What the relativists ultimately cannot stomach are moral arguments coming from the mouths of Westerners, directed at non-Westerners. Writing in the Nation, Richard Kim assails “assumptions about the ‘clash of civilizations’ that supposedly pits enlightened, secular, humane Western society against backward, theocratic, oppressive Islamic society.” In the mind of the “anti-imperialist,” morality derives from oppression, and as it is the citizens of the “global south” who have always been the oppressed, it is they who have the right to figure these things out on their own terms, free from the hectoring of Americans, Europeans, or Zionist Israelis. “Absolute demands replace dialogues,” Long complains. “And the demands neglect disparities of power.” Gays in the UK, he writes, “have accumulated cultural capital and political influence” while “British Muslim communities…feel steadily more besieged, not only by daily prejudice but also by anti-immigrant hysteria and a security state,” as if the bigotry that exists in Britain toward Muslims excuses Muslim bigotry towards gays (and others).

These ideas will get an airing in April at the City University of New York, at a conference entitled “Homonationalism and Pinkwashing,” in which the United States will also be accused of using its supposed open-mindedness toward homosexuality as a propaganda tool. To the proponents of the “pinkwashing” meme, the hard-fought, tangible victories won by gay people over the past five decades are illusory, because America remains a capitalist, oppressive, and imperialist hegemon. “In the United States, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people have been invited into an equality defined, not by rights, but by the ability to participate openly in immoral wars,” Sarah Schulman writes in the conference description, reducing over half a century of gay-rights activism to enjoying, as an acknowledged homosexual, the right to kill innocent, dark-skinned people. By failing to engage in a more radical, Marxist critique of society, gay activists have sold out: They advocate for “assimilationist” goals like marriage and military service, when what they should really be doing is undermining the patriarchy and advocating pacifism. They have become handmaidens to “homonationalism,” or the “collusion between LGBT people and identification with the nation state, re-enforcement of racial and national boundary, and systems of supremacy ideology no longer interrupted by homophobia.”

As gay people overseas become increasingly emboldened by the gains seen in the West, they are taking on a new visibility, which can be seen in the proliferation of gay associations around the world and through public demonstrations in places ranging from Moscow to Colombo. This has resulted in a backlash from illiberal regimes and other hostile forces, often religious but sometimes also secular nationalist. And so the positive development of gay people asserting their place in society and demanding legal equality has been met with reactionary counterattack.