The End of The Gay Rights Revolution, by Ronan McCrea, Polity Press, 206 pp, €21.99, ISBN: 978-1509570003

In Untimeliness and Punctuality, Wendy Brown, a notable American political thinker,  identifies a charge of ‘untimeliness’ used to discredit radical political thinking. This charge turns on different senses of ‘time’. One is strategic. The time is not right for radicalism and therefore it will be currently unhelpful in attaining political goals. Another sense of time is conjunctural; the times we live in are so darkly threatening that radical critique is a luxury we cannot afford right now. The third temporal concept used to quell radical thinking involves warnings about appropriateness, usually figured through images of psychological maturation, suggestions that radical politics is indecorous or infantile and lacking in maturity.

But for Brown it is precisely the ‘untimeliness’ of radical critique which makes it both powerful and necessary. As she argues, ‘to insist on the value of untimely political critique…is to contest settled accounts of what time it is, what the times are and what tempo and temporality we should hew to in political life’. For that reason, the standpoint Brown terms ‘untimely critique’ aims to ‘grasp the times by thinking against the times’.

Viewed from this perspective, Ronan McCrea’s The End of The Gay Rights Revolution is paradoxical. McCrea self-consciously situates his book as putting forward unpopular or challenging propositions, and so it appears to correspond with Brown’s ‘untimely critique’. Ultimately though, the book exemplifies the opposite; rather than embrace untimeliness the book evokes the threat of untimeliness as a warning to encourage us towards caution, pragmatism and compromise.

The book is festooned with celebrity endorsements, including Mary McAleese’s observation that ‘the future has to be homophobia-free and this book will play a significant role in ensuring it is.’ Unfortunately, this is a misleading impression. Far from arguing that the future can ever be ‘homophobia-free’ McCrea is convinced that Western societies are never likely to be any less homophobic than now, and in fact those societies are already reverting to being more homophobic. For that reason, he argues, the organised gay and lesbian movement needs to act promptly, making effective use of this historically anomalous window to defend those rights achieved during the last few decades, most significantly the right to legal marriage.

McCrea has some sharp words for his fellow liberals’ whiggish historical imagination, deploring their misguided faith that the arc of progress tends in a singular, positive direction. His is a more disenchanted historical understanding. There was nothing inevitable about the expansion of liberty for lesbians and gay men and there is nothing inevitable about the future maintenance of that liberty.

As a legal scholar, a professor of law at University College London, McCrea is professionally disposed to value legislative and institutional developments over political activism, and thus minimises the transformative role of social movements – feminism, lesbian feminism, gay liberation –  in Western democracies over the last seven decades. In his account, gay men and lesbians were accidental beneficiaries of a broad historical process of liberalisation of sexual morality and sexual regulation. This development was primarily centred on heterosexuality, driven by the lessening of inherited taboos against sex outside of marriage and built on securing liberal rights to privacy and individual autonomy.

This is a cornerstone of his minoritarian political standpoint. In his view, gay men and lesbians are, and will always be, a tiny minority in society and thus dependent for their security on the tolerance of the majority. For that reason, the sole purpose of an organised lesbian and gay rights movement is to negotiate astutely with that majority, striving to maintain a sufficient compromise with the dominant culture to facilitate an always fragile space of safety. This is the politics of allyship, but only with the powerful since, in this view, there is nothing to be gained from allying with other vulnerable minorities.

In the current conjunction, McCrea argues, the future security of gay men and lesbians in the West is vulnerable to a series of threats, which he categories as ‘external’ and ‘internal’. Of the external threats, he identifies three as especially pressing.

Most obviously, there is the rightward political shift and resurgence of a militant, authoritarian conservatism, exemplified by the regime currently occupying institutions of power in the United States. On this, McCrea observes that the ‘small state’ version of conservativism dominant in the Cold War era, and directly after, benefited the expansion of lesbian and gay rights. Conservatives who believed the state should not interfere with the market beyond a minimal level were susceptible to the logic of arguments that the state should likewise not interfere with an individual’s sexual life beyond a minimal level. The principle of setting aside one’s moral or subjective views when making political decisions about personal liberty made sense. But in contemporary conservativism that position is anathema, since for movements such as Christian Nationalism in the US, politics is morality by other means and the institutions of the state should, in this view, aggressively impose a violently misogynistic and homophobic conception of ‘traditional’ sexual morality on individuals.

