From the Vaults: Andrew Sullivan, Part 2

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb and this is in Bed with the Right.

So this is the second half of our three-hour episode about the lifetimes and copious, copious opinions of Andrew Sullivan. This is an episode that we released on our Patreon back in the summer.

If there are references to heat, that's what that's about.

We are not, in fact, traveling in tropical locales, but we are traveling, which is why this week we decided to instead release something from the vault rather than record something new as we're preparing to close out the year with two absolute barn burners of episodes, namely the final installment of Project 1933 and a deep dive into the media hubbub surrounding Olivia Nutsi's American canto featuring frequent friend of the pod, Michael Hobbs.

So we hope you enjoy this re-release from our vaults. And if you do enjoy it, I do want to point out that it is the season of giving and it's the season for annoying conservative relatives.

And if either of those two things are on your 2025 bingo card, you still have a couple of days to either gift yourself or gift one of your relatives or your mortal enemies or, I don't know, Andrew Sullivan

a

wonderful gift subscription to our Patreon. Thank you so much for being on this journey with us.
Please enjoy this special holiday episode re-release. Can't wait to see you next week.

Can't wait to see you in the new year. Thank you, as always, for listening.

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb. And I'm Woibra Downegan.
Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So Adrian, today we are returning to Friend of the Pod,

the icon, the Enigma, the one and only Andrew Sullivan, a paragon of reactionary centrists, of gay conservatism, of anti-trans and misogynist impulses among gay men, a little crucible of the things that we look at here on the podcast, all represented in one guy.

One guy who has also put your early tweets on his sub stack.

Yeah, it's all, you can all go read my sub stacks from on Andrew Sullivan's sub stack if you want to There are like several articles devoted to me and what a bad person I am including one that's all about my alleged misandry

From which he has like a bunch of my tweets from like 2014 when I'm like 23 24 years old going like well I think rape is bad and I think misogyny is real and bad.

And Andrew Sullivan thinks that the fact that I tweeted this and then later deleted them is like evidence of a great conspiracy against men.

So I'm happy, happy to have a fan in Sully.

Anyone who's ever tweeted, men are trash, just part of a secret

international anti-man cabal. Yes, I understand that we're part of the male loneliness crisis, the downfall of civilization, responsible for Donald Trump's election and re-election, et cetera.

He also is like, oh, she deletes her tweets. And I like, for the record, I automatically delete my tweets and always have.
I like signed up for some script. But I mean, this is stupid.

I'm not going to fight with Andrew Sullivan

about my tweets because there's so many more substantial, interesting things to fight with him about.

In some ways, it's a good avenue into him because he never seems to shrink away from a fight, which, you know, I respect. On the other hand, he also is never happy with the fight.

Then he then ends up fighting.

He's blazed the trail for reactionary centrists everywhere in the sense that you can imagine that there's a version of the polity and of public discourse that Andrew Sullivan aspires to that he never ever encounters in real life.

And all we ever do is sort of fall short of it. He also has a vision for the gay rights movement that exists in the platonic heaven of ideals.
And just we just never get there.

And he'll just keep on listing the reasons why we're not. It's this kind of conservatism of disappointment that I think...
I just think it's fucking lazy.

There's something about this kind of happiness to get down in the gutter. And as we said, when he, for instance, got involved

in shaping the public reception of the bell curve, he was really getting down in the gutter.

And to then sort of retreat to your Olympian kind of precipice and say, like, well,

isn't it truly illiberal to have pointed out that data didn't show what it purported to show?

Yeah, like he creates

these

needless controversies by doing something like elevating the bell curve. But then I think he does select the conversations he wants to have.
And I think his impulses are incredibly petty.

Because somebody with his platform, with his tenure, with his, to me, frankly, kind of fucking bewildering amount of respect from his professional circle, he could dictate the terms of what he wants to be writing and talking about in public, right?

He is, especially now that he's entirely self-employed and is working on his own podcast and his own sub stack, he could be writing and having the conversation he wants to have. And I think he is.

And I think the conversation he wants to have is one about the foibles

of

particularly young people

who he thinks are excessive in their particularly feminist or like queer liberation commitments, right?

He doesn't really want to be having this loftier conversation because he enjoys having what he considers these tawdry ones. We left him when he left the New Republic, so employed in

a very important magazine, but one that famously doesn't make you rich. He is now, as far as I know, a Substack millionaire.

He's just making a lot of money off of Substack month after month after month. You're right.
With that kind of purge comes a

agenda setting ability, and there

would come an opportunity to take some real chances, right? You're no longer playing to Marty Peretz's foibles. You're no longer playing to what the Washington establishment wants to read about.

You're no longer worried about subscriber numbers that much. Yeah, you could find something other to do than amplifying the wizard lady and

saying that maybe skull measuring is getting a bad rap. But, you know, again, like these are choices, and we'll get into how and why he makes them.

O'Sullivan's pair of books from the mid-90s, which I think are the parts of his Uber that we have been taking the most seriously, I would say.

So that's Virtually Normal from 1996 and Love Undetectable from 97, I believe.

Those express two things, I think. One, they are reflections on AIDS.
They're looking forward towards realigning the gay rights movement along a very, very narrow

part of its previous brief, which is to say, participation in institutions of the state. That is to say, marriage, that is to say, the military.
That's right.

And it is, as you pointed out last time, it expresses a kind of social conservatism.

It's not just the gay movement politically has gone off the rails, but like also if you guys didn't carry on like this, if you just got married, had kids, got a dog, got a fence, et cetera, et cetera, then maybe the Straits won't be quite so mad at us.

And this is a position that Andrew Sullivan has held. until this year.
We know that because he just expressed it again in the New York Times and we'll get there. But that's important.

He has this reputation as a kind of gay social conservative, as a guy who looks at a gay pride march and is like, Isn't this all going a little far?

Aaron Ross Powell, but I think it's important to push back on this notion that he's, you know, merely trying to shield gay men from social opprobrium.

He is, in fact, participating in the social opprobrium, right? Like one of his

agendas, and one of the reasons he supports gay marriage is not just that he thinks that this kind of assimilation into a recognizable form of like bourgeois life will make gay men less vulnerable to homophobic attacks.

He actually does, in fact, think it would make them more virtuous, right?

He wants them to be closer to monogamous, closer to like recognizably participating in this kind of prescribed vision of adult life. Yeah.

He blames not the gay movement, but really gay people themselves for certain actions

and thinking, and he's very explicit about this in the recent New York Times piece, as enabling the Nita Bryants of the world, right? This is a through line of his. They would not come for you.

And also, you shouldn't do it. Unprotected gay sex is murder, is what he says, I believe, in Love Undetectable.
It is strategically wrong to carry on the way we're carrying on.

And in fact, there's something wrong with carrying on that way.

You're making the conservatives be homophobic by being so gay. And if you were a little less fruity about it, they would just be all hunky-dory.

Yeah, which gets us to a very interesting moment in Andrew Sullivan's life. So just to catch up with him briefly, he leaves the New Republic in 96.
In 98, I believe he's a Times columnist.

And then in the early 2000s, there's this,

I think immediately before 9-11, really, there is a blow-up around him when

he gets outed in a very interesting way, right?

He was not out of the closet yet. No, he was.
Okay, okay. So everybody knows that he's gay.
Yeah. But when you say he gets outed in the late 90s, early 2000s, what do you mean?

That is the interesting thing, right? How do you out someone who's been writing explicitly as a gay man since the 1980s? And credit to him where it's due. Well, you track down

personal ads he placed on various gay sex sites, including a Bearback City. And it's important to note that Andrew Sullivan is HIV positive and openly so.

What he gets outed at as is someone who engages in barebacking practices, meaning sex without a condom,

while being HIV positive.

Now,

the ethics around this outing are obviously pretty fraught and they're doubly ironic because, like, Andrew Sullivan hates outings. We've dealt in that first episode and why that might be.

But the question of, like, well, is it okay to out someone as someone who engages in these high-risk practices is another really, really interesting question.

Remember, he's called these people murderers, and now it turns out he appears to be doing this.

In absolute fairness to Andrew Sullivan, who I think we've all learned a little bit more about than we maybe wanted to know, my understanding is that in these ads, he was specifically seeking other HIV-positive men.

Is that correct? Um, no, uh, no,

no,

but

he does acknowledge his own status, okay, right?

My guess is that, like, the number of takers who were negative was minimal, and anyone reading those ads, I won't read them here, I feel like that's that is an invasion of privacy.

And also, just disrespectful to our poor listeners who

don't need to hear this. Oh, it's fine.

It's gross. You are asking our listeners to think about Andrew Sullivan having sex, which I think most of them probably don't want to do.
I guess so.

Nobody talks about the violence of outing to the audience. Like, what if I don't want to know this? All right, but I'm going to quote the line, no such thing as too hairy.

Okay.

To me, it's a thorny issue. On the one hand, you can see

Sullivan's point when he's absolutely outraged by this. If he had said he's HIV negative in those ads, yeah, go ahead, like mention this to people.
But he's very open.

