A friend recently described a TikTok he’d seen about a child who saw “LGBTQIA+” written somewhere and innocently asked:
“Is the plus what the gays were doing an hour ago?”
Which is objectively magnificent.
Also, if we are being honest, just as good as the actual answer.
I am old enough to remember when the entire conversation fitted comfortably inside three letters.
LGB.
Everybody broadly understood the assignment.
The Gays and Lesbians.
And then the Bisexuals joined us, bringing their charming opposite-sex attraction thing into what had previously been a comparatively focused discussion.
After that things became progressively more complicated.
Each subsequent letter arrived carrying new terminology, new politics, new flags, new posters and increasingly specific explanations until somewhere along the way the Tom of Finland posters were quietly replaced by notices about emotionally safe communication practices and a sign-up sheet for the crochet group.
And now here I am at the AGM to set the agenda for the next financial year, sitting next to an asexual person trying to find something to talk about.
I confess that somewhere after LGB, I stopped feeling entirely fluent in the language being used around me to describe me and increasingly find myself grouped with people whose relationship to sex, gender and attraction appears to involve considerably more moving parts than mine.
This is not entirely a criticism; more an acknowledgement that my own operating system was installed sometime around 1989 and has only really accepted security patches ever since.
Now, I understand perfectly well how and why the expansion of inclusivity happens: coalitions form because people tend to recognise familiar patterns in one another, and there’s certainly some crossover in our rainbow.
Politically, broader coalitions make total sense as well.
More people.
More voices.
More visibility.
More leverage.
Obviously.
The question that has become a nag is whether the degrees of separation have expanded to the point where some of us are now connected purely by our membership of the umbrella group itself.
The ties that bind us feel more tenuous now than perhaps they once did.
The thing that made the original grouping feel more intuitive to me is that, for most of my life, society regarded all of us as some flavour of deviant.
Their word, not mine.
Not ours.
And, in terms of sexual deviance at least, I suspect I have more in common with a hetero adulterer than with somebody who experiences no sexual attraction whatsoever.
Which is an extremely strange sentence to discover yourself writing.
But both homosexuality and adultery were understood as problems of desire.
Excessive desire. Misdirected, forbidden and immoral desire.
But desire nonetheless.
We were the ones sweating with our shirts off in the middle of the dance floor. Whereas asexuality sits in the chill out room, wondering what the fuss is all about.
And perhaps that observation points toward the real answer.
Belonging to the same group did not make us all the same.
Our deviance simply made somebody uncomfortable enough to be hostile, and that shared experience of hostility created solidarity.
We were not the same. The storm we faced was.
But the weather has changed.
The gays are not especially deviant anymore.
Or perhaps more accurately: society no longer seems particularly convinced that we are.
There is, after all, an entire month dedicated to celebrating how remarkably normal we have become.
Complete with merch.
Which is generally accepted as progress.
Membership to our group now feels more like arriving at a high school reunion.
You recognise the room, and most of the faces.
To varying degrees you also feel genuine affinity with everyone.
But somewhere along the way everybody carried on with their lives, developed new interests, found new friends and learned new vocabulary.
The connections remain.
The distance between them have simply expanded.
And it is probably a good thing everybody is wearing name badges.
Anyway.
I’m still perfectly happy with “gay.”