They're Coming to Erase Us and We're Too Busy Fighting Over Grindr

The Ugly Truth About Queer Infighting

It's Pride Month, and the air is thick with fake corporate rainbows and empty promises. But we have to stop acting like passive passengers in a culture that is actively trying to erase our footprint from public life.

Look at the streets. Look at how people across this country are turning against us. A major new Gallup poll from May 2026, highlighted in Newsweek and other national outlets, shows that public support is sliding backward. For the first time in twenty years, American acceptance of LGBTQ rights has hit a wall and started to roll back.

The data is blunt. Support for same-sex marriage has dropped to 65 percent, down from its peak of 71 percent. Only 62 percent of Americans now think gay and lesbian relationships are morally okay, marking the lowest number since 2016. When it comes to trans people, the numbers are even scarier: only 38 percent of Americans think changing your gender is moral, down from nearly half just a few years ago.

That isn't just a polling problem. Poll numbers become campaign lines. Campaign lines become laws. Laws become closed clinics, scared teachers, stripped websites, and people with nowhere safe to go. Neighbors who used to smile now look at us with suspicion because right-wing media has spent years poisoning their minds. They treat our lives like a trend, a disease, a threat, or a political debate topic. The basic social safety we thought we had is cracking in real time.

But the most sickening part of this disaster is what we are doing to ourselves. Instead of building a solid wall to defend our lives, we have turned our knives on each other. We are fractured by stupid online rules, purity tests, gatekeeping, racism, biphobia, transphobia, and old, cowardly arguments about who looks normal enough to deserve human rights. We are fighting over scraps. We are tearing each other to pieces while the wolves wait at the door, trading real safety for the fake promise of fitting in.

And the wolves know exactly who they are coming for. All of us.

The Day-One Execution: How the Feds Are Writing Us Out of Existence

On January 20, 2025, the federal government did not just change presidents. It started a planned war to erase queer and trans people from public life. Using a stack of executive orders copied from the right-wing plan called Project 2025, the administration began wiping out decades of civil rights.

With one pen stroke on day one, the president killed Executive Order 13988, which stopped gender identity discrimination, and Executive Order 14075, which protected LGBTQ equality. They shut down the White House Gender Policy Council, created under Executive Order 14020. 

They took away health protections for queer kids in schools.

The worst attack is Executive Order 14168, called "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to The Federal Government". The name alone tells you the game. This order says the federal government only recognizes two sexes, male and female, decided strictly at birth or conception. It legally erases gender identity. It orders every federal agency to delete any website, form, or rule that mentions gender identity.

This is not just paperwork. Paperwork decides who gets a passport, who gets healthcare, who gets counted, and who disappears. This is a real purge.

By cutting federal funds, they shut down or threaten local HIV programs and community health clinics that help trans patients. On March 17, 2025, the Department of Veterans Affairs fell in line and stopped giving trans veterans their medicine.

Think about that. A person can serve the country, wear the uniform, carry the damage, and still be told their healthcare is now politically inconvenient.

They're destroying us through five specific, targeted plans:

• First: Executive Order 14168 bans trans recognition on all federal forms and documents. It replaces the word "gender" with "sex" in all federal documents, making it impossible for trans and non-binary people to be legally recognized.
• Second: Executive Order 14187, called "Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation", cuts federal funds for trans kids' healthcare. This stops Medicaid from paying for transition care and halts critical medical research.
• Third: Executive Order 14183, called "Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness", bans trans people from serving in the military again. This order claims that being trans conflicts with an honorable and disciplined life, pushing active-duty trans soldiers out and denying transition care to veterans.
• Fourth: Executive Order 14151, called "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs", ends federal diversity programs and shuts down offices meant to protect workers from discrimination.
• Fifth: Executive Orders 14201 and 14190, called "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" and "Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling", ban trans kids from using the right bathrooms and playing sports, while defunding school districts that teach trans-inclusive lessons.

At the same time, they cut SNAP food benefits, which hits poor queer adults hard, and stopped aid to global LGBTQ groups. The Department of Justice called youth transition care fraud and told police to go after doctors, while the Department of Health and Human Services published proposed regulations designed to exclude youth transition care from Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Programs (CHIP) nationwide.

