Rudy Rendon

As a gay man, I'll say what a lot of us are thinking. We fought to be left alone. To marry the man we love, keep our jobs, and live a quiet life. We won. Then woke activists took our letters, stapled on a dozen causes we never signed up for, and started calling us bigots for saying sex is real. That isn't our movement anymore.

As a gay man, it is exhausting to watch what used to be a movement about same-sex attraction get completely hollowed out. Gay used to mean something clear. Men who are attracted to men. Women who are attracted to women. That was the entire point. Now it has been buried under layers of gender ideology, identity politics, and a demand that we rewrite our own orientation to make other people comfortable. I am constantly told that if I am not attracted to a woman who identifies as a man, or a man who identifies as a woman, I am bigoted. That my sexual boundaries are a form of discrimination. That “trans men are men” and therefore belong in gay male spaces, dating pools, and communities. This is not inclusion. It is a direct attack on the reality of same-sex attraction. The same institutions that once claimed to fight for gay people now treat actual gay men and lesbians as the problem if we refuse to play along. Corporate Pride has become a vehicle for this ideology, not a celebration of us. The language has shifted so far that many young people no longer even understand what gay means. I do not need a parade or a rainbow logo to validate my existence. I need the freedom to live as a gay man without being pressured to deny biological reality or accept opposite-sex partners under a new label. The people pushing this did not liberate us. They colonized the movement and turned it against the very group it claimed to represent.