Gay Pride 2026: Leaders Confessed Losing Control of Their Movement 

Pride Month 2026 marked the date on which two of its groundbreaking leaders publicly confessed their movement’s ungovernable anthropological problem.

 

The gay program, now actually operating as “queer pride,” is built on an intentionally radical and incoherent anthropology. It cannot cohere because it set out, from day one, to challenge the most fundamental truth of being human: the universal telos of man and woman and the biological and cultural fact that they require each other, that they find their fullest natural meaning in the other. The first irrefutable fact of life is that humanity doesn’t work anywhere without this beautifully profound and complementary mystery. 

Pride Month 2026 marked the date on which two of its groundbreaking leaders publicly confessed their movement’s ungovernable anthropological problem. 

Andrew Sullivan was the first, ever the rainbow movement’s prophet. In 1989, he made the first serious proposal in the New Republic for definitionally and functionally de-sexing marriage through legal same-sex unions. He remarkably argued that doing so “could bring the essence of gay life—a gay male couple—into the heart of the traditional straight family,” as if that were ever a goal of gay politics. He admitted: “My own guess is that most gays would embrace such a goal with as much (if not more) commitment as straights.” It was a ridiculous claim that no one believes. Last year The Wall Street Journal enthusiastically featured a gay throuple in a splashy celebratory spread. 

Sullivan now widely admits being stunned that winning gay marriage in 2015 would so quickly lead to the erasure of what started the movement. In 2023, he lamented how the LGBT project devolved into “the queers versus the homosexuals,” with the latter losing badly. He admitted, “We are in a new era and the erasure of gay men and lesbians is intensifying.” Sullivan added, “No one held a news conference and announced that from 2015 on, after Obergefell, the gay rights movement had changed its entire rationale.” The fact is, “queers now run what was once the gay rights movement” and “they quietly changed the meaning of the word ‘gay’ so that it no longer referred to same-sex attraction, but to same-gender attraction; and changed the word ‘men’ to include people with vaginas and uteruses.” 

A few of us publicly warned, back in the 2000s when large open-auditorium college campus debate was a thing, that legalized same-sex marriage would obliterate the meaning of male and female. Sullivan’s team laughed at us, uproariously. We were right, though. 

Just days into 2026’s Pride Month, Sullivan was back hammering what he terms “the TQ+ threat to LGB Rights.” As evidence, he cites socialist New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s June 1 Pride statement that referred “solely to ‘queer and trans people,’ excising LGBs from the movement we built.” This gay founding father explained the new LGBT reality with brutal honesty: “That’s where we are in gay and lesbian world this Pride month. Queer as f*ck.” He claims this is “setting us back 20 years.” 

On the final day of Pride Month 2026, a younger groundbreaking gay leader (not yet conceived by his mother and father when Sullivan wrote his 1989 essay) took to the pages of the New York Times to join Sullivan in protesting what happened to their movement. Matthew Vines was just twenty-four when he published his highly influential God and the Gay Christian in 2014, which set out to make “the biblical case for same-sex relationships.” Of course, there is no such case in Scripture, but his creative hermeneutics succeeded in confusing the minds of untold numbers of young people who wanted to believe him. 

Vines’s essay is entitled “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.” He is deeply troubled that the Q is fully eclipsing the G. He’s also getting trounced in the gay press. Vines admits this is a “worldview” skirmish within his movement, centered in the fact that the “born this way” claim “is being undermined by those who argue that same-sex orientation is better thought of as a part of a wider rebellion against social norms.” He’s concerned that this is putting the future legality of queer marriage at risk. 

Of course it is. The claim was always a manufactured narrative for political expediency, and Vines is firmly planted on the losing side.   

Gay politics gave up on the “born-this-way” claim years ago. Lesbian scholar Lisa Diamond explained in a viral 2018 TED Talk that the assertion needs to be abandoned because it is “unjust” and “doesn’t advance LGBT equality.” Science gave up on it because the most sophisticated work in genetics concludes “there is no ‘gay gene,’” as one MIT/Harvard geneticist put it in 2019. And lesbian New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen ceremoniously rejected the “born-this-way” claim in a lengthy 2023 essay because, “To many queer people, myself very much included, it feels like an incomplete account of their experiences, a simplification that shortchanges their lives.” It left no room for creative sexual innovation.  

The lie certainly served its rhetorical and political purposes ,though. Sullivan and Vines, and others like them, are simply angry that their movement did not stick with the more conservative and politically expedient “We’re just like you, save our radical views of marriage and family redefinition.” Their end was always about de-sexing humanity’s first and most important institution because that’s what happens when you claim that dad’s gay lover can replace a child’s mom in every way. 

The LGB project was always about challenging the natural essentiality of male and female for each other, for sexuality, the family, parentage and for society. The manufactured claim of the same-sex couple’s social legitimacy screams this every time it is asserted.  

The anthropological incoherence of LGBTQ is rooted in the fact that the first three letters require, and are squarely built on, the human binary, while the added Q and the ever evolving 20, 72, 81, or 112 other gender identities exist to overturn it. The L, G and B make no sense outside of the sexual binary. 

But gender queer changed all that, creating whole new and endless frontiers. Yes, gender and queer theory have resulted in men who pretend to be women being further up the existing feminist power differential than actual women. It’s why saying “O.G. lesbianism is going extinct” has been recognized as a form of transphobia since 2021. And there is no sexual orientation anymore because queer theory deems it too “essentialist.” It has been replaced by a more elastic sexual configuration theory that celebrates sexual fluidity over a fixed “born that way” conception. 

Sullivan and Vines are right. Their old movement is no longer recognizable. The supposedly set binary sexual-orientation scheme of their day has, in just a few quick years, morphed into a wholly fluid spectrum mentality resting on subjective identity. People who were once “born this way” can now become whatever they feel they are, and the rainbow flag celebrates it all. But as these men and others have noted, if male and female are not objectively real, same-sex attraction loses all meaning.  

But of course, this is their own doing. Sullivan, Vines, and their fellow revolutionaries are the ones who defined it all away, for that is exactly what same-sex “marriage” and “family” do. It demands that what makes male and female uniquely essential must be constantly and emphatically denied. Otherwise, the natural family joining male and female is superior to all same-sex pairings. We cannot miss that it was no mere coincidence that Bruce Jenner infamously appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine as Caitlyn within hours of the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision. These two radicalisms go together as different manifestations of the same thing: the erasure of human nature. 

And that is the real problem facing people like Sullivan and Vines: their movement has no self-limiting regulator. They only have themselves and their selective shortsightedness to blame. Their movement was radical in the extreme from the beginning. The T, the Q, and everything else that will ever come under their fashionably inclusive + must not only be welcomed but deemed worthy of full celebration. Radicalism is their movement’s functional DNA and it is all dead-set against what male and female objectively are. This troubling fact is precisely what every pride flag symbolizes.  

And it is what’s presently cannibalizing what every Pride Month claims to celebrate. Its leaders are recognizing this inconvenient truth.