating, but it also, for a long time, alienated me from people I mistook for enemies and trapped me in a self-replicating narrative of perpetual victimhood.

In the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, one often hears an analogy: “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” The Irish-American actor, Malachy McCourt, is often credited with the quotation, although variations of it have appeared before, including in Emmet Fox’s The Sermon on the Mount (1934), a popular text among AA members. “Resentment”, according to the “Big Book” of AA, is “The number one offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else.” AA comes with its own dogmatisms and blind spots, but on this point, they are unquestionably correct.

These ideas about resentment are the basis of the fourth of AA’s twelve steps, which suggests we make “A searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” We begin this inventory by listing our resentments. The end game is to determine which aspects of our lives the alleged wrongdoings of others have affected — was it our self-esteem, our security, our finances? — and then to determine what our part was in the conflict. This simple act of taking responsibility for our part, no matter how minuscule, renders the resentment less potent, which makes our compulsion to drown our anger and bitterness with alcohol less necessary. It also sparks humility and compassion for the object of our resentment, readying us for the steps that follow, in particular the ninth step, during which we approach those we listed on our inventory and make amends for the harms we may have caused them.

When I joined AA in my early twenties, I jumped at the opportunity to take a moral inventory. You’re telling me that all I need to do to stay sober is list out my resentments and all the things I’ve done wrong? Piece of cake, I can do that in my sleep. But it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.

Listing my resentments wasn’t a problem, however when I met with my sponsor to do my fifth step, which involves admitting “To another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”, I wasn’t prepared for what came next. He asked me what my part was in my resentment towards the Christian cult I grew up in — the headmaster of my school, my teachers, and everyone else who programmed me to believe that homosexuality was evil. The mere suggestion enraged me. I drove home that evening and got wasted. (That night ended at a Baltimore gay bar, where I entered a wet underwear contest and lost.) The fragile value system that I had been trying to construct in the aftermath of my childhood was predicated on the religious fundamentalists being the bad guys. Even contemplating how I may have been wrong meant there was a possibility that they were right.

That’s how it was in the beginning of my sobriety, when I was just embarking on the long road to liberation. Everything was black and white. Either Christians were evil, and I was good, or Christians were good, and I was evil. The slightest challenge to whatever perception I held at the moment could tip the scales, inverting my worldview and sending me into a mental tailspin. If only I had voiced my objections to my sponsor, who, being a gay man much older than me, would have undoubtedly understood. I returned to him the next day with my tail between my legs, hung over and with one more night’s proof that I could not drink successfully. I had to stay sober, or I was going to die.

The solution, beyond working the twelve steps, was to learn how to break the habit of black-and-white thinking and find beauty — and vast amounts of truth — in the gray. It involved sitting in discomfort and anxiety until the discomfort and anxiety dissipated. This process took years. Nearly two decades, in fact. The payoff is immense, and simple: I am no longer a victim, but a survivor.

This move from victim to survivor means that I am no longer immune to criticism. I no longer expect less of myself because I’ve been wounded. I don’t use my identity as a gay man — as a “marginalized” and “oppressed” minority — as a shield. The inverted value system I constructed has been shattered. They are not evil and I am not good, nor vice versa.

This idea is anathema to modern Critical Social Justice movements. Black-and-white thinking is the modus operandi (literally!). Blackness is good, and “whiteness” (and “white-adjacency”) is evil. LGBT is good, and being cis and straight is evil. This zero-sum framing is a symptom of today’s trendy, ideologically-manufactured pseudo-queerness. The opposite of this Marxian queerness is liberal queerness. A queerness that sees people not as victims and oppressors, but as individuals; where immutable traits are protected equally instead of being weaponized to create new moral hierarchies.

Today, we venerate victimhood. Disabilities, mental illnesses, and chronic health issues are listed in Twitter bios next to our professions. World-class athletes earn praise, not for winning gold, but for dropping out. “It’s okay to not be okay,” people coo to one another in the gentle cadence of a mental health therapist, which is to say, “It’s not okay to be okay.” Because to be okay is a privilege. And to be privileged is, well, evil.

Nietzsche praised Jews for their resilience and triumphant self-affirmation, all despite the persistent tug of resentment towards their oppressors. But he criticized early Christianity, whose resentment, he wrote, resulted in its creation of a worldview that would have the powerful (the evil) burn in hell for eternity. To this, I’ll say: at least Christians believe in the possibility of salvation. In today’s church — the Church of Social Justice — there is no mercy. No forgiveness. No grace.

Identity politics have proven essential to achieving legal equality for racial and sexual minorities. Outnumbered groups who lack equal rights must band together to gain them. That’s the end goal of identity politics in a liberal, democratic society: equal rights. It’s a temporary means to an end. Beyond that point, it’s just tribalism. When it comes to the homosexual facet of my complex human identity, I have my rights. Identity politics may be necessary to preserve these rights in the face of regressive efforts to roll them back, but they must be free of tribalism and victimhood. Persisting with the former would only exoticize my homosexuality and supercharge it with meaning when there is none. It would perpetuate the myth of a harmonious and monolithic “gay and lesbian community”, when in fact the only trait that we all share is our same-sex attraction; and it would thwart individualism, inhibit freethinking, and stifle the intellect. The latter — victimhood — diminishes self-esteem, encourages hyper-dependence on others, and breeds smug self-righteousness. Today, when victimhood is currency, it might earn me capital, but it will always leave me spiritually bankrupt.

So where does this leave me with Strangio? His activist tactics still bother me, but my resentment towards his appropriation of “faggot” is subsiding. Not because I’ve sublimated it and toyed with any preexisting value system, but because I’ve looked at my part in it. I’ve established specifically why it bothers me. I’ve robbed it of its power.

If Strangio wants “faggot”, he can have it. (Although I insist on still being able to fling it about with my gay friends in private.) The word, and the memory of how it was used against me, are not puzzle pieces in my identity. Without them, I’m still a complete picture. An evolving one, sure, but always complete. And I hope that one day, Strangio will be able to say the same.

Published Sep 2, 2022
Updated Apr 6, 2023