Am I Part of a Global Conspiracy?
How online culture wars obliterate people's ability to process political moderates.
A version of this essay was originally published in Queer Majority. You can read it here. This is a tricky piece to republish, because it’s an article written for an outside magazine about that magazine and might initially seem like irrelevant inside baseball. It’s not. This piece illustrates so many of the problems with public discourse in a single, truly wild case study — one where yours truly, as QM’s managing editor, is front and center.
Queer Majority, like any publication, is not without its detractors. With trust in the media at an all-time low, and a backlash against sexual freedom in full swing, that’s not exactly breaking news. But QM occupies a truly unique niche as virtually the only politically moderate, small-l liberal queer publication in the English-speaking world. We publish some articles that lean to the left, others that lean to the right, and still others that fall somewhere in between or are wholly apolitical. We’re not constrained by loyalty to any political tribe, only to sexual and romantic freedom.
In today’s media environment, this kind of diversity is not always celebrated — or understood. Often, it seems genuinely confusing to folks. As one person said, “Queer Majority pisses me off so much. They change their opinion from article to article.” We don’t neatly fall within the preconceived boxes we’re “supposed” to be in. Many people don’t know quite what to make of us, and these days, the go-to explanation for anything or anyone not behaving as they’re “supposed” to are conspiracy theories. As the magazine’s managing editor, I’ve had a front-row seat to this unfolding gong show — and boy have the intrepid truth-seekers from across the political spectrum been busy.
So fasten your tinfoil hats, ready your evidence boards, and power up your shortwave radios, because we’re going down the rabbit hole of Queer Majority conspiracy theories.
The Bafflement-to-Conspiracy Pipeline
The fascinating thing about QM conspiracy theories is that you can see them take shape in real time. They begin with the sheer preponderance of people who, upon encountering our work and finding that it doesn’t conform to the hard-left messaging they were hoping either to agree with or hate on, immediately ask questions like “Who funds Queer Majority?” Here we can observe the Western-spotted conspiracist in their natural habitat. Notice how the very first reaction to something unexpected causes a moment of uncomfortable dissonance that gives way to knee-jerk suspicion. “A queer publication that isn’t just another Pink News — or Log Cabin Republicans?! Impossible! LGBT people can’t be moderate normies! Something fishy must be going on here!” And, of course, once internet-poisoned warriors for Truth begin to “ask questions”, they begin to “answer” them.
QM’s Web of Nefarious Funders
There is a particular fixation within the growing community of QM conspiracists around the publication’s finances. Everyone seems to agree that Queer Majority has “massive funding available” (if only), but opinions differ on the specifics. Some have, after a bit of “quick digging”, “rapidly confirmed” that our budget comes from a “dark money [right-wing] operation.” Others allege that we must be funded by “foreign governments” and “Democrats.” One particularly ambitious dot-connector somehow discovered that we’re funded by “Koch and other MAGA Republican billionaires” and managed to conjure a link between QM and the “Atlas Network”, a libertarian/conservative NGO, based on… my own Substack publication, American Dreaming. It’s remarkable what one can discover with the aid of a little psilocybin. (Just to be clear: If anyone from the Atlas Network is reading this, I will absolutely accept any large checks you might send my way. But you probably won’t enjoy my views very much.)
Other conspiracists are convinced Queer Majority is bankrolled not by partisan interest groups, but by the military-intelligence industrial complex. For some, our money comes from the CIA. For others, it’s Mossad. But why limit yourself to just one, when you can declare that we are funded by both the CIA and Mossad, or by the CIA, Mossad, and MI6 combined? On the other hand, perhaps it’s more prudent to play it safe and simply assert that we’re funded by “three letter” agencies and “pedo overlords.” One should always strive for parsimony.
And what would monetary conspiracy theories be without a little obligatory anti-Semitism? Naturally, QM is said to be run by Jews, funded by “international Judeo banking” (not for lack of trying), and financed by oil companies and genocidal Zionists. Remarkably, in the current political landscape, it’s not immediately clear which political camp these aluminum-lined sleuths hail from.
In my research for this piece, I even found one fellow who seemed to acknowledge the easily googled reality that Queer Majority is a nonprofit magazine funded by the Bi Foundation (a bisexual nonprofit) but insisted we were involved in some kind of convoluted charity fraud! There’s truly something for everyone. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll definitely lose some brain cells.
