Time to take stock of what we’ve won — and lost.

2025 has had a couple of anniversaries for yours truly. The Dish turned 25. The Daily Dish, Deep Dish, The Weekly Dish, and The Dishcast all evolved out of that decision to throw my lot in with the web as a writer in 2000. I helped pioneer blogging in the early aughts, then my team innovated real-time 24/7 coverage of breaking news in 2009, then we achieved the first successful blog paywall in 2013. That, in turn, was the proof of principle for Substack, which has grown this year beyond recognition, and given us back the Dish community. To expand the freedom of writers to say what they want is something incredibly self-interested, of course, but also, I think, very American, especially the making-money part.

And then, of course, we’ve had ten years of nationwide marriage equality since 2015’s Obergefell decision — a cause I imagined, helped kick-start in 1989, and spent a quarter century arguing everywhere I could. It included my own civil marriage and, in true American fashion, my sad but amicable divorce more than a decade later.

“If you live long enough” is a cliché for a reason. And, against the odds, thanks to protease inhibitors, I did live long enough to see these two evolutions in media and society unfold. “Did they do more good than harm?” is a question I’ve found myself pondering in my third trimester of life. The media revolution? A truly mixed bag, I’d say, especially in the iPhone and now AI era. A story for another time.

But gay marriage? Personally, I feel I failed in my own journey, but nonetheless tried hard, and treasure the enduring love and deep friendship I still have with my ex-husband. My marriage helped me mature, grounded me more firmly, taught me what sacrifice and generosity can be. Maybe it will happen again.

And collectively? A much higher grade surely — with the caveat that we’ve only had a decade of evidence. My opponents feared it would destabilize marriage more generally. It didn’t. Marriage rates were 6.9 per 1,000 in 2015 and 6.1 today — a decline in line with the previous half-century. Not great, but there’s no sign that gay marriage had any serious impact. Divorce rates? They have actually improved since 2015: from 3.1 to 2.4 per 1,000 in 2023. One small contributing factor is that divorce rates among gay men are actually lower than that for straight couples. Who predicted that? Certainly not Bill Kristol.

How has marriage affected these gay men and lesbians? It’s been a boon. Married couples have higher household incomes, lower poverty rates, higher levels of employment, better health than unmarried ones, higher home-ownership rates — and report greater social acceptance. Gay men have been thriving in education:

Over half of gay men have earned a college degree, compared with about 35 percent of straight men. Some 6 percent of gay men have a Ph.D., J.D. or M.D. — a rate 50 percent higher than that of straight men … What’s more, gay men’s college graduation rate dramatically bests even that of straight women.

Before 2015, gay men earned around 10 percent less than straight men; now they earn 10 percent more. Married gay men have a median income of $142,000, compared with $125,000 for married straights. HIV infection rates have fallen by about 17 percent; and the mortality gap between gay and straight men disappeared by 2022. With no discernible damage to society as a whole, a previously marginalized group, emerging from a devastating epidemic, has integrated and prospered. That wasn’t inevitable; and it remains the most successful reform of this century.

The queer activists, of course, loudly insisted that same-sex couples rejected the institution of marriage and would never join it. But the number of married gay men and lesbians more than doubled from 390,000 in 2015 to 823,000 now; and nearly 60 percent of same-sex cohabiting couples are now married, compared with 40 percent in domestic partnerships. How has this reform been greeted in the country at large? Gallup shows that support has grown from 58 to 69 percent. In 2024, the GOP removed opposition to gay marriage in its platform. A married gay man with two sons is now the Treasury Secretary in a hard-right Republican administration — a more senior position than any openly gay Dem has ever held.

As social reforms go, it’s hard to do better than this. It sure hasn’t been a panacea for marriage as a whole, but it has shored up the thing a bit and broadened its base. And then there are things for which there are no statistics. The young mercifully don’t know much of the immense psychic pain, deep spiritual anguish, emotional trauma, and intense self-hatred that the past contained for so many of us — a pain far worse for the countless generations before.

The stress is not over, of course. It never will be when you’re a tiny minority, which is why resilience is what we need to foster, not victimhood. But so much darkness has abated, so much agony disappeared. So many weddings have healed someone’s soul or repaired someone’s family. No price can be put on that. I sobbed at the first wedding I attended — helpless, embarrassing sobs. So much pain had been welling up like water behind a dam; and then it broke.

The trouble, of course, is that success breeds its own set of problems. Successful civil rights movements — think of the mid-1960s — can radicalize and curdle. And as most normie gays got on with their lives, queer extremists duly took over the gay infrastructure and institutions, and the era of more general woke madness set in.

The goal was to re-marginalize us as “queer” again, to indoctrinate kids with leftist lies about human biology, and create an entirely fake history of gay and lesbian rights. Dissent was punished, old leaders ousted, and an ever-expanding alphabet of ever-more bizarre and niche identities — often approaching mental illness — replaced any idea of gay and lesbian identity.

