It's in All of Our Self-Interest

to undo misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia

I will begin by dismantling the compliment before anyone tries to hand it to me. When I strive to dismantle misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, I’m not merely being kind. When I devote my wild imagination to enhancing and celebrating the lives of women and LGBTQ+ people, my motivation goes way beyond an expression of niceness.

Niceness is a thin, well-behaved thing. It’s a way of being pleasant while changing nothing. What I’m doing is more selfish and sacred than that.

Here’s my confession: I do this work because I want to live in a gorgeous world, and I have understood for as long as I can remember that I can’t live in a gorgeous world while so much of it is caged.

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I was raised, as most straight white men are raised, inside an invisible bargain. The deal went like this: Accept a narrowed life, and in exchange you will be handed a little extra power. If you will only amputate your tenderness, ration your tears, treat your feelings as a security risk, and learn to dominate rather than to commune, then you will be permitted to stand a half-step above the women and the queer and nonbinary people and anyone else the culture diminishes.

I saw through it early. As a young man I understood, in my body before I could have argued it, that this was a robbery disguised as a coronation. The patriarchy did its utmost best to train me to devalue the feminine. It also tried to train me to deprecate the feminine in myself, including my own capacity for sensitivity, deep feelings, receptivity, and a sense of wonder.

The homophobia that the patriarchy tried to foist on me didn’t merely target other men who love men. It tried to install in me and every boy a low-grade panic that policed every unguarded affection and every place where male love might spill past its assigned borders. I watched it happen to other boys, but luckily it never took hold in me. I simply didn’t buy the fear. I didn’t accept that tenderness between men was a threat to be managed rather than one of the plain glories of being alive.

And I could see, even then, where the whole apparatus was headed: toward the lie that the self is a prison sentence rather than a work of art and that a person is stuck being whatever rigid roles they were assigned. I refused to believe that about anyone, which meant I got to refuse to believe it about myself, too.

I knew instinctively that every wall I was told to build against someone else’s freedom would turn out to be a wall inside my own imagination. So I refused to build them. And I as I emerged into adulthood, I got loud about it.

In the 1970s I turned my rock bands into loudspeakers for a high-intensity feminism and an unapologetic advocacy for gay rights and safety. For a straight white man in those years, this wasn’t a fashionable stance to strike; it was closer to a provocation. I caught a lot of shit for it from men who felt betrayed by a defector, from people who couldn’t fathom why I’d volunteer for a fight that wasn’t, as they saw it, mine to fight. But it was mine. It has always been mine. I wasn’t slumming as an ally. I was refusing to be swindled.

So when I fight for women and LGBTQ+ people, I am also fighting for the exiled parts of myself. This isn’t altruism performing a good deed for the less fortunate. It’s a jailbreak motivated by my clarity that we’re all susceptible to being snared in the same trap.

The Indigenous Australian activist Lilla Watson is often credited with a line I have carried for years: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

I take that as scripture. My freedom and everyone else’s are not two freedoms. They are one thing pretending, under duress, to be separate.

A culture that despises women is a culture that has declared war on its own source. A culture that persecutes queer and trans and nonbinary people is a culture that has made imagination a crime. I don’t want to be a citizen of that country. Not just because I am virtuous, but because I am greedy for beauty and liberation, and that country is a wasteland.

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I will be specific about my winnings, because vague nobility bores me and specificity is a form of respect.

When women rise into their full sovereign intelligence—their sublime, unbossed, uncontainable intelligence—the entire world grows smarter, kinder, wilder, and infinitely more interesting.

And I get to live in that world. I get to be surrounded by people operating at full power instead of half-throttled by contempt. Who wouldn’t want that? Only a fool volunteers to be the smartest voice in a room emptied of geniuses.

When queer, nonbinary, and trans people are free to invent themselves in private and public, they teach the rest of us that we, too, are permitted to be creative authors of our destinies. Every trans person who insists on becoming who they are is informing me that my life isn’t a fixed sentence but a living poem I am allowed to revise. That’s a gift of staggering value.

When love is allowed to take whatever shape love takes, the total quantity of love in the culture increases. And love isn’t a scarce resource I have to hoard. It’s a fire that lights other fires without diminishing itself. A society drenched in permitted love is a warmer, wilder, more erotic and more alive place to spend one’s incarnation.

This is what I mean by PRONOIA: the hypothesis, always worth testing, that reality is rigged in our favor, and that the liberation of the people I was urged to diminish is not a loss for me but a windfall. Their flourishing is my inheritance.

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I want to be clear that I’m not offering to save anyone. The white male savior is one of patriarchy’s favorite cartoon characters, and I have no interest in auditioning for the role. Women don’t need me to rescue them from a burning building; they need me to stop stacking the kindling and, more often, to shut up and hand them the water and get out of the doorway.