The second external threat is rather amorphous, more feeling than identifiable political perspective. While lesbians and gay men experienced the loosening of older sexual norms as welcome freedom from oppression, many heterosexual people experienced these changes as unnerving dislocation, and so are likely to welcome any reversion to shared sexual codes of behaviour promising stability. Beyond some data from attitudinal surveys, McCrea offers little meaningful analysis of this unsustainable generalisation, on which one would be unwise to rest a sustained political argument. (More generally, McCrea’s method relies too much on citing such survey data to create a simulacrum of ‘empiricism’, where more thoughtful engagement with real scholarship would have strengthened the book.)

By contrast, he gives far greater attention to the third external threat, euphemistically termed ‘demographic change’. Immigration, particularly of Muslim people, into the Western democracies must inevitably alter the political atmosphere of those democracies, destabilising the current liberal consensus on the regulation of sexual conduct. Invariably, the reassertion of ‘traditional’ values and norms creates a less secure and more hostile environment for lesbians and gay men. Again, McCrea is impatiently critical of his liberal fellow travellers, faulting their contradictory commitments to diversity and secularism; welcoming the diversification of the culture, while insisting on conformity to a secular world view as a condition of citizenship. This contradiction, McCrea argues, cannot be resolved, and all that can be done is to prepare for a different, sexually more conservative, future.

But preparing for that less liberal future is impeded by two ‘internal’ threats to the coherence and effectiveness of the organised lesbian and gay movement. One is what might be called mission overreach, or what McCrea terms ‘hubris’. Reiterating that gay men and lesbians will always be a tiny minority, McCrea has no patience with fluid, variegated or ambiguous expressions of sexual and gender identity and is especially averse to the category of ‘queer’. This is a strictly binary worldview, in which everybody is automatically enrolled in either the homosexual or heterosexual camp. For McCrea, that expansive umbrella term LGBTQ+ is the linguistic correlative to an incoherently inclusive political strategy to which, he believes, lesbian and gay NGOs pivoted after the widespread achievement of equal marriage rights. While he expresses a particularly intense animus for that innocuous ‘+’ , it is, of course, the ‘T’ which stands in for the most politically charged issue. In summary, McCrea’s legal training allows him to tread carefully, avoiding any explicit expression of prejudice against trans people and liberally wishing them well in the struggle to vindicate their rights – while insisting that they are absolutely on their own in that struggle, and to continue supporting them is dangerous folly on the part of the lesbian and gay movement.

As you may have noticed, in this review I have conjoined the terms ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ (or ‘lesbians’ and ‘gay men’). However, that might give a misleading impression of consistency in the use of those terms in McCrea’s text, where ‘and lesbian’ is only erratically appended to ‘gay’. This indicates the degree to which the book primarily addresses the situation of gay men. However this is only made explicit when McCrea identifies the other ‘internal’ threat to the effectiveness of the lesbian and gay rights movement. He believes that there is an unstable contradiction between gay men’s political and sexual lives. Politically, gay men as an identifiable minority have for decades been committed to securing equal marriage, and thus to an ideal of sexual commitment and monogamy. Meanwhile, gay men in the West have created a vibrant sexual culture based entirely around the pursuit of casual sexual encounters, multiple sexual partners and active non-monogamy. McCrea insists that he is not concerned with the morality of this sexual culture. His concern is entirely with health, the negative effects of this culture on the physical and emotional well-being of individual gay men, and with political strategy, the risk of this sexual culture alienating potential allies in the heterosexual majority.

The End of the Gay Rights Revolution puts forward a political argument perched precariously on a foundation of categorical errors and delusions. Chief among the latter is an unquestioning faith in the liberal fantasy that something called ‘sexuality’ exists autonomously from the current arrangement of economic and social life in which we live. Forty years ago the historian John D’Emilio argued that the development of industrial capitalism simultaneously created the conditions for modern lesbian and gay identities and the conditions for the emergence of modern homophobia. Wage labour, and the new emphasis on the individual as a ‘free’ labourer, weakened the role of the family as the primary unit of production. At the level of ideas and values, these material changes facilitated a gradual distinction to be drawn between sexual intimacy and pleasure, on one hand, and the imperative to procreate on the other. At the same time, urbanisation created a mobile labour force of young people making lives for themselves away from the connections and expectations of family. For those attracted to people of their own sex these developments facilitated a gradual, uneven but decisive historical transition; away from patterns of homosexual behaviour and towards new forms of consciousness and sexual identity.