They changed the flag and merged its colors with the BLM movement; they pioneered untested medical experiments on pre-pubescent children with gender dysphoria, including gay and lesbian kids; they sterilized them and rendered many incapable of orgasm for life; they perverted the English language — “chest-feeding” anyone? — and tried to abolish the whole idea of homosexuality as a distinct human experience, in favor of their generalized, post-modern, intersectional queerness. And they replaced the principles of live-and-let-live by forcing others to take the knee to their radicalism. No-enemies-to-the-left syndrome became a pandemic. Sore winners.

Then there was the Internet. It took a sledgehammer to gay communal life, as gay bars declined — and all but disappeared for lesbians — and hookup apps proliferated. Those apps did not just kill gay social life, they also imposed queer radicalism on everyone: on Grindr, for example, biological women were now deemed gay men if they said they were, and being a gay man now included vaginal sex. Want to filter out bio women? Grindr removed that option. The queers hate choice and fear freedom.

The left replaced homosexuality with queerness and sex with gender. Queer “journalists” imposed queer-theory terminology on the media and tried to shut down any reporting of sex changes for children. Many gay boys and lesbian girls were transed before they ever had their first orgasm (and many would barely have another one in their lives). The gay elites refused even to acknowledge their existence — and still couldn’t care less. And, of course, none of this was popular, got even less popular over time, and played a critical part in the re-election of Trump.

Part of this was surely just mission creep, as activists needed to find new niche causes to keep their funding up. Part was the general madness of the Great Awokening, which imposed new orthodoxies everywhere using fear and bullying. Part was the toxic influence of academia. Part was well-meaning straight people trying to make up for once opposing marriage equality by mindlessly backing anything “queer”. But part was also perhaps a broader failure of gay and lesbian nerve.

There is something easy about victimhood, after all. Everything wrong is someone else’s fault always. Any argument is ended by identity: whoever is more “oppressed” wins. (A trans person arguing with a gay person is always right and debate itself is oppression.) Any adjustment means “throwing people under the bus.” And because the normie gay majority is doing fine, they just let it continue. Who wants to be called a “transphobe” anyway? Who wants to be cut out of their social scene, disowned, or ostracized? Easier to book the next trip to a circuit party, diss normie gays on Bluesky, and blather about trans sisters and brothers than actually prevent gay kids being transed by fanatics by mistake.

Not a huge shock, of course. Human psychology is perverse and complex. Taking yes for an answer — and all the responsibility that comes with it — can be difficult if your entire identity has been constructed expecting a Big Fat No. I guess what saddens me most about this is what it has done to the next generation. For me, the great boon of marriage equality was that it could simply inform the young and gay that they too could be fully part of their families and society, whether that was in a red state or a blue state, helping reduce the anxiety, stress, and pain so many of us had to go through in our youth. You didn’t need to indoctrinate; the world would show them their potential if we just got out of their way.

The queers, however, saw a chance to get into the heads of the young very early, by capturing the educational establishment. They moved swiftly to indoctrinate kids — as young as kindergarteners — in the precepts of queer theory before their own sense of what being gay for them could naturally evolve. They told gay boys they could be girls inside, and gay girls they could be boys inside, and they could be cured if they wanted to be. They told them everyone had a “gender identity” (no, we don’t) and that their bodies had nothing to do with whether they were a boy or a girl (insane).

They told them that being gay included relationships with women as well as men. They replaced gay identity with “2SLGBTQIA+” ideology. They told them they were victims from Day One. No wonder that generation has reversed the gains in psychological health the older generations had won. The queers and the Internet fucked an entire generation up, and made them miserable. In a period of far greater acceptance, and full civil rights, making gay kids more depressed is quite an achievement and an extraordinary indictment.

I remain deeply proud of what we did. Nothing will ever take that away. The current madness is based on lies about human nature, and lies always fail in the end. We will emerge from it because it’s built on sand. Meanwhile, you carry on, hoping some kind of moderation will happen, but seeing no sign of it at all. I realize don’t belong in this intolerant “LGBTQIA+” community any more. And it doesn’t want me or any gay men like me. The price of success is always failure, I suppose. But the success was real.

Back On The Dishcast: Shadi Hamid

Shadi is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He runs a substack with Damir Marusic called Wisdom of Crowds, and his new book is The Case for American Power. It’s the third time Shadi has been on the Dishcast. We hashed out the National Security Strategy and the future of US leadership in the world, if any.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on Bush’s idealism leading to anarchy in Iraq, and whether Trump’s amorality is stabilizing the Middle East. That link also takes you to listener feedback on our pods with George Packer on post-liberalism, Michel Paradis on Eisenhower, and Karen Hao on AI — plus an assortment of reader emails.

Money Quotes For The Week

“Trump swipes money from taxpayers… to bail out the farmers… who were harmed by the tariffs… that Trump himself placed on American businesses and consumers. This is the Trump economy,” – Justin Amash.