And as he himself observed in his 90s reporting about the gay community,

of course, given how many gay men were infected with HIV, like certain practices had to evolve around this status, right? So in some ways, there really shouldn't have been a problem.

The problem becomes

that

basically, as Richard Goldstein puts it in a piece in the Village Voice, explaining why it was probably right to publish this or to disseminate this, was that this ad describes precisely the kind of, quote, pathological creature who normally raises Sullivan's wrath.

And that's, of course, it's a really interesting moment. I don't know if I 100% agree with that.
What is interesting is that that is exactly

the way outings of anti-gay preachers used to go. Right.
That's the reason why people disseminated those.

You'd be like, well, look, if he just says like, oh, I don't have an opinion on this and then goes to a gay club, that's fine. But it's all about like,

you know, man on dog, this, and worse than Hitler, that. And then suddenly you're like, at the shaft, like, I'm sorry.
What is this? Right.

He's doing something that he has described as akin to murder, right? Like very recently. And I think the outers would defend their.

actions here by saying like, listen, the wrong of his hypocrisy compounds the wrong of his homophobia, of his contempt for this group, right?

It implies a station of moral superiority from which he's issuing these judgments, which he in fact does not occupy, and that is word newsworthy for somebody of such stature. I think very few people,

except maybe some of Inter Sullivan's allies on the social right, would describe the like actual underlying sexual practices here as inherently immoral, right? Like this is almost kind of tame,

assuming that he is doing due diligence around safety, which might be a little ambiguous from this ad.

There's nothing here that offends me in the sexual contact being sought.

What offends me is the homophobia of this guy and the role of hypocrisy in underlining it.

There's a great book by Tim Dean about the subculture of bearbacking in San Francisco called Unlimited Intimacy. It's from the late aughts.

And Dean's point, if I'm remembering correctly, it's been 10 years for me since I've read it, is basically that, of course, these forms of

barebacking, of risk-taking, of bug chasing as well, right?

People who deliberately put themselves in a position to be infected with the virus is a form of community building, just not in a way that people generally recognize.

Whether or not you buy that particular hypothesis,

I do think it points to something that

the

Bareback city fracas around Sullivan is really about, which is community, right?

He engaged in these practices, and I think it would be wrong to apply his own punitive logic to it and say, you shouldn't have done that. It's like he's HIV positive.
He has to do something.

And telling other people seems like a good first step. And we don't know, as you say, what the conversations were like then after that.

But what's important is he's engaging in a set of practices that presumes an intimate.

a very, very thoughtful community, right? This is not something to be handled lightly.

But the real point is, it's then real funny if you then turn around and yell at that community from the outside, right? I think that is what really gets my goat about this.

So he is presuming a kind of responsibility on the part of these other men that he is then accusing them of abandoning in print.

He's saying you're irresponsible when in fact his entire private life appears to be premised on the fact that, yeah, your conservative Connecticut ass might not think that he's not even from Connecticut.

He's from England. He's from English.
The person I'm imagining is a Pennsylvania Connecticut person. Prove me wrong, Moira.
Prove me wrong.

This is a joke about the fact that I grew up in Connecticut, which is also very embarrassing. I've also lived in Connecticut.
So, like, you also lived in Connecticut.

It happens to the best of us, the nutmeg state. It comes for us all.
It like barebacking is a

there's nothing wrong with it in the abstract. Yeah,

it's just a little irresponsible. I can imagine ways to live in Connecticut responsibly.
Sort of bridge, port, and up.

Nowhere west of that. So I don't want to dwell on it, and I don't think it's ultimately like anyone's finest hour.
Few outings ever are.

But it is interesting in that it does give this sense of like this guy who thinks he can play. I think last time I described it as hopscotch, like he can be inside the community and outside of it.

And that's okay if it's the big LGBT umbrella, I feel like it's a little annoying, but like okay.

But this, as Tim Dean is saying, like is a community that is really quite unique that you and I would probably have real trouble navigating at all and that really presumes and depends on so much and then to have this guy pretend not to be part of it like Andrew Sullivan could have written a gay life gay death about it and made it really really moving and interesting but no it's instead it becomes this kind of chiding thing that ingratiates him to people who believe the worst about these people, right?

Who believe the worst about that community and who frankly believe that that community stands in for all LGBT people, right? So this kind of, do I belong? Do I not belong?

Like, okay, maybe you're a heterodox gay or something like that, or you're just kind of an asshole. And the other thing that's really important is how he reflects on this.

So I think we'll, I'll stipulate to the fact that if that happened to me, I'd be pretty outraged. TERFs do this.
They'll like find trans women's dating profiles and put them on the internet.

And there's a there's a degree to which like people get to talk about what you do in public, right?

It's the content of the talking that they're that I really object to, which is just like there's a mean-spiritedness to it. Yeah.

And there can be at times a mean-spiritedness to these outings, even if I'm like more sympathetic to the motivations for why. I think like most people, if they had their personal ads

displayed with all the kind of like undignified vulnerability that that position implies, like it would, it would make us mad.

I think Paul Robinson in his book, Queer Wars points this out that this type of Michelangelo signorile versus

Andrew Sullivan fight on outing really is a fight between two moralisms, right?

Like they're each pretending at a kind of liberality, but like in fact, like, no, they both have very, very clear senses of how you ought to live your life and the wages of deviation from that, right?

I don't think we've covered Michelangelo Signorile. Do you want to explain for our listeners who that is? Yeah, it means he's the big outer of that time, right? And he's probably the most...

So Paul in his book on gay conservatism picks him as a gay conservative, and he's like, he's probably the one who'd be objecting to that the loudest.

He's like, I think it's true because, right, there is this moralism behind it, behind outing, right?

Which is why it's funny that Sullivan, who's frankly, when it comes to a young woman's tweets or a...

intellectual's remarks on 9-11 is remarkably or a transphobe's insane rantings is perfectly happy making very personal things public. Right.

The actual objection is not to the tactic, but to the underlying goals to which the tactic is being used. Exactly.
Yes.

So this gets us to the most important thing, I think, about this entire affair, which is that he reads it insistently in political terms.

You and I have done an event where we said, like, well, all gossip is political. Like, sure, stipulated, stipulated, stipulated.
But that's not quite what Andrew Sullivan makes of it.

The essay he'll eventually write about it is called Sexual McCarthyism, right? Like, this this is the thing.

And basically he blames the left for outing him as this. Somebody who fucks without a condom.
Yeah. He says, quote, they are exactly the same as the far right.

They'll try and get you by any means they can. It's an enforced moralism.

And suddenly, Andrew Sullivan, who is like a pretty doctrinaire moralist in a lot of ways, including about sexual morality for people other than himself, suddenly he objects to that when the same standard is applied.

But also notice that he says it's the left. Like, again, as Paul Robinson is saying, no, what you're dueling with is a different aspect of your movement, ultimately.
This is a gay conservatism.

The left isn't coming at you with this. Like,

the left for Andrew Sullivan is like queer theory plus Act Up plus Larry Kramer plus the human rights campaign. You're like, okay, these are all different dudes.
He does this thing.

Where the left is whoever is annoying or offending him most at that moment, right?

Which are often people who are not getting along with one another, not working together, not in meaningful cooperation or even really coalition.

It's a diverse array of positions and personalities, which he collapses into one boogeyman. Yeah.

Which is ultimately identical to the kind of boogeyman a anti-gay preacher will call the gay agenda, right?

It's just, it's every gay person except for Andrew Sullivan and like three of his select friends. The people on his email list serve.
Yeah.

The next thing we should talk about is a text that he writes in April of 2000.

Have we come to his essay on testosterone?

Testosterone.

The

treatment with a synthetic hormone that he is taking reveals how men are naturally just that way and feminism is doomed. Yeah.
So this is an essay called The He Hormone.

And this is sort of a beginning of Turf Sullivan.

He's becoming interested in the positivity of masculinity, not positivity in the sense that it's good, although he probably thinks that too, but the idea of masculinity as a thing in the world, observable and evaluable.

It's an affirmative entity as opposed to just like the absence of girliness. Yeah.
It's an object in the world as opposed to a social construction. Right.
Right, right.

We should posit what is going on here. Andrew Sullivan starts taking testosterone to treat some health conditions he's got that he doesn't love.

Because of this, once again, synthetic and medically administered treatment, he comes to understand masculinity as like a pre-social natural state, a biological condition that arises spontaneously as opposed to something that is created through like historical and social conditions.

Yeah. There's a sort of therapy in which they replace his hormones, which is very different from HRT, which he's against.

We know why he was sick. This might also be the kind of thing we don't need to know.
He says in the essay. He has low T, which is apparently a side effect of...
I sort of glanced over it.

It's either because the HIV virus can, in fact, make that happen, or it's because of the HIV drugs at the time. That's the thing.
These things have evolved so much since the late 90s.

