Introduction: Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Kay.

Today my guest is Canadian gay activist-turned-journalist Adam Zivo, whose columns appear regularly in the National post newspaper. Adam writes regularly about a variety of subjects, including the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, drug policy, and the politics surrounding LGBT activism, which is the subject we’ll be talking about today.

In his most recent column, titled Canada needs a new LGB movement—without the T, Adam writes that following the legalisation of gay marriage, many gay activists drifted away from LGBT organisations—which were then co-opted by activists primarily interested in transgender activism and esoteric queer causes. As a result, Adam argues, many of these organisations have come to disdain or even vilify gay men and women.

Adam Zivo: Canada needs a new LGB movement — without T

Gay organizations have been co-opted by transgender activists who often despise homosexuals

National PostAdam Zivo

Here’s a quote from his article:

Cannibalized from the inside by gender radicalism, the mainstream LGBTQ movement came to insist that biological sex is irrelevant to orientation. Lesbians were advised to enjoy ‘girl dick’ while gay men were pressured to unlearn their ‘genital preferences.’ Homosexuals who asserted their sexual boundaries were excommunicated from queer spaces and dating apps while being smeared as bigots.

Please enjoy my interview with gay activist-turned-National Post columnist Adam Zivo, who spoke to me from Odessa, Ukraine.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited.

Jonathan Kay: Adam Zivo, thanks so much for joining the Quillette podcast.

Adam Zivo: Thanks for having me on the show. It’s great to be here.

JK: I’ve been reading your columns for years now, which is a strange thing to say because you look about fifteen years old. Of course, everybody younger than forty looks like a teenager to me. You’ve written for Quillette, but this is the first time you’ve been on the podcast. I’m going to ask you about a few different subjects. But let me start with your most recent column, or at least the most recent as of this broadcast. We actually had a British professor, who happens to be gay and has written about human rights for many years, write an essay for us. In it, he describes how he used to take for granted that LGBT rights were a single fight. But over time, his view changed. Could you describe the timeline of how your view became more nuanced regarding the separation between LGB and T rights?

AZ: Sure. Just for context, I’m 33 years old. I came of age in the early 2010s, when I was in university. From the mid to late 2010s, I was a fairly successful gay rights activist in Toronto. I founded my own LGBTQ advocacy campaign called “Love is Love is Love,” and we produced large-scale art and educational installations in civic spaces in Toronto and Ottawa.

As a result, I engaged quite a bit with the local queer activist scene in Toronto. I saw both the good and the bad. Over time, I grew frustrated because I realised many of the activists I was engaging with were not practical people. They were more interested in tearing down capitalism and discussing abstract revolutions than in achieving real reform.

JK: Queering capitalism and stuff like that.

AZ: Exactly. For them, there was this need for ideological and moral purity. They seemed woefully incurious about how actual reform is achieved or how one consolidates a base of support. What I noticed was that the trans community tended to be more radical than the gay community. Most of the gay people I knew were more assimilationist, more moderate. Not all, of course. Whereas the trans community was sometimes really out there politically. I didn’t mind at the time, as I had sympathy for them. I still do, in many respects. I understood that historically, the trans community was a junior partner in the LGBTQ acronym. So when gay marriage was legalised—in 2015 in the US, earlier in Canada—many gay men and lesbians retreated from activism. They felt victorious and decided to focus on their lives.

JK: You grew up in that world.

AZ: Exactly. As a Canadian, I already had marriage rights, but I would still refresh Wikipedia to see which new country had legalised same-sex marriage. It was a huge win when the US legalised it, since the US is the nexus of international queer activism. So when that happened, many gays and lesbians stepped away, feeling they had won. The more militant gays, lesbians, and trans activists stayed. I think they felt abandoned, and they also had more radical politics.

So I noticed increasing militancy within the LGBTQ community in Toronto. Many queer activists seemed to exist in a cultural bubble. They were uninterested in what others thought, and frankly, quite ignorant of broader society. This wasn’t initially specific to the trans community, but over time, it became that way. By the late 2010s, I saw a lot of demonisation of cisgendered gay men.

JK: And cisgendered means someone who doesn’t have gender dysphoria.

AZ: Exactly. Like you or me. “Cis gay man” became a slur. We were seen as a fifth column within the LGBTQ community because we were deemed insufficiently radical. On top of that, I saw an unsettling revisionist history emerge—one that erased gay men from the story of their own liberation. The new narrative claimed that gay men owed their rights to trans women of colour.

JK: Let me stop you there. That’s a strange subplot. You read these new versions of the Stonewall story and suddenly every heroic figure is a black trans person. It felt like a weird rewriting of history.

