(19)17 shades of gay
Gabe Gottfried
Platypus Review 179 | September 2025
THE LGBT “COMMUNITY” has long grappled with internal fractures, particularly in relation to the distinction between sexuality and gender identity. The presumption that those who love non-traditionally and those who orient their gender non-traditionally share unified political interests has always been tenuous. After some slipshod presentations of Millennial solidarity between gays and transsexuals — Sylvia Rivera’s cult of personality and the romanticization of Stonewall as a crucifixion for the LGBT youth to precipitate a “second coming” — the dilapidated front has splintered.1
One could argue, given the direction of commentary, that “vanilla” is the only sexual minority out-group remaining — and it may not be a minority at all. Such a schema leaves some gays and transsexuals disaffected for lacking fascination with extreme, twisted displays of sexual behavior, and raises a barbed myriad of unsavory content that remains undigested.
Debates about sexuality and gender identity are inflamed not only by the sexuality and gender-identity divide, but also by accounts of pedophiles attempting to gain acceptance in the movement. Additionally, controversial scenarios involving pubescent teens and adults get thrown into the seething cauldron of debate, sometimes getting conflated with true pedophilia, attraction to prepubescent minors. Pedophiles have been referred to as “minor-attracted people,” a formulation which has been both justified and repudiated by LGBT thinkers.2 These contentions have left sexual minorities and gender nonconformists embroiled in heated disputes. The only meaningful danger to fear would be not pursuing the obscurity of age-related sexual taboos in the contemporary Left, necessitating immanent dialectical critique.3
The gay-rights movement has vacillated between ambivalence and outright denial regarding the question of whether the existence of adult relationships with minors who are close to adulthood, despite strict laws against it, has anything to do with the emancipation of sexuality in a free society. Once focused on combating state oppression, the movement now defers to a bourgeois moral framework for same-sex relationships, and a more or less vulgar, pitiful appeal to transsexuals (but moreso the nebulous transgender, non-binary phenomenon) — the fraught notion that if minors and adults are allowed to get sex-change procedures and demand they be called a litany of pronouns, this will decrease the suicide rate or retain their dignity. But what dignity is there without the questioning of the state’s outdated role in society’s bedroom activities and gendered socialization? To prescribe “new” options for a society to justify its domination by a class of CEOs, politicians, and socialites — really, capital itself — is a festival of oppression,4 not a revolution. Especially in the light of a movement that had once aimed no lower than to subordinate the state and hail in the worker’s full enfranchisement in: socialism. This lowering of horizons suggests regression of historical consciousness since the 19th and 20th centuries’ reconstitution of gender and sexuality in capitalism: we contended with perversions of classical love, only to find new possibilities that have ripened past useful enjoyment.5
For centuries, gay sex was stigmatized as illicit. The many attestations to its consensual nature were dismissed by a society that gave primacy to the promulgation of the race and archaic social morality.6 During the “coming out” movement, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) advocated for the decriminalization of relationships between older men and pubescent boys, arguing against statutory laws that the state could weaponize against unusual yet civilly consensual relationships.7 Though the mainstream gay rights movement has distanced itself from NAMBLA, its critique of the state’s role in legislating morality contributed to the broader discourse on sexual freedom, paving the way for marriage-equality and anti-discrimination protections.8 But upon these modest reforms’ realization, the path to full articulation of sexual freedom in capitalism has been clouded. Blowing the proverbial smoke away would cast out many odd bedfellows who have no business associated with the Left — namely, the “LGBT community politics” mass. To stall any further would only prolong the masochistic self-gratification — more mental masturbation sessions to fill the unproductive time in wait for a sign from nowhere.
In recent years, segments of the LGBT community have unintentionally unearthed this problem by responding to laws about gender identity. For example, some gay activists, one group being Gays Against Groomers, have criticized laws permitting convicted felons to change their names to align with their ostensible gender identity. Gays Against Groomers argues that such laws could be exploited by sexual predators, thereby linking transsexualism with pedophilia. The group also connects the issue of children changing their pronouns and undergoing sex-change-related medical procedures to immoral sexualization of children, but how could a different puberty than the biologically determined one be considered any more sexual?9 Because it lacked the involuntary, uninterrupted puberty that is nonetheless altered by all kinds of socially constructed mores? Puberty is said to happen much earlier in women than men, specifically the age that menstruation starts. If GMOs, stress, or the decline in the cohesion of families contribute to this meaningfully, ought those things be studied and protested against too?