At the same time, modern homophobia is an effect of capitalism’s contradictory relationship with the family. On the one hand, capitalism undermines the family’s material basis by replacing its economic functions with wage labour and weakening people’s dependence on family ties. On the other hand, capitalist ideology sanctifies the family as a source of love, affection and nurture, making the family a privatised resource for the reproduction of labour. In this context, the ‘homosexual’, a phantasmic construct rather than any actual gay man or lesbian, has repeatedly been scapegoated as threatening the family, when in fact the source of anxiety is capitalism’s endemic instability and alienation.

By refusing to pay attention to these material determinants of our sexual lives and identities, McCrea relies on an attenuated and therefore politically useless conception of both sexual identity and homophobia. His argument simply assumes gay men to be a homogenous bloc, undifferentiated by class, race or any other social or political differences. This produces a thoroughly abstracted and artificial sense of identity, bearing no relation to the complex, variegated reality of gay men’s lives and social identities.

The prose style includes frequent rhetorical use of the first person plural. But who is the ‘we’ being so confidently addressed? Since the argument relies on an unquestioning faith in the value of ‘common sense’ McCrea finds it unnecessary to positively state who ‘we’ are, since, of course, ‘we’ know who ‘we’ are.  However, across the book there is a gradual winnowing down as ‘we’ is negatively defined by who ‘we’ are not: queer, asexual, non-binary, trans, sexually non-monogamous and so on. Gradually it becomes apparent that ‘we’ are actually a minority within a minority, and that the book’s real concerns are limited to the interests of white, middle-class, cis-gendered gay men.

Similarly, the book wrongly assumes homophobia to be a fixed entity residing in straight people’s hearts and minds. Like misogyny, racism, transphobia and other forms of bigotry, homophobia is a social and ideological phenomenon. More people in Western democracies are finding the politics of hatred convincing right now because of economic inequality, levels of which have accelerated rapidly over the last few decades and most intensively since the 2008 economic crash. Right-wing political movements are effectively redirecting the intensifying insecurity caused by inequality as hatred towards the less powerful to secure and further the interests of the powerful and wealthy. This is not to rationalise or justify hatred and violence but to identify accurately the forces driving those politicised emotions.

McCrea advocates a hopelessly inadequate and counterproductive response to these developments. On one hand, effectively writing off most of the population, especially Muslim immigrants, as bigoted and beyond redemption. On the other, collaborating with the fantasy projected by right-wing politicians and activists that the ’cause’ of these problems are  minorities. Homophobia is not caused by gay men’s sexual conduct, any more than racism is caused by the arrival of immigrants or transphobia by the existence of trans people – or, indeed, misogyny by the existence of women. The current predicament faced by trans people seeking to vindicate their rights is especially instructive here. Demographically the number of trans people is tiny, and completely disproportionate to the level of political debate around the issue. That this is wholly irrational suggests that when people are engaging in this debate most of the time they are not thinking about actual trans people but a phantasm culturally constructed in right-wing discourse (with not a little help from liberals). Actual trans people choosing not to vindicate their rights, or gay people keeping their political distance, will not magically make that phantasm disappear.

The End of the Gay Rights Revolution is a critique of liberalism from within liberalism; a useful and necessary approach. However, McCrea completely ignores any critique of liberalism, and liberal ideas about sexual identity and politics, from its left. Arguably, he even ignores liberal perspectives on sexuality, and especially the history of ideas about sexuality, since his primary interlocutors are conservatives and those on the right. This means that his critique effectively weakens rather than strengthens liberalism, since the terms of the debate are so completely set by conservativism. Frankly, it is difficult to take seriously a work purporting to map the future direction of the gay and lesbian movement which so completely ignores decades of rich scholarship on sexuality and identity but attends so extensively and respectfully to the ideas of Patrick Deneen, house philosopher of American Christian Nationalism.

