LGBTQIA+ doesn’t speak for me. It is time to dismantle the rainbow alliance
Jack Ayoub is gay. But it doesn’t follow that he wants to be part of the trans lobby. Will the unionist and former federal ALP candidate be cancelled for his views?
It’s taken me two years to build the courage to write this essay. In that time I’ve shared these words with a small group of confidants, some of who are gay like me. All agreed with it, and all warned me of the wrath that may be unleashed through the fabricated aegis of the “LGBTQIA+ Community”, and other well-meaning or adjacent the movement routinely captures. Chief among my friends’ concerns was that publication would destroy my nascent future in politics.
If writing this disqualifies me from public office then we are in a worse state than I have suggested even here. Should the predicted wrath eventuate, it will only reinforce the uncomfortable truths I have stated.
I was around the age of 14 when my homosexuality began to emerge. Although not born into a particularly religious household, I found myself lying in bed each evening, bargaining with God. “You can take my left leg if you will rid me of these feelings...”, such negotiations always started with the offer of a limb and ended with a digit. It’s fair to say I was uncomfortable with this part of myself. A discomfort born of fear: fear of rejection, of shame, of alienation and ridicule. Fear that I would be judged on this fact of my being and not any other.
Although my mother probably sensed my gayness, she never lived long enough for me to disclose it. My father, a Gamilaraay man, lived long enough for us to have a single interaction on the subject. One afternoon he summoned me to sit beside him on our garish red patterned lounge. Before the cushioned seat could fully depress under my weight, my father, whose rustic charm and brutal anger was familiar to me in equal measure, asked a simple yet terrifying question. “Son, are you gay?” His question, as though filled with an electrical charge, immediately stiffened my posture and sent my heart racing, questions flooding my mind of what I may have done or said to provoke such an inquiry. My answer was swift and well rehearsed: “No! Of course not.” It was delivered, I thought, with the stage presence of Placido Domingo in full operatic flight. Despite this, my father embraced me and offered the simple words, “Well, I’ll love you all the same regardless. But don’t expect that of the world.”
I was born in 1995 and grew up in western NSW. Societal acceptance of homosexuality was well advanced. There had been, by and large, a social and legal delimitation on overt discrimination and exclusion. I have never faced criminal charges, imprisonment, execution or even physical violence - threats that, in Australia at least, predate my existence by a slim historical margin. I am keenly aware of the debt I owe to brave activists who fought for change, yet I don’t see the spirit of their struggle in the current LGBTQIA+ movement. The movement has morphed; it is no longer rooted in a fight against true unfairness and injustice. It is now concerned with particular disputes and controversial causes, some of which won’t and shouldn’t prevail.
Each person’s experience of growing up gay will differ. Yet it’s my view that what I wish to say here is broad enough that many will relate. Our identities are born of many things; filled with a choir of embodied complexities and juxtapositions. But I believe the influential LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual) movement potentially makes a journey of self-integration and identity formation all the more onerous in two ways.
First, the movement, without your agreement, conscripts you as a gay person to its cause - whatever it may be - regardless of the diversity of views that may exist. This is done in myriad ways, but most loudly through pronouncements about what “the community” thinks, often reinforced by politicians and other leaders in response. The cause of today seems to be that of gender identity - and despite one’s personal opinions, if you fall within the acronym you are commanded to endorse and champion the movement’s undemocratically determined positions. Indeed, only a few weeks ago, I learned that Equality Australia on behalf of the LGBTIQ community was demanding that the Minns Government’s hate speech laws “must include LGBTIQ+”. I must have missed the memo.
Second, in conscripting one element of you (i.e. your sexuality) to its cause by default, all of the additional elements that equally inform your “self” are denied. You are the sum total of your sexuality and, by the way, LGBTQIA+ shall marshal that fact as it sees fit. Even if one chooses not to buy into this reductionist notion of the community, the chance of forming new relationships with individuals and the world at large is tainted. It’s a subtle form of control over how gay people should think, feel and act. A clear deviation from the historic spring of courage that sought equality and liberation. We are conscripted to the LGBTQIA+ battalion of the culture wars, without even the conscripts sure of who the commanding officer is. Of course the alliance does not actually have the uniformity and coherence of a military force, but that makes it no less powerful in its manacling of minds. This conscription is of course most problematic for young gay people coming to terms with it all.
So prolific is the nature of this grouping of ideas and thought, it casts a shadow over any form of self assertion. Indeed, these social edicts have become so entrenched that a young gay person may feel shame if they don’t own something embossed with a rainbow. I once felt this way, but I don’t anymore - after a euphoric liberation partly thanks to the supreme good fortune of knowing men and women, older than me, who have conducted themselves with good humour and grace. Their struggles were more debilitating than mine and yet they had seemingly resolved within themselves to face the world as individuals above all else. They understood that the true essence of solidarity is helping to give voice to the choirs without diminishing your own.
I’d even go so far as to observe a new exclusion, alongside all of the division, suspicion and fear toward gay people. A new form of homophobia that demands extremism on threat of social banishment. Big Queer Brother commands: “Accept what we order or we shan’t accept you.” Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, agender, demisexual, genderfluid, graysexual, Non-binary/genderqueer, pansexual/omnisexual, polyamorous, sapiosexual. This ever growing plethora of labels is deeply reductionist; a way of thinking that pays paramount attention to the parts, losing sight of the embodied whole. It is obvious that, far from being a force for equity, the “alliance” and its staunchest proponents lean towards enforcement. Rather than accepting that most people are generally indifferent to another’s sexual proclivity, the modern LGBTQIA+ movement demands vigorous and unquestioning advocacy - particularly in the corporate world.
