Following are a number of responses which I find both insightful and inspiring. Perhaps you will too.
I have so many things I could say in response to Vines article, but I’m not sure I even want to dignify his points with a response. For as much education as he has under his belt, this is utter nonsense. It’s a privileged, limiting, superficial, desperate attempt at protecting one identity by limiting the identity of others.
So let me make one thing very clear: BEING QUEER IS A GIFT, my dear friends.
AND IT MATTERS.
In all its arrays of beautiful barrier-breaking diversity, it is the biggest gift to the world and the deepest reflection of the Divine.
Who you are matters.
Your gay self.
Your bi self.
Your trans self.
Your non-binary self.
Your gender non-conforming self.
Your questioning self.
Your closeted and not safe to come out yet self.
Your intersex self.
Your pansexual self.
Your polyamorous self.
Your asexual self.
Your QUEER self.
ALL of who you are and what makes you unique is worth protecting and fighting for.
Don't let a weak, watered down, fearful approach to the world put yet one more baracade in front of you living your most whole, alive, completely embodied life. Live YOU. Be YOU. Love YOU.
Vines does not speak for me.
I'm gay AND queer. It matters. 🏳️🌈❤️🏳️⚧️
– Amber Cantorna-Wylde
via social media
June 30, 2026
via social media
June 30, 2026
Our subversion of social norms is our power, friends. We exist in God’s creation specifically to be a thorn in the side of those who demand conformity.
The privilege and, frankly, gall it takes to look at the history of our movement – a movement populated with and propelled by freaks and outcasts who countered culture with all of the weirdness they could wear on their beautiful bodies – that privilege is the thing that has no place in this movement.
Anyone who says this:
“In a time of backlash, this is not a confusion that gay people can afford, especially those of us who live in red states and religious communities.”
. . . has lost touch with the heart of what we’re doing here.
We’re now bowing to culture. We’re not playing respectability politics, and we’re sure as hell not leaving any of our rainbow fam behind to score a few points with the bigots in power.
– Flamy Grant
via social media
June 30, 2026
via social media
June 30, 2026
I worked in proximity with Matthew when I was at the National LGBTQ Task Force. Matthew leads the Reformation Project which is rooted in Calvinism. It seeks to stay within what I would call rigid, Reform Protestantism/mostly white Evangelical circles and just add LGBTQ (although mostly lesbian and gay) folks into a largely unchanged worldview.
While I appreciate his desire to work within really conservative circles, I do not agree with his premise.
Given the rise of White Christian nationalism – in many of the spaces in which he is seeking to operate – to advocate that the problem is the LGBTQ+/Queer movement's languaging and desire to transform dominant culture and narratives and not the danger posed by the "modern re-articulation of the Doctrine of Discovery" as Project 2025/Seven Mountain Mandate/New Apostolic Reformation are rightly called, is particularly dangerous right now. The violent misogyny, homo-, bi-, transphobia, the virulent xenophobia and racism of this movement threaten us all. And its long, long history here in the US is something that needs to be dismantled/repudiated.
Starting with the first piece of existing European art from the Americas (an etching portraying the mass execution of genderqueer or homosexual Cuna people by Balboa), gender and sexual variety have been used by the Doctrine of Discovery (and white, Christian supremacy) to distinguish between those who are human (Christian and Europeanm . . . which has evolved into Whiteness and Christian) and those who are heathen or savage.
As an LGBTQ+/queer movement, this grounding in the history of the Doctrine of Discovery and a more intersectional lens, makes me reject his argument. Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery and dismantling White Christian nationalism have to be the goal. Not appeasing or gaining entry into a diseased and distorted version of Christianity.
One more thing, Matthew is white, young, conservative Christian, able-bodied and cisgender. I don't hear a lot of BIPOC, non-binary, non-Christian, femme or woman-identified, disabled, etc queer folks making the same argument.
The argument that “queer” identity is harming gay people rests on a fragile foundation which assumes that the backlash we’re seeing is mostly the result of LGBTQ people becoming too broad, too visible, too complicated, too trans, too nonbinary, too politically unruly, and too unwilling to fit into a neat public-relations package. But that is not what I see.
I see a well-funded, well-organized backlash against all of us. I see politicians and preachers using trans people as a wedge because they know fear works. I see the same old machinery of dehumanization that was used against gay and lesbian people being repurposed against trans and nonbinary people. I see efforts to roll back LGBTQ protections, demonize gender-diverse children, restrict medical care, narrow public education, and revive old claims that our lives are threats to children, family, faith, and civilization itself. That didn’t happen because some young people began identifying as queer, but because the religious and political right never repented of its need for a scapegoat.