They want us broke, sick, invisible, and dead.

Before anyone clutches pearls over that sentence, look at the outcomes: less healthcare, less food, less legal protection, less school safety, less funding, less recognition, and less life. If a machine keeps producing harm, we need to stop pretending the machine is simply misunderstood.

Bleeding in the Courts: The Losing Battle to Save Our Lives

Progressive states are trying to fight back, but we are losing ground.

On February 4, 2025, civil rights groups sued to stop the trans healthcare bans.

We got a few small wins.

On March 7, 2025, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) backed down after being sued for forcing artists to sign an anti-trans pledge to get grants.

On May 23, 2025, a court ordered the government to put back medical databases they deleted just because they had the words "LGBTQ" or "trans" in them. The agencies finally filed their last report in December 2025, showing they had put the pages back.

Washington State Attorney General Brown led a group of states to fight back:

• They got temporary orders on February 14, 2025, and preliminary injunctions on February 28, 2025, to stop the cuts to trans healthcare.
• They sued on April 25, 2025, because the government tried to take school funding away unless schools forced trans kids into the closet.
• They fought to keep conversion therapy bans in June and August 2025.
• They blocked cuts to sex education in September and October 2025.
• They opposed the military ban in May 2025.

In August 2025, California led 17 states in a lawsuit called Massachusetts v. Trump, which argued that the federal attacks on transition care were illegal.

All of that matters, but the courts are packed with conservative judges. The system is not neutral just because it wears a robe.

On May 6, 2025, the Supreme Court let the military ban start. In June 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Skrmetti, saying Tennessee's ban on healthcare for trans kids was totally fine. In March 2026, the Supreme Court in Mirabelli v. Olson started targeting California's laws that keep trans students safe from being outed.

This is the part people do not want to face.

The legal system can slow or occasionally stop harm, but it is not a parent, a clinic, a home, or a movement.

A trans kid does not get their childhood back because a court might rule correctly two years later.

A veteran does not get stable healthcare back because someone filed a good brief.

A student outed at school does not get to undo family rejection, homelessness risk, or fear.

The system is not coming to save us: it is the machine erasing us.

The Palatable White Gay: Trading Trans and Black Lives for a Seat at the Table

Mainstream queer spaces love to put up rainbow flags, but let's talk about the real racism inside our community.

For Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (QTBIPOC), safe spaces are often a joke. They face racism from white queer people and homophobia from people in their own racial groups. The place that is supposed to offer relief becomes one more room where they have to brace themselves.

The white gay establishment has spent years pushing a clean, safe image: the "Palatable White Gay".

You know the type: neat, masculine, married, professional, non-threatening, not too loud, not too radical, and not too trans. Think of politicians like Pete Buttigieg.

To be fair, the guy has done some real good, and his basic stances on our rights are correct. He broke new ground by kissing his husband on TV and proving a gay man can raise millions of dollars and win delegates.

But here is the catch: he plays to the crowd. 

He molds himself into a traditional, masculine, straight-acting husband to make heterosexuals feel comfortable, while keeping his distance from trans and radical voices. By playing the respectability game to win votes, he expands the problem. He sells a version of gayness that is only acceptable if you look and act close enough to a straight white man, leaving the rest of our diverse family behind.

This destroys mental health. Connection to the gay community can actually make stress worse for Black LGBTQ adults.

A study showed that when Black queer adults are highly connected to the mainstream gay community, their well-being goes down. That is a brutal paradox of belonging. A space that should provide safety becomes another place of harm, transforming into a toxic loop of trauma bonding. Some Black queer adults have to avoid gay spaces altogether just to protect their peace of mind.

White cis gay men get the rewards of marriage and safety, while Black and brown trans women get left out in the cold to face violence. And then people wonder why trust is low.

Three Husbands, Eleven Years, Zero Legal Rights: The Cruel Reality of Polyamory in America

Let's talk about another huge erasure: polyamory. Society treats any relationship that isn't just two people as a joke, a phase, a kink, a moral failure, or something to whisper about after brunch.

