Good News! It’s 2024 and the battle for LGBTQ+ rights and safety has been won! At least, that’s what James Kirchick would have you believe in his article for The Atlantic, “How the Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way.”

In the broadest sense, Kirchick argues that the gay-rights movement has achieved its goals and now the organizations behind it should be dissolved. He claims those organizations are now bloated and corrupt, creating nonexistent problems to react to. For much of his argument, he focuses on the non-profit GLAAD, challenging their mission and methodology in the wake of their recent scandal.

His arguments are somewhat flawed and require an extremely narrow view of the problems faced by the community. His combination of revisionist history, taking blind eye to glaring threats to the queer community, and fixation on a single demographic to the exclusion of others create an article that will feel out of touch to many.

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Before we get into that, it’s worth providing some context on who Kirchick is as a person. James Kirchick is a gay reporter with bylines everywhere from The Atlantic to The Washington Post. In 2019, for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Kirchick penned an article arguing that “The Struggle for Gay Rights Is Over,” where he suggested that we had “won,” despite some strong rebuttals to his arguments. Similarly, in 2013 Kirchick wrote about “How GLAAD Won the Culture War and Lost Its Reason to Exist.” When looking at his argument in “How the Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way,” it’s worth remembering that this has been Kirchick’s hill to die on for over a decade now.

Despite his “expertise” on the topic, here are five major flaws with James Kirchick’s essay “How the Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way.”

The idea that we’ve won

At the center of James Kirchick’s argument is a simple claim: organizations like GLAAD should go away because we just don’t need them anymore. He explains the evidence for this succinctly:

Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission.

If you read that and it felt like you were being gaslit, we’re here to reassure you that you’re not crazy.

There are certainly more LGBTQ+ characters on our screens now than there were ten or twenty years ago. However, they’re still underrepresented in the mainstream and those portrayals are often not given the same depth as other characters.

Any movie that wants to be released in the Chinese market has to be willing to remove the LGBTQ+ content, keeping it to subtext and carefully extraneous scenes. Take Strange World, where complaints about gay representation were basically the majority of the marketing because the studio didn’t promote it. The representation that does exist is extremely limited as well. Trans representation is rarely done well, nonbinary representation is scarce, and intersex and asexual representation is nearly nonexistent.

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As for wider acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community in media, ad campaigns, and the like, the sunshine and roses that Kirchick portrays is distant from reality. In 2023, Bud Light partnered with trans TikToker Dylan Mulvaney for an ad campaign. The backlash involved mass boycotts and Kid Rock using Bud Light as target practice (for some reason). In the wake of that, Anheuser-Busch parted ways with Mulvaney and in 2024 Bud Light worked instead with Shane Gillis, who was fired from SNL for using racist and homophobic slurs.

Multiple news networks and publications are still happy to run wantonly transphobic stories (whether intentionally or not). Anti-queer propaganda is being spread across right-wing sites, and news media budget cuts mean less affirming coverage to counteract all of that.

So, when did Kirchick think our problems were over? Well, he thinks that in 2013, when GLAAD’s current CEO and president Sarah Kate Ellis took over and was told to “Fix it or shut it down,” “She should have done the latter.”

Kirchick thinks that GLAAD had finished its job back in 2013,before same-sex marriage was even legal in the United States. A lot of things have changed in the intervening decade. In the two years after Ellis took over, GLAAD worked with Facebook to create its “custom gender” field, teamed up with Glee when they wanted to handle transgender storylines, and In 2015 provided resources to media outlets to cover Caitlyn Jenner’s transition with more care (yes, 2015 was that long ago). More recently, they have been creating resources to help expose Project 2025.

GLAAD provide training and consultation to other organizations. They help educate people in the media on how to make news coverage more empathetic and on-screen depictions more understanding. They provide resources to help cover a huge range of LGBTQ+ topics. If things are better today, it’s in part because of organizations like GLAAD.

Of course, James Kirchick isn’t making claims with nothing to support them. Kirchick brings in statistics from GLAAD’s reporting on recent movies:

Today, GLAAD’s own statistics speak to its obsolescence. In 2013, GLAAD began publishing its “Studio Responsibility Index,” a meticulous tabulation of gay, bisexual, and trans characters in film and television. According to its latest report, surveying the year 2022, 28.5 percent of films released by the top 10 movie distributors contained an overtly LGBTQ character.

28.5% might sound like a decent amount at a glance. However, that means that nearly three-quarters of those major movies examined included no LGBTQ+ characters whatsoever. The data has some other interesting facts that Kirchick didn’t include. 350 movies made up the study, but of the 100 movies that make up that 28.5%:

  • 55% included a gay man
  • 45% included a lesbian
  • Trans characters appeared in only 17% of the 100 movies, and therefore only 4.8% of the full release schedule.

