So it’s not surprising then that we are seeing a splintering of gay men away from big tent “queer” identity. One faction is the “LGB without the T” crowd who wish to segregate sexual deviance from gender bending. Another is formed of the homo-nationalist movements, who seek to align gay liberation with a white Western ideal.

Despite appearances of a united front, rabid infighting has generally been the norm within the so-called LGBT community — or the LGBTQQIAAP2S+ community (yes, really), as some now insist on calling it. Lesbians, and particularly lesbian-feminists, have wavered back and forth in their tolerance for gay male sexual excesses. In her book, Anticlimax (1990), the radical feminist Sheila Jefferys famously documented what she saw as an “eroticizing of power difference” inherent to gay male subcultures — particularly our penchant for sadomasochism and the rise of macho “clone culture”.

Among gay men too, the Nineties and early 2000s saw significant divides. “Anti-assimilationist” queers such as Michael Warner questioned the gay movement’s focus on inclusion within traditional institutions like marriage and the military in his book The Trouble with Normal (1999). The homosexual conservative Andrew Sullivan meanwhile argued in his own book, Virtually Normal (1995), that gays should become model citizens in order to be embraced by mainstream society.

More recently, a new group of gay male academics, writers and artists have entered the fray providing “post-liberal” or “dissident” perspectives on gay life. Their essays are collected in a new book Inversion: Gay Life After The Homosexual (Verdurin) edited by Pierre d’Alancaisez and Amir Naaman.

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The editors frame the collection around what they call a “crisis” in homosexuality — the crisis being that gay men have become “normies”, “albeit a peculiar kind of normies that get a whole month of Pride dedicated to them.” Their fear is that as the LGBTQ+ umbrella expands and various formerly fringe gay identities become ever more mainstream, “it becomes difficult to articulate what position gay men, former social pioneers and cultural taboo breakers, play in society. Even the historical characterization of the homosexual as exceptional is thrown into doubt with the advent of this crisis.”

One clear theme unites the gay dissidents who contribute essays to Inversion — a wish to reinvigorate a sense of profanity and vice within homosexuality. Unlike previous anti-assimilationist queer movements, the contributors do not wish to abolish “institutions of normalcy” nor to frame mainstream heterosexual culture as the enemy. Indeed, in their view, homosexuality ought to be pushed to the margins in order for it to thrive.

Anthropologist Roger Lancaster, in his contribution, bemoans the “professional managerial class” for sanitizing homosexuality into a consumerist lifestyle, and seeks — through Marxist analysis — to posit a more authentic “working class” faggotry bubbling under the surface. In a similar vein, the writer Travis Jeppenson laments the loss of the early queer punk scene, where homosexuality and nihilistic rebellion were intimately intertwined in the music of Pansy Division and Tribe 8 or the films of Bruce LaBruce and Gregg Araki. He calls on modern gay men to “nurture our inner faggotry” and to externalize “the sordidness that resides within”.

For these post-liberals, there is an inherent “scandal” to homosexuality — one that cannot and should not be normalized or sanitized by corporate Pride parades or cutesy Netflix shows about gay teen romance. In their reading, the authentic gay man is not happily partnered in the suburbs but on his knees in a public toilet.

He is also perpetually alone. According to co-editor d’Alancaisez, there is an irresolvable individualism to gay male identity precluding all strong community bonds. He argues that gay men are best understood as lone wolves “freely dissociating from a community that he is no longer able to imagine, deserving neither pity nor rescue”. Only when these men are threatened does a “gay community” form — whether during the AIDS crisis or the shared grief that followed the Admiral Duncan nail bombings of 1999. Without a clear enemy, any hope of gay communion is impossible.

Underlying many of the contributions in Inversion is sexual grievance. Most of the writers are older millennials — and they complain surprisingly frequently about being overlooked on Grindr due to their perceived politics or ideology. Co-editor Naaman constructs an elaborate theory of sexual psychopathology in order to air out his dating troubles. As an Israeli gay man living in Europe, he is sick of being “expected to voice his stance on the war in Gaza before he can be allowed to participate in chills, druggy, after-parties, or random hookups”. Pro-Palestinian homosexuals, he argues, are driven by an erotic attraction to primitive rebellion. He notes — in overloaded syntax — that these men are “…locked in a masturbatory, fetishizing gaze at the theaters of violence on their phones: in the onanistic eroticizing of morality, yearning to become one with the actors in the tragedy playing out on the screen.”

A deep fear of “biopolitics” also plagues many of the gay dissidents in the collection. The term, popularized by Michel Foucault, describes how modern institutions regulate through the setting of norms of health and productivity. Here, it is deployed to critique HIV-prevention efforts like PrEP and an undue focus on LGBT mental health. Writer and “independent researcher” David Moulton appears to be in a state of post-Covid paranoia. He fears that society has ruined the uniquely “gay art of suffering” reflected in the literary works of unrepentant sodomites like Jean Genet, who occupied a world of pimps, prostitutes and erotic longing.

