On June 30, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Matthew Vines titled “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.”
My show is called A Queer POV. You could say I have a dog in this fight. So buckle in, Thelma. We’re pedal to the metal now...
Let me be fair to Mr. Vines before I go after the argument. Vines came out at 19, in 2010, in an evangelical family in Wichita, Kansas. He wrote God and the Gay Christian and founded the Reformation Project, and he has spent his adult life arguing for people like me inside rooms that did not want us there. He married his husband in a breakaway Baptist church in Texas, which means he fought for his own wedding twice. Once against the law and once against the pew. That took courage, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
Which is exactly why his op-ed needs an answer. When someone with that history gets it this wrong in the paper of record, silence reads as agreement.
Here’s his argument, and I’ll give it to you straight, pun intended. Support for marriage equality is eroding. Republican support has dropped 18 points since 2022. Conservative lawmakers are openly working to overturn Obergefell. All true. Vines then argues that the word queer is partly to blame. In 2009, about one in five gay men viewed the word positively. By 2025, 48% of LGBTQ+ people thought of themselves as queer, including nearly 60% of those under 30. Queer, he says, quoting the theorist David Halperin, is “by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.” Too elastic. Too ideological. It muddles the message that carried marriage equality, that being gay is “neither chosen nor changeable,” and polling shows fewer Americans now believe people are born gay. His fix: go back to gay. Go back to ordinary.
Count the names.
Vines wrote a whole essay about a backlash and never named a single person or organization conducting the backlash. He comes close with "some conservative Christian activists," a phrase with a hyperlink where the names should be. Follow that link and you land on Them Before Us, announcing a campaign called Greater Than to end same-sex marriage and claiming a “direct line between gay marriage and child victimization.” Their post names its own coalition proudly. The Family Research Council. Focus on the Family. The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles. Vines had the names one click away. He wouldn’t type them. And before anyone blames the Times' word count: "Them Before Us" is three words. The vague phrase he replaced it with is four.
He doesn’t name the Heritage Foundation, whose Oversight Project sent the FBI a memo in September 2025 requesting a brand new domestic terrorism category called TIVE. Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism. A formal request that the federal government treat trans people, and anyone who defends trans people, as a national security threat.
He doesn’t name Project 2025, which put the playbook for all of this in writing and published it proudly.
Mark Zuckerberg goes unmentioned too. He gutted Meta’s hate speech protections in January 2025 so that calling us mentally ill is now allowed, in writing, on the platforms half the country scrolls every day. I laid that whole story out in Shadow Banned for Existing.
Nothing about GLAAD’s ALERT Desk, which tracked 1,042 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents across this country in 2025. More than half of them, 532, targeted trans and gender-nonconforming people specifically. Nothing about the FBI’s own statistics, which logged more than 2,400 anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime incidents in 2024, making us the third most targeted group in the country. And those are only the ones reported to police.
Juniper Blessing doesn’t appear. She was 19, a trans girl at the University of Washington who loved meteorology, stabbed more than 40 times in a laundry room this past May. Neither does Renée Nicole Good, a lesbian, a mother, a poet, shot through her car window on January 7 in Minneapolis by an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross. He still has his job.
How does the community itself show up in his essay? Barely. Trans people in passing, lesbians as a polling statistic, bi people as a footnote inside his definition of queer theory. Keep following his logic and the coalition shrinks with every paragraph, until the movement is married gay men in churches. Roughly, him.
Did you notice who the missing names would offend? Heritage. Them Before Us. The Family Research Council. Conservative Christian institutions, every one. You could say his target audience. Vines has spent his career trying to win them over. His essay even shows you where his concern sits. Conservative Christians who made their peace with our marriages are now "increasingly alarmed," he writes, and their alarm gets more ink than our dead.
He’s protecting the wrong flock. Many queer people carry faith and community every day. What he’s trading away is his people, and what he’s buying is a warmer seat in rooms that still haven’t decided whether he belongs in them.
Every one of those omissions sends the same message. Quiet down. Blend in. Be less queer.
I decline.
Quiet has never stopped a project, and a project is exactly what this backlash is. It has a budget, a legal team, a publishing arm and a memo to the FBI with an acronym on it. Blaming the word queer for it is like blaming the smoke alarm for the fire.
There’s one more line in the piece I can’t let pass. Vines allows that Queer Nation’s anger had “understandable resonance at the height of the AIDS epidemic,” then declares that its us-versus-them posture “has outlived that crisis.” I graduated high school in 1982. I buried that crisis friend by friend while a president refused to say the word. The posture hasn’t outlived anything. The other side never dropped theirs. They just changed focus.
We’ve all seen the deal he’s offering before, too. It’s the respectability deal, and the terms never change. Lower your voice. Distance yourself from the ones who can’t blend, and maybe they’ll let you keep what you have. The Lavender Scare purged thousands of federal workers who wore suits, said all the right words and asked for nothing. They were fired anyway. I wrote about this in Are We Facing a New Lavender Scare?, and the conclusion holds: the people running the purge don’t check your vocabulary at the door. Different names. Different tools. New focus. Same goals.
