By choosing performativity over persuasion, activists are turning Americans away from the people and policies they claim to champion
By: Ryan Self
Published: Jun 22, 2026
“Bad and Bigoted” reads a headline about the San Francisco Giants annual Pride Night.
At the event in question, players wore special caps with the Giants logo in rainbow lettering. The bases were rainbow colored. Ten gay couples renewed their vows. A drag queen could be seen along the first base line.
And yet the writer—channeling the ire of many on the left—claimed the event was “equal parts bigoted and embarrassing, and blame deserves to shine throughout the organization.”
The Giants’ egregious sin was… not every player enthusiastically participated in Pride Night. Three players wrote Bible verses on their caps (Gen 9:12-16, about God’s creation of the rainbow). One chose to wear the regular cap without the rainbow lettering.
Not since Harvey Milk was shot has there been such a shocking affront to San Francisco’s gay community.
The story has generated national media coverage. The Athletic Senior Writer Grant Brisbee ended his piece on the hate crime-adjacent event with an impassioned plea: “Do better. That’s the only thing we’re all supposed to do around here, anyway. Do better.”
I’m gay. I’m also a Christian. And I hope both of those identities can be respected in a neutral way. In a pluralist society, that means not coercing others into sharing my beliefs.
But coercing others is exactly how we got into the current state of affairs.
Shockingly, despite the ubiquity of Pride Nights, corporate sponsorships, Pride merchandise, drag queen story hours and LGBTQIA+ themed children’s books, this has not led to an increase in support for same-sex marriage.
In fact, the opposite has happened. According to the latest Gallup polls, after two decades of steady increase in support for gay marriage, the past two years have seen notable declines. The percentage of those who view gay relationships as morally acceptable is the lowest it’s been in a decade.
Forcing people to express views they don’t hold is not only illiberal, it’s completely counterproductive. Persuasion, not performativity, is what won gay people the right to marry. Yet it’s what many progressive activists have abandoned in favor of polarizing virtue signaling.
From Asking for Tolerance to Demanding Active Celebration
The winning ethos of the gay rights movement from the 1990s through the 2010s was “we just want to be left alone.” The pitch was that gay marriage would require little of straight people. In the last several years, especially after gay marriage became the law of the land, that winning ethos morphed into requiring an active validation of homosexuality.
Many Fortune 500 companies were brow beaten into submission by the Human Rights Campaign and their “Corporate Equality Index.” In his book, “The End of the Gay Rights Revolution: How Hubris and Overreach Threaten Gay Freedom,” gay writer Ronan McCrea documents how this heavy handed operation worked:
Doing well on this index also required going way beyond avoiding discriminating against gay employees or even the formation of allyship groups and the like. It required ‘at least five efforts of public commitment to the LGBTQ+ community’. This included the equivalent of a kind of gay tithe seen in the duty to provide ‘philanthropic support via cash or in-kind donation to at least one LGBTQ+ specific organization’. In a slightly chilling echo of George W. Bush’s ‘you’re either with us or against us’ thinking from the era of the ‘War on Terror’, the Index also called for business to adopt guidelines that ‘prohibit philanthropic support of non-religious organizations with an explicit policy of discrimination towards LGBTQ+ people.
Demands for active validation not only led to companies choosing polarizing promotions that led to backlash, boycotts and harm to the bottom line. These heavy-handed promotions also did little to help the cause of greater acceptance of gay people.
But worst of all, it set up expectations that, unless a business, government or organization is vocally announcing their support of gay people, they are hostile. This has led to a type of fragility I don’t think is healthy.
In his self-righteous write-up about the Giants’ Pride Night event, Brisbee claimed, “Events like Pride Night reduce suffering in a very real way. To suggest they don’t is to ignore the humanity of the individuals involved. The community is filled with human beings, people who need support and reminders that they’re worthy of love.”
A reminder that the Giants reside in… San Francisco. I struggle to imagine the gay person living in a city where nearly every business is covered in Pride flags yet needs every single baseball player to affirm them. Requiring 100% compliance of a professional sports team for you to feel “worthy of love” is a recipe for misery.
I’ve written before about a progressive church I used to attend that held a drag show. The event was divisive. Multiple families left. But a pastor at a different church who had been approached about co-hosting the drag show (and declined), told me that a gay board member had insisted on it, claiming the progressive church wasn’t serious about supporting LGBT people unless they held the event.
Half of the church’s “About Us” page is dedicated to LGBT topics. The church’s logo year-round contains a rainbow. This is Austin, where progress pride flags are everywhere and you’re more likely to find a Bernie bro than even a moderate Republican.
And yet, one gay person told me they still struggle to believe that straight people accept gay people. And events like the drag show help them feel accepted.
I’m sorry, but that’s a you problem.