My job isn’t to lead the parade. My job is to be a fierce and joyful accomplice, to spend my inherited advantages recklessly and gladly, in service of a world where such advantages no longer exist.

And I want to do it while fully embodied and incarnate, not as a bloodless moral position but as a visceral delight. Too much allyship is performed with a long, grave face, as though justice were a grim tax we pay to feel clean.

I reject that funeral. The dismantling of misogyny and homophobia and transphobia isn’t a chore. It’s one of the most thrilling collaborative art projects our species has ever attempted: the reinvention of what a human being is allowed to be.

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So yes, when I do this work I’m serving the higher good of my culture. A culture that liberates its women becomes more intelligent. A culture that honors its queer, nonbinary, and trans citizens becomes more imaginatively courageous and more capable of transformation. A culture that lets love run free becomes more beautiful. These aren’t sacrifices I make on the altar of goodness. They are the conditions of a life I actually want to live.

I fight misogyny and homophobia and transphobia the way a person trapped in a stale room throws open every window. It’s not out of duty to the wind, but out of hunger for air.

Call it selfish, then. I’ll accept the charge and raise the stakes: It’s the most enlightened selfishness I know. My liberation is bound up with everyone’s. And I have come, exuberantly and greedily and for the rest of my life, to work together.

For anyone counting who’s missing

Someone is going to read my essay above and feel a sting: Why only these groups? Where is everyone else?

The answer is built into the argument itself.

I wrote about misogyny and homophobia and transphobia because those are prohibitions I felt pressing on my own life, and the freedoms I had to win for myself before I could recognize them in anyone else. This essay is the map of one particular jailbreak, mine. I won’t pretend I’ve made every escape or know every prison from the inside.

But the thesis doesn’t halt at the borders of my biography. It can’t. My liberation is bound up with everyone’s isn’t a slogan I get to apply selectively. If it’s true, it’s true all the way down.

So I’ll say more of it plainly.

A culture that brutalizes Black people is at war with its own genius.

A culture that works to erase Indigenous peoples is trying to amputate its own oldest memory and its deepest knowledge of how to actually live on this land.

A culture that treats immigrants as invaders is starving itself of the exact hunger and nerve and reinvention that keep a nation alive.

A culture that scorns its Latina and Latino people is spurning the very warmth and boldness it needs and secretly hungers for. A culture that demeans and diminishes its disabled people is throwing away its hardest-won wisdom about adaptation. A culture that punishes the poor is criminalizing a wound it inflicted in the first place. A culture that treats the homeless as inconvenient scenery to be cleared away is refusing to look at its own failure. A culture that pathologizes neurodivergent minds is narrowing the range of the ways it’s allowed to think. A culture at war with certain bodies that don’t match absurdly narrow beauty standards is at war with the fact of embodiment itself.

Each of those cruelties impoverishes the world I have to live in. Each of those liberations is, by the same greedy logic, my inheritance too.

I don’t say all of it every time I say any of it because no single essay can carry the whole weight of everything that needs undoing. But I will never pretend the wrong I named is the only wrong, or that the freedom I’m this greedy for has a color, a border, or a limit.

The invitation is identical for all of it: not to help from a safe distance, but to work together, because we have always been in this together.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of July 9

