Matthew Vines Says He Has 'No Issue' With the Word — For Anyone but Himself.

Matthew Vines's guest essay ran in the New York Times on June 30, the closing day of Pride month, under the headline “I'm Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.” The replies began the next day. On July 28, Vines published a long post on his own Substack setting out three separate meanings of the word and naming which one he was arguing against.

A note on what we can and can't stand behind, because it shapes everything below. We could not read the Times essay. It returned a hard block to both of our fetchers, so we do not know its contents. What follows comes from Vines's own July 28 post, from the single line of the essay that one other outlet quoted directly, and from what other writers said it argued — attributed to them as characterisations, not as the text. The Times essay, the two Advocate pieces, the Blade piece and Vines's Substack post are all opinion writing, not reporting.

How the essay was read

The Washington Blade responded on July 1, in a piece by a writer who describes themselves as a queer public historian. (Their byline didn't survive our fetch, so we're not naming them.) It carries the only direct quotation of the essay we have — that “being gay is not a rebellion against ordinary life” — and summarises Vines as arguing that encouraging people to call themselves queer is feeding the current backlash against LGBTQ+ rights.

Josh Ackley, in The Advocate the same day, reached for a narrower summary: an argument that in his phrasing “the language of queerness is undermining public support for marriage equality.” He set it beside a Wall Street Journal essay by Ben Appel from three months earlier and argued the two take different routes to one destination — “Gay is respectable, queer is the problem” — reviving “one of the oldest bargains in modern queer politics: acceptance in exchange for distance.”

The Blade writer's own answer was historical. Their argument is that it was Black queer and trans people — “people who recognized that queerness is a political act as much as it is an identity” — who secured the rights Vines now holds, and that reclaiming a slur was itself a refusal of the assimilation that made it a weapon. They also gave ground, which is worth quoting in full: “Maybe Vines has a point. There are members of the LGBTQ+ community that remain settled and complacent in their privilege and refuse to recognize the fragility of their and others' civil liberties.”

On July 18, Chase T. M. Anderson — an assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at UC San Francisco — answered in The Advocate, and his objection was to what the word “gay” has come to describe. “When someone says ‘gay' to me these days, I think of cisgender,” he writes. “I think of palatable.” He opens on the headline: “My mouth tightened the moment I saw the headline,” he writes, and as “a Black, queer person living in America” he immediately wondered whether the author was white and cisgender. “Turns out, he was.” He describes being outed by a classmate in sixth grade at a Catholic middle school and the fear that he would be physically assaulted, and says he took up the other word only after, in his words, “further racism and discrimination in medical school and residency.” Following every rule “to fitting in with straightness and whiteness,” he writes, did not spare him: he describes suicidality and two suicide attempts “due to discrimination,” and concludes that being “gay” didn't save him.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 in the US by call or text.

Then, on July 28, three meanings

Vines's July 28 post separates the word into three senses and takes aim at one.

The first is the slur. Many people refuse to reclaim it, he writes, and that refusal is “most common among those over 50 or so, but plenty of younger people share it as well.”

The second is the reclaimed identity — the roomy synonym for not straight he dates to the mid-2010s, whose openness he says “can feel liberating” for people who don't want to be locked into a category, with “a particular appeal for many transgender people because it is more readily compatible with non-binary understandings of gender.” Then the parenthetical: “To be clear, I have no issue with this use of the term on an individual basis, and I'm happy to support those who use it for themselves.”

The third is the academic sense out of queer theory. Many of its theorists, he writes, challenge “norms like marriage, monogamy, and the very goal of integrating into society itself” — and that is what he is arguing against. His objection is personal. He says he was “increasingly told” — “despite still not identifying that way” — that being queer obliged him to endorse polyamory and consensual non-monogamy, and that “my Christian faith is what determines my beliefs about sexuality.” His summary: “Being gay in orientation was no longer enough; I needed to become ideologically queer to remain respectable among a vocal minority of LGBTQ people and activists.”

Two things in that post cut against the way he's been read, and belong here. He says the Times piece went through “a fairly extensive editing process” before publication. And while he describes much of the disagreement he has met as reflecting “significant philosophical differences within the broader LGBTQ community,” he also reports finding “meaningful common ground” with people who analyse the backlash differently but “still share my fundamental goals and values… regardless of our preferred identity terms.” He names two responses he valued — one critical, from Georgia Coley in Sojourners; one sympathetic, from Dennis Sanders on Substack. We have not read either.

Our read

None of the three replies we read takes up the breakdown as a breakdown. We can't tell you why, and we're not going to guess: the June essay is the one document in this story we couldn't open.

What we can say is that a breakdown of one word wouldn't have settled these particular objections. Anderson's piece, as published, doesn't take up queer theory; his complaint is about who the word “gay” now conjures for him — “I think of cisgender… I think of palatable” — which no definition of the other word speaks to. The Blade writer does engage the political sense, but holds it alongside the identity one rather than instead of it: queerness as “a political act as much as it is an identity.” Vines describes that political sense as something pressed on him; the Blade writer treats it as inseparable from how the rights were won. That is a straightforward disagreement, and a glossary doesn't touch it.

Ackley's objection is different again, and it's the one we keep coming back to. His charge isn't that the essay was misread — it's that neither essay is really about language, that both are about respectability, and that two of the largest newspapers in the country chose to hand over the space. Our own version is narrower than his. A headline reading “I'm Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.” travels on its own, detached from whatever qualifications sit under it, and a three-part distinction in a Substack post does not travel with it. Vines says the essay was extensively edited before it ran; we don't know what that changed.

We're not neutral here and won't pretend to be. Our house style keeps the word out of headlines and email subject lines and permits it in body copy — which is why it appears throughout this piece, and why our venue page calls the Stud a queer bar. That's not a resolution of anything. It's a working compromise, and we'd rather show you ours than pretend we don't have one.