The Fallacy of “Making Everyone Gay”

A new article on gay writer and activist Larry Kramer
mentions his latest project, The American People.

This is not your average history book. A 4000 page behemoth that has yet to be published, the book has already earned attention for Kramer’s claim that it will prove that George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Abraham Lincoln were gay. He outlined some of his arguments in an essay for the Huffington Post earlier this year called “Homo Sex In Colonial America.”

With such potentially explosive revelations, critics were quick to challenge Kramer, despite having not read the manuscript. While questions about documentation and how the modern definition of “gay” compares to people in the 1700s are valid, what I find most amusing are accusations that Kramer is going through history and “making everybody gay.”

This is something that I hear all the time, even from gay friends who reject the latest rumors about closeted celebrities: “you can’t make everybody gay.”

But what is “everybody”? It seems that society will only acknowledge a handful of gay people, and anything else is “making everybody gay.” For example, the Bravo network is often referred to as the gay cable channel, but only a few of its programs have gay characters. One of the justifications people give for not allowing gays in the military or mentioning anything gay-related in schools is because it will “turn everyone gay.”

This phenomenon is similar to the attitude behind white flight: whenever more than one person of color enters an establishment, the minorities are seen as “taking over” and the whites leave. I have seen this in restaurants, nightclubs, neighborhoods, parks, schools, grocery stores, and anywhere that people congregate. Earlier this year, we saw this happen with the racist swim club in a Philadelphia suburb. They were rightly criticized for their actions, but far too often that attitude goes unchallenged until a major incident happens.

I believe that the number of gay and bisexual people (that is, people who have sex with someone of the same gender on a regular basis, but may not identify as gay or bisexual) is around 15 to 20 percent of the population. Even with that generous estimate, that leaves 80 percent of humanity as heterosexual. Yet I have been accused of “making everybody gay.”

To me, playing the “making everybody gay” card is about fear. If you are secure in your identity, why does the idea of more gay people scare you so much? That tells me that people have heterosexist/homophobic thoughts they need to work on, or perhaps they aren’t so sure about their own sexuality.