Maybe what he was taking was dipping his tea. I'm sorry, isn't decreased testosterone also just a symptom of aging in men? He's pathologizing a

state that his body may have gone into that it might have done without any kind of medical intervention at all

because it is

leading him to what he considers an insufficiently pronounced gender.

He does describe what happened to him as unusual in the essay and that links it to his HIV status. But it's true.
Today's

testosterone enthusiasts on the right really are just raging, raging, raging against the dying of the light, right? It's like you had this and you don't, now you don't.

Or you never had it, but imagine a past version of yourself that would have had it in a, in a less sullied and artificial time, right?

They're like, men used to be, have higher T back before we all started eating soy or whatever it is that their conspiracy-minded idea is, right?

It's also harkening back to an imagined like prehistorical purity.

So I have it on good authority that people who worked with him in later ventures tended to, in fact, avoid him on days when he had his testosterone injections because he was kind of insufferable.

Now, why am I gossiping about this? Well, I'm just pointing out that this thing that Andrew Sullivan thinks is absolutely natural had social ramifications around him.

Turns out these things do not exist in a vacuum, Andrew.

Like how this chemical is lived, how it is expressed, whether it is made to be the problem of everyone around you or not, appears to be socially conditioned, which is the point that people on the postmodern left were making.

They weren't saying these substances don't exist. They're saying, like, they don't exist independent of our social interactions and social embeddedness.

And the fact that people could tell when you were on the T,

when with other people, you can't.

Well, that's a sign. I'm sure he would get those

injections and then like get a little pep in his step and spread out really wide on the subway and like gaze at himself for just like a little too long in the gym and just be like, wow, look at what a manly man I am.

I bet it made him

invest

quite strongly in his own notions of what masculinity should be and feel that he is surpassing them in a way that perhaps exceeds the actual medical efficieness of the drug. Does that make sense?

Sullivan is just like, find me Rebecca Solnit. I need to explain a word my bridge to her.

He's relishing what this gives him, which is, I'm going to say, at least partially psychosomatic.

I have no idea.

But so

he makes his own experience with this, the he hormone, into a kind of verdict on

social progress and on feminism specifically. He says, Fears of natural difference still haunt the debate about gender equality.

Many feminists have made tenacious arguments about the lack of any substantive physical or mental differences between men and women as if the political equality of the sexes depended on it, But to rest the equality of women on the physical and psychological equivalence of the sexes is to rest it on sand.

In the end, testosterone bites.

Suck it, feminists. My big dick injections are more powerful than you.
I have a chemical that trumps your claims to equality.

You can see here, I think,

something that we already observed with the role of race in this thinking. He needs this to be true.
He needs race to be a biological reality and he needs gender to be a biological reality.

And here we, I think, are getting the first four shocks of the Sullivan that we all know and are getting mad about in 2025, which is the TERF, right? Because he's, well, minus the F. Or the R.

TERF is now a...

phrase that has expanded its original acronym, right?

It was referring to a very specific subset of BO within radical feminism and now just means anybody who doesn't like trans people, many of whom have absolutely no connection to radical feminism whatsoever.

It's one of these words whose definition has changed in its usage.

Yeah, if you want to hear more about this, check out a very early episode that I remain very proud of about the transsexual empire by Janice Raymond, one of those original radical feminists who turned super transphobic.

An actual TERF in the full expression of the acronym. Yeah, so we had Susan Stryker on for that, and she was great.
That's right. Well, I guess maybe what we should call him

he's an anti-trans conservative from the Catholic right. It doesn't need to be cute.
You're like, what's the mystery here?

You're like, I know that there's a great acronym for this somehow. Oh, there is.
It's NSDAP.

Boom.

It becomes the way in which

he

reframes his criticism of the gay rights movement. Now, this is a text that I must admit I've only read excerpts of because I couldn't find it online.

This is a lecture I think he gave in June of 2001 called The Emasculation of Gay Politics. There's also a certain kind of gay conservative who's just like

so annoyed that there are gay women. You know what I mean? Like,

he's like, I don't, I want this to be my special boys' club for very important guys. The notion that they might have to be in political allegiance with lesbians who they find

annoying and also just like less important than they are by virtue of being women is it is a strain. It is a thing.

And it wouldn't shock me if the emasculinization of gay politics is something he considers literal as well as figurative. Yes.
That's the important thing.

The talk, as far as I've read it, doesn't mention lesbians at all. It is about the emasculation of gay men, cis gay men.
When he says gay, he means white sixth gender men of his generation.

Although I think one really interesting through line between Love Undetectable towards the recent op-ed in the the New York Times, is that often he thinks of gay men slightly younger than him.

Specifically, I'm guessing the ones who don't want to fuck him.

They're doing gender wrong. A great sign of our corrupted culture is always when a Gen X pundit can't get laid.
Yeah. Yeah.

There's something terrible about today's young people and their allergy to sexuality and the erotic. It's because none of them want to have sex with me at all.

There's a, do you remember this as a fantastic piece? I don't think David Brooks is doing so hot, you guys, and it just traces his relationship status through columns.

It's like, it's really, really good. And it has like a beautifully Photoshop picture of like David Brooks with like stubble and like smoking a roly.

It's called I Don't Think David Brooks is okay, you guys. It's no longer up on Dead Spin.
You have to find it through the internet archive. Send it to me in the chat.

I kind of want to see this Photoshop picture of David Brooks.

Sorry, I'm looking at this on my phone now.

If you look at it, it really is just like the columns are a record of him ending his marriage and then fucking his research assistant or in whichever order that happened.

But it's bizarrely specific. You're like, this guy's like sounding off in the New York Times.

It's like, you know what, marriage maybe isn't so great, he says, like, you know, in a column three months before he files for divorce. This is a occupational hazard of the pundit, right?

And I say this as a pundit, is that you can mistake what are actually personal problems for you for grander social problems or cultural pathologies.

And it's important to keep enough perspective to see

when

you've actually tapped into something in the zeitgeist and when it's really just kind of a you thing. Yeah, we can cut this, but like I said, so good.

No, we don't need to make fun of David Brooks for seven minutes in the middle of an unrelated episode. I mean, don't we?

But here's a really important thing about this emasculation of gay politics talk that he gives. He starts it with a visit to San Francisco.
So that's already interesting. Classic, our hometown

that never is symbolically laid in for conservatives at all. Yeah.
And so he goes and he says, and again, these are quotes from this text, which I wasn't able to access.

The streets were dotted with the usual hairy-backed homos. I saw one Hirsuit fellow dressed from head to toe in flamingo motifs.
And he goes into a gay bar.

Quote, rarely have I seen such a scary crowd. Gay life in the rest of the U.S.
is increasingly suburban, mainstream, assimilable.

Here in the belly of the beast, village people, lookalikes, predominate, and sex is still central to the culture. I'd go nuts if I had to live here full-time.

Great news, Sully. You don't.

You can fucking leave. I don't know.
I won't pretend I've never walked into a gay bar and been like, oh, Jesus Christ, like this is exhausting and not my scene. And I don't want to be here.

And what I have done in those scenarios is leave.

Yes, this is an option.

And not mistaken my personal mood and preferences for a symptom of a cultural pathology. And I think it's very, very important to note.
It's the way these people are dressed. It's the hair.

It's the village people lookalikes, meaning I'm guessing handlebar mustaches or whatever, right? Like this, the assimilability and gender are linked here, I think.

This is going to be a talk about the emasculation of gay politics. You know, you could see a version where gay men being

non-threatening and feminine might work in our favor in terms of assimilation, right? Like, I've certainly found that it kind of does. That's not what he thinks.

He thinks in order to be assimilable, we have to be butch. We got to be dudes, man.
You got to be going to the gym and doing push-ups and building a deck and hating women. That's really crucial.
Yeah.

Well, unfortunately, effeminacy does not necessarily preclude that, but still, I think it's really noticeable here that that to me just reads like a real leap and it's an interesting leap, right?

If only we were to sign on to the gender binary in the way we're meant to and realize our destiny as men, we would be much more assimilable. The carrying on and the gender variance are one.

There's something of Ernst Rheim's like masculinist homosexuality that we talked about in our 1933 episode on the SA about male homosexuality as actually potentially being the logical end point and like crowning achievement of male supremacy, right?

You can be such a man, you can be so full of this pure masculine energy of acting out upon the world that not only are you personally masculine, but you refuse to have your masculinity contaminated by proximity to women.

This kind of like, fellas, is it kind of gay

to be straight? It's like the notion that like gay men have a means of dispensing with women altogether and should aspire to that.

Rome thought of it as a kind of warrior ethos. It did set you apart from the rest of society.
That's not what Sullivan is doing here.

No, Sullivan is like, this will make us the whiniest pundits of them all.

It's making us suburbanites. Like, those paragons of fucking masculinity is kind of bizarre, right?

I mean, this is a moment when, frankly, the idea that heterosexual men might be a little too namby-pamby, right? Like, is starting to really take hold.

This is the beginning of the metrosexual discourse as well in the early 2000s. I think this is a little earlier, although the word existed, but it wouldn't have circulated around Sullivan, maybe.