AZ: Yes, and I thought it was an effort to delegitimise gay men politically and remove their moral authority. For example, Marsha Johnson—the black trans woman said to have thrown the first brick at Stonewall—wasn’t even there at the beginning. She came later. But people accepted that myth as fact. Even if she had thrown the first brick, what matters is the broader body of work in rights advocacy: legal activism, institution-building, maintaining newspapers, engaging politicians. That’s the hard, unglamorous work that gets ignored when you focus only on someone throwing a brick. It shows an infatuation with the aesthetic of revolution rather than the substance of reform.

JK: We just had Pride Month here in Toronto. In my neighbourhood, I saw trans-identified groups marching with slogans like “Punch a fascist” and “The world needs queering.” There was a revolutionary gloss to it—almost violent cosplay, filled with academic jargon. Things like “eradicating the family” have become strange obsessions in queer theory.

AZ: Academics are a big part of this. But I think there are strong psychological drivers too. Many trans people are marginalised. They have difficult lives. Despite my disagreements with parts of trans activism, I feel a lot of sympathy. Gender dysphoria is agonising, and so is the social scorn, employment discrimination, housing issues. The same applies, less now but still, to some gays and lesbians. When people are rejected by society, they sometimes create a mythical alternative world to save them. This happens in religion too: People who feel ostracised become fundamentalists.

I view the revolutionary myths in the queer community as akin to religious fervour—an attempt to bring some imagined heaven onto Earth. But it’s also cowardly. If you fixate on utopia, you stop engaging with the real world and with practical progress.

JK: You engage with your social media silo instead.

AZ: Exactly. You avoid the hard work of making incremental, real-world change. Just like zealots who wait for heaven, you disengage from practical action.

JK: But it becomes very exalted and abstract. I’m not a member of the LGBT community, but I see it play out where, to some extent, these quasi-religious ideas are mapped onto other political causes. You get this imagined narrative that Indigenous life before European contact was a gender-bending, queer nirvana. You see new terms like “Indigiqueer” and “Two-Spirit.” Then it’s mapped onto strange ideas, like the notion that Palestinian society is queer-friendly, or that Marxism is inherently queer. There’s a conflation of utopian political ideologies with queerness—and it all becomes very untethered from reality.

AZ: Yes, it does. And I think the common thread is that utopianism is a powerful coping mechanism for people who are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo.

JK: Right. I’m glad you emphasised sympathy for people with gender dysphoria and the importance of baseline liberal rights—like non-discrimination in housing or employment. Just because you’re a man who wears a dress doesn’t mean you should be discriminated against.

AZ: Precisely. What I want to emphasise is that my initial alienation from the community stemmed from its impractical politics, particularly among the activist class. And there’s one story that really epitomises that. If that’s alright—I’m not sure how much time we have?

JK: Absolutely.

AZ: So back in 2019, there were some Christian preachers who wanted to organise a “Christian rights” rally that would march down Church Street.

JK: And for listeners who aren’t familiar with Toronto, Church Street is the heart of what used to be called the Gay Village.

AZ: Exactly. They justified it by saying, “Well, it’s called Church Street, and we’re rallying for Christian rights.” But it was obvious they wanted to provoke the gay community.

JK: Like staging a Palestinian rights march through a Jewish neighbourhood—there’s a message in that.

AZ: Right. The pastor leading it was known for showing up in the Gay Village and preaching in a deliberately provocative way. He wore a bodycam to film people reacting angrily, and then he’d post the footage on YouTube claiming Christians were being persecuted. It was all very strategic.

JK: So a hardcore culture warrior.

AZ: Very much so. And I was actually impressed by how effectively he worked his strategy, even if his cause directly conflicted with my rights. So I thought: If this kind of activism is rising, then LGBTQ activists need to take a strategic approach. It was obvious these Christian activists knew LGBTQ people in the late 2010s were angry and impulsive, and they were counting on that.

When the “Christian positivity” rally was announced, many LGBTQ leaders in Toronto held an emergency meeting at City Hall. I nearly got in but didn’t have formal permission. The focus in that meeting, from what I gathered, was on denying the Christian group the footage they wanted—footage of angry queers yelling at them, which would make them look persecuted. So the idea was to organise a positive, pro-LGBTQ event in the Gay Village, featuring supportive religious leaders. I thought that was a smart strategy.

But then, The 519, which is a major LGBTQ institution in Toronto, went rogue. They’re very radical and militant. They organised a counter-protest called the “Army of Lovers.” Immediately, it was clear that would be a disaster—militant language, emotional escalation. It gave the Christian activists exactly what they wanted.

AZ: On the day of the protest, thankfully the police took control of a major intersection and kept the two sides well separated. That limited contact and helped prevent the Christians from getting the provocative footage they wanted. I ended up sneaking over to the Christian side—there weren’t fences everywhere, and I’m not obviously identifiable as gay, so I could pass.