In this way, McCrea makes his task impossible for himself, since it is difficult to defend liberalism once you cede the territory so completely to its right-wing antagonists. This leads the book into various conceptual conundrums and cul-de-sacs. For instance, he takes seriously the conservative critique of ‘identity politics’, adopting the centrist counter-response that conservatives have a point and ‘too much’ of such politics are alienating potential liberal or centre-left voters. But McCrea’s book is advocating for a form of identity politics; that is, a political movement premised on the idea of a minority sharing an identity and claiming rights on that basis. The only solution then is to get into a pointless calculation of authenticity. How to distinguish real identities that should be politicised from inauthentic identities that should not? The more politically astute response would be to point out that contemporary right-wing politics is itself a form of identity politics. People subscribing to these reactionary positions are invariably mobilising around forms of identity: whiteness; ethno-national identification; masculinity or femininity (for women conservatives as well as trans-exclusionary feminists); religious affiliation, and so on. But this would involve some complicated thinking about the conceptual basis of identities and how they become politicised, and engaging with the radical (rather than right-wing) critique of identity – a move McCrea is clearly unwilling to contemplate.

Once you accept the premise that immigration and gay men’s sexual conduct are causal factors for the rise of homophobia, you are in confused and confusing conceptual, as well as political, terrain. How exactly to register your anxiety that Muslim immigrants are threatening your way of life while not sounding like the respectable equivalent of a right-wing ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theorist? Ironically, McCrea discusses growing up in Ireland a grandson of conservative, homophobic Catholics, and noticing the changing attitudes across the generations. Yet his imagination fails when it comes to the children and grandchildren  of Muslim immigrants to Western democracies, who might have similarly complex histories. Again, a rigidly homogenous concept of identity impedes empathy. Just as ‘gay men’ are an undifferentiated mass, so too are ‘Muslims’.

And for all the stated concern with gay men’s health and well-being, it becomes difficult to distinguish McCrea’s position on gay male sexual culture from ‘traditional’ objections to promiscuity. If McCrea had engaged with scholarly work on the history of sexuality he would have discovered that in post-Enlightenment thought the line between moral and medical sexual discourse has long been blurry. Concerns about sexual healthiness have always sounded remarkably like a secularised version of concerns about sexual sinfulness. Put simply, if you start from the premise that gay men are having the wrong kind of sex and too much of it, you will struggle to distinguish your position from that of the homophobes.

Reading The End of the Gay Rights Revolution is dispiriting because of its bleak, Hobbesian view of the political field. All aspirations for transformative change, any commitment to the ideal of freedom for all, must be banished. The best we can do is barter respectability for security, in this strange world where, it turns out, the real obstacle to our flourishing is not authoritarian billionaires and their intellectual servants like Patrick Deneen but vulnerable minorities. Equally dispiriting is the book’s insistence that being a gay man is intrinsically defined by injury, humiliation and trauma. This is central to the book’s politics, which is founded on securing minority rights rather than a universal objective of freedom. This model rests on a bargain. In exchange for legal protection from homophobic discrimination gay men symbolically conform to the idea that such homophobia cannot be transcended since their identity is structured around always being a potential victim of homophobia. In seeking recognition of an identity founded on injury, you are committing to a conception of yourself as defined by that injury. In the book’s imaginary other experiences around which to configure one’s identity as a gay man must then disappear;  being moved by male beauty, unmoored by sexual ecstasy with another man, sharing complex pleasures of the bathhouse with many men, or sharing domestic pleasures of a life together with one man.

As I write, in winter 2025, the American left is energised by a glimmer of brightening light on the horizon after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral election. The most convincing explanation for Mamdani’s unlikely success is that his centrist and right-wing opponents offered pragmatism and fear while he offered possibility and optimism. If, as Ronan McCrea sees it, the lesbian and gay movement – or, more broadly, all of us committed to an ideal of gender and sexual freedom – is at a crossroads, perhaps this is the strategic choice to be confronted. There is the route plotted in this book: a politics of fearful, anxious exclusivity, founded on jettisoning ethical principles in pursuit of pragmatic self-interest. Or an alternative route: a political vision of liberation that is ambitious and expansive in scope, founded on solidarity, love and hope.