Gay Is Not Enough (2025)

Gay Is Not Enough

There are two postcards gracing my lover’s and my bedroom: This is about the one that says ‘Gay is Not Enough’ by John Waters (2006). 

It had sprung out to me, this quiet but urging appeal that gay is not enough: Speaking to a present, where yes, for the moment we have gay rights across Northern Europe, but that we shouldn’t stop there, which then points to a future where there is more than, or something beyond, gay. What would that look like, I often wondered, when my gaze went over the postcard propped on top of our mirror, and what might be meant by it?

Perhaps we have already come closer to that future, with the move from ‘gay’ to ‘queer’. In the 2018 TV show, The Bisexual, created by Desiree Akhavan, there is an illuminating scene on this move between her character, Leila, and a younger woman whom we might see as representing our trusted Gen-Z. Leila is a newly bisexual 30-something, who is confused and ashamed about fancying men after coming out of a ten-year-relationship with her lover, Sadie (played by Maxine Peake), pours her heart out in true millennial overthinking fashion, ending her monologue on the note of: “When you have to fight for it, you think that being gay can become the biggest part of you.” The essence of this outpouring speaks to the fear of being a bad gay, which the author Jeremy Atherton Lin touches on in his seminal book ‘Gay Bar’ from 2021: “When a gay person remarks they’re being a bad gay, it doesn’t mean unethical, but that they haven’t been conforming to type.” (p. 38). The response by the female member of Gen Z to Leila’s outpouring reveals the changing of that type: “I think you’re making a problem where there isn’t one.” To Gen Z, being a life-long lesbian who, at a later point in life starts fancying men, does not constitute a problem. The categories that helped former generations to fight for their right to love members of their own sex, are no longer needed (for the moment): we have moved beyond ‘gay’ and towards ‘queer’. 

For those of us who had to fight; the ones growing up gay and made to feel ashamed for it, the word ‘queer’ can seem like a step back. Its vague expansiveness seems to swallow up our hard-fought right to love whom we want, especially when meeting straight couples who say they are queer. But isn’t this what those earlier generations fought for? To move beyond gay because gay is not enough? Rather than having to label ourselves and put ourselves into categories that are easier to digest for homophobe conservatives, we can now move freely between the categories of gay, lesbian, bisexual, pan etc. 

Blurriness can cause in us anxieties. It is a human response to the vast nothingness that our consciousness awakes to: to name, label and categorise the unruly queerness of the world. It is also human to evolve with the times, which is why we are still around. 

In the scene, Akhavan’s character, Leila, reacts by laughing to herself because with that one comment, it is shown to her that the suffering of the earlier generations has been successful if it is not even seen as a problem. 

Gay was never going to be enough because we know that fluidity is natural, if scary for some. As Atherton Lin writes: “We head for a gay bar when we want to be anonymous homosexuals, what the sociologist Erving Goffman called ‘eventful to no one.’” The ultimate goal has to be to be ‘uneventful to no one’, but free to love whom we love.