Pre-queer eye for the straight guy, right? That's right.

But it's this really interesting thing that, like, that

the kind of variance he perceives in the gay community that is a problem.

Like, if he said, oh, we spend too much time in the gym and getting jacked, and therefore we can't fight for our rights.

I mean, I don't think that's true either, but like, I could see that as a purely economic argument, you could make it, right? But that's not his point.

He's saying, you guys aren't spending enough time at the gym getting jacked because that way you're falling behind the American standards of masculinity.

Assimilation means reattainment of the gender binary, right? Repairing what has set you apart in terms of your gender presentation.

And I think this will come to a really ugly head in his New York Times piece from this year, where he lays this card on the table that he thinks that

The only thing that as a young gay boy prevented him from being trans by his teachers was that like this kind of social contagion wasn't available to him, right?

Like he he cannot conceive of people whose sexuality and gender are arranged and interact in ways different from his own right this also speaks to his insistence on like

the natural pre-social and fixed nature of all of these different identity categories like we're talking about how he needs race to be a natural category and he needs sex and gender to be natural categories he also needs them very much to not be historically contingent.

Like this is something that you really see in his recent anti-trans piece affirming the Supreme Court's Scrum Medi decision allowing states to outlaw transition-related care for minors.

And he says, I could have been

like seduced into transgenderism as a child if these social conditions uh existed then and then by his logic he's i would not have been the true self that i am now Yeah.

And I want to be like, no, you would have been the true self in a different version, right?

Like, there's a the notion that he was inevitably going to grow up to be Andrew Sullivan's cisgender gay man is actually something that I think was facilitated by the social and historical conditions that shaped his life, right?

I think that this idea that somehow

a lot of this gender stuff amounts to really almost a genocide of gay men is something that clearly is starting to warp his

his

AIDS politics, which I think were overall fairly admirable, into what is today the anti-trans politics. He thinks this is a destruction of gay boys.

We'll get to that when we get to his Skrimedi text from the New York Times this year.

His notion is that we have to prevent like assigned male children from transitioning so that we can have in 10, 15 years, a population of young gay men. Yeah.
That's so strange.

It certainly testifies to the fact that he doesn't know that many young people.

Yeah, I'm not, I don't think that there is a shortage of gay men, albeit I live like right on the border of the Castro, so they're certainly everywhere here.

He can't swing a dead cat without hitting one. I'm like, yay!

But it's the same line you get from noted non-lesbian J.K. Rowling about like, oh, we're going to run out of lesbians.

There's a great pool of lesbians among like recently divorced women in their 40s just out of marriages with men. I mean, right, because what Hunter S.

Thompson said about drugs is also true for gay sex. I hate to advocate for them, but they've always worked for me.

Yeah. So the idea that there is this kind of gendered conspiracy against men and against cis homosexual men in particular

is Cathru line in his thinking, right?

I'm glad that you mentioned J.K. Rowling because this is the logic that you usually hear applied almost exclusively when we're talking about assigned female children, right?

Like we're running out of tomboys or we're surgically eradicating our

baby lesbians. And it's often wrapped up in an imagined white child whose fertility is being compromised, right?

And this isn't really doing that. I think because he's so committed to misogyny as well as to his like peculiar gay male politics that he has to take this

typical gender panic that has like a racial reproduction panic smuggled in and take it in this different direction.

Yeah, I think that the eugenic aspects to the anti-transpositions of someone like J.K. Rowling and of someone like Andrew Sullivan is not to be underestimated.

Like this is about reproducing categories that they take to be natural, but also reproducing the kinds of people that would fit into those categories and who are now being conspiratorially whisked away into the weeds of queerness and of

neo-pronouns and whatever. Just in terms of how

allergic he can be to what he perceives to be kind of conspiracism against cis men, I thought maybe I'd briefly mention a entry of his in his sub stack.

This is a tweet from Moira Dedigan at Edin Moira

from July 17th, tomorrow,

2017.

The eighth anniversary of this tweet. And what does this tweet say? Men are bad.
Bum, bum, bum.

I stand by these tweets that Andrew Sullivan thinks. It's a banger.

Short and sweet.

Yeah.

It scans.

It does, right? I did the, I capitalized every word. I'm reminded of that, of that thing Homer Simpson says when he, I forget what, what he's accused of.
He's like, hey, that's a half-truth.

The other thing that these pundits

do when they're looking to be scared is they mentally preclude any possibility that the young person might be joking

or like speaking with a degree of irony or self-deprecation or detachment, right?

There's this presumption of like immediate sincerity in everything that every young person says, which I don't, I think the internet would drive me absolutely insane, more so than it already has if I was just reading everything

with a presumption that nobody was ever joking.

And I think that's kind of what's required for him to keep erecting these straw men of what the gay rights movement is, of what the feminist movement is. I mean, a movement famously given to irony.

But here's the thing, right? This is something I wrote about in my cancer culture book, that like the same people who are like, oh, this person who's saying men are bad cannot possibly be ironic.

will retreat into, I was being ironic the moment they get any pushback too, right? It's always this like, oh, I am this ironist and I'm being playful.

They just can't follow me, these overly moralistic assholes. This reminds me also of our episode on Pamela Paul, who I think has a lot of impulses, like very similar to Sullivan's.

Not only did she, like him, sort of like presume this membership in a

community to which he had not really joined, but she also wanted a presumption of being read

with a kind of playfulness without really like signposting or earning that kind of credit from her readers, but then would also not attribute the same sort of playfulness to those she was reading and writing about.

There's a way in which having been made

the object at that time of my life around me too, when I became the source of this controversy and people like Andrew Sullivan started like collecting my tweets, I got like really an education

in kind of the futility of trying to make yourself understood to these people, right? Like there's no way

I could have done that

that would not have elicited so much bad faith. You know what I mean?

At one point during that whole debacle, that I was at the center of a media controversy. It's not a really interesting story.
You can look it up if you want to.

But, like, this media critic wrote an account of this incident that wound up being sympathetic to me.

And I heard from this person later that after their piece was published, Andrew Sullivan sent them a a long email, which included this dossier about what a bad person I was and how they shouldn't have taken my side in the Me Too controversy in print.

So in case you think this is just something he idly

accumulated, he's been very committed to his anti-Moira Donegan policy and has gone out of his way to try and persuade others to his side and discipline those who disagree.

It's really also interesting the way he picks examples.

We're going to get there, but like there's so much, like the amount of bad faith that he he employs in a lot of these debates is, I think it's getting worse with time, frankly.

Have you noticed that it's getting worse? What do you mean?

I'm thinking here of a passage in the New York Times piece, which we'll get to, right, where he singles out friend of the pod, Chase Strangio.

Chase Strangio, a attorney for the ACLU doing a lot of their most prominent trans rights work, and a guy who gets misinterpreted and listened to in bad faith, like more or less every time he opens his mouth.

That's right.

And so he writes in that piece a key leader of this movement chase strangio informed us that quote a penis is not a male body part it's just an unusual body part for a woman try to track this down this is linking to a another new york times article apparently where about the tennessee case that became scrimmed

and it's based on something that Two people who were in a meeting two years ago claim that Chase has said.

And this is the kind kind of thing, as you say, Chase has been before the Supreme Court arguing this case. Chase has been in the media talking about this case.

You can find things that Chase has said about this case. Why would you go to a thing that Chase allegedly said in a meeting with two other people? It's so fucking telling, right? And then we get to

this whole thing where, again, something that Chase allegedly said in a private meeting, according to two people who were there, right?

As a diagnosis of the entire movement, quote unquote, when in fact you may also not recognize any part of that movement, right?

We were suddenly expected to announce our pronouns as if everyone didn't already know them. Then neo-pronouns, Z-Zem, were added.
I have never met a person who has Z-Zem pronouns, but whatever.

The movement came up with a mantra. Trans women are women.
Trans men are men. It was not an argument or a proposition to be explored or debated.
It was a theological command in all caps.

And you're like, oh man, man, like it's just.

That's so tedious.

This is the de-ironization.

You're going from a thing that a person allegedly said that one time and you're saying, not only does it stand in for this entire movement, but it has the quality of a, not a proposition, but of a theological command.

I'm sorry, it's a funny theological command if the person who said it can't remember it, which Chase does not.

It's a funny theological command if you have to ask two people who were there whether they allegedly heard it, but the de-ironization, it's not just that, like, you take context away, you step by step embedded in a new context where you're like, this is actually an imposition on you.

This is actually taking something away from you, not something that a person said possibly that one time.

Yeah, there's a disproportion of emphasis, right? And an overstatement of harm, which is, of course, what pundits like Sullivan always accuse the left and feminists of doing, right?

And it's wielded here totally without irony, right? This notion that anybody is being commanded to state their pronouns, which I've only encountered at all very rarely and only in the most

like rigorously optional and polite kind of way, you know, it's a strange accounting.

of the power of rhetoric and of the harm that he feels himself to have been inflicted on by being exposed to worldviews he just doesn't share.