In the most extreme case, Marcas Lancaster speaks in a derivative Burroughsian register about his early life of sexual abuse and neglect while romanticizing the tragic excesses of AIDS-era perversion. Lancaster describes himself as a “failed gay” for not becoming one of the “Sadian heroes, who wore their lesions like badges of honor” and for “making the ultimate sacrifice for what they believed was a higher cause”. For the post-liberals, the AIDS crisis haunts all attempts to normalize homosexuality, revealing as it does the underlying degeneracy of gay sex. The lesson that they draw from this is that we must all make peace with our place at the fringes of society.

Of all the attempts to chart a course for gay men away from mainstream queer culture, theirs is the most depressing. It is, thankfully, also not very convincing.

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It’s telling that there is no mention of romantic love anywhere in Inversion’s near 500 pages. Indeed any hint at emotional warmth is quickly shunned for an empty “transgression” — lacking any transcendent ideal. I suspect many of the gay male critics in the collection could very well resolve their inner turmoil through a simple combination of the — troublingly “biopolitical” — interventions of sunlight, cardio and tender affection.

There is, however, a slim glimmer of hope buried in one contribution. Philosopher Ran Heilbrunn outlines the failures of queer theory to account for gay male desire. One such desire is the preference amongst gay men for distinctly masculine physical beauty — contrary to the anti-hierarchical gender bending of the queer theorists. The obsession with male beauty is the thread that runs through a variety of homoerotic traditions, from Theognis of Megara to Robert Mapplethorpe. It strikes me that such high aestheticism — vitalist and passionate — could very well form the basis of a post-queer culture, but such a model is fundamentally anathema to the vacant despair preferred by our post-liberal essayists.

This more aspirational vision of gay male community is not without precedent. As historian Blake Smith notes in this collection, prior to the modern “gay homosexual” there existed a variety of homoerotic subcultures: from the formalized pederasty of Ancient Greece to the effeminate “invert” men (“fairies” or “mollies”) of the early 20th century who sought out rent boys and heterosexual “trade”. As I’ve written before, the mostly forgotten artists, scientists and thinkers who clustered around Adolf Brand’s magazine Der Eigene in late-19th-century Germany, saw their desires as an extension of refined taste and romantic male friendship. The past was complex and it demonstrates that homosexuality can come in many forms, both the lowly and degrading and cultivated and meaningful.

So desperate are the post-liberal dissidents to reject the “normie” homosexual that they have become trapped in an ironic appreciation for the worst features of past homosexual subcultures. I can only hope that their cynicism does not catch on and that gay men who find themselves out of place within contemporary queer culture aspire to something far more beautiful, communal and sustaining.

Mermaids claims that LGB Alliance was not, in fact, established to support lesbians, gay men and bisexuals — but rather to discredit and disband Mermaids itself. The LGB Alliance, allegedly, “does not have charitable purposes”. If Mermaids wins this case, the consequences will be devastating for lesbians and gays. Any future charity set up to advocate specifically on our behalf will be wide open to legal challenge.

LGB Alliance was founded in 2019, in response to Stonewall’s refusal to engage with concern, voiced by lesbians and gay men, about trans orthodoxy. We are concerned that “same-sex attraction” has been recast as nothing more than a dog whistle for transphobia — an argument made by Mermaids in court. We are concerned, too, that lesbians are being labelled bigots for not wanting to have sex with people who have penises. And we are concerned, most of all, by the wholesale acceptance of this orthodoxy by organisations, such as Stonewall, which are supposed to protect same-sex attracted people. Mermaids’s case is being supported by Gendered Intelligence  and the LGBT Consortium, groups that promote the notion that “gender identity” should carry as much, if not more, weight in law as biological sex. Together, they are arguing that LGB alliance is “denigrating trans people” and does not “serve the public interest”.

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But what does “denigrating trans people” actually mean? Before gender ideology captured the liberal masses, and allowed misogynistic men to scream “TERF” at any passing feminist, it was a phrase that might usefully be used to describe the discriminatory and cruel treatment of people living as the opposite sex. But in 2022, “denigration” can apparently mean campaigning for women-only services such as rape crisis centres and changing rooms.

And how is advocating for lesbians and gays not a positive public service? As someone who came out in the Seventies, facing hellish bigotry and a lack of any legal protections, I desperately needed the support of a community that respected same-sex attraction. The Gay Liberation Front was, for me, a lifeline. It was set up in 1970 by Bev Jackson, who found herself compelled to come out of retirement to start the LGB Alliance. Her cofounder is another veteran of the movement, Kate Harris, who was a Stonewall Ambassador until breaking ties with the charity after it shifted away from lesbian and gay issues to trans orthodoxy.

