Queer Imagination, Solidarity, and the Road to 2045

Our community faces a double crisis: a crisis of imagination and a crisis of solidarity. Defining an ambitious global political and economic project is our way out.

In recent years, my Pride reflections have been more like love letters to our community. This year calls for something else—a manifesto. We’re not just facing an external backlash; we’re facing a collapse of our own vision. Our imagination has stalled, our solidarity is fraying, and the forward momentum that once defined us has curdled into nostalgia. It’s time to stop looking back and start building what comes next.

The claim by gay conservatives, mostly in the U.S., that we’ve “achieved our goals”—marriage equality and open military service—is a symptom of this failure of imagination. There is obviously more to life than fighting wars or getting married. American progressives fall into a different trap, searching for constant symbolic victories, inclusive pronouns, semantic acrobatics, DEI consulting paychecks, a Vogue cover, and a Netflix role. As if continuous attention was the same as inclusion.

The reality is that we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of gay liberation—even in the West.

Beyond the well-documented disparities in our economic and health outcomes or the fact that 66 countries still criminalize homosexuality, 2025 laid bare our dependence on the whims of others. We found ourselves exposed to the shifting winds of institutions, governments, and corporate sponsors. As I wrote in 2020, after I left the United Nations, we are still guests of straight people. We don’t co-own the house.

This is true of many other realms. In my recent work around the corporate boardroom,I often hear stories of queer leaders who owe their success to the kindness of a straight man—a CEO, a gatekeeper, someone who “took them under their wing” or “threw them a bone.”

It’s not surprising that we instinctively feel the way out of our 2025 predicament is to make ourselves lovable again. We are back to square one: thinking of clever ways to make them like us.

Visibility in media, strategic messaging, and legal advocacy propelled many of our early victories. These tools gave shape to our movement and opened doors once firmly shut. So it’s no surprise that we’ve come to believe they’re the only path forward. But this belief has also fed a deeper myth: that our progress depends on the goodwill of allies, that our value lies in being legible and palatable to straight institutions, and that ambition must always be modest. It’s the story of the benevolent sponsor, the straight savior—the foundation upon which much of our current institutional architecture still rests.

That’s how the LGBTQ+ movement in the U.S. ended up fully subcontracting its fight to the Democratic Party, with disastrous results this November. That’s how our leaders can claim at their galas that the evidence of our imminent victory was their 90 seconds on stage at the DNC, Davos, or Cannes.

I’ve bought into that myth, too. I wore a necktie for 20 years. I worked the rooms. First, at the World Bank—an institution that froze lending to Uganda in protest of its draconian anti-LGBTQ+ law two years ago, only to reverse course yesterday in a clear wink to its largest shareholder. Then, at the UN, where funding for LGBTQ+ initiatives is evaporating as we speak. And more recently, in the corporate world, where many former allies have joined what will be remembered as the great 2025 Rainbow exodus.

These institutions have, in different ways, chosen funding over principle in the past five months, erasing years of painstaking progress. This is the betrayal—not just of queer Ugandans but of the idea that inclusion only matters if it holds firm when it's inconvenient or unprofitable.

Even our language reveals the limits of our imagination. We celebrate “resilience” as if survival were the ultimate goal. But resilience is a neoliberal virtue—it rewards endurance, not transformation. It praises us for adapting to the cage, not for breaking it. We claim “a return on equality,” as if our worth were measured in our productivity or purchasing power. But we are not just economic pawns or diversity metrics. Our liberation must mean more than being part of a straight GDP.

As Larry Kramer once said, “We are not crumbs. We must not accept crumbs.”

That’s for the crisis of imagination.

The crisis of solidarity is its natural twin. Without an inspiring shared project, we drift. We trade collective dreams for private success. We, like Scott Bessent, mistake personal wins as the promise of ineluctable community progress: “In a certain geographic region at a certain economic level, being gay is not an issue.”

The truth is that Bessent is where he is because of our past sacrifices. He is alive because of us. And he must pay it forward: that should be the root of our solidarity.

Some of our fraying solidarity is structural. We lack the anchors that bind other communities—a shared religion, generational continuity through children, and a fixed geography. Ours is a chosen community, and choosing requires intention. Solidarity must be built; it cannot be assumed.

Our solidarity is also a symptom of a leadership crisis. We lack discipline because we have no chiefs or institutions besides self-governing nonprofits with many vested interests.

And yet we have a singular structural asset: we are everywhere, across class, race, gender, and geography. We already have all the raw materials for a more ambitious project. We can break free.

What struck me most these past months is how many of us still cling to the myth of American marriage equality (I say American deliberately, because its narrative often conveniently erased the fact that the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada led the way) as if it were the pinnacle of queer progress, as if good lawyers and tight messaging could save us again, as if queer progress began and ended in Washington.

Strangely, we cling to our American marriage mythology, not our global AIDS crisis response, which I personally find more inspiring because it is a story of empowerment, innovation, and building parallel systems when existing ones abandon us.

I’m tired of hearing American LGBTQ+ leaders rehash the same playbook—win the midterms, litigate bad laws, try to rewind the clock to June 26, 2015. That model had its moment. American hegemony served us, for a time. And while we shouldn’t abandon the fights we’re in—or the hope that more will come to like us—we need something bolder now.

A global vision rooted in ethical living, pluralism, and human development. A bold project for 2045 that builds a global ecosystem of dignity and inclusion—where queer people don’t just survive but thrive. Where we invest in education, health, entrepreneurship, finance, and culture. Where we channel our savings and talents into community-owned ventures that create durable economic power. Where we build transnational democratic institutions—led by us, for us—capable of uniting our fragmented diaspora.

Technology can also accelerate what once felt impossible. We were once dispersed and invisible. Now, we can be connected and intentional. We’ve built apps to have sex—but not yet to organize, invest, or build power. Grindr has 14 million users - I am not sure that’s progress - but it shows the potential.

Our aim by 2045 shouldn’t be mere safety or visibility. It should be nothing less than the power to shape our future.

Imagine if we had started this project ten years ago. Imagine if we had invested our money in an economic project rather than in political fundraisers and legal fees.

Someone commented on a previous post this week: “But what does that look like? Bullet points please.” I loved it. I know—I’m naming a vast, unruly ambition without offering a blueprint or twenty-year plan for queer political and economic power. That work will take time, and much of it must happen offstage—in rooms built on trust, not in manifestos like this one. We’ll argue over tactics, disagree on priorities, invent new tools, and resurrect old ones. Some will focus on capital, others on culture, some on cities, others on the global stage. That’s as it should be. Once we have goals and leadership, the paths will multiply.

So no, this piece is not the “roadmap to 2045” it claims to be. But I know this: we’ve been playing a game that was never designed for us to win. We’ve spent too long trying to be included in rooms that will never see us as equals. It’s time to build our own rooms, systems, economies, and narratives. Not for visibility. Not for applause. But for power, and each other. This Pride, I’m not interested in looking back at our past achievements but in envisioning how we build on them.

This Pride, let’s return to that work.

Let’s stop looking at the past.
Let’s stop waiting for crumbs.
Let’s start building our banquet.