Look at my own life. I'm in a relationship with two other gay men. We have built a home, a life, and a shared path for ten years. Ten years means bills, repairs, grocery lists, holidays, sick days, dog hair, shared grief, exhaustion, and love. The boring, sacred stuff that actually makes a family. But in the eyes of the law, our love means absolutely nothing. We are treated like second-class citizens, our relationship dismissed as a legal non-entity.

I don't need the law to validate my love, but I do need it to stop making illness, grief, housing, taxes, inheritance, and medical decisions more dangerous for my family.

There is zero federal safety for families with multiple partners. I cannot put both of my partners on my health insurance. If one of us is dying in a hospital, the other two can be locked out because we are legally strangers. If one passes away, we face massive tax bills and legal wars just to keep our house or get our partner's ashes.

Imagine grieving the love of your life while some clipboard goblin asks whether you count. The law does not just refuse to recognize us; it actively makes our emergencies worse.

A few West Coast cities like Portland (in March 2026), West Hollywood, and Olympia have passed laws to protect diverse families from being fired or evicted. Portland's law even allows private lawsuits for job, housing, and public accommodation discrimination. That is real progress, but the rest of the country is a legal nightmare.

Sociologist Dr. Elisabeth Sheff found huge bias in family courts. Judges assume polyamorous parents are bad and unstable, with zero proof, treating stable homes like swingers' clubs in cases like V.B. v. J.E.B. (2012) and Cross v. Cross (2008).

Groups like the Chosen Family Law Center, run by Diana Adams, are trying to separate basic rights (like health insurance and hospital visits) from the legal concept of marriage.

But mainstream gay groups don't care enough.

They wanted marriage for two people, got the clean photo, and left polyamorous families to rot.

The movement narrowed itself around the relationships straight America could understand: two people, one license, one clean story.

That was always too small.

Cutting Off the "B & T" to Save the "LG": The Cowardly Campaign of Erasure

We're actively erasing our own majority. Bisexuals make up more than half (57 percent) of the entire LGBTQ population, but we treat them like they are invisible.

Law professor Kenji Yoshino called this the "epistemic contract of bisexual erasure." In plain English, straight people and monosexual (strictly gay or lesbian) people make the same quiet deal: pretend bisexuality is fake so nobody has to question the boxes.

Gay and straight spaces both attack bisexuals, calling them greedy, confused, fake, or too cowardly to pick a side.

The numbers are terrible:

• Nearly 3 in 10 (27 percent) bi women have faced hate from inside the gay community.
• Only 7 percent of staff at major queer groups are bisexual, and bi-focused groups get almost no funding.
• Bi women have the worst health outcomes of any sexuality, with 72 percent suffering from clinical anxiety and the lowest life expectancy.
• Over half of bi men (56 percent) have anxiety, and 43 percent have felt like life is not worth living.

We tell them they're "straight-passing" and kick them out of our circles, forcing them back into the closet as if erasure is a privilege, or as if being doubted by everyone is safety.

At the same time, cis gay men are throwing trans people under the bus. Groups like the LGB Alliance in the UK, founded in 2019 by Bev Jackson, Kate Harris, and others, argue that trans rights hurt cis gay people. They claim trans kids are just same-sex attracted kids being forced to transition. In June 2021, the charity Mermaids had to appeal the government's decision to even give these people charity status.

This is the same cowardice from 1973.

Sylvia Rivera was booed off the stage at the Pride rally by white, middle-class gay organizers who wanted to hide trans people to look clean for straight society.

Today, we see trans and queer experiences being systematically erased from the Stonewall National Monument and from public memory. The people who bled at the beginning are being edited out by those who arrived after it became marketable.

This same toxic erasure is happening right now in El Centro, California. In December 2024, the Imperial Valley LGBT Resource Center rebranded itself as the Donnelly Community Services Center. The CEO, Rosa Diaz, removed "LGBT" from the name and publicly sided with conservative parental rights groups. She attacked California’s Assembly Bill 1955 (which stops school staff from outing kids without consent), claiming that trans youth are just experiencing a social influence.