Aaron Ross Powell, we'll get to it, but it's also noticeable. We've now been tracing Andrew Sullivan making these kinds of complaints about activist spaces in the LGBT community for the last...

We've done about 20 years of that, and we're going to do 25 more years of that. So 45 years of LGBT history, he has been complaining about this.

If you look at the piece in the New York Times called, by the way, I don't think I've mentioned that yet, How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way, he's telling, I think, his straight readers a story where this stuff that he blames people like Chase for happened in the last 10 years since Obergefell.

This is ostensibly a look back after 10 years of Obergefell and kind of a reflection on why it might well go away. Well,

Andrew, you've been making the same complaint about illiberalism and about language policing, etc., etc., since ACT updates, since 88, since 87.

It's patently disingenuous to pretend that this is a development of the last few years because, like, if it's a problem at all, which I don't concede it is, it's a problem that's been in activist spaces for decades.

Like, it was true when we were fighting for gay marriage. People were having weird language debates in activist spaces.
It's sort of their thing, it's their kick.

Uh, some people, some people like hairy butts, some people enjoy debating language endlessly. Lo, Adrian, boo.

I'm sorry, I had to go there.

But there are some good faith criticisms that I think he lobs against the gay movement. Fair enough, whatever.

But it gets less good faith with time because it's like you've been making it, right? Recently, it went bad. Recently, it turned authoritarian.
You know, the recent stuff, that's very worrying.

And you're right to be worried about that, straight people.

He's trying to justify his own position by saying that it's an emergency that requires urgent addressing, even though he has in fact been crying about it for like 30 years. Yeah.

Just to give one example from that article still, the words gay and lesbian have all but disappeared. LGBT became LGBTQ and then LGBTQ plus, and more letters and characters kept being added.

LGBTQIA plus or 2S LGBTQIA plus to include intersex, asexual people and 2-spirit indigenous people.

The plus sign referred to a seemingly infinite number of new niche identities and by some counts more than 70 new genders.

The point was that this is all one revolutionary intersectional community of gender-diverse people and intertwined with other left causes from Black Lives Matter to queers for Palestine.

I'm glad that you got there, Andrew, that your real complaint was there in the very last word. The twirling got a little manic there for a second, but your dismount was ace.

Yeah, this is once again the same tendency to collapse a lot of different people into one boogeyman grievance, right? I don't think all of these people he's listing here agree with each other on

everything either. But he requires them to be one sort of nefarious force with ill-defined boundaries that's like coming to get him.
And I mean, like, 70 new genders.

I work at a Institute of Gender Studies, and I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about?

I always want to get on my pedantic horse and be like, well, I don't know if it's really understood that genders are these discrete, definable things, so much as a system and a bunch of processes and just really make him suffer.

Oh, yeah, name him.

We've been over this on the podcast. It's like the idea that the words gay and lesbian are disappearing.
My God, I'm a gay man, you're a lesbian woman.

I feel like we mentioned that almost every fucking episode. We have yet to get an email about it.
But my point here, really, is that he's annoyed about the word queer.

This is the attack that he rode against the word queer, as in queer theory, queer activism, queer nations, et cetera, et cetera, in the 90s. Meaning he can't possibly believe this.

He can't possibly say since Obergefell, like we've had all these proliferating genders there and we can't say gay and lesbian anymore. It's like, well, you made the same claim in the 90s.

So it feels like it's not a post-Obergefell thing. Like it just feels like it's an Andrew Sullivan thing.

Yeah, it's a little hard to take this seriously after so long. This is where you could tell.

And I should at this point plug the fact that Chase Stranger was in fact on our friend Matt Bernstein's podcast about this article. And people should definitely check that out.
It's phenomenal.

I don't want to, we will not spend as much time on that article because you could just go over there and I would sign my name to everything Matt says in that. It's fantastic.

But what's important is, and something that I think Matt is really good at pointing out is that like, A passage like this presumes who the reader of this piece is.

Like there are moments when Andrew Sullivan might speak for other gay men of his generation. I'm not even sure he's doing that here.
He's talking to straight people.

No, he's talking to straight people who are, like, homophobic and annoyed and a little scared. Yeah.

Like, the New York Times, I'm sure, will present this as we want to present all voices from within the LGBT movement. The point is, this is not a text.
coming out of the LGBT movement.

This is a text about it for people who are very much not in it and who will believe just about anything about it. And I think that's a really important point.

Like he does have this positionality where he can sort of be like, well, an internal critic. It's like, well, no, you're not.
Because this shit wouldn't fly.

I stop anyone here in the castro and like, does this ring true to you? They'll be like, what the fuck is this? Right.

I go to, you know, not to make ugly, not to engage in ugly stereotypes, but like down Main Street, Wichita, Kansas, people might believe this. Well, that's who this is for.

I think there are some neighborhoods in San Francisco where people would believe it.

Like, walk around Pacific Heights before you have to go all the way to Wichita. You know, the Twitter headquarters.
Like, it's a section that is identifiable, right?

If you like introduce me to 10 people at random, I could tell you the ones that this is for. Matt points out that his dad sent it to him, right? Yeah.

Well-meaning, non-homophobic person who like was like, is this true? Like, that's who it's for.

Yeah. So I think that's important too.
I think we've... taken great care to extend a great deal of generosity to Andrew Sullivan.

And I think people will notice we're going to do less and less of that.

And that's not because he necessarily gets worse, but because the plausible deniability for these kinds of positions becomes more and more threadbare the longer this goes on, right?

Like with our anti-woke pundits of today, right? This kind of shit works for two or three years because it exploits a very specific, discursive situation.

But then when you do it about moral panic after that one, and the one after that, and the one after that, it's like, okay,

kind of feels like you're a not part of this movement it feels like time is just a flat circle for you it feels like maybe you're not representing the historical record well and when you say I'm with these people I share their goals you're just lying

so in the spirit of not extending that much more sympathy to him let's talk about his turn towards a national security homocon.

You'll notice that basically in these masculinity pieces that we were just reading, we're inching up to the summer of 2001, a time I remember well and that I'm guessing Moira remembers indistinctly.

Not as well. The fall of 2001 was a,

you know, it's kind of a blur of American flags. Yeah, so many flags.
Yeah. I must at this point date myself and say that for me, this was a very formative year.

And for my political understandings, it has really been perhaps the most significant one. It's also when Hung and I first got together, so that's nice.
Oh, yeah.

You guys have been together for a long time. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. You made it.
Look, who says, Andrew Sullivan, that gay relationships don't last? Yeah.

Well, that's very sweet. I didn't realize you guys have been together for so long.
Yeah. And it's just, it's where I first really became aware of Andrew Sullivan.

Like the gay stuff, like I was sort of faintly aware of, but I was taking queer theory seminars and hanging out with trans kids, so like I was not.

You were not his target audience. No, I think Sportsmore College in general was not his target audience.
But he became this very powerful

voice in what I would call the homocon to Islamophobia pipeline. It's much more of a European thing.

I think of this as less pronounced for Americans because our Islamophobes tend to be also quite homophobic. Yeah, so it does exist in the United States as well.
Bruce Barr makes this pivot after 9-11.

Jonathan Rauch turns dissatisfaction with the queer left orthodoxy in the 90s into sort of war on terror, cheerleading in the oughts.

But you're right, it is much more of a much more of a European phenomenon. And maybe we should say, he had stopped writing for the New Republic.

He had stopped a brief gig at the New York Times magazine. And he was now mostly blogging, although a lot of his 9-11 texts also do come out in various publications.

But I think the blogging is important. For people who weren't there or who weren't that aware, it was a crazy time.
And it was really a time when the fact that we all could

form thoughts and put them on the internet really was starting to show some of the qualities that it has today. Things were happening very, very quickly, right?

Like I remember brushing my teeth and hearing on the radio that like a plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center being like, what a fucking fucking moron.

I went to my job at the campus language center, and they're like, did you hear that a second plane hit? And we're like, oh, shit, well, this is a whole different thing now.

Like, things were happening in real time. And of course, a lot of people turned to CNN, but like a lot of people also turned to the internet to sort of like get information.

These are the early days of political and news blogging was like sort of coming up simultaneously with the advent of the war on terror.

And there were these guys offering political hot takes on the internet with no real real qualification beyond their own

supreme confidence and Andrew Sullivan was among them. Yeah.

And so I'm inclined to be a little forgiving of Sullivan's immediate reactions to 9-11 because it was a crazy time, because things were moving so fast, and because very frequently, of course, with a blog, you don't have an editor saying like, whew, maybe we should cool it.

And clearly, Sullivan was disturbed and panicked and a bit traumatized by all this stuff. But through his panic and confusion, they threaded something else, I think.

There's no other way of putting this, but the man had the raging hard on for finally doing away with all the namby-pamby lefty shit that he had hated all along, frankly, in order to finally get to the cracking of heads.

9-11 is a permission structure to believe what he always believed, but harder, and to basically delegitimize the people he had disagreed with for going on 15 years at that point, but in much more strident and frankly, much more dangerous terms.