Rather than developing an internal sense of self worth, needing constant external validation—even in some of the most gay-friendly places on earth—is deeply unhealthy.
Supporting Every Cause Imaginable, Except for Gay Marriage
The American public has been asked to stay up-to-date on the latest acronyms, identities, and correct language. And many find it exhausting.
A movement for lesbian, gay and bisexual people added transgender, then queer, then intersex and asexual. In Canada, they added “two spirit”—a term tied to indigenous identities. Recently, a Canadian activist dropped a new acronym, MMIWG2SLGBTQIA+, which adds missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.
Once a rainbow flag that represented gay pride, the flag has since morphed to include stripes for Black and Brown people, stripes for transgender people, a circle for intersex people and in Canada, two feathers for “two spirit” people.
And then there’s the plus. As the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Center in New York City defines it: “The ‘plus’ is used to signify all of the gender identities and sexual orientations that letters and words cannot yet fully describe.”
We truly do not know what identities are yet to come.
To be a true “ally,” you must sign on to an ever-expanding list of identities and an ever-growing list of demands. This has only alienated large swaths of the American public and made LGBT “inclusion” radioactive among certain segments of the country.
As independent sports writer Ethan Strauss put it in his excellent write-up about the Giants’ Pride Night:
There’s an additional component here, never noted by the critics of abstaining athletes, that the modern LGBT movement has moved far beyond basic appeals for marriage equality and general acceptance. It’s obvious that much of the public has grown weary of accommodations demanded by the “T” part of the ever-expanding acronym. Maybe these players would avoid the hat in a world where this broader movement wasn’t pushing for males in women’s sports and medicalized alterations to minors. But the activism does happen to be associated with these unpopular demands.
“LGBTQIA+” became a repository for a variety of progressive causes anathema to the average American. I can’t say I’m surprised that support has cratered among Republicans, and with it support for gay marriage. Even as a gay person, I find myself disagreeing with much of what is presented by this “community.”
Who Is This for… Really?
I’ve had conversations lately with a number of gay friends who feel alienated by Pride activities. One gay friend remarked that a non-LGBT progressive is likely more at home at the average Pride event than a non-progressive LGBT person. And that says something.
After that progressive church held a drag show, which plenty of my gay friends were uncomfortable with, I publicly criticized the choice. I was swiftly rebuked by a straight “ally” at the church.
If your goal is building lasting support for gay people, you might want to listen when gay people tell you you’re hurting the cause. But if your goal is merely virtue signaling to your fellow progressives, then gay people questioning you poses a threat.
If you actually care about gay people and building or maintaining support for gay marriage, you’ll want to avoid unnecessarily polarizing people. You’ll want to build bridges, not burn them.
But many activists are more concerned with appearing to care about gay people than actually caring about gay people.
The thing about virtue signaling is there’s nothing virtuous about it. It’s deeply self-absorbed. It’s all about you and your status among your peer group.
It’s notable who is the target audience for common forms of LGBTQ activism (“queer” people in some of the most LGBTQ-friendly, progressive cities in the world) and who isn’t (gay kids in deeply conservative and religious areas where hostile attitudes and barriers to opportunities are more common). “How will this action impact gay kids in rural Alabama or ruby red Arkansas?” is a question I wish activists asked themselves. Instead, the concern seems to be, “Do queer baseball fans in San Francisco feel seen?”
The Real Work of Lasting Change
Persuasion takes building relationships. Having conversations is what truly changes hearts and minds. Persuasion takes time.
But virtue signaling? It’s quick and easy.
Many gay people are exhausted by the performance, the demands for constant validation. Many gay people just want to live their lives with dignity, and are equally put off by activists’ antics.
This tension has always been present in the fight for gay rights, as Andrew Sullivan noted all the way back in 1993:
For most gay people —the closet cases and barflies, the construction workers and investment bankers, the computer programmers and parents—a “queer” identity is precisely what they want to avoid. In this way, the radical politics of homosexuality, like the conservative politics of homosexuality, is caught in a political trap. The more it purifies its own belief about sexuality, the less able it is to engage the broader world as a whole. The more it acts upon its convictions, the less able it is to engage in politics at all.
For the “queer” fundamentalists, like the religious fundamentalists, this is no problem. Politics for both groups is essentially an exercise in theater and rhetoric, in which dialogue with one’s opponent is an admission of defeat. It is no accident that ACT UP [a confrontational gay rights organization] was founded by a playwright, since its politics was essentially theatrical: a fantastic display of rhetorical pique and visual brilliance It became a national media hit, but eventually its lines became familiar and the audience’s attention wavered. New shows have taken its place and will continue to do so: but they will always be constrained by their essential nature, which is performance, not persuasion.
It was true more than three decades ago and it’s true today: sometimes the biggest obstacle to progress is progressive activists.
We need less performativity and more pluralism and persuasion.