The men coming for Obergefell right now, the ones I named in They’re Coming for the Ring, Jonathan Mitchell and Judge Hensley and the Project 2025 authors, they were drafting their briefs long before “queer” hit 48% in a Pew survey. Mitchell isn’t parsing our word choices before he files. Nobody who wants my marriage annulled will hand it back because I introduced myself as gay instead.
Vines says the word queer became an umbrella so wide anyone can walk under it. He means that as the indictment. I mean this as the answer: good. That’s what an umbrella is for. You don’t shrink the umbrella in a storm. You ask who needs cover and invite them in.
I named my show A Queer POV on purpose. That word was a rock thrown at people like me for decades, and a generation caught it and built something with it. Gay fits me fine. It’s accurate. So is queer, which I use often. There’s my friend Kenny Patrick, who found non-binary to be the perfect fit. But gay doesn’t stretch to cover every queer kid figuring out who they are. Queer holds all of us. That’s the point of it.
Here’s where Vines and I actually agree. Gay life is dignified. It’s ordinary in all the ways that matter and extraordinary in all the ways that count. Derek and I have the kid and the twenty years, and we had the mortgage until we sold the house. And thanks to Obergefell, we just marked ten years married. Vines found freedom at 19 in realizing there was nothing inherently radical about being gay, and I believe him, because I remember my own version of that revelation.
But he’s drawing the wrong lesson from it. Our ordinariness was never the price of our safety. Dignity that depends on distancing yourself from trans people is dignity bought at someone else’s expense. And the other side doesn’t honor the deal. They never have, and they’ve shown us they never will. We’ve been here before.
By his own account, Vines knows better than almost anyone what it means to search for the word that lets you finally live in your own skin. He found his at 19, in Wichita, against everything his church had taught him. Gay. That word made his whole life possible. So why is he so dismissive of people doing the exact same thing with a different word? A kid somewhere right now is trying on queer, bi, non-binary and so on, feeling whole for the first time, the same way a scared evangelical teenager once tried on gay. He’s welcome to his word. He doesn’t get to take, or dictate, theirs.
I think you should read Vines’s piece. Take it seriously, because millions did. Then think of the names it left out. Close your eyes. See their faces. Juniper Blessing. Renée Nicole Good. Sam Nordquist. Pauly Likens. O’Shae Sibley. Nex Benedict. The five at Club Q: Daniel Aston, Kelly Loving, Ashley Paugh, Derrick Rump and Raymond Green Vance. Say them out loud for their gravity to take hold.
Then read the queer voices already answering him. Brandan Robertson, a gay Christian pastor, wrote Queer Isn’t the Threat. Respectability Politics Is. and named what Vines is proposing: “a sacrifice he is not the one being asked to make.” And Flamy Grant, the first drag queen to top the Christian music charts, said it plainer: “we’re sure as hell not leaving any of our rainbow fam behind to score a few points with the bigots in power.” The journalist Bil Browning put it in one image: "Every time a segment of the LGBTQ community has tried to purchase safety by throwing someone else under the bus, the bus just got bigger."
When someone tells you our language caused this backlash, ask them who wrote the Heritage Foundation’s TIVE memo. Ask who published Project 2025. Ask who’s funding the briefs against Obergefell. Make them name names, because the whole argument depends on never having to.
Don’t spend one minute of this fight policing what another queer person calls themselves. Gay, lesbian, bi, trans, queer. The people coming for us have never once cared about the distinction. Our unity is the thing they’re trying to talk us out of, and Vines, whatever his intentions, just wrote them a permission slip.
We don’t get safe by getting smaller. Nobody ever has.
Be bold, be free, and most of all, be you.
-David. Still here. Still queer.
Sources: Matthew Vines, “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters,” New York Times, June 30, 2026. Gallup polling on Republican support for same-sex marriage. Pew Research Center 2025 data on queer identification. Heritage Foundation Oversight Project TIVE memo, September 2025. Project 2025. GLAAD ALERT Desk 2025 Report. FBI hate crime statistics. Them Before Us, “Today, We Take Back Marriage,” January 28, 2026. GLAAD on the murder of Sam Nordquist, February 2025. HRC, “Remembering Pauly Likens”, July 2024. Brooklyn District Attorney on the hate crime conviction in the killing of O’Shae Sibley, June 8, 2026. HRC, “Honoring Nex Benedict”, February 2024. Club Q shooting, Colorado Springs, November 19, 2022. NBC News on Meta’s hate speech policy change, January 2025.
Organizations to Support
Trans Justice Funding Project — funds grassroots, trans-led groups doing the work in their own communities
Trans Lifeline — peer support and crisis line run by and for trans people
The Trevor Project — crisis intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth
Advocates for Trans Equality — policy and legal advocacy for trans people nationwide
GLAAD’s ALERT Desk — report anti-LGBTQ+ incidents and support the tracking this piece relies on
If you or someone you love is struggling: The Trevor Project at 1-866-488-7386 or text START to 678-678. 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, call or text 988.
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Well said.
The reminder to name the people and the organizations behind the backlash matters. It’s easy to start arguing over language while the people driving the policies disappear into the background.