Local trans activists, including Raul Ureña, the first trans Latina mayor on the border, pointed out that stripping trans support in a rural area like the Imperial Valley is a death sentence for trans kids, placing them at immediate risk of family abuse, rejection, and homelessness. For trans kids, support is not a branding choice; it is survival.

So no, we do not get to cut off the "T" and the "B" to make the "LG" more comfortable. There is no LG without the B & T. Only a smaller closet with better PR.

Shopping Without a Wallet: The Hypocrisy and Abuse of Blank Profiles

Nowhere is our self-destruction more obvious than on hookup apps. And no, it’s not just Grindr. Grindr is simply the easiest target because everyone knows the grid, the blank profiles, the torso crops, and the emotional smell of a gas station bathroom after midnight.

But this is bigger than Grindr; it’s Scruff, it’s Sniffies, it’s Tinder. It is every app, map, and message box where we learned to turn desire into a transaction and people into inventory. We built a digital cage where we treat each other like pieces of meat and then act surprised that everyone feels bruised.

Let's be brutally honest about what happens on these apps every night. An out gay man puts his face, body, and real life on display. Then a blank profile named “DL,” “NPNC,” “Masc,” “Married,” or “Hosting” messages him with the confidence of a landlord.

They want pictures, body shots, face pics, and immediate access, expecting you to prove yourself like you're applying for a job.

But if you ask them for a picture back, they snap. They don't apologize: they block you, call you ugly, tell you to get fucked, or throw a tantrum from behind a blank gray square. It is pure, unhinged hypocrisy.

Closeted people can have real safety, family, job, or immigration risks, and nobody should be forced out before they are safe. But safety does not give you the right to treat out gay men like free sex machines. Your fear may explain your behavior; it does not excuse your cruelty.

This is where an app like Sniffies makes the whole thing even more complicated. Sniffies, and others like it, is a map-based cruising platform that lets users browse nearby individuals, cruising spots, and hookups through a live interface.

It can be used anonymously, tapping into the historical relationship queer culture has always had with secrecy, danger, and survival. Anonymity can be protective, letting someone find a piece of themselves before the world crushes it. But anonymity can also become a costume for cowardice.

There's a difference between being private and being predatory. Between not being ready to show your face and demanding full access to someone else’s body while offering nothing but a blank icon and a hard no on accountability.

App culture has turned hiddenness into power. The blank profile gets to watch, demand, reject, and disappear without offering any vulnerability of its own. That's not liberation; that's shopping without a wallet.

And the apps know it.

Platforms turn our attention and our loneliness into product design. Sniffies now sits close enough to mainstream dating-app capitalism that Match Group made a $100 million minority investment in it in 2026.

This shows what should already be obvious: queer desire is profitable, and corporations are monetizing the way we find each other.

The apps sell us access, but not care; options, but not community.

Psychologist John Suler calls this the “online disinhibition effect”. When people hide behind screens, they lose restraint and say things they would never say face to face. On hookup apps, that effect becomes a whole personality.

U.S. users add their own special rot, proudly displaying long lists of demands: “no fats,” “no femmes,” “no Asians,” “don’t waste my time.” In Europe, public cruelty is less aggressive; people are more likely to say, “I don’t think we’re a match, sorry.”

This connects to older history. In The Stonewall Experiment, private hookups are tied to the history of survival. During the worst of the AIDS crisis, when our love was illegal and our friends were dying while the government laughed, private encounters were the only way people could feel wanted and alive.

But big tech has taken that old wound and built a subscription model on top of it. Grindr charges up to $500 a month for "EDGE" and "gay AI" subscriptions while physical gay bars get priced out of existence by capitalist greed.

We handed our desire to shareholders, resulting in a hyper-individualistic meat market where we discard each other because we're too emotionally bankrupt to organize.

The enemy is the way these apps reward the worst version of us: hidden enough to avoid accountability, visible enough to consume others, horny enough to stay logged in, and lonely enough to pay for more.

If we can't treat each other like people when we want each other, how are we supposed to stand together when they come for us?