Gallup’s 2026 polling does show that support for same-sex marriage has fallen from its recent peak: 65% of Americans now support legal same-sex marriage, down from 71% in 2022 and 2023. The share saying gay or lesbian relationships are morally acceptable is at 62%, its lowest point since 2016. But Gallup also notes that most of the recent decline has occurred among Republicans, whose support for same-sex marriage fell from 55% in 2021 and 2022 to 37% in 2026.
In other words, the data doesn’t show that queer identity caused the backlash, but rather that we’re living through a partisan and religiously fueled backlash against LGBTQ people. Blaming queer identity for this anti-LGBTQ backlash feels like blaming the wounded for bleeding too loudly.
. . . I am, in many ways, exactly the kind of gay man respectability politics should love. I am a white, cisgender, out gay man. I am legally married to one man. I believe in covenant, fidelity, Scripture, tradition, reason, experience, and the sacramental life of the church. I believe marriage is one of the means of grace through which God answers the ache of Genesis: “It is not good that the human being should be alone.” I am a Christian pastor. I preach, preside at Holy Communion, baptize babies, visit the sick, bury the dead, officiate at weddings, and pray the prayers of the church. I have given my life to the ministry of Word, Sacrament, Order, and Service. In other words, I am hardly the caricature of radical disorder that some people imagine when they hear the word “queer.”
And yet, I am queer.
I’m queer not because I’ve rejected Christianity, marriage, sanctification, Scripture, or the church. I’m queer because I exist at the intersection of identities that many conservative Christians assert cannot belong together: gay and Christian, gay and married, gay and ordained, gay and faithful, gay and loved by God without first being made straight. That’s queer.
It’s queer because the systems that form so many of us have long insisted that those things were contradictions. They have screamed at us that we could be gay or Christian, but not both. Honest about ourselves or ordained, but not both. Married to our same-sex partners or faithful to God, but not both. True to ourselves or beloved by God, but not both. My life says otherwise, and that is why I have begun using the term “queer” for myself.
For a long time, I primarily used the word gay to describe myself. I still do. It’s true, accurate, and names my sexual orientation. But “gay” doesn’t always carry the full weight of what it has meant to survive the church’s attempt to divide me against myself.
That’s also part of why my forthcoming book is titled Suspended Grace: A Queer Pastor’s Journey. It will be available in November from Abingdon Press, and in it I explore much more fully what it means to live at the intersection of identities that the church has often claimed couldn’t belong together: gay, Christian, married, ordained, wounded, called, and beloved.
To be clear, I’m not using “queer” as a synonym for a political platform, a rejection of covenant, or a dismissal of Christian sexual ethics. For me, “queer” names something more than orientation. It names the disruption that happens when a life the church once called impossible becomes, by grace, fully visible. It names the reality that my life doesn’t fit inside the categories handed down to me. It names the grace that met me outside the boundaries of what I’d been told was possible. And it names the holy refusal to let shame have the final word. God didn’t rescue me by making me acceptable to the old system; God rescued me by showing me that the old system had lied.
For me, that’s not a rejection of Christian faith but a testimony to it. The Gospel is not nearly as invested in “normal” as some Christians seem to be. The incarnation isn’t normal. The resurrection isn’t normal. Grace isn’t normal. A crucified Messiah isn’t normal. A Table where the poor, wounded, sinful, excluded, respectable, and despised are all invited to receive mercy isn’t normal. The Kingdom of God isn’t a baptized version of middle-class respectability; it’s a new creation in Christ Jesus.
. . . I’m gay. I’m queer. I’m Christian, an ordained pastor, white, male, cisgender, married, and by many outward measures very conventional. And still, I’m queer. I’m queer because my life is only possible by the grace of a God who keeps crossing the boundaries fearful humans keep drawing. I’m queer because my marriage is a testimony against the lie that gay love can’t be holy. I’m queer because my ministry is a testimony against the lie that gay people can’t proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. I’m queer because my survival is a testimony against the lie that shame is the voice of God. I’m queer because I refuse to purchase my place in the church or the world by stepping over the bodies of those whom respectability would leave behind.
As someone who aspires to be a responsible ally, I respect every human being's personal perspective on these words and how they impact their own experience, Matthew Vines’ included.
I completely yield to his position regarding his own life and the way he wishes to exist in the world. I would never question that for him or anyone. We are all the authorities over our own humanity. I would never ask him to embrace queerness as a label any more than I would ask him to embrace heterosexuality.
Yet, I do feel that his words about the queer community seem to be born out of the misplaced feeling that he can somehow evade the Right's disdain and their punitive violence by distancing himself from supposedly "less palatable" expressions of sexuality, but that seems myopic to me. As a white gay man, Vines may feel he is distinct from a black trans woman (and of course he is), but to the hateful Evangelicals steering us into theocracy, there is no difference whatsoever.