“When Kate and I met in 2019, we discovered that we’d both been trying, independently, to engage with Stonewall about our concerns,” Jackson tells me. “We met a brick wall. The mantra was ‘no debate’. We were also told the change from ‘sex’ to ‘gender’ did not cause any conflict.” Jackson tells me that, in her view, “something has gone very wrong with this movement”.

Between them, Jackson and Harris have spent a century campaigning for the rights of same-sex attracted people. They have set an example by living as out and proud lesbians. And yet, every day, they are attacked on social media. Journalist Owen Jones, for instance, has branded them “monstrous, unhinged, horrible fanatics”, adding that LGB Alliance is a “ludicrously titled organisation”, simply because it chose not to add the T to the LGB.

Why is it considered “ludicrous” to focus on the needs of a specific minority? The LGB Alliance mission statement seems perfectly reasonable: it will stand up for the rights of same-sex attracted people; it will uphold the definition of homosexuality as same-sex attraction; it will accept the biological reality of sex. How have we got to a stage where this is seen, by trans activists and their allies, as hate-filled bigotry?

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The scenes I’ve witnessed in court since 9th September have suggested that what is ludicrous about this case is not the position taken by LGB Alliance, but rather Mermaids’s arguments that gender identity trumps biological sex. Paul Roberts is Chief Executive of the LGBT Consortium, representing more than 500 LGBTQ+ groups. A disciple of gender orthodoxy, he said during cross-examination that he believes “anyone who identifies as a man is a man”, adding that he believed if a biological woman identifies as a trans man, that person should be able to access male-only services. When Roberts was asked if, given his view that people are attracted to gender identity rather than sex, a lesbian couple in which one is butch and one femme are actually a heterosexual couple, he responded: “I don’t believe there are many lesbian couples like that.” Many of the lesbian spectators in court, myself included, couldn’t help but laugh out loud at that.

John Nicolson MP, Deputy Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global LGBT+ Rights, also submitted evidence in support of Mermaids’s position. He pompously declared that he knows what a lesbian is, because he is a gay man. “You are a lesbian because you declare yourself one,” he proclaimed. Male-bodied trans women are, in other words, entitled to use this label.

When Michael Gibbon KC, counsel for Mermaids, was cross-examining Harris, he asked her to reflect on whether some people would understand “lesbian” to refer to something other than a natal female who is attracted to other natal females. Or, as he put it, would Harris consider whether some people would have a different understanding of “lesbian” from the understanding her organisation is based on?

Harris broke down into tears, asking: “That a lesbian can be a man with a penis?” After composing herself, she responded: “I’m going to speak for millions of lesbians around the world, who are lesbians because we love other women … We will not be erased and we will not have any man with a penis tell us he’s a lesbian because he feels he is.”

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The phenomenon of men claiming to be lesbians is nothing new. In 1973, at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles, there was a row over a scheduled performance by Beth Elliott, a folk singer who was referred to as transsexual (the terminology which was applied before gender ideology prevailed). Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker at that event, said: “I will not call a male ‘she’. Thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman’.” Today, almost 50 years after Morgan spoke truth to power, the situation is far worse than any of us in the lesbian rights movement could have imagined.

The fact that one of Mermaids’s key criticisms of LGB Alliance is that they even use the phrase “same-sex attraction”, which Mermaids claim is “weaponised” against trans people, tells us all we need to know. We are no longer allowed to use the language we have developed to describe ourselves because eliminating perceived slights towards trans people must always come first.

“Sometimes one person’s demands clash with another’s rights,” Bev Jackson tells me. “That is what happens when someone with a penis claims to be a lesbian, and lesbians object. We have the right to define ourselves and not to be redefined by others. Basically, the whole concept of ‘gender identity’ erases homosexuality and is homophobic at its core.”

If it is ruled that LGB Alliance was founded with the purpose to undermine Mermaids, it will mean that same-sex attracted people have no right to campaign for their specific needs: a terrifying prospect. But win or lose, the case brought by Mermaids has revealed the organisation’s ideology for what it is: deeply homophobic and relentlessly misogynistic. This offensive contortion of “LGBT rights” will, it seems, backfire, by inspiring people to support LGB Alliance and rescue our once-proud movement from the jaws of gender fanatics.

“We are one small organisation facing a global movement to eliminate the sex-based rights of LGB people,” says Jackson. “We have experienced an ongoing torrent of abuse, but also an outpouring of love and gratitude. We will not be silenced or discouraged: we will prevail.”