These 100 films included 292 LGBTQ+ characters. Of those:

  • 59.7% of LGBTQ+ characters were white.
  • Only 3.1% were nonbinary
  • 29.5% of LGBTQ+ characters had less than a minute of screen time
  • 27.1% had 1-5 minutes of screen time.

From these numbers, you can see how it a cis white gay man can see himself represented in film and decide that the war has been won. The majority of our community might not come to the same conclusion.

Rather than acknowledging real threats to LGBTQ+ people in the United States, Kirchick argues that these advocacy organizations are the ones perpetuating an image of dire circumstances to keep themselves needed.

[GLAAD] and other groups constantly gin up publicity on the faulty premise that life in the United States keeps getting worse for LGBTQ people. Last year, HRC declared, for the first time in its more than four-decade history, a “national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans”—an absurd pronouncement that diminishes not only the suffering of the thousands of gay men lost to AIDS but also the terrible treatment endured by LGBTQ people in the 64 countries where homosexuality is illegal and in some cases punishable by death.

First of all, it’s unclear how HRC declaring a state of emergency now diminishes the suffering of those lost to AIDS. Both things can be an emergency, and if Kirchick is suggesting that HRC should have declared an emergency back then, it’s worth remembering that they only functioned as a campaigning fund until 1995, when they began work more similar to the projects they undertake today. By that point, announcing an emergency might have felt a little redundant. Similarly, declaring a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States does not suggest that things can’t be worse elsewhere.

More importantly, is Kirchick right? Are organizations like GLAAD and the HRC declaring false emergencies to get attention? Let’s take a look at some of the things that have been going on in the world that James Kirchick may or may not be aware of:

That’s not a comprehensive list, but it illustrates the differences between the real world and the one that Kirchick is viewing. If this is winning, I’d hate to see what losing looks like.

What Should You Do If You Win?

So, if we humor Kirchick for a moment, and pretend that we’ve won and transphobia and homophobia are a thing of the past, should GLAAD (and other organizations like it) then shut down? In his article, he highlights the organization Freedom to Marry. After same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, the group dissolved, and Kirchick hails this as the correct response.

However, there are three particular reasons that this doesn’t help his argument. Freedom to Marry had an extremely focused goal—the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. That’s more easily quantifiable than a national change in how LGBTQ+ people are viewed and represented in the media. Second, Freedom to Marry might have dissolved too soon. Kirchick has stated previously that despite Roe v. Wade being overturned he’s not concerned about SCOTUS overturning Obergefell. With the court leaning hard-right and plans like Project 2025 on the horizon, that might be overly optimistic. Finally, Freedom of Marry had another opportunity that they didn’t explore: expanding their scope to utilize their existing network. There are many people in the United States who still do not have the freedom to marry, most notably those who rely on disability checks and would lose them if part of a married household.

Once a non-profit engine has been built and made positive progress on its goal, does it make sense to stop there and dismantle that engine? If those same tools, the same knowledge and understanding of the system, can be further applied for human good, is that a bad thing? James Kirchick says yes.

[GLAAD] originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment.

 GLAAD has gone from criticizing negative media portrayals—once pervasive, now vanishingly rare—to demanding quotas for positive ones.

Media representation has improved since 1985 because of GLAAD’s work, and that’s a great thing. But the media that we see, and the responses that we see to it, don’t represent the same utopia that Kirchick sees. There’s still more work to be done and organizations like GLAAD have the grounding, the name recognition, and the forward momentum to keep us moving forward.

Corruption should end the movement

James Kirchick makes one very compelling point in his article. He suggests that there is a very serious problem with the way that GLAAD has been operating recently. Pointing to a New York Times exposé, Kirchick highlights problems with lavish spending within the organization and a reportedly exorbitant CEO salary. Additionally, Kirchick suggests the potential for impropriety in the fact that GLAAD seeks sponsorships from “the same companies whose content it ostensibly ‘monitors.’”

All of that should give people pause and does bear investigation.

For what it’s worth, Kirchick includes that GLAAD responded to his request for comment with a “lengthy statement” (most of which he hasn’t provided), in which they claim that:

The Times report “excludes much of our critical advocacy work and grossly mischaracterizes the organization” and citing three instances in which GLAAD had criticized “LGBTQ representation/other LGBTQ issues by a company that is also a financial sponsor.

Whether GLAAD has a leg to stand on here doesn’t really matter in the scope of Kirchick’s article and opening claims. His evidence is targeted specifically at GLAAD and he does nothing to suggest that those issues are endemic to the movement as a whole. Indeed, when he talks about the salary GLAAD gives Ellis, he notes that it is “far higher than the salaries of CEOs at charitable organizations of comparable size.”

If Kirchick and The Atlantic want to highlight issues with how GLAAD is being run and how donor money is being spent, then they should (as The New York Times did) provide an exposé, and then talk about what should be done with that particular organization. With the network it has already, rehabilitation seems more logical than dissolution.