There's a way in which

9-11 like created a new kind of racism that had not been at the forefront before. And there's another way that 9-11 sort of like unleashed a racist id, right?

It's really noticeable to me that the initial pieces after 9-11, including on his blog and including, I believe, in the Wall Street Journal, really are more left-bashing. right?

But I take your point, which is to say what you get the sense of is a man unleashed, right?

This is a man, again, in high moral dudgeon, getting to beat up on the people he's always wanted to beat up on with a whole new vocabulary and a far greater level of ferocity than he might have reasonably mustered in July of 2001.

The readiness with which Sullivan embraced this idea of America as a deeply wounded nation, a wound that allowed for all manner of exclusion and nastiness, was a kind of fucked up mirror of how he felt, or many in his generation had felt, about AIDS, right?

The first piece he writes after 9-11, I believe, is on the 16th, so five days later, one of the lines there is like, why did it have to be a perfect morning, right?

There's a kind of ready-made morning, ready-made woundedness, which a lot of people expressed and felt at the time. And 9-11 was on the East Coast a...
breathtakingly beautiful day, weather-wise.

Which also made the footage of it particularly clear. Yeah, I haven't thought about that.

Videos that were playing on a loop for like weeks on every news station afterwards, those were crisp, clear, perfect images that were all the more dramatic for not being obscured by clouds and smog and rain.

Yeah.

But it's interesting and noticeable that like for Sullivan, he's digging into the language of trauma that he had honed on the AIDS crisis, right?

So there is this kind of very interesting shifting of the targets, which is also, of course, like because he's declared AIDS a non-issue in the late 90s, right?

Like, he this is going to be his new AIDS, basically. He's moving on from that.
It's the kind of people he cares about will no longer die from it, so he doesn't want to talk about it anymore.

And so, therefore, the new attack on people that Andrew Sullivan cares about and identifies with is the one on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Almost immediately, he starts

both identifying this kind of Islamist threat, but he also identifies their nominal leftist allies who allowed for this to happen.

This is what today, in a modern iteration of this stuff, goes in France as Islamo Gushisma. I wrote a whole article about that in the Republic if people want to check that out.

But yeah, he very quickly fastens on the idea that the left has sort of invited this attack or allowed it to happen.

And he says, for instance, in that piece entitled, Why Did It Have to Be a Perfect Morning? An essay on 9-11, right,

he says, the middle part of the country, the great red zone that voted for Bush, is clearly ready for war.

The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column. This was five days after, right? I assure you, no one had any time to be a fifth column.

We were totally scared. No one knew what was going on.
There were no protests. People were scared to go fucking outside.
This was his chance to advance pre-laundered grievances.

This is him beating up on on people he didn't like on 9-10, right? Based on what happened on 9-11. And this is five days after 9-11, they didn't know who did it, right?

And out of that uncertainty, out of the absence of information, people revealed their sort of preferences for who would turn out to be to blame, right? And he already said the left right away.

Yeah, exactly. Right.
In the Wall Street Journal, He published a piece on October 10th, so just about a month after 9-11.

Quote, it may be, in fact, that one of the silver linings of these awful times is that the far left's bluff has finally been called. War focuses issues in ways peace cannot.

Huh. I'm glad we're finding silver linings, Andrew.
They were still finding bodies, but I guess you were searching for silver linings.

Just going on here, he says, quote, leftists would like to pretend that any criticism of their views, something he'd been doing for weeks now, raises the specter of domestic repression.

But in a country with the First Amendment, no suppression from government is likely. And in the citadels of the media and the academy, the far left is actually vastly overrepresented.

The real issue, as pointed out this week by Britain's Labour Prime Minister, is that some on the left have expressed a hatred for America that shames those that feel it.

It has aged like a rat carcass in a huntavirus area, hasn't it? Okay, so a couple of things. What you're hearing here is saying like

something that our anti-woke pundits today, including probably andrew sullivan are saying again which is

sure

could

bush's new anti-terror campaigns have an impact on your civil liberties sure maybe a little bit but the real issue is groupthink on college campuses right this is the lead up of what will become the patriot act which still

helps restrict what you can say and do in this country. This is the beginning of putting this country towards a very, very troubling trajectory, the culmination of which we're witnessing right now.

During that time,

this is October 10th, 2001. Today is Wednesday, July 16th, 2025.

During that 24 years, there has been no intensification of the so-called far-left hegemony on college campuses that Sullivan identifies here.

But he's warned about it every year in between, I would bet. That's the thing.
Like, the thing he criticizes here has manifestly come true. The people that he's criticizing here were correct.

Meanwhile, the thing he's directing your attention to is the pay no attention to the man behind the curtain move that these fuckers pull every fucking time they take your actual civil liberties away.

It's so

fine. You're overreacting.
The real threat is these damn kids with their pronouns. It's so familiar.
The antecedents to these sentences

could be anything. You could switch them out for a controversy of today, and somebody would print this.
Oh, yeah. I mean, they did.
It was the New York Times on June 26th.

So, full disclosure, we put two and a half hours into recording, which I'm guessing will be something like an hour and 20 minutes of an episode.

And we know that you, our dear, dear Patreon listeners, our blessed children, are absolute super freaks. But I'm guessing that even super freakiness has its limits.
And so we got to wrap this up.

We're like at the showtime at the Apollo and everyone's like, we're glad you did this. We would like for you to stop doing it.

Well, you know, it is a long career in which several intellectual pathologies continuously reassert themselves. Like when you're playing a game of whack-a-mole, that's how it feels.

And we don't want to sort of like yada yada the last 25 years of his career. I will say,

to Sully's credit, after very predictably being a real big cheerleader for the Iraq war and its run-up, he really seems to have taken to heart in a way that very few of the pundit cheerleaders of that invasion did, that he was wrong about something.

And he's been going around like truth coming out of her well to shame mankind, like remembering people who cheerleaded it and didn't, you know, properly atone the way he felt they should have.

And he did that for a while when the Iraq war was going to shit. And it is one of these moments where you kind of have to hand it to, you know, like this is a flash of acidity,

of examination, of a capacity for shame, of an understanding of one's own complicity that he does seem capable of, which makes it all the more conspicuous when he doesn't demonstrate it later.

One of the interesting things is that, like, I think people often treat him as this kind of sui generis figure.

And I think we've been trying to push back on that a little bit step after step and to say, in that combination, it may be pretty unique, but he does travel paths that other people have traveled.

No shame in that, but it's just like he's not as much of an outlier. The kind of homocan to Iraq cheerleader pipeline was shared with several other gay conservatives.
And at the same time,

his path away from George Bush is that kind of neocon Iraq cheerleader to tepid, Obama-friendly punditry to then never Trumper. And I think that's a trajectory we know.
And again, no hate.

Like there are definitely worse ways to have responded to the last 20 years. Again, there are people who have fully beclowned themselves and these people by and large have not.

At the same time, I think that his reaction to 9-11 and to the Iraq war kind of foreshadows some broader pathologies I think that he didn't quite manage to wrestle down, right?

To seriously suggest in the fall of 2001 that a dominant left, whatever that was, I guess John Kerry or whatever, was powerfully undermining America, it feels like alternative history.

Having been there, it's like, where the fuck did you get that?

And it seems to me important because over the course of the next quarter century, while he's blogging, while he's at New York Magazine, when he starts moving to Substack, there is this odd thing where on the one hand, he himself appears to move to the left.

on a bunch of these issues, but at the same time, he starts peddling exactly these kinds of counterfactuals about the resurgent right wing, right?

I always think of that line from the Royal Tenon bombs, right? Everyone knows that conservatism has ascended. What this book supposes is, what if it weren't?

The other thing he doesn't really grapple with is

the ideas behind his

kind of left punching right after 9-11, which is, and I hope we've been able to drive this home, a form of what Jasmine Puar calls homo-nationalism, right?

That is to say, Part of why Sullivan goes all in on like the American project of bombing different countries with smithereens

is that this is a way for gay men specifically, but probably gay women too, probably not transgender people, to join in the nation-making project and to meet out violence and therefore become respectable.

It was a form of respectability politics through the national security state.

And while the individual adventures that he had endorsed in the early aughts, sort of he stages pretty public disillusionment with and says like this was a a mistake.

The broader project of like, guys, this is our chance to be adults in the room. It's our chance to be accepted into the national family by finally fucking behaving.

Like that strikes me as something that he just never disavowed. There's a deeper structure of like wanting to belong, wanting to be a part of the polity

that

he didn't interrogate. And I think it comes back to bite us with a piece like the New York Times piece that we're all working towards, the one we started with.

The other point to make is probably one that Lisa Duggan makes about Andrew Sullivan, which is

that there's a kind of accommodation with neoliberal policy goals and with a neoliberal state, one that becomes less and less muscular and more and more focused and fixated on security and on sort of safeguarding the absolute minimum of rights.