Acting Straight Won't Save You: The Lie of Respectability Politics

We are still sick with respectability politics. This is the garbage strategy that says if you dress nicely, speak quietly, marry one person, act straight, serve in the military, and keep your lawn neat, the state might leave you alone.

It's a giant lie.

Respectability politics demands that we perform sameness to earn conditional survival, treating rights as rewards for good behavior.

It puts a crushing load on Black queer people who have to hide who they are to survive in a white supremacist world.

It turns trans people, polyamorous relationships, sex workers, and poor queer people into trash to be thrown away.

We saw this in the 90s and 2000s when organizations narrowed the movement around marriage and military service, pretending that if we could just fight in their wars, we would be equal.

Well, I bought into that lie and enlisted. I didn't even make it to basic training before I was called out for being gay during the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" days.

Now, the military works out great for some people, but using it to parade our progress was a trap. We watched the policy shift from an outright ban, to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," to open service, and now right back to bans for trans service members.

This institutional whiplash is telling.

It proves we shouldn't rely on volatile federal systems to validate our existence. If a right can be given and taken away based entirely on who sits in the Oval Office, it isn't safety. It's a rental agreement. 

It's not okay anymore to parade military service, corporate Pride, or a rainbow logo on a weapons contractor as a victory. Being allowed to participate in broken systems is not the same as being free.

This "post-gay" fantasy was only ever a luxury for rich, white, cis gay men who wanted to pretend the struggle was over because their own lives got easier.

Now we see the results.

The 2025 and 2026 rollbacks prove that the state can take away our rights in a single afternoon. Protections can be removed, websites scrubbed, and clinics closed.

Respectability did not stop that; it never could.

If we keep playing nice to fit in, we will keep losing. Radical queer action, like ACT UP, the Gay Liberation Front, and trans pioneers, is the only thing that ever saved us.

They didn't ask for a seat at the table: they demanded to flip the table over and completely dismantle it.

Stop Being an NPC: Wake Up and Fight Back Before There Is Nothing Left

We're running out of time. Dividing ourselves into "good" and "bad" queer people is political suicide.

Our enemies do not care how polite you are. They do not care if you have a white picket fence, if you are masculine, or if you are in a ten-year throuple.

To them, we are all the same. The only difference is who they come for first.

We have to burn down our own internal walls before they become prison walls:

• Stop the biphobia:
  We must actively destroy internal biphobia, recognize bisexual identity as fully valid, and build dedicated bi+ safe spaces.
• Protect polyamorous and chosen families:
  We must organize to protect polyamorous and chosen family structures, fighting to unbundle basic civil rights from the state-enforced, monogamous marriage model.
• Protect trans youth:
  We must treat the safety, health, and medical autonomy of trans youth and adults as our non-negotiable redline.
• Stop letting big tech turn our bodies into products:
  We must stop letting corporate, outrage-driven social media platforms and hookup apps commodify our bodies, isolate us, and dictate how we treat each other.
• Give up on respectability:
  We must return to our intersectional, radical roots, organizing collectively in physical spaces rather than isolating ourselves in algorithmic panopticons.

If we keep treating each other like trash on apps, in bars, and in political fights, we are doing our enemies' work for them.

They only need us divided enough to be useless: cis gay people seeing trans people as a liability, white queer people ignoring racism, gay men mocking bisexuals, and monogamous couples looking down on polyamorous families.

They need us lonely, bitter, and scrolling, convinced that the person next to us is the problem.

A divided community is easy to manage, easy to sell to, and easy to police. A movement fighting itself is not a movement; it is a waiting room.

So wake up. Stop being passive NPCs.

Pride was not born as a corporate networking event so companies could sell us rainbow bags; it was born because people got tired of being raided, beaten, erased, and told to be grateful for survival.

The point was never to become palatable; the point was to become free.

Freedom will not come from acting smaller or cutting off the people who make straight society nervous. It will come from refusing the bargain.

All of us, or none of us.

That is the line.

Cross it, and you are not protecting the movement. You are helping bury it.

