No Andrew Sullivan, You Can’t Separate LGB From TQ

Andrew Sullivan, one of the longest-running and most-visible public advocates for homosexual public approval, is really good at math. At least, he’s good at calculating the current cultural vibe quotient for the modern gay movement he helped launch. Public opinion is now turning against it, and for good reason. 

Gallup’s recent poll shows support for the morality of gay and lesbian relationships declining among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, returning closer to 2016 numbers after peaking in the early 2020s. Over the last three years, support for gay “marriage” declined six points among all Americans. Sullivan believes these numbers put his movement back 20 years. 

Google Trends data demonstrates “Pride Month” has been consistently declining in interest over the past six years, in the United States and worldwide. 

Sullivan blames one thing: “queer overreach.” He thinks the alphabet soup movement has gone off the rails. This is not a new drumbeat for Sullivan. He warned in 2023 that LGBT had devolved into a “new era” of “the queers vs. the homosexuals.”  

In 2024, he lamented that the growing letter train had become a “meaningless incoherence.” And this was before everyone laughed at Canadian Parliamentarian Leah Gazan for expanding it to MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+. 

The New York Times gave Sullivan more than 4,200 words to decry “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way.” Lo and behold, he informs us the claim that “trans women are women” was never discussed or voted on at any of their “meetings.” It was just proclaimed as theological truth. He also smacked trans American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio for saying utterly dumb things like “a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman,” and “There [is] no such thing as a ‘male body.’” Last week, Sullivan took to his Substack to inform the world that “TQ+” is a growing “threat to LGB rights.” Homophobes can breathe easy now. We are no longer the whipping boys. Stunningly, he blames the TQ+ers for “the return to the narrative of gays as queers, freaks, and child-obsessed is dangerous.” He believes TQ “could be the beginning of the end” for the rainbow movement because they seek to abolish the sex binary.  

But Sullivan and his friends achieved that very thing in their June 2015 crowning victory: Obergefell v. Hodges. If male and female are no longer essential for marriage, family, and parentage, they no longer exist in any practical way in law, society, and culture.  This is precisely what happens when a man can simply displace a child’s natural mother because the adults desire it. This is precisely what Obergefell did. It didn’t just redefine marriage and parentage. It pretended to redefine nature. 

Sullivan is right that his movement is ridiculous, but he gets the timing wrong. It didn’t become crazy because gay and lesbian immigration agents failed to maintain a secure border on their precious movement, keeping out the undesirable trans and queers. Sullivan fails to appreciate that when you set yourself to toppling natural, universal sexual norms, you open yourself up to lots of wild things. Many of us warned of this, but people like Sullivan and his colleagues derided us as slippery slopers. 

Sullivan is now confessing that the slope is greasier and nastier than he’s comfortable with. In 1989, Sullivan was one of the first to make a serious case for gay “marriage” in the pages of The New Republic. It was subtitled, “A (conservative) case for gay marriage.” 

But there was and is nothing conservative about the idea of de-sexing marriage and dethroning it of its essential function. It always was a radical and revolutionary idea. Sullivan admitted in his early article, “Much of the gay leadership clings to notions of gay life as essentially outsider, anti-bourgeois, radical.” He falsely hoped linking “gay” and “marriage” would temper the former and improve the latter.  

“To be gay and to be bourgeois no longer seems such an absurd proposition,” he claimed. He hoped gaining marriage would make the gay relationship “clear and dignified.” Instead, this is the ever-expanding spectacle that is gay “marriage” in 2026.

Sullivan can be as outraged about this ridiculous display as anyone, but his ideas certainly helped create it. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy created this when he asserted that “[t]he Constitution grants them that right” in his razorthin Obergefell majority decision 16 years ago.  

Kennedy blindly confessed he could conceive of “no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle” of marriage’s essential role in the social order. No difference? Really? He dreamed, “Same-sex couples, too, may aspire to the transcendent purposes of marriage and seek fulfillment in its highest meaning.”  

Of course they cannot. They are categorically very different things, having chosen to intentionally exclude the human binary of male or female in their choices. Two men are not the same as a man and a woman because men and women are different. This fabulist hairdressing Texas couple, among many others, vividly demonstrates how excluding the human binary robs small children of their mothers.  

Make no mistake: The G created the very spectacle Sullivan has been going on and on about. The T and Q have just kept pulling the string of gender devolution in new ways. All the letters must accept the blame for the resulting madness that comes from the proposition all the alphabet movement’s letters share: that men and women are interchangeable everywhere. 

Unlike Sullivan and many others like him, celebrated gay writer Michelangelo Signorile was all too honest about the radical nature of the gay marriage proposal. In 1996, he wrote in OUT magazine:

“The trick is, gay leaders and pundits must stop watering the issue down – ‘his is simply about equality for gay couples’ – and offer same-sex marriage for what it is: …a chance to wholly transform the definition of family in American culture. …Our gay leaders must acknowledge that gay marriage is just as radical and transformative as the religious right contends it is.” 

Sullivan doesn’t like that more people are vividly seeing LGBTQ’s gender radicalism for what it’s always been. Expect to see more declining support for the rainbow project. 

Glenn T. Stanton is the director of family formation studies at Focus on the Family and the author of “The Myth of the Dying Church.”