The logic and historicity of allowing minors to do gender transition rests on shaky ground, but of course there is a kernel of rationality — that minors could have more agency over their upbringing and decision making as they grow up than we grant today. It is just abused for socially conservative purposes masquerading as Leftism. The issue of “gender identity” qualifying as sex in legal matters, triggering certain protections, has created the potential for convicted sex criminals, pedophiles, to falsely appropriate being transgender, attempt to dodge surveillance due to their past crimes, and imprint their pathology onto children under the guise of LGBT advocacy. But to suggest that children changing their gender identity, whatever this may mean, is a sign of widespread predation fails to address how the sexualization of minors happens mostly in “normal” (heterosexual) nuclear families with little tolerance for the consideration of a child’s “gender identity.” Concerns about children undergoing irreversible procedures have merit due to acceptance that children lack the capacity to vote, get a tattoo, or engage in mature sexual conduct. Yet, the notion that on the first day of legal adulthood all are suddenly capable and were never capable prior is obviously absurd. Equating such medical choices with systemic sexual exploitation could be an unconscious sleight of hand, revising the gay-rights movement’s past on the matter to bolster its credibility in the eyes of the capitalist state.
Historical parallels between the gay-rights movement and debates about age of consent poses a problem, but it is unacceptable to discuss this sanely on the Left. Both the gay-rights movement and NAMBLA questioned the state’s regulation of personal morality. It was once the playbook of the conservative to curry state favor in the name of morality, women, and children. In the mid-20th century, gay activists, as a pragmatic matter, rejected biological determinism, the “gay gene,” as their basis of existence and right to promulgate a culture. In pre-bourgeois civilization, sodomy was often considered an instinctual and therefore wild, un-Christian bane to a fruitful civilization. Before the late 20th century, gays were tasked with demanding their rights on the basis of individual freedom against state oppression. The right to be gay was not merely so, it was the right to become something different from what had been possible in any prior moment of history: free agents producing in society.
This opens the door for an inconvenient addition to the argument about sexuality and civil social morality — namely, adults who get into relationships with legal minors who are physically and emotionally ready to have sex, and pedophiles, who are attracted to children who cannot consent at all.
With adults who sexually socialize with minors who are mature enough to consent in the civil sense, one could simply determine that their choice of sex partner is controversial, but not that of true pedophilia. But today, there is a culture of branding any activity involving a legal minor, without evaluating their proximity to adulthood, as the same as pedophilia. To lack a distinction between the two tends towards protectionism and paternalism, allowing more opportunities for the state to determine how civil society will conduct itself at the cost of its freedom.
Society has rejected wholesale any discussion of rights or autonomy when adults are found to have had sex with minors, viewing all of their inclinations as inherently predatory. An argument from nature would only upset society, because even if documented as a common or natural behavior in man’s annals, the notion that minors have sexual desires that do not require draconian regulation in every incident of sex with a legal adult could imperil the presently stable position of gays. Minors begin to think about sex before they reach puberty, and although this in of itself does not constitute consent on behalf of the children, the abject denial of this phenomenon only clouds critical thought. Most today believe that engaging in sexual activities with prepubescent minors is wrong because the child hasn’t reached the state of mind and body that constitute the conditions for consensual relations. Whether true pedophiles are biologically or socially determined in their attraction and pursuit of young children could be better understood if society did not become so emotionally transfixed in the wrongness and lump instances of consensual encounters between older minors and adults into the population at hand.
