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Walking down the streets of Dublin the last few weeks, I’ve seen “Progress” flags popping up more and more in shop windows and up along the quays. Wondering to myself what exactly the purpose is for all of it.
One thing that comes to mind is The Sopranos, and Tony’s obsession with a family of ducks that land in his swimming pool.
He feeds them, watches them and even worries about them.
Then one day they leave.
Taking with them his purpose, stability and a reason to get up in the morning. The panic wasn’t about birds flying away, it’s about the fear of not knowing who you are once the thing keeping you going disappears.
As Dublin prepared for another Pride parade, with progress flags hanging from every public building and stretched across the city centre, it reminded me of those ducks.
The original gay rights movement had a purpose. It wanted acceptance. Equal treatment under the law. For gays and lesbians to stop being treated as defective.
And it succeeded.
So why does the movement seem more confused than ever?
As a gay man in my twenties, the last thing I’ve ever felt from the modern Pride movement is acceptance. Not because society rejects me, but because the movement itself rejects anyone who falls outside a very narrow ideological point of view.
Over the years I’ve been criticised for supporting JK Rowling, questioning progress flags, or for believing that same-sex attraction means exactly what it says.
From the inside, it feels like disagreement isn’t treated as debate, but as proof you don’t belong. You can see this attitude by how the movement tells its own history.
A few days ago, I saw a video of a young Irish gay man asking why the LGB and T are grouped together. The replies were filled with people attacking him for his opinion, tearing apart his looks, one white commenter even insulting him for being white.
What annoyed me the most was that most of these people told him he “didn’t know his history,” and that “trans people fought for his rights”. When in reality, these people don’t know it themselves. The gay rights movement in Ireland wasn’t fought for by the Trans-identified, it was fought for by gays and lesbians after the murder of Declan Flynn.
The problem here is that institutions have reshaped history to suit their modern day political needs, which leads to activists misunderstanding history.
Such as in 2023, when Dublin Pride went as far as photoshopping a picture from the first gay rights protest in Ireland to fabricate a lie that trans was involved.
But a movement founded on the idea that people should be allowed to live honestly has become deeply uncomfortable with disagreement. There is no pride in shutting down diversity, the minute it goes against your own beliefs.
The LGBT movement has become less grassroots and more like a wider activist ecosystem where every cause has the same conclusions and anyone who questions them becomes the problem.
And when criticism becomes impossible, mistakes multiply.
You can see that in safeguarding failures and the unwillingness to ask difficult questions. That is arguably what led to the Stephen Ireland case being as severe as it was. No one wanted to question what was happening.
Over the years, criticism has been treated as bigotry instead of something worth engaging with. If you question gender ideology, you’re a transphobe. If you raise concerns about safeguarding, you’re spreading hate. If you point out tensions between trans rights and women’s rights you’re accused of “genocide”.
When institutions become more concerned with protecting moral authority than answering questions, warning signs get missed and uncomfortable conversations get avoided. We’ve seen this time and time again throughout history.
The loudest voices aren’t necessarily the most representative. They are simply the loudest.
This is what happens when you spend too long looking for ducks. The original fight was concrete, but after those victories were achieved the institutions built around them stayed. The same staff, funding and organisations. And those organisations built on struggle weren’t ready to declare the struggle was over.
That’s because organisations built to solve problems don’t want to vote themselves out of existence after those problems are solved. So they go looking for a new crisis, one that will keep the money flowing.
But when it comes to real issues, they don’t seem to care.
Earlier this year Senegal increased penalties for homosexual acts. Men can face imprisonment simply for being gay.
Two days later Jack Chambers, one of Ireland’s most prominent openly gay politicians and a figure within Ireland’s LGBT establishment, visited the country.
There was no outrage, not even a discussion. Zero pressure from the activists who never miss an opportunity to lecture the public about anything and everything.
That silence says something.
A movement that once existed to defend gay men and lesbians now spends its energy debating pronouns, language, and identity, while staying quiet when homosexuality is criminalised abroad.
That same mindset appears in another area many gays privately discuss but rarely speak about publicly. Modern day homophobia.
I regularly hear from gay men across Ireland who are concerned about safety, migration, and the importation of attitudes towards homosexuality from parts of the world where being gay remains illegal. Across Europe, attacks against gay men are on the rise. Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee here in Ireland for example. But speaking about that makes you a racist.
Whether people agree or disagree with those concerns isn’t the point. The point is that most are afraid to voice them at all because the movement that claims to represent them brands them as bigots once they do.
LGBT spaces are the one place they feel least comfortable speaking honestly.
And then the movement asks itself why so many gays are moving to the right. AFD and Reform for example have become largely popular with gay men.
The reasoning isn’t that complicated. When people stop feeling represented, they don’t disappear. They leave.
That’s the story of modern Pride, it has become so absorbed by radical activist politics to the point it struggles to represent the people it was built to serve.
Which brings me back to Tony’s ducks.
The tragedy wasn’t that the ducks left, it was that Tony didn’t know who he was without them.
So when the original fight was won, they had a choice between celebrating victory, or go looking for new ducks.
The people shouting loudest about gay rights are too busy chasing new causes, new identities and new battles to notice the footsteps of ordinary gays walking away.
The ducks left a long time ago. The question Pride hasn’t answered is, what it exists to do without them?
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