Psyops, Psyops, and more Psyops
Where some people see Queer Majority’s unexpected political moderation as their cue to hallucinate a phantom trail of dark money, others see it as grounds for claiming that we’re part of a psychological operation, or psyop — a military propaganda campaign engaging in pernicious information warfare. As one Twitter user said, “This account feels weird to me, is queer majority a psyop or what?” This sentiment has been echoed over and over and over and over and over, usually without any specificity. Some, however, are brave to put a finer point on their claims that we’re a “government psyop”, a right-wing psyop, a “CIA psyop”, a “TERF psyop”, an anti-LGBT psyop, and, naturally, an Israeli psyop.
Along these lines, some conspiracists allege that QM is “controlled opposition” and an “astroturf” group — a fake façade put up by some covert interest group to both advance but also disguise a hidden agenda. When QM isn’t being called a general, all-purpose astroturf operation, we’re declared to be an “astroturf hate group.”
Queer Majority is Controlled by the Far-Right… and Far-Left
Part and parcel of the imbecilic dichotomies in which modern politics flail — where everyone must be on one extreme or the other, one side or the other, one of “us” or one of “them” — having liberal principles instead of playing team sports puts you in a precarious no man’s land. In such an exposed position, people from across the political landscape assign you to the “other side” — and often its most extreme or imagined fringe. As such, conspiracists on the political left are convinced that Queer Majority is a bigotry-laundering, Hitler-loving, race-science peddling, “crypto-conservative lobbying group” of groypers (an outgrowth of the “alt-right”) engaged in “opportunistic exploitation” and “divide-and-conquer” tactics, seemingly in league with right-wing groups and/or political parties. Indeed, “the point of Queer Majority is the bigotry”, as one writer put it. You’d think that would come up more often in our weekly meetings.
To QM conspiracists on the political right, by contrast, the publication is part of a vast conspiracy of globalists, queer people, communists, the World Health Organization, and the World Economic Forum. Together with other unnamed shadowy masters, QM’s “regime-approved” degeneracy aims to turn everyone LGBT — or bisexual, depending on who you ask — and thereby depopulate the planet, usher in a one world government, and harvest that sweet, sweet, adrenochrome from all of the children.
In some of the more troubled corners of the Internet, Queer Majority has become a Rorschach test upon which disordered souls whose minds have been disfigured by the culture wars can see whatever they want. We’re communists and fascists. We’re in cahoots with Elon Musk, but we’re also foreign agents because we’ve published harsh criticism of him. We’re promoters of “anti-trans hate”, but we’re also “groomers” pushing “trans ideology” on children. Oh, and apparently QM, the LGBT rights activist Peter Tatchell and I have teamed up to… hijack trans discourse and simultaneously erase and co-opt bisexuality. What in the world that means is anyone’s guess — mine is that lead remediation deserves more attention as an issue.
As amusing — and disturbing — as all of this is, it’s a small price to pay to stand up for liberal values. After all, liberalism has been the driving force behind virtually every advancement in LGBT rights and sexual freedom, a fact often lamented by authoritarians, populists, and post-liberals. What those who would roll back human rights to some imagined past golden age deem “decadence” and “degeneracy” — LGBT tolerance, the ability to divorce, same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, and the freedom of consenting adults to live and love as they see fit — is what we see as progress. It’s progress worth fighting to preserve, and there’s no better tool with which to do so than the one that has already done the job. We’ve seen what happens when we leave LGBT advocacy solely in the hands of political extremists — wide-scale backlash. Now it’s time for moderates to lead.
The growing jumble of Queer Majority conspiracy theories is sadly to be expected. The fact that QM stands seemingly alone in the media landscape, to the point that our existence seems a brain-melting paradox, is what’s truly mystifying. It’s somehow easier to believe that we’re backstroking in swimming pools of Mossad shekels than that an LGBT publication could possibly be philosophically liberal, when in fact liberalism is the only proven and sustainable path to human rights. That perception is what we must change.
See also: “There Can Be No Culture Peace Without Moderates”
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"We’re not constrained by loyalty to any political tribe, only to sexual and romantic freedom."
I don't think queer people are or should be a monolith, but (under the assumption this article/blog revolves around American politics), one political tribe is openly and vehemently and uncompromisingly opposed to sexual and romantic freedom. So I'm not sure how you make it work.
Again I'm not saying every queer person must be a communist, but if you asked any Republican in their party about sexual and romantic freedom, most of them would say "no, those things should not be free".