Duggan writes, quote, he only asks that gays be allowed to exist within this neoliberal landscape so long as they support sentimental, masculinist nationalism and challenge nothing.

And in some way, you could look at that line from Duggan, which he wrote like 20 years ago, and look at his New York Times opinion piece, how the gay rights movement radicalized and lost its way, and notice that really what he's charging them with is, hey, you didn't just confine yourself to existing within this neoliberal hellscape and support sentimental masculinist nationalism and challenge nothing.

Like, that was your mistake right there. That seems to be his thesis.
So I'm sure Lisa Duggan will be like, I feel pretty good about that.

You're supposed to reconcile yourself to these oppressive structures, not

challenge them. What are you doing? Yeah.

Yeah, and so maybe with that, we'll just given the advanced hour. I do really feel like we've tredged through the wilderness together, like just mud up to our knees,

sweaty and exhausted through this like long challenge with Andrew Sullivan. Like a mirage in the desert, a weirdly tie-dye-y

rainbow beckons, which is the accompanying graphic, at least on the internet, for how the gay rights movement radicalized and lost its way from June 26th. 2025.

Let me describe this graphic for our listeners in case they don't want to give the New York Times a click.

This is a op-ed he published on the Times opinion page where only the best ideas are ever foregrounded. And it's like a vertical

like rainbow, like the traditional colors of the old style rainbow flag. But as the stripes

go down the screen and they become more and more bled out, like a too wet watercolor and start to smear and become this sort of undifferentiated purple.

Like a they, them pronoun of visual presentation.

In case listeners have not encountered this piece, congratulations.

If you want to hear an in-depth discussion of it, I would recommend having a listen to our friend Matt Bernstein, who went over this with someone who's actually name-checked in the article.

There's just Chase Strangio. Chase Strangio, a favorite punching bag for transphobes everywhere.
And the other thing to point out about this is

I notice here it says, listen to this article, and it's 25 minutes. So it's long as shit.
This is a guy you can tell has been his own editor on Substack for a long time.

I mean, I noticed that with myself. My Substacks are fucking long, man.
It is a

form that has democratized publication in some ways, but has also just

added fuel to the fire of writers' most narcissistic instincts. But like, they let him go on for thousands and thousands of words.

And the quite valuable digital real estate and print real estate of the New York Times opinion section to talk about how the gay rights movement has lost its way by being

too nice to trans people. Yeah.

So I don't know if we can go through all of this, but I said earlier that basically

there are positions that I think one can assume or hope or infer that Sullivan took in good faith 30, 40 years ago, it's a little less possible to credit him with that now.

And this essay really suffers from that. There's a really fascinating version of history here, like where you're just like,

not only do I know

that's not true, I know it not even on the basis of being a gender scholar. I know it for having lived through it.
I know it from having been a gay man during that time.

And what's more, I know Sullivan knows it too. So it's like, why would you tell a just-so just-so story? It's a matter of public record that this is not true.

One being, for instance, the very premise of the article, which is that there's this big change. The gay rights movement fought for marriage.
And now this new

breed of activists has taken over, including Chase Strangio, who are hijacking it and driving it into a ditch.

And it's like, yes, you, Andrew Sullivan, may have put gay marriage first on the agenda in 1989, but the people who brought it home were these very people that you're now attacking for allegedly going crazy, right?

Or he goes on and on about like, well, you know, we were very, very respectful. We were not radical.
I was there for all this shit. We were called radical for this stuff too.
And for that, there is a

long tradition of deliberate provocation and smears from the right of radicalism and quite a bit of like deliberate, avowed, proud radicalism in the gay rights history, which he has to erase to tell, as you say, this just-so story of very polite, very incrementalist, very like low-expectation liberals getting their wedding registries.

And we have to add that, of course, the thing that Chase had just argued before the Supreme Court is exactly the kind of incrementalist and, hey, let's just defend our rights shit that he's allegedly so in favor of.

Surely.

making decisions about your own body and about your own medical treatment or keeping those between you and your doctor would seem to be a pretty straightforwardly like that's not a radical demand it's not like everyone should get injected with tea or something like that right this is a good point is that the aclu's argument in scrimetty which is the nominal peg for andrew sullivan's anti-trans screed was in fact like a very minimalist quantity libertarian like argument against government intervention in the private gendered and sexual lives of individuals So you would think, well, gee, how can a guy who's been arguing this exact thing,

who

now watches that strategy fail, right? It's failing. One has to just be blunt and say that.

How does this guy then turn it into the fault of the people who have pursued his very remedies while

he goes full homophobe? There's no other way of saying it.

But this is some shit.

Because basically he's like, oh, they made the mistake of going after the children. Yeah, he's iterating basically like the old blood libel against gay men by saying this is a

like

point that the

previous gay rights movement never touched, which is just not true.

Like arguments about whether or not gay people should be allowed to be teachers, for one thing, focused on the gay rights side frequently on the notion, like, no, there are like queer children.

There are children who are embodying and living their gender differently and who will likely grow up to be queer adults.

Like, you can find old anti-like teaching ban protest images from the 1980s and 90s, you know, the heyday of Andrew Sullivan's career, with women wearing t-shirts and holding signs saying, I was a lesbian child.

You know, this is, again, ahistorical, pointedly ahistorical, and needs to be be for the sake of its argument. He's saying this is a taboo we recognize.

We never talked about kids, which is not true, but also relies upon the specter of the gay male pedophile, right? The like

evil queer in the bushes who's coming after your kids, which is something that animates a lot of irrational fears and relies upon bigotry to try and cast those people.

who are trying to allow transgender

children to get the medical care that many of them really need to thrive

as people who are like sexually interested in children rather than as people who are interested in children's welfare.

Yeah, let me quote him here, just in case people think we're not being sufficiently generous.

Quote, but this illiberalism, meaning, you know, the gay rights movement, okay, whatever, made a fateful strategic mistake. In the gay rights movement, there had always been an unspoken golden rule.

Leave children out of it. We knew very well that any overreach there could provoke the most ancient blood libel libel against us, that we groom and abuse kids.

So first of, yes, the gay rights movement was very careful about, was accused of this stuff all the time, but

there was no way of avoiding that because that's the thing about blood libel. You can't avoid it.
It's like they will just lie about you.

I mean, the radical feminist lesbian groups chased Niambla out as if with brooms, right?

They were very militant about policing this boundary around those who do sexualize children and do victimize children, both because it's politically disadvantageous, but also because it's fucking wrong to advocate for pedophiles.

The radical feminist lesbians who I think he would be very eager to disavow himself are the ones who, in fact, did police that boundary, right? And it didn't work, right?

The Anita Bryant style smear that gay people were out to

sexually abuse your kids and therefore you can't allow them to be teachers, to be regular parts of public life, was something that this movement got smeared with anyway.

Maybe let me quote him again here. And here I would invite long-time listeners to see whether they can spot the problem with this particular line of argumentation.

Quote, so what did the gender revolutionaries go and do?

They focused entirely on children and minors, partly because the adult issues have been resolved or close to it, and partly because true cultural revolutions start with the young, meant overhauling the education not only of children with gender dysphoria, but of every other kid as well.

So, first of all,

the gender revolutionaries did not do this.

We have a, I think, our second or third episode, which lays out that the first thing that after Oregefell, that the anti-gay right went after was bathroom bills, right?

They were like, we were trying to figure out how to target trans people. That failed.
And that is when they decided to pivot to two issues,

you know, trans people in sports and a gender transition care for minors. This is not something that anyone on the gay rights side chose.

These are cultural war issues handpicked in some case by committee and focus group in order to smear the gay rights movement, which is exactly what's happening now, which Sullivan in some bizarre way seems to almost recognize.

What is undoing the advances that he celebrates is the fact that they found this kind of Archimedean point from which to attack these newly won rights.

But he thinks it's like, oh, the mistake was that they went after the children. It's like, no, Andrew, those are lies they told about us.
And I find it weird that you believe that.

I mean, it's a classic Darvo tactic, right? I do feel that studying sexual violence and attempts to reveal it. has like unlocked so much of conservative thought for me, right?

Because what this is, is casting the victims as the aggressors and casting self-defense, which is what Chase Strangio was doing at the Supreme Court after Tennessee volunteered to pass this trans care ban

as a kind of aggression, right? Like your self-defense is in fact an offense against me because my hurting you is neutral and you defending yourself is not neutral.

That is very much a diversion from the mean that Andrew Sullivan sees himself as trying to restore.

Yeah. So first off, we have this very strange kind of

way in which history is just manhandled in this essay. Like history, he knows better.
And I think you're right.

I think you said at the very beginning, you made the joke that, like, the right never acts, it only reacts. And that's like exactly what's happening here.

He's like, anti-gay people are just acted upon, right? That is all that's happening here. And the mistakes really are all coming from gay people.
Andrew Sullivan reminds me of that.

It's a meme, but it's a still from a Simpsons video where like Mrs. Lovegood, the pastor's wife, is screaming, won't somebody please think of the children? And he's like,

oh, won't somebody please think of the children?