Works cited

1. 'LGB Without the T'? Backlash Builds Over LGBT Center Rebrand ..., accessed June 2, 2026, https://calexicochronicle.com/2024/12/24/lgb-without-the-t-backlash-builds-over-lgbt-center-rebrand/
2. Overview of President Trump's Executive Actions Impacting LGBTQ+ Health - KFF, accessed June 2, 2026, https://www.kff.org/lgbtq/overview-of-president-trumps-executive-actions-impacting-lgbtq-health/
3. Federal Executive Orders | Washington State LGBTQ Commission, accessed June 2, 2026, https://lgbtq.wa.gov/federal-executive-orders
4. Project 2025 In Trump's First Month: The Threat to LGBTQ+ Rights and Freedoms - Interfaith Alliance, accessed June 2, 2026, https://www.interfaithalliance.org/post/project-2025-in-trumps-first-month-the-threat-to-lgbtq-rights-and-freedoms/
5. Trump Anti-LGBTQ+ Executive Order Litigation Tracker, accessed June 2, 2026, https://lgbtqbar.org/programs/advocacy-resources/trump-executive-order-tracker/
6. Know Your Rights: LGBTQ+ Rights in Response to Federal Attacks - ACLU of Socal, accessed June 2, 2026, https://www.aclusocal.org/know-your-rights/lgbtq-rights-california-amidst-recent-executive-orders/
7. Biphobia is sending our community back into the closet — here's ..., accessed June 2, 2026, https://www.wearequeeraf.com/biphobia-is-sending-our-community-back-into-the-closet-heres-what-we-can-do/
8. LGB Alliance - Wikipedia, accessed June 2, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGB_Alliance
9. LGB Folks, Don't be a Peter: Resist Divesting Trans Community - Good Faith Media, accessed June 2, 2026, https://goodfaithmedia.org/lgb-folks-dont-be-a-peter-resist-divesting-trans-community/
10. Black Queer People and Respectability Politics - SURFACE at Syracuse University, accessed June 2, 2026, https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2713&context=honors_capstone
11. GAY MEN & SELF-PERCEPTION BASED ON GRINDR USE - ScholarWorks, accessed June 2, 2026, https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/zp38wg19v
12. Gay Hookup culture is toxic…here's why #queerpodcast #gay #lgbtcommunity #grindr #datingadvice - YouTube, accessed June 2, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eY21PE-OAks
13. Grindr's Hookup Culture Brings More Pain Than Pleasure – The ..., accessed June 2, 2026, https://ucsdguardian.org/2021/10/10/grindrs-hookup-culture-brings-more-pain-than-pleasure/
14. TikTok, Twitter, and Platform-Specific Technocultural Discourse in Response to Taylor Swift's LGBTQ+ Allyship in 'You Need to Calm Down', accessed June 2, 2026, https://dspace.stir.ac.uk/retrieve/c2a18aa2-b4ba-4a8c-a765-1062992173fe/TikTok%20Twitter%20and%20Platform%20Specific%20Technocultural%20Discourse%20in%20Response%20to%20Taylor%20Swift%20s%20LGBTQ%20Allyship%20in%20You%20Need%20to%20Calm%20Down.pdf
15. The Queer/Gay Assimilationist Split: The Suits vs. the Sluts - Monthly Review, accessed June 2, 2026, https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-queergay-assimilationist-split/
16. LGBTQ+ Rights | Museum of the City of New York, accessed June 2, 2026, https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/lgbtq-rights
17. Queer radicalism - Wikipedia, accessed June 2, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_radicalism
18. Social media algorithms amplify right-wing content against young users' preference, study finds | BIT - Behavioural Insights Team, accessed June 2, 2026, https://www.bi.team/press-releases/social-media-algorithms-amplify-right-wing-content-against-young-users-preference-study-finds/
19. Independent research shows that X's (Twitter's) algorithm can influence political polarisation, accessed June 2, 2026, https://sciencemediacentre.es/en/independent-research-shows-xs-twitters-algorithm-can-influence-political-polarisation
20. No LGB Without the T - Rochester.lgbt, accessed June 2, 2026, https://rochester.lgbt/no-lgb-without-the-t/