Pride Month

I did a good bit of traveling in early June. Only in mid-month did I settle back into my regular routines, walking to work through midtown Manhattan with my miniature dachshund, Mabel. As I traversed the avenues, I noticed a striking fact: Pride flags are conspicuously absent. Yes, a large Pride flag flutters in front of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Park Avenue. There’s a clutch of them at Rockefeller Center, and small flags hang in the windows of a few businesses here and there. But compared to recent years, the city manifests few outward signs that Pride Month is in full swing.

What accounts for the disappearance of the banner of the Rainbow Reich? Matthew Schmitz offers his answer in this issue (“The Fall of Pride”). I have some thoughts as well.

A simple answer is success. We’re talking about New York City, and perhaps the rainbow gauleiters have taken yes for an answer. LGBTQ and the rest of the alphabet soup is so thoroughly established that it’s easy to take the rainbow agenda for granted and just get on with life. I can imagine an exchange in the West Village. “Hey, you going to the Pride Parade this weekend?” “Oh, jeez, forgot it was Pride Month. Can’t join you. I’ve already made plans for a session at Soul Cycle that afternoon.”

The take-it-for-granted reality of gay rights suggests another explanation. The Rainbow Reich is today’s dominant cultural regime. Those of us who dissent must do so delicately. Anyone who talks like Pope Francis (“frociaggine”) is immediately censured, not just by progressives, but by conservatives as well. By contrast, the New Yorker can publish trans writers who swing rhetorical machetes, and in so doing win applause. And there’s the rub. We’re living in a time of record distrust of institutions—and the rainbow agenda has become the house ideology for very nearly all of them, from universities and museums to Fortune 500 companies, the NFL, and the organization formerly known as the Boy Scouts.

One hundred thousand people die from drug overdoses each year. Mentally ill vagrants sleep in the streets. Migrant tent cities occupy public soccer fields. Young people report mental health problems at record levels. At drug stores, deodorant and toothpaste are under lock and key. People are smart enough to know that they were lied to during the pandemic. Perhaps none of this has anything to do with gay rights and trans activism. But causality does not matter. When your ideology is the regime’s ideology, it is implicated in the regime’s failures.

Put simply, maybe Pride flags have ceased to festoon Manhattan’s buildings for the same reason Joe Biden suffers from low job approval: People don’t think things are working well, and they blame the rainbow-waving powers that be.

Perhaps there is still another reason. As Schmitz notes, in 2018, the wedge of black, brown, and other colors was added to the original rainbow design of the Pride flag. This was done to effect symbolic “intersectionality,” the unification of various progressive enterprises that seek the liberation of the marginalized. After October 7, 2023, pro-Hamas protests erupted at many universities. Although they waved the Palestinian flag, not the Pride flag, the hardcore supporters of Hamas were joined by students and outside activists devoted to defeating the patriarchy, calling out white privilege, and other progressive causes. It became clear that the Pride flag was the anti-Israel flag, the flag of those who denounce “settler colonialism.” As a consequence, the rainbow symbol has lost its feel-good, “affirming” character. It’s a battle flag now, and quite a few people, including some who thought of themselves as on the left, are realizing that it’s the flag of destructive, barbaric, anti-civilizational forces, which must be opposed.

We’re living in a time of change. Above, I note the rapid transformation of the international scene. Very different but equally dramatic changes are underway in American society. A recent poll by the French marketing firm Ipsos shows a slight decline in support for gay marriage among Americans. Fifty-one percent of respondents believe that gay couples should be able to marry, down 8 points from the peak of support in 2021. The decline is astounding. Since the 2015 Obergefell decision, we have been bombarded by LGBTQ propaganda. The Rainbow Reich has captured the media and our educational institutions. Yet support for gay marriage is declining?

Gay marriage is only one aspect of the cultural revolution that has transformed our lives over the last two generations. Widespread divorce affects far more people, as do the torrent of pornography and the deterioration of male–female relations. Yet gay marriage is an important symbol. It promised to stabilize the liberationist ethos of Stonewall by uniting it with the normative institution of marriage. (This view was promoted by Andrew Sullivan and many others.) In effect, gay marriage promised a cessation of hostilities. Progressivism would no longer attack the basic patterns of traditional life, as those patterns generously opened themselves to those formerly marginalized.

I never believed that promise. Transgender ideology follows directly in the train of gay marriage, which is why progressive activists have found it irresistible. If we can redefine marriage, the most fundamental and primordial form of human relations for all cultures, then we can redefine what it means to be a man or woman. After Obergefell, a child can have two fathers, or three. It’s no great leap from that fantasy to the transgender dogma that a father can become a mother. Perhaps the American public is waking up and realizing that it was sold a false bill of goods. Far from establishing a stable basis for “inclusion,” the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage signaled the license to redefine absolutely anything and everything.

The Rainbow Reich is an ugly, dysfunctional place in which to grow up. In absolute terms, the Zoomers are the generation most loyal to the Rainbow Reich. But as Schmitz documents, support is falling faster among Zoomers than among any other generation. In 2021, Gen Z support for gay marriage ran at 80 percent. In 2023 it dropped to 69 percent. Results shows a similarly sharp reduction in support for transgender ideology. The sexual revolution’s grandchildren are beginning to revolt against the revolutionaries. We’ll know we’re on the brink of a cultural Thermidor when a group of Yale students gathers on Old Campus to burn the Pride flag.