Won't somebody please think of the homophobes? Like these people who are just trying to be bigots in peace are so affronted by your aggressive existence and they need defending. And it's like, no.

Actually, the existence of trans children or of trans adults or of gay adults is not an act of aggression towards these people. It's just that they don't want to share the world with us.
Yeah.

The second thing that I think listeners who've read this article may not have noticed is the way history and repression sort of comes back in funny ways.

You may have found it strange that Andrew Sullivan is only second to J.K. Rowling in somehow being obsessed with trans kids being really gay kids that have been misled, right?

Like he's met met the transitioners. I've met many, they break your hearts.
And so many of the gender dysphoric kids are gay and lesbian, right?

The idea that you're making it harder to be gay and lesbian by making being trans an option for these kids is all through this.

Just to read one quote for this, and a fix for gender dysphoria for gay and lesbian kids can be puberty itself, as it was for me and many of my gay male friends.

Once my hormones kicked in, my anxieties evaporated.

Here's the testosterone again. I love being a boy, I realized.
Puberty blockers literally block gay and lesbian kids from the chance at that possible resolution of their gender dysphoria.

There's a real conflict here and is obscured by the LGBTQ identity.

Just a little bit as an aside, this is symptomatic of the like male myopia of Andrew Sullivan.

It's like clear he has never considered what going through puberty is like for a girl who is not suddenly endowed with all this confidence and like social permission and a sense of embodied entitlement.

Well, in defense of Andrew Sullivan's girls are gross.

You know, going through prunity for a girl marks you as a sexual object who is suddenly fighting off goatidian, almost like background noise of sexual aggression from dramatically older men, and particularly being a teenage girl.

You're just pestered all the time

by men trying to pick you up in this way that is emphatically not more comforting. I don't know.
I don't know what...

like this guy has just never listened to a woman talk about her experience in his life.

So his example for this is basically, oh, when I first was coming out as gay, like sometimes female friends would be like, hey, have you considered whether maybe you're a girl, really?

I'm like, did that really happen? I'm sure someone said that to me at some point. Who cares? Having gone through puberty as a gay boy, like

I understand what not fulfilling gendered expectation looks like. From what my friends describe gender dysphoria to be like, it is nothing like that.
And

when they describe it to me, it's like someone describing migraines that I don't have, right?

Like you clearly are having a bodily experience that is nothing like mine, which Andrew Sullivan would know if the people that he met and whose stories apparently break his heart, he'd actually listened to.

Like it seems very, very strange. But why am I saying that this is history sneaking up in ways that he sort of can't control?

Because I think you're absolutely right. This war on gay kids for him is a war on gay boys.
Why is he so worried about this?

Well, he thinks, I think, of the transgender identity as a genocide of gay men like himself it's like okay it's just aids again like you're repeating your 1990s traumas which are real to be clear like under this guise and you just cannot see that reality really

doesn't conform to what you're imposing on it here you're just you are in this repetition compulsion which i find in its own way understand moving but like you gotta move past it bud it's just not it's it's you know it's not that.

What's that line from the big Lebowski? Face it, Andrew, there is just no connection.

I can see that one connection, which might be that like one reason it might seem to Andrew Sullivan like there are suddenly all of these trans

teenagers and children when there are comparatively fewer trans people in his own generation is that a lot of the trans women particularly of his generation died of AIDS, right?

There is a demographic after effect of the AIDS crisis where, you know, there are indeed fewer gay men of that generation than there used to be.

You can see how it gets displaced, the grief, the anger. But now he's just, he's hurting people who don't deserve it and their children.
I just will never understand this impulse.

The other thing we should mention is that this

umbrella of identities that

has been able to agree on very little over the last 40 years emerges yet again and as always in Andrew Sullivan as this all-powerful repressive force right by drift activist extremism a social media bubble and suppression of

this is how he thinks the gay rights movement went so wrong he thinks they're illiberal because they have a different opinion from Andrew Sullivan.

And this is a misperception he's so predisposed to at this point, he doesn't even notice it as such anymore. Like, it's weird to think that the village voice is illiberal for like outing people.

Like you may not like outing. It's not like Stalinism.
It just isn't. You may not have agreed with what Susan Sontag wrote after 9-11.
It's not Stalinism. It just isn't.

And you may not like neo-pronouns, but guess what, bud? It's not Stalinism. It just isn't.
Maybe it's Maoism or the Dreyfus affair. Oh, yeah.
Or possibly McCarthyism.

It is McCarthyism if you think about it. From the left.

Yeah, I know that this is a

conservative tendency that predates it, but it does also strike me as, among other things, another way that the internet has broken people's brains, right?

It's like now you can see people who disagree with you, and it is harder to tell

what is an opinion other people have that are different from yours that, you know, you just get to ignore and go about your day with versus what is actually a suffocating consensus.

And I think that, you know, Andrew Sullivan is really online. I think that's one of several problems with this guy's thinking.

So he makes the move, what, in 2020, to the Daily Dish, his Substack newsletter.

And, you know, I have a Substack. If people want to subscribe to my Substack, they can totally do that.
I don't know if you've found Substack to be very good for your thinking.

I found it a good outlet for certain kinds of thinking. I've been very careful to keep some of my thinking off of Substack.

There is something where your thought processes will fit the space you give it um meaning it becomes very online it often becomes the

the basic pathology of the substack post i mean again there are very very good ones but the ones that are bad are the ones that pick on like four tweets and then like go to town for like 5 000 words or however much that newsletter will allow you and then we'll hide it all behind a paywall right and then who will mime contrarianism but

let's be clear i don't know how you use sub stack but like every time you send something to your couple of thousand followers you think well gee i hope they like this meaning like when i send something to a german newspaper i'm like i'm gonna juke these motherfuckers out of their boots i'm excited by the fact that people are gonna get mad at me right i'm like i want to say something that they haven't heard before i genuinely in these stodgy papers try to be kind of heterodox or whatever, right?

I'm not heterodox when I'm trying to, you know, get another subscriber for my sub stack.

It's a performance of being heterodox while at the same time, but giving people the kind of thing they expect from you. And I think Sullivan has that in spades in this essay, frankly.

Being

a substack writer means that you people are paying you because

reading you makes them think of themselves as a certain kind of person, right? You're turning yourself into a branded commodity, basically. And that is

something I think some people do very efficiently and elegantly. I do it very inelegantly on my own substack,

which I don't use as often as you use yours. Yours is very good.

But it's also something that can lead to,

yeah, a kind of like

a kind of chummy complacency, I think, if you're not really, really careful, as most people who are trying to make a living on Substack just don't have the time or energy to be.

I think Sullivan is by now in a prison house of his own making. It is very clear that when he says the LGBT community, he's thinking of very specific people that he's mad at.

In this case, you know, Chase Strangio, like... Chase Strangio, Matt Bernstein.
I don't know. Who else? Maybe.
I mean, Michelle Foucault still, right?

But also when he's thinking of the left, he's thinking of the guy who takes pot shots at him on Twitter.

You get a feeling that Andrew Sullivan picks fights and it's framed as this big fight of principles. But really, in the end, you get the impression he's thinking of very specific people, right?

When he says the young gay is no longer sort of take the struggle seriously, when he says, like, young gay men are all turning trans or whatever, right?

Like, that's a guy named Steve or whatever that he's thinking of. There's something about a shrinking world.

You know, people in print media have that too, but it can very easily become the disease of the very online, it seems to me, where you're just like, this is taking forever, Andrew, just name the dude.

Who is it? Right. So we can all be like, please don't do that because we need Andrew Sullivan to stop writing these pieces.
And this has always been the case, right? Like, I do think that

his hatred for parts of the gay movement are

about very specific slights that he perceived in the 80s and 90s, right?

I aspire to that kind of pettiness, like holding a grudge for 30, 40, 50 years

and letting it shape my career as a pundit because I have nothing else going on and nothing worse that's ever happened to me. I don't know.
This sounds like a pretty good life.

Yeah. Hey, maybe he's living the dream.
Yeah, maybe we'll leave it at that.

Now, I do invite you all to engage a little bit more with the piece in the New York Times, but it really does seem like at the end of an exhausting five-hour journey with this guy, I don't now want to go through this overlong piece.

Matt and Chase do an incredible job dissecting it. If Peter and Michael on If Books Could Kill don't do an episode on this in the near future, I'd be shocked as well.

So, we're not going to dwell on it, but I think we've been able to give you a little bit of a background of what's happening to Sullivan really is something that reveals some deeper pathologies on the right,

even though he himself is no longer allegedly that far on the right. And why he was this white whale that we waited quite a while to harpoon, but now we

got him.

Now

we have

the big whale carcass and we have delivered it to you our loving listeners yeah it's it's smelly and

it's about to explode uh and you should probably take a step back but as always until we get to the next rotting carcass which spoiler alert will be one phyllischlafly

we are in bed with the right

that didn't work yeah

they like our homespun charm yeah yeah the fact that we talk over each other except when we're trying to.