Take a walk through any major city or observe the busy foyer of a large corporate headquarters with its small LGBTQIA+ flags and symbols. Supposedly, these are to signal to any passerby that this establishment welcomes those of the acronym. Carrying with them all the hollow corporate virtue that is utterly devoid of the kind of cultural fullness that one might experience in an old Newtown pub when, upon ordering, you see slung behind the bar a rainbow flag. Embodied, embedded into the sense of the place, powerful in its context.
Social media has chronicled many examples of equality despots. Insults like “homophobic”, “transphobic”, “bigot” being hurled at various dissenting groups, alongside profanities, all delivered with unsettling aggression. It probably began to really dawn on me during the 2017 gay marriage plebiscite, when I came across a video of a group of young Christians being mobbed and harassed, all in the name of LGBTQIA+ equality. This Christian group had erected a small marquee on the main promenade of Sydney university, from which they were advocating a NO vote. An obvious position for them to take. As far as can be gathered there was no provocation other than the seemingly intolerable suggestion of a different point of view. It horrified me. It’s beyond comprehension that a movement for equality and fairness could conjure up such incivility. I often think of those stoic souls in 1965 in Selma, Alabama, who, when met with batons, dogs and water cannons, managed to restrain themselves from becoming combatants. The “social justice warriors” I have so often witnessed are not marching across the bridge. They are manning the water cannons. What’s more, it is occurring among those in our society who claim to be the most enlightened and open: the warriors on the new frontiers of equality.
In 2023 I watched those enlightened warriors block the entrance to a Sydney church where then One Nation leader Mark Latham was scheduled to speak. The footage of what descended into a riot as parishioners violently threatened the protesters is chilling to watch; it’s conduct I could never condone. Such unnecessary provocation invites in from the outskirts of public debate the bigoted few and sets them against us all. Some present at this protest/riot are associated with the radical group Pride in Protest, which last year mounted a sustained and determined effort to have NSW Police barred from marching in the Mardi Gras Parade and succeeded in ensuring they could not march in their uniforms. They have tried and failed to do so again this year. They push an utterly false narrative of disproportionate police brutality. Actively inculcating distrust all in the name of the LGBTQIA+ alliance. One can’t help thinking of those gay members of the NSW Police who were ostracised because of their profession. Their alliance membership seemingly cancelled; their right to inclusion denied.
Where all this leads me to is the latest frontier in militant LGBTQIA lobbying, which has emerged in recent years.
The movement for equality, which has successfully allowed gay people to live openly in a broad range of communities without hindrance, now captures those same people in a loudly advertised class to which they may not necessarily belong. A class that shouts others down with accusations of transphobia and homophobia if they, for example, didn’t support gay marriage or believe sex is not a question of self-ID. Rather than being a dance of decency between individuals, gay people have to formally and demonstrably opt out of these beliefs if they don’t want to be pigeonholed by the “alliance”.
The radical trans movement will ultimately be seen as having played a major role in exposing the excesses of the movement. Most gay men, I would dare to suggest, see little they have in common with the trans movement and its demands. In broader society the foundation of a claim to equality, and of gay rights, rests on immutability. Yet the trans movement seems by the day to be moving further from establishing a solid claim on such a foundation. Its protestations of immutability contradicted by the desistors, detransitioners and those who we knew all along were probably just butch dykes or camp boys with some neurodiversity. (Of course there are many immutably trans people, but to suggest all of them are is false). It is not, however, this radical trans movement that I condemn; its members are just as captured by the reductionism of the alliance as we all are.
The flags commonly associated with the “alliance” seem to signal where the distinctions should fall. They are for the most part simple and symbolic in their own right. Then there is the combination flag, referred to as the “progress flag”, useful only in its visually inelegant illumination of the incongruity of many of the thought lines and peoples it purports to represent. Rather than “progress”, it epitomises the reduction of thought and the homogenisation of distinct individuals, of common struggle, into nothing more than the struggle itself.
I am fearful of the rainbow alliance’s current rigid orthodoxy. Particularly, that it will cause (perhaps is causing) the confusion and potential reduction of hard won rights and freedoms. Indeed, in some parts of America there is a push to reduce the protections afforded to gay people. The sanctity of authentic human connection, with our fellow citizens is the most powerful force for change. We must not allow those relationships to be compromised by an unreasonable few. America is a poignant warning of what this breakdown can look like. Any movement that seeks equality with another must trade first in advocacy. No great advocacy can occur when ill concerned with your opposite’s feelings, thoughts, objections and objectives.
The movement for equality has indeed evolved from its hard-fought beginnings. But it has evolved into something almost entirely unrelated - a great insult to its origins. If the theme of the 1998 Mardi Gras was “20 years of (R)evolution” consider the 2025 theme: “Free to be”. Yet can we really say that 27 years of (R)evolution has left us free to be? It is time, I think, to abandon the acronym, and the ridiculous fiction of a coherent homogeneous “community”, of one mind and one voice. It cannot and does not exist, and this casuistry is matched only by the falsity of suggesting homogenous beliefs and values on matters of great controversy. It is indeed time we were all free to be.
Jack Ayoub was a candidate for federal parliament in 2019 and 2022. A classically trained opera singer, with indigenous heritage, he currently works as a trade union organiser.