Let’s remember that James Kirchick has previously expressed his views that “GLAAD Won the Culture War and Lost Its Reason to Exist” and proclaimed “The Struggle for Gay Rights Is Over.” With that, the fact that he has taken this report on GLAAD and used it as an argument to end the whole movement might make sense. But there’s another, deeper issue with Kirchick’s arguments.

Somehow trans rights are the problem?

If it feels like Kirchick has blinders on when it comes to seeing the challenges faced by the wider LGBTQ+ community, that might be too charitable. One section of his article makes it very clear that he’s not ignorant of the battles that trans people face every day of their lives. He’s just on the other side of that battle. For Kirchick, taking up the mantle of trans rights was something that these organizations did because they had nothing better to do.

Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause: transgender rights. Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach—seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress—they have taken hard-line left-wing positions.

The characterization of supporting transgender rights as a “hard-line left-wing position” helps to reveal where Kirchick is coming from here. And that ties together with his suggestion that GLAAD should have dissolved in 2013, when Ellis took over and Kirchick wrote his first essay on it. In 2013, GLAAD, seeking to be properly inclusive of the wide LGBTQ+ community changed its name from “Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation” to simply be “GLAAD” without the letters standing for anything (just as PFLAG went on to do in 2014 for the same reasons).

When a non-profit is succeeding at what it is doing, it makes sense for it to expand its focus to include similar issues. The problems that media had with portraying gay and lesbian people were the same as those faced by trans people and not, as he suggests, “fundamentally different.” But the fact that trans issues and gay issues are different doesn’t seem to be Kirchick’s main concern.

The reflexive promotion of major medical interventions for minors should be a red flag for gay men and lesbians, considering the research indicating that many gender-distressed and gender-nonconforming children grow up to be gay.

In 2022, touring a book he wrote, “I think gender identity is a different issue. It’s not something that I feel particularly knowledgeable enough to write about.” Apparently, he has changed his mind since then. This commentary of apparent concern around trans healthcare is reminiscent of the LGB Alliance and other queer groups that think trans people understanding themselves and being able to pursue a happier life is in some way taking something away from the rest of the community. Not only is he saying that organizations like GLAAD shouldn’t be supporting the trans community, he seems to question whether trans people even exist.

Last year, though, GLAAD, HRC, and other organizations staked their reputations on a foolish crusade against the Times, condemning the newspaper’s careful and empathetic reporting on youth gender medicine as “irresponsible” and “biased.” GLAAD has placed the Harry Potter novelist J. K. Rowling and the journalist Jesse Singal, who has reported extensively on youth gender medicine (including in The Atlantic), alongside such people as the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on a McCarthyite list of “individual public figures and groups using their platforms to spread misinformation and false rhetoric against LGBTQ people, youth, and allies.”

Kirchick’s timing of this inclusion of J. K. Rowling on his list of “brave warriors unfairly attacked” isn’t great. It came in the middle of her transphobic attacks on cisgender Olympian Imane Khalif and shortly before Rowling was named in a lawsuit filed by Khalif.

The characterization of The New York Times’ reporting on trans issues as “careful and empathetic” is not one that widely shared by those they’re reporting on. Just as GLAAD should perhaps not be taking money from organizations it is monitoring, Kirchick perhaps shouldn’t baselessly defend the NYT without disclosing the number of pieces he has written for this paper this year alone.

Rights for gays only

It is notable that in his articles, from headline to final period, Kirchick uses the phrase “gay-rights.” With “gay” commonly used as a catch-all term for the LGBTQ+ community (along with “queer”), it’s easy to assume that’s what he means. But his comments about trans people, his declaration that everything is fine when trans people in particular are so embattled, and his suggestion that the movement’s work can end now, all make one thing clear: for James Kirchick, gay men are the focus, and everybody else can deal on their own.

The strange grounding that Kirchick uses for this is simply that the movement was started by gay individuals, so it should only be for them.

LGBTQ organizations have slowly been erasing the people whose interests they were established to advance.

For the first several decades of their existence, gay organizations relied on the generosity of gay individuals and small, gay-owned businesses. […] Fundraising for LGBTQ causes has had an inverse relationship to the actual legal and social hardships faced by LGBTQ people, ballooning in the years since all of the most difficult battles were won.

While the organizations that Kirchick is talking about started out with the goal of gay and lesbian individuals, that in no way means that it is where they have to stop. Organizations founded in the 1980s have restrictive names because there was a narrower understanding of sexuality and gender identity in the social consciousness at the time, not because people contributing to the organization thought support should only go to gay men.

The battle for same-sex marriage wasn’t the final victory, as Kirchick seems to think, but rather a step on a long road to equality and acceptance. For Kirchick, cis white gay men have it pretty peachy, so the organizations that helped them get there can go now. If the fire in James Kirchick’s house was put out, he’d say we needed to disband the fire department because they weren’t needed any more, the fire in his neighbor’s house be damned.

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