I Still Call Myself a Gay Liberal

I still call myself a gay liberal. At least, that is how I define myself. Whether every person who now claims those words would still permit me to use them is a different question.

I want to think aloud about something I have not fully resolved. I would rather ask the question honestly than pretend I have arrived at the answer.

Let me say who is asking. I was born in South Africa and left in 1986, in my twenties, because my family and I were involved in the fight against apartheid and staying had become impossible. I am a gay man who immigrated to the United States at a time when gay people were still legally forbidden from entering the country. I am a Jew and a Zionist, from a Litvak family most of which was murdered in Lithuania. I have spent my life on the wrong side of more than one orthodoxy, usually by choice, and I have paid for it more than once.

So when I ask the question that follows, I am not asking it from safety, and I am not asking it only about other people. I am asking it about every group I belong to, including my own.

How does a society decide who belongs, and what does it do to the people who fall outside the line?

I am not equating the consequences of the systems I am about to place beside one another. The Holocaust was industrial murder. Apartheid was state violence. A quarrel over language is not either of those, and I will not insult the dead by pretending it is. What I am asking about is not consequence. It is mechanism: the underlying human move these systems share at wildly different intensities.

The move is familiar. A community defines the acceptable member: the right beliefs, the right words, the right loyalties, the right identity. Then it treats deviation not as disagreement but as corruption. The dissenter is not merely wrong; he is dangerous, contaminated, a traitor. Facts cease to determine conclusions. Conclusions determine which facts are permitted. Belonging stops being something you are and becomes something you perform. People prove themselves not by what they think, but by repeating the approved slogans and policing those who do not.

Every society needs ways of distinguishing insiders from outsiders. That instinct is probably older than civilization itself. The problem begins when membership ceases to depend on conduct and begins to depend on ritual demonstrations of ideological purity. Once belonging must constantly be performed, someone must always be found performing it more loudly, more absolutely, and more cruelly than everyone else.

I have long suspected that people need something to hate in order to feel better about themselves. The object changes. Jews. Gay people. Black people. Capitalists. Communists. Socialists. Liberals. Zionists. Internationalists. Isolationists. “Rootless cosmopolitans.” The vocabulary changes with the fashion and the political need, and Jews have been made to fit an astonishing number of those categories, sometimes several of them at once. The target moves. The emotional reward does not. Hatred offers belonging, innocence, superiority, and the relief of locating everything wrong in somebody else.

Years ago, a specialist in addiction explained an idea to me: when people surrender one addiction, they may seek another object to replace the function it served. I am not making a clinical diagnosis of political life. I am describing a resemblance that has stayed with me. Moral certainty can become intoxicating. So can public denunciation. So can the brief elevation that comes from identifying a sinner, exposing him, and joining the righteous crowd. When one subject loses its charge, another appears. During Covid, millions of people suddenly spoke with the certainty of epidemiologists. Then the fixation moved elsewhere. The subject changes; the performance remains.

The object is interchangeable because the object is not the point. Denunciation supplies belonging, innocence, elevation, and the licensed discharge of aggression against a permitted target. When one target loses its charge, the appetite recruits another. This is the part I refuse to place outside myself. The appetite for righteous certainty is not a defect peculiar to my opponents. The moment I imagine it runs only in other people is the moment it has recruited me.

That is why conformity can begin to look like an addiction of its own. It often acquires the characteristics of addiction: repetition, escalation, and eventually the search for a fresh object. It produces a community of users who reassure one another that the intensity of their feeling proves the truth of their conclusion. Doubt becomes withdrawal. Nuance becomes betrayal. The person who asks for evidence threatens not only the belief but the emotional economy built around it.

I read authors such as Orwell and Solzhenitsyn young, and though I never studied them formally, I suspect 1984 shaped my instincts more than I knew. Newspeak was not merely censorship. It was the shrinking of the sayable until certain thoughts became impossible for lack of words. The Party did not only forbid dissent; it made loyalty performative, a daily demonstration, and turned every citizen into an enforcer. That is the machine I keep recognizing, in different costumes.

I saw it first in the country of my birth. Apartheid sorted human beings into categories and demanded that the whole society participate in maintaining the sort. You were not asked merely to agree with it. You were required to enact it, and often to report those who would not. Ordinary people proved their standing by their zeal against the marked. That experience left me permanently alert to the pattern, even when it appears wearing a kinder face and speaking a gentler vocabulary.

Which brings me to harder ground, closer to home.

I fought for gay equality, and I have lived to see it arrive in ways I did not expect in my lifetime. Much of that change was necessary and humane, and I am grateful for it. I supported gay rights when gay people were still treated as shame, disease, threat, and moral failure. I gave time, money, loyalty, and public identification to a movement whose promise was simple: no person should be required to amputate part of himself in order to belong.