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Male humpback whales in the Pacific Ocean change their songs over the years. New phrases can spread across thousands of miles as other whales take up and transform them. Researchers don’t know why, but the pattern is clear: The whales value novelty even in their ancient rituals. They create an evolving musical tradition. Consider what this practice might suggest for your own relationship with the past, Cancerian. The memories and patterns you’re carrying don’t have to remain frozen. You can honor your history while remixing it, adding new verses, and changing the key. What needs to be preserved isn’t the exact form but the living spirit.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Leo-born oceanographer Marie Tharp created the first comprehensive maps of the ocean floor. Her work was pivotal in proving theories about plate tectonics.​ She did much of this work in the 1950s, when women weren’t even allowed aboard research vessels. She had to rely on data collected by others, never seeing the terrain she mapped. But her limitation became her advantage; distance allowed her to perceive patterns that field researchers missed. I suspect that you, too, are working with incomplete information, Leo. Does this disqualify you from drawing conclusions? No! I believe your inability to access certain details will compel you to see larger patterns. What you’re missing might be precisely what enables you to see what others can’t.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): The “problem” confronting you right now is unusual: Your vision is too sharp, your thinking too precise, and your words too unambiguous. This would usually be good news to celebrate, but at the moment it’s blocking you from noticing the subtle openings life is presenting. Those portals may only reveal themselves if you soften your intense scrutiny and call on a creative, blurry logic. It’s like how, at night, you sometimes see more clearly when you peer from the edges of your vision rather than staring straight ahead.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): This is a perfect moment to express your own unique power more than ever before. I invite you to act with conviction, assert your influence, and claim what you’ve earned. For best results, clarify your ambitions and assert your authority. Write down a formal vow or two. Don’t wait for approval from anyone higher up, and don’t waste time wondering whether destiny is on your side. The succulent opportunities aren’t somewhere else or someday later. They’re here and now.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): I’m exultant when a vigorous bike ride up the trail of my local mountain leaves me so cleansed and energized that a flash of truth strikes and instantly dissipates the illusions I’ve been clinging to. I get a delightful shock when, while wandering through a city’s maze of asphalt and litter, a sudden breeze carries the earthy aroma of a rebellious garden. I love it when the reckless choices of misguided leaders jolt my community into doubling down on our quest for audacious harmony, inventive affection, and untamed wisdom. How about you, dear Scorpio? Where do you search for your awakenings and salvations? Keep your inner radar tuned; they’re circling close.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Sagittarian physicist Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) proposed that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations might build megastructures around stars to capture their energy. These “Dyson spheres” would be detectable from Earth as unusual infrared signatures. We haven’t found any yet, but his idea revolutionized how we think about looking for alien intelligence. Moral of the story: Valuable contributions can come from inventing the framework for how to search for unknown things. In the coming weeks, Sagittarius, you might not solve problems, but you could redesign the questions. You may not find the answers, but you could create better tools for exploration.

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CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Do you have a muse? If not, please find one. You shouldn’t go another day without a provocative, inspiring presence to stir your imagination and drive you deliciously wild. If you already have a muse and that genius has been faithfully fueling your creative fire, bestow a reward. Give a gift or blessing that provides a muse-like boost to your muse. And if your existing muse has grown quiet lately, go off on an adventure together. Dream up plans to stimulate the bursts of kaleidoscopic energy that you two are capable of generating.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In some monastic traditions, practitioners engage in “work prayer.” They transform ordinary labor into spiritual practice not by thinking holy thoughts while working, but by bringing complete presence and fond attention to ordinary labors. Chopping vegetables becomes meditation. Sweeping floors becomes devotion. The sacredness arises from their wholehearted attitude. This would be an excellent experiment for you to try, Aquarius. Divine solace and inspiration will arrive as you perform your daily duties with verve and gratitude. Try this: For a few days or even two weeks, approach routine duties and familiar obligations with a ceremonial reverence. Be joyful for the privilege of being alive in the most ordinary ways.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): You’ve entered a phase when your magnetism and charisma will expand as you focus on ruminating deeply about what’s most meaningful to you. Seeking out new teachers and fresh lessons will bring lucky breaks and helpful influences into your sphere. Each fresh insight will polish your allure, and every surge of curiosity will add to your glow. Be extra sexy and ultra smart: Cosmic energies will work in your favor as you weave your id and intellect together.

ARIES (March 21-April 19): There are only two types of humans, right? Some of us serve beauty, truth, and goodness, while the rest pledge their allegiance to illusions, lies, and shadows. Our planet is now caught in a colossal showdown between these two sides. And it’s high time for you to align yourself with one or the other. JUST KIDDING! The truth is far messier and more interesting: Every one of us is a blend of luminosity and ignorance. And now is a perfect moment to study how those two currents move within you. When you clearly see how you contribute to the murky jumble, your commitment to love, harmony, and justice will soar.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): You’ll move with style and purpose if you take quick jaunts, dare gentle risks, and make a few nimble leaps of faith. You’ll go awry and astray if you wander too far afield, chase swaggering adventures, or try vaulting across yawning chasms. Keep it light, sharp, and intuitive, Taurus. Refrain from lugging heavy emotional baggage or drifting into daydream limbo. It’ll be wise to trust your sprightly impulses, but foolish to dissect them so ruthlessly that the magic leaks out. The color amber and the number three will be your allies. Somber gray and the number four will not. Align with sly visionaries and soulful realists but sidestep bitter contrarians and nostalgic clingers.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I swear I’m smarter in some places than in others. My intelligence soars in Barcelona, Kyoto, Aix-en-Provence, France, and Florence, Italy. But I seem dull-witted in Munich, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. Even in Northern California, my long-time home, some areas bring out the best in me. I feel mediocre on Valencia Street in San Francisco, for instance, whereas I’m extra wise in downtown Berkeley. Why is this? The branch of astrology known as astrocartography says that my strengths are more likely to shine in certain spots than others. In the coming weeks, Gemini, I urge you to experiment with the possibility that this may be true for you, as well. Wander far and wide. Find out where you feel most aligned with your deep, bright, genuine self.

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