John Ackley

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, titled “I’m gay, but that doesn’t make me queer,” contributor Ben Appel draws a clean line between being gay and being “queer,” casting queerness as an ideological project built on rejecting what is normal and legitimate. On its own, the argument might read like a personal distinction, but placed alongside the Journal’s broader cultural coverage, it begins to look like something more deliberate: an effort to define which versions of queer life are acceptable and which ones are not. The problem is not that Appel’s argument is controversial. It is that it is reductive, historically thin, […]