I always understood the destination to be equality and, beyond equality, irrelevance. A world in which who you love matters less and less, until one day it hardly registers at all. That was the liberation I wanted: to be ordinary.

What I sometimes see now is not the fading of the category but its multiplication into an ever-expanding script, where fluency in the latest vocabulary can become a test of moral character. I do not object to anyone’s identity. I object when a movement for freedom begins treating an imperfect, unfamiliar, or outdated word as evidence of a corrupt heart. I object when conduct matters less than recitation. I object when belonging depends on repeating a catechism and identifying its heretics.

There is a difference between judging conduct and demanding recitation. Conduct can be demonstrated and then left behind. Recitation can never be completed because it leaves no enduring evidence. It must be performed again tomorrow, and more emphatically than today. That is how loyalty tests become perpetual rather than finite.

I have already written about the most painful example for me: the treatment of gay Jews and Zionists inside parts of the LGBTQIA++ movement. Jews helped build the modern gay-rights struggle. Yet Jewish symbols have been treated as threats, Jewish gay organizations have been pressed to denounce Israel, and Zionism has been converted into a contamination from which the Jew must publicly cleanse himself. The acceptable Jew may remain, but only after surrendering the part of Jewish identity the movement has decided is disqualifying.

That is not inclusion. It is ideological probation.

I do not mean criticism of Israel. Criticism of any government’s policies is legitimate, and I have plenty of my own. I mean antizionism as it now functions in many spaces: not as an argument open to evidence, but as a conformity system. Moral standing is earned through denunciation. Nuance is treated as weakness. Complexity itself becomes suspect. The competition is to be more absolute, more accusatory, more purified of doubt.

Every ideology eventually discovers that the most effective policing comes not from the top, but from believers proving themselves to one another. Institutions may establish the boundaries, but ordinary members enforce them because enforcement itself becomes evidence of belonging. In today’s antizionist movement, denunciation is often less about persuading Zionists than demonstrating one’s own moral standing before fellow believers. The real audience is rarely the Zionist. It is everyone else watching. Every denunciation becomes both accusation and credential. That is what keeps the performance escalating.

A Zionist is not answered; he is exposed. A Jew who refuses to recant is not debated; he is marked. The ally who asks an inconvenient question is made to understand that the question has revealed something impure about him. Ask for evidence and you have not entered the discussion. You have placed yourself on trial.

This is the same movement that once taught me that no human being should have to hide, confess, denounce himself, or disappear in order to belong. Yet parts of it now ask precisely that of Jews. The rainbow loyalty test is not incidental to my argument. It is one of the places where I have watched a liberation movement begin reproducing the mechanism it once resisted.

A fair reader may notice an apparent asymmetry. I wanted being gay to become socially unremarkable, yet I insist that Jewish and Zionist identity must not be surrendered. But irrelevance before the law is not the same as disappearance. I wanted sexual orientation to stop determining whether a person could enter a country, marry, work, serve, or live without shame. I did not want gay people stripped of history, memory, or community. Nor will I accept Jewish equality on condition that Jews abandon their peoplehood, history, or connection to Israel. In both cases, the principle is the same: identity must not become a civil disability, and self-erasure must not become the price of admission.

So here is where this leaves me, still unresolved.

Nazism demonstrated the most catastrophic consequences of a mechanism that recurs, in vastly milder forms, throughout human history. Define the acceptable group. Mark dissent as deviance. Reward public conformity. Supply an object of hatred. Punish those who will not perform. Turn ordinary people into enforcers, because the surest way to prove you are inside the circle is to police its edge.

The mechanism does not remain attached to one ideology. It can migrate from right to left, from religion to secularism, from nationalism to internationalism, from conservatism to progressivism. It survives by changing its vocabulary and convincing each new set of enforcers that they are nothing like the enforcers who came before them.

If that is right, the discipline it demands of us is uncomfortable, because it cannot be aimed only at our enemies. The hardest place to see the machine is inside the group you love, speaking the language you agree with, punishing the people you were taught to disapprove of.

I still call myself a gay liberal because I still believe in liberty, equal dignity, pluralism, evidence, and the right of human beings to live without ideological coercion. I do not believe liberalism requires me to repeat every current slogan. I believe it requires me to defend the person who refuses.

Every generation imagines it would have resisted the conformity of the past. Far fewer ask whether they are performing the conformity of the present.

I have tried, in this reflection, to ask that of myself. I do not claim to have escaped the machine. But I am fairly sure that the willingness to look for it inside one’s own tribe is the only thing that separates a dissenter from an enforcer. The moment we decide the pattern belongs only to other people is usually the moment we have joined it.