The modern Left’s shift toward moral absolutism on issues of sex and consent reveals a departure from its earlier emphasis on challenging state power. Today, the “Left” promotes raising the age of consent, implementing contracts before any allowed sexual conduct, and the criminalization of sexting between minors, indicating a punitive, authoritarian turn. Despite the occasional nod to the Left’s past opposition to the infusion of sexual morality into politics, the turn toward the state alienates those directly impacted by sex-related laws, and conceals the historical vitality of the Left itself.10
Ultimately, these debates reveal a deeper challenge: reclaiming the emancipatory roots of opposition to statism. The rights of adults who sleep with mature minors, and even true pedophiles, are just as useful as the rights of gays, transsexuals, and children in radically organizing society. Rights against the state are to be disposed of by the Left to make revolution. “Dignity” can be relegated to the pietistic. One would think the postmodern turn of the “Left” — the refusal to grant any objectivity to “grand historical narratives” (censured as colonialist) — could handle the controversy. Pre-bourgeois tribal morality involved pedophilia, but the decolonial tribe could declare its revision of multiculturalism with newfound wisdom (Millennial #MeTooism and Gen Z’s chastened response to what was once normal sexual socialization), reforming its ancestor’s wrongs at best. And it’s likely the police would have to become the enforcer of this new set of mores, as recent attempts to show sovereignty apart from the state have remained woefully inadequate.
Sexual liberation would not be postmodern. Civil society’s independence is bound up in the Left’s ability to apprehend the dictatorship of the proletariat. Until the Left can handle the social question in the face of trifling appearances, ancient notions of justice that pervade the modern day “dogma,” sexual minorities and gender nonconformists will remain misunderstood as moral and biological features of society, instead of social creatures containing revolutionary potential. As sex between adults and near-adult minors, and true pedophilia continue to taunt gays and transsexuals with no critical relief, an abandoned movement will sink into the unexamined chronicles of history, miring society in sexual and moral tyranny. On the level of thought, the Left’s self-betrayal only needs to be confessed for its “sins” to be fully absolved.11 |P
1 See “Heroes of Stonewall: Sylvia Rivera,” World Queerstory (June 12, 2019), <https://worldqueerstory.wordpress.com/2019/06/12/sylvia-rivera/>.
2 See Joy Pullmann, “Activists Defend Canceled ‘Minor-Attracted Persons’ Camp In Vermont Next To School,” The Federalist (September 26, 2024), <https://thefederalist.com/2024/09/26/activists-defend-canceled-minor-attracted-persons-camp-in-vermont-next-to-school/>.
3 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 71–88; and Chris Cutrone, “Critical authoritarianism,” Platypus Review 91 (November 2016), <https://platypus1917.org/2016/11/08/critical-authoritarianism/>.
4 Keeanga Yahmatta Taylor, “How Do We Change America?,” The New Yorker (June 2020), <https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-do-we-change-america>. The phrase “festival of the oppressed” originates from V.I. Lenin, “Two Tactics Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 9, ed. George Hanna, trans. Abraham Fineburg and Julius Katzer (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 113, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/index.htm>.
5 See D.M. Faes, “Transgender liberation? A movement whose time has passed,” Platypus Review 111 (November 2018), <https://platypus1917.org/2018/11/02/transgender-liberation-a-movement-whose-time-has-passed/>.
6 See John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, et al. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 100–13.
7 See David Thorstad, “Gay Liberation and the Taboo on Male Homosexuality,” MR Online (May 27, 2013), <https://mronline.org/2013/05/27/thorstad270513-html/>.
8 See Greg Gabrellas and Max E. Katz, “Book Review: Sherry Wolf, Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation,” Platypus Review 31 (January 2011), <https://platypus1917.org/2011/01/01/book-review-sherry-wolf-sexuality-and-socialism-history-politics-and-theory-of-lgbt-liberation/>.
9 See “Gays Against Groomers and Rocky Mountain Women’s Network Sue to Protect Right to Speak on Trans Bills,” Institute for Free Speech (March 27, 2024), <https://www.ifs.org/news/gays-against-groomers-and-rocky-mountain-womens-network-sue-to-protect-right-to-speak-on-trans-bills/>.
10 See “Hands off Roman Polanski!,” Workers Hammer 209 (Winter 2009–10), <https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/workershammer-uk/209_2009-10_winter_workers-hammer.pdf>.
11 Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge (September 1843), in Marx & Engels Collected Works, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 141–45, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm>.
