We Are All Gay Now

Twelve years before same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, the openly-gay British writer Andrew Sullivan declared that “we are all sodomites now.” Behind his provocative statement was a rather simple observation: By 2003, non-procreative sex between heterosexuals had been thoroughly normalized. 

Ten years after Obergefell, Sullivan’s statement proves more prophetic than he anticipated. More people, especially Zoomers, openly identify as gay or some type of queer. Fewer heterosexuals are marrying, as Matthew Schmitz recently pointed out in these pages, and even fewer are procreating (though many are proud dog parents). I can’t help but notice that heterosexual couples are beginning to mirror homosexual ones in more ways than just barrenness. 

Polyamory—a common feature of the gay lifestyle—is increasingly popular among heterosexuals, as relationships are now driven by individual fulfillment rather than procreation and starting a family. And traditional gender roles have become largely superfluous to romantic pairings. Women have surpassed men in education and the workforce. While women tend to have mastered basic “adulting” skills by their early thirties, men lag behind, with many lacking stable careers, money, or a sense of direction. By the time they marry (if they ever do), millennial women are more likely to be the breadwinner and, given their greater maturity, are notionally more fit to call the shots in the relationship. Surely, this inversion of gender roles does not render gender difference completely irrelevant to the relationship. But the fact that said differences are no longer tied to the given embodiment of the man and the woman does indeed serve to relativize the role of gender difference in the relationship. 

Some argue that this new dynamic stems from the demonization of “toxic masculinity” and the feminization of men. The overarching cultural message has been that it is better for men to be passive and vulnerable than to cultivate their more properly masculine traits in virtuous ways. When the male abdicates headship in heterosexual pairings, women step in to fill the role. 

Furthermore, it has become a mark of a straight man’s superior, “evolved” social status to proclaim he is “totally cool” with gay men and supports them as an “ally.” While this may be pragmatic for boosting his social capital, it also demonstrates he is out of touch with his own masculine nature. Camille Paglia writes in her 1994 book Vamps & Tramps that homophobia among adolescent boys is not necessarily a sign of their “hatefulness,” but rather is a “means of group self-affirmation. Because boys lack a biological marker like menstruation, to be a man is to be not female.” It is only natural for a young man to be repulsed by the prospect of assuming the role of the “female” and being penetrated by another man. For that matter, “No truly masculine father,” she continues, “will ever welcome a feminine or artistic son at the start, since the son’s lack of virility not only threatens but liquidates that father’s identity, dissolving husband into wife.” 

While a mature man should refrain from violence and leaven his instinctive revulsion toward gay men with the supernatural virtues of charity and mercy, there is certainly something suspect (and, frankly, unnatural) about a heterosexual man who claims to have no issue whatsoever with being around gay men—as if all gay men were exclusively interested in sex with other gay men. 

Just a few years before Lady Gaga, Kesha, and Katy Perry started releasing pro-gay anthems, heterosexual female pop singers complained about their boyfriends acting too gay. In 2003, Amy Winehouse sang to her lover that he “should be stronger than” her. She cites him “always wan[ting] to talk it through, I don’t care.” She feels like “a lady” while he’s her “ladyboy,” as she “always ha[s] to comfort” him, when what she really needs is for him to be the one to comfort her and “stroke [her] hair.” She prods him further, going as far as asking him if he’s gay. Even gay icon Katy Perry herself sang that her boyfriend is “so gay” in 2008, despite the fact that he doesn’t “even like boys.” She complains of him being too skinny and wearing more makeup than her, and implies that he’s castrated himself by failing to be the man in the relationship.

But I’d argue that there is something graver—and gayer—going on here than the feminization of straight men. It is a well-known Freudian trope that many gay men had distant fathers and overbearing mothers who used their sons as confidants. The narrative holds that the homosexual’s pursuit of other men as sexual partners is driven less by effeminacy than by his need to rebel against his mother’s hold over him—of which women are a poignant reminder. 

I can’t help but recognize this dynamic at play in many millennial heterosexual couples. A man’s failure to get his career together, to make key decisions for his family, or his dependency on his wife for encouragement, direction, and even discipline, is a sign not of his having become too “girly” but of his prolonged adolescence, his need to be infantilized by a mother-figure. Though the heterosexual man who treats his wife as a mother figure is distinct from the gay man who rebels against his overbearing mother by pursuing a male partner, they are united by their unresolved maternal complexes.  

Surely, I don’t mean to pin this all on men’s moral failure. It’s hard to take responsibility as a man in a society that demonizes masculinity and paternal authority, and that instead favors nanny-like bureaucratic systems. Men who value their own agency, who are determined to protect, build, and fight for the good of their own, are threats to the expansion of automation and globalized technocratic power, and are treated as such.

Regardless of whether one attributes the shifting dynamics in heterosexual relationships to the inversion of gender roles or to pervasive Freudian emotional complexes, the reality is that the behavior of heterosexual and homosexual couples is becoming less distinguishable. Not only are we all sodomites ten years after Obergefell; we are all becoming gay.