“I’ve always said Vance is the White Kendi. Here he is rejecting every scientific and academic paper that’s ever been written on immigration because of who writes it, saying without evidence they’re all getting rich. This is indigenous ways of knowing for hillbillies,” – Richard Hanania.

“Such a lack of LOYALTY, something that Texas Voters, and Henry’s daughters, will not like. Oh’ well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!” – Donald Trump on Henry Cuellar continuing to be a Democrat after Trump bribed him by pardoning him for bribery.

“Classic high-dominance narcissistic personality … so classic it should be taught in seminars. … [The text] vibrates with hypomanic energy — the kind that makes normal people reorganize their closets but makes Trump accuse newspapers of sedition,” – Grok on a Truth Social post from Trump.

“Among certain elite circles on the right, vice-signalling plays a similar role as virtue-signalling once did among the left. Today, toughness, cruelty, and transgression are all performed to demonstrate belonging. It is 2020 Twitter, but inverted,” – Claire Lehmann.

“If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law. We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others,” – Joe Lonsdale, Palantir co-founder.

“Yup. This is real. The University of Minnesota [launched] a program to end the ‘Whiteness Pandemic,’” – Matt Tardio.

“Has the Republican establishment ever looked more like a herd of, you know, totally conformist, and pathetically running-to-catch-up-with-the-trends minds? They don’t even have minds, maybe, but just political beings trying to … join this parade [for same-sex marriage], as if they’re going to get much credit for joining it at this point. … [A]lleged intellectual leaders [are] just kind of jumping on the train because it looks fashionable and because some poll shows that it’s now 58 percent popular and five years ago it was only 43 percent popular. There’s something pathetic about it, and I find it really distasteful,” – Bill Kristol, fanatical anti-gay crusader as late as 2013.

The View From Your Window

Doha, Qatar, 4.21 pm

Dissents Of The Week

A reader writes:

Respectfully, I must take issue with part of your latest column. As someone who has an advanced degree in International Humanitarian Law, you have mischaracterized or misunderstood some of the laws of armed conflict:

There are legitimate controversies over various rules of engagement, but the laws of war are different. Killing civilians or unarmed soldiers or armed soldiers not posing any direct threat is not warfare; it’s murder. Killing enemy combatants who surrender or flee or are shipwrecked is what barbarians do.

By this logic, unarmed active-duty Russian soldiers doing PT at a training camp would be off-limits to being targeted. Al-Qaeda insurgents building bombs in distant garages wouldn’t become lawful targets until they set out to place their bombs. Enemy soldiers executing a tactical retreat would be illegal to pick off. All three examples are lawful military objectives under the law of armed conflict as it stands — whether in international or non-international armed conflicts.

It’s true that enemies who are genuinely surrendering, and also those who are shipwrecked, are theoretically protected by the Geneva Conventions and customary international law. But a fleeing (see: retreating) soldier is still fair game. An unarmed enemy combatant is still a lawful target. A citizen providing tactical intelligence to the enemy is also a lawful target, regardless of whether this upsets one’s moral conscience.

Laws and morals are often closely related, but they are not one and the same. The devil, as always, is in the details.

Another quotes me:

“Grown men, especially those who have seen war close-up, have always known this. But draft-dodgers like Trump and insecure boys like Hegseth … ”

There are a lot of insults you could honestly apply to someone with two Bronze Stars: trigger-happy or PTSD, for instance; perhaps a war criminal if the anonymous sources are right and the official account dishonest. But your careful dodging (and implicit denial) that ex-Major Hegseth is one of the “grown men, especially those who have seen war close-up,” while calling him an insecure boy, is irresponsible establishment journalism.

As always, please keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Heads Up

My latest diary for The Spectator, “Trump has made D.C. safe again,” is here.

Mental Health Break

What the Bee Gees might’ve sounded like in the 16th century:

In The ‘Stacks

• Erick Erickson is outraged over Trump allowing NVIDIA to sell chips to China.
• A debate over affordability and Trump’s role.
• A Senate majority for the Dems looks more and more possible. Nate Silver draws lessons from the race in Texas.
• Tara Ella wonders, “Is the Groyperification of the right really inevitable?”
• Trump is the participation trophy president.
• Damon Linker dives into the debate over birthright ahead of SCOTUS.
• Bruce Bartlett finds JFK was more responsible for the Southern Strategy than Nixon.
• First heroin, then fentanyl, now … WTF is xylazine and medetomidine?
• Yascha Mounk points to the “quiet scandal of of affirmative action for men.”
• Is Conan O’Brien’s pod more profitable than late-night talk shows?
• An insight into the insanity that now defines the “LGBTQIA+” world.
• TIL Epstein had a really weird dick.
• Even The New Yorker is joining Substack.

The View From Your Window Contest

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“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” – Orwell