At the beginning of April, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from Ben Appel titled "I'm Gay, but That Doesn't Make Me Queer." On the last day of Pride Month 2026, the New York Times followed with an op-ed by Matthew Vines titled "I'm Gay, Not Queer. It Matters." Both were written by white, cisgender gay men, and both made the same argument: the hard-won gains of the gay rights movement are now endangered by queer people, queer politics, queer theory, and maybe even the word "queer" itself. Most public responses treated this as a quarrel over vocabulary, as if the authors had merely declined a label that others remain free to adopt, but what the op-eds actually proposed is a trade, in which some letters of the alphabet community purchase their safety by cutting loose the people who make "normal" nervous.
The HBS co-hosts are not inclined to take that deal.
But refusing it requires answering some hard questions: what does "queer" name, exactly, when it can function as a slur, an identity, a coalition, and a verb? Who gets to decide when a wound-word has been reclaimed, and who is still entitled to flinch at it? If queering something means exposing the instability of the categories we call normal, what happens when we point that lens at politics itself?
Grab a drink and join us as we take the bait, talk back to the op-eds, and explain why normal was never all that normal to begin with.
Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/theqword
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