Matthew Vines Reveals Why More Gay Men Are Rejecting "Queer"

A few weeks ago, Matthew Vines and I were complete strangers.

Then we both found ourselves in the middle of the same controversy for saying something pretty simple: we prefer to be called gay—not queer.

What interested me most wasn’t the label itself. It was what happened when we challenged a narrative that people assumed we were supposed to accept.

The public reaction was intense. The private reaction was very different.

That raised a bigger question for me: How much room do we actually give people to disagree within their own communities?

Matthew comes from a very different background than I do, and we don’t agree on everything. But that’s part of why I wanted to have the conversation.

We talked about gay identity, Christianity, queer theory, gay rights, and what it means to think for yourself without walking away from the people you care about.