Homonationalism?

No. But maybe the dying gasps of social justice identitarianism.

Monotheism isn’t really renowned for its acceptance of same sex desire, and this is putting it quite politely. The tolerance that European and Anglo/American Christian societies currently show fags like me is quite tentative and fragile. Adding in yet another monotheism whose sacred documents and teachers happily consign homosexuals to death and eternal flames doesn’t really make the situation that much easier for us.

Before the elections in Germany, one of the largest and oldest gay dating sites, Romeo (previously Gay Romeo), continued their tradition of running an election poll for their users.

Now, before I go further, I should give you some context about gay dating sites and Romeo in particular. There are quite a few such services, but most of them only have a smart phone app version, meaning you cannot access it without a phone. Romeo, which is the largest in Europe, continued the older model of web-based chats and then added an optional app.

That’s important context for the poll. Whereas in the United States it’s common to find even a homeless person with a smartphone, it’s much more common in Germany to see blue collar workers still using a flip phone with at most a web browser. That means that you’re a lot more likely to find lower class gays using Romeo rather than any of the phone-only services.

One other thing will help give you context for the composition of people who use Romeo. Unlike many of the other services, it continues to resist the fad of pushing users to proclaim their pronouns in their biographies (unlike Grindr, where making a joke about alternative pronouns will get you banned¹). But this follows the general trend in Europe, where alternative pronouns aren’t really a thing except amongst academics and heavily Americanized activists.²

So, Romeo ran their poll just before the election and the results made quite a bit of news throughout Europe and even in the United Kingdom. That’s because the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far right German political party, came in first. This led immediately to panicked proclamations that “homonationalism” was on the rise there, and that gay German men were becoming a looming fascist threat.

Homonationalism is a term first used in 2007 to explain why many gays and lesbians tended to vote for conservative, rather than liberal, political parties. According to the prevailing wisdom, we should naturally gravitate towards liberal politics because so many conservative politicians were morally opposed to homosexual activity and liberals were tolerant of it. In other words, being homosexual should be a predictor of liberal political values, yet it wasn’t the case at all.

Already you maybe noticed that this framework starts from two flawed premises. It assumes a person’s sexual identity should be a primary factor in determining his or her political opinions. And it also assumes that there are political parties that fully represent those sexual identities. In other words, because I desire men I should vote for liberal politicians because liberal politicians care about my male-only sexual desire.³

These flawed premises are also at the root of all social justice identity politics. It assumes that because a person is black, for example, all their political opinions should therefore be informed by that blackness. And blackness, in this view, determines what a person truly cares about.

The problem for this framework has always been that people just don’t seem to care about identity programs as much as the academics and activists insist they do. This was especially clear around the issue of de-funding police departments after Black Lives Matter. Though it was a consistent political platform of the activists, black people — especially older ones — living in unsafe neighborhoods actually wanted more police interventions in crime, not less.⁴

To explain how some people just didn’t fit this identity-first model, other theoretical tricks were employed. Most ridiculous and insulting of these in regards to racial minorities was the theory of “multi-racial whiteness,” meaning that black and brown people who didn’t support social justice political ideas were actually white, even though they were not.⁵

Homonationalism was exactly this same kind of theoretical trick and was also one of the earliest. Rather than re-examining the flawed presumptions that gays and lesbians should automatically be voting for liberal politicians, it instead sought to explain why some gays and lesbians weren’t really acting like gays or lesbians at all.

Especially in Europe, homonationalism tends to be employed as an explanation for why many gays and lesbians tend to support restrictions on immigration, and the sticking point is always the matter of non-integrated immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. The analysis then concludes that the gays and lesbians who support restrictions are essentially Islamophobic and collaborating with their own oppressors to oppress another group.

The problem here, just as with all social justice identitarian theories, is that there’s no attention given to the material conditions informing these opinions. To not feel physically safe showing your affection for someone of the same sex as yourself in front of a group of Muslim immigrants isn’t Islamophobic, any more than not kissing your husband in front of a group of Orthodox Jews or Evangelicals means you’re antisemitic or prejudiced against Christians.⁶

Monotheism isn’t really renowned for its acceptance of same sex desire, and this is putting it quite politely. The tolerance that European and Anglo/American Christian societies currently show fags like me is quite tentative and fragile. Adding in yet another monotheism — whose sacred documents and teachers happily consign homosexuals to death and eternal flames — doesn’t really make the situation that much easier.

Thus, the results of that poll were hardly surprising, and they generally fit along with larger voting trends of all people in Germany. The AfD’s appeal is that it’s one of the few political parties in Germany actually addressing these material fears, though it’s of course got no real solution to the problem.⁷ And this is the same reason why so many racial minorities in the United States voted against liberal politicians and even a mixed-race liberal political candidate. Liberals don’t address their material concerns.

But again, no right political party has any real solution for these problems, either. What’s needed are more political formations drawing from older (pre-social justice identitarianism) leftist frameworks and also older (pre-Reagan/Thatcher) conservative frameworks that don’t just give lip service to material conditions but actually fight to make these better.⁸

And this would also require honest conversations about the real state of cultural disintegration caused by capitalist displacement (the real cause of disruptive mass immigration) without explaining away real concerns of people with terms like “homonationalism” and “multi-racial whiteness.”

Otherwise, the failures of social justice identitarianism will lead us to the only kind of identitarianism more destructive than it has been. And this won’t be good for any of us.

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1. For another example of how social justice identitarianism colonized homosexual desire, let me introduce you to “top privilege.” Sorry.

2. It’s really, really rare. I can count on one hand (without using my thumb) the number of people I’ve met in person who insist on alternative pronouns in my nine years of being in Europe.

3. Core to this framing is the belief that capitalism has liberated homosexuals from the shackles of religious and cultural restrictions, similar to the false belief that capitalism liberated women.

4. There’s even more important context here, which is that police departments in the United States often used de-policing as a punishment against black neighborhoods. What would happen is that after a local protest against police brutality, the police would stop answering any emergency calls and stop patrolling those neighborhoods in retaliation. This would result in increased crime (including murders), especially among black women and older black residents who were especially vulnerable to crime by young black men.

5. This term was first minted to explain why lower class black and Hispanic people voted for Trump instead of Hillary Clinton in 2016, as well as why so many of them seemed so concerned about illegal immigrants taking what few jobs were available to them.

6. I’ve been called a faggot and threatened after publically expressing affection for another man by devout adherents of all three monotheisms, yes.

7. One of the only uses of homonationalism in academic literature which actually came close to admitting the underlying material conditions was from 2023. In that study, the authors proposed that the nationalist factions in a society actually become more tolerant of gays and lesbians when foreigners attack them. That study concluded that, “the inclusion of LGBT+ citizens is instrumentally liberalized and heightened when homosexuality is seen as part of native culture under ethnic out-group threat.”

8. (Cue accusations that Rhyd Wildermuth is advocating a “red-brown” alliance.)