To these phobic zealots, trans people are nonbinary people, are gay people, are nonconforming people, are lesbian people, are bisexual people.
It seems as though Matthew is choosing to lean away from the collective liberation of all marginalized people in the hopes of finding safety in the sexual and political expression of least resistance.
– John Pavlovitz
Excerpted from From A Straight Ally:
Why Matthew Vines' Dismissive Words
About the Queer Community Matter
The Beautiful Mess
July 1, 2026
Excerpted from From A Straight Ally:
Why Matthew Vines' Dismissive Words
About the Queer Community Matter
The Beautiful Mess
July 1, 2026
The real argument around Matthew Vines' article has little to do with what word people use – the headline is misleading. It has more to do with what tactics are used in the ongoing fight for LGBTQ+ equality and who gets included in that fight. Vines argues not that the word queer is absolutely unhelpful or inappropriate, but that the theory behind it is. He is opposed to how fluid the queer movement has become, including people who have diverse sexualities or gender identities beyond the binary "gay" and "lesbian", which he sees as fueling GOP opposition to the LGBTQ+ movement. He sees the queer project of opposing arbitrary norms as inherently unhelpful and dangerous. I disagree.
The science and psychology of sexuality and gender have evolved greatly. While it is true that there are many who experience "fixed" sexualities and genders (gay, lesbian, straight, cisgender male, cisgender female), we also know that there are many more who experience sexuality and gender on a spectrum.
I also disagree that simply fitting into the mold of being a respectable gay person is the path that led to LGBTQ+ rights and will help us achieve more robust LGBTQ+ rights in the future. Many, and I'd venture to say most, LGBTQ+ people will never simply live the "normal life" – part of what makes our community so beautiful is that we get to show others the wide array of possibilities that exist for our lives beyond what has been considered "normal." If we are relying on convincing conservative America that "LGBTQ+ people are just the same as you", then we will never win, because it is glaringly obvious that many LGBTQ+ people are *not* just like them in many ways. In our fundamental humanity, yes. In our desire for love and relationships, yes. But we are also unique in many other ways in the way we desire to live our lives.
Instead, I, and many others, in the long tradition of queer activism, believe that the way we win is through living our "abnormal" lives out loud, for all to see, so that we can dispel the demonizing myths that the far right spins against us, and so that we can expand the possibilities for what life can look like for the broader population- more creative, more diverse, more free than ever before.
This is not a debate about what label people use. This is a debate about who is included in the fight for LGBTQ+ equality and how we continue to advance it. Assimilation has never been the path towards victory and has never been the goal – liberation has. That is where I disagree with Vines.
. . . Queerness, ultimately, is an invitation to and affirmation of human freedom. It’s an affirmation of the possibilities of human imagination. It’s a confrontation of our biases, our prejudices, and our desire to appease some arbitrary idea of “normal” in order to gain status and privilege.
Related Off-site Links:
Queer Isn’t the Threat. Respectability Politics Is – Brandon Robertson (Brandon Robertson (June 30, 2026).
Actually, I’m Gay and I’m Queer. It Matters – Emma Cieslik (Washington Blade, July 2, 2026).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Cassandra Snow on Reclaiming the Word “Queer”
• Dyllón Burnside: “For Me, the Term Queer Just Opens Up Space”
• Reclaiming and Re-Queering Pride
• The Queer Liberation March: Bringing Back the Spirit of Stonewall
• Michelangelo Signorile on the Rebellious Purpose of Queer Pride
• Queer Native Americans, Colonialism, and the Fourth of July
• North America: Perhaps Once the “Queerest Continent on the Planet”
• Afdhere Jama’s “Love Song to the Queer Somali”
• Thoughts on Queer Cinema
• Queer Black Panther
• The New Superman: Not Necessarily Gay, but Definitely Queer
• Adam Sandel on the Queer Appeal of Harry Potter
• Dusty Springfield: Queer Icon
• David Bowie: Queer Messiah
• In a Historic First, Country Music’s Latest Star Is a Queer Black Man
• Kuan Yin: “A Mirror of the Queer Experience”
• Barbara Anne Kozee on Knowing the Divine in “Queer Time”
• Three Radical (Religious) Ideas for Queer Liberation
• Recovering the Queer Artistic Heritage
• Sister Teresa Forcades on Queer Theology
• Our Lives as LGBTQI People: “Garments Grown in Love”
• Tian Richards’ Message to Queer Youth: “Every Part of Your Identity Is a Superpower”
• Mia Birdsong on the “Queering of Friendship”
• Kadeem
• “Queer Love Is My Divine Companion”
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