JK: You can pass, yeah.

AZ: Right. And I was shocked by how organised they were. Everyone wore matching T-shirts, carried the same signs—it was all very centralised. They even had booklets with talking points. There was real discipline. Then I went over to the LGBTQ side, and it was utter chaos. No discipline, no coherent messaging. It was an amalgam of different groups, brought together at short notice, and they were angry. They were shouting that the Christians were “white supremacists,” which made no sense because around seventy to eighty percent of them were racialised—immigrants, black, or brown. Meanwhile, the LGBTQ side was about ninety percent white.

It was surreal. You had radical, mostly white, queer leftists shouting “white supremacist” at a group largely made up of people of colour. The pastor kept saying he wanted to debate someone from the LGBTQ community, but no one stepped up. So I thought, I’ll do it—better me than someone who might turn it into a spectacle. I calmly approached him from behind the police cordon and said, “You want to talk? I’ll talk.”

For me, it was like a game. The rule was: If you show anger, if you break face, you lose.

JK: Same as on social media, like X or Twitter. First person to lose their cool, loses.

AZ: Exactly. So I decided to remain perfectly polite and composed. And I could see, in his eyes, that he was slightly unhinged—not saying Christians are like that, but this individual definitely had a fanatical edge. He asked me to justify basic facts, like when I said that evangelicals fund anti-LGBT movements globally. He challenged that, and I responded by citing my recent trip to Taiwan, where it was demonstrably happening.

Anyway, I ended up taking up quite a bit of their time and helped defuse tensions. But then he started claiming the police were applying double standards because I was allowed through the cordon and his group wasn’t. I explained that I hadn’t gone through the cordon—I’d walked around it. So he said, “Well, let’s do that too,” and suddenly the entire protest started to move. I had a brief panic: Did I just give them that idea? But I think they probably knew already and were just waiting for a pretext.

They later posted our conversation to YouTube. It got at least 50,000 views. Most of the comments were predictably negative—given their audience—but some were surprisingly positive, complimenting my calmness and politeness. That made me realise that even a small percentage of positive responses—five or ten percent—is better than nothing. It’s something.

But the real kicker was that after the Christian march had moved on and was blocked elsewhere by police, the “Army of Lovers” returned to Church Street and celebrated. They were claiming victory: “We scared them off. We stopped them from marching.” And I thought, you’ve completely missed the point. It was never about marching. It was about making you look like the villains. And in that respect, they succeeded. That’s when I realised how badly LGBTQ activists in Toronto were misreading the situation—and I saw that a backlash was coming.

JK: What year was this?

AZ: 2019. I began warning my friends then: if we don’t change course—if we continue with this unstrategic militancy, with rageful activism and no thought to optics—we’re going to face a backlash. I didn’t know when, but I knew it was inevitable. And sure enough, by the early 2020s, the backlash arrived. By 2023, we were in the middle of it.

JK: Can I ask you about that? You’ve written columns for the National Post citing survey data showing that—putting aside trans rights—support for LGB rights has declined. The theory is—and I suppose it’s impossible to prove definitively—that in the public mind, LGBT rights are now one bundle. And if being pro-LGBT means supporting things like male access to women’s sports, rape shelters, locker rooms, or aggressive medical transitions for minors, then many people—myself included—will say, “Well, I can’t support that.” Because those demands seem radical and destructive.

You’ve pointed out in your writing that support for what we might call radical trans activist demands has dropped sharply. But there’s been collateral damage: Support for gay marriage has gone down as well. Not as much, but still. And it seems the more people are told it’s one cause, the more one ends up dragging down the other.

AZ: Right. We can’t prove causality here, but anecdotally, I do think there’s a connection. LGBTQ activists insisted this was an all-or-nothing package—you can’t go à la carte. So people started saying, “Well then maybe the entire movement is broken.”

Then you had critics who were deeply sceptical of the whole LGBTQ agenda but who pointed to genuine issues—like the medical transition of minors. And because they were saying something true, they gained an audience. People who normally wouldn’t have listened to them—people who were worried about women competing against biological males or about children being transitioned without parental consent—suddenly started paying attention.

JK: These are real concerns.

AZ: Yes. So those critics gained traction with people who would otherwise dismiss them. And then, anti-trans rhetoric started bleeding into anti-gay rhetoric. Take someone like Matt Walsh, for example. I disagree with much of what he says, but some of his criticisms of the trans movement are valid. He’s pointed out, for instance, that under current gender ideology, there’s no coherent definition of what it means to be a woman.

And because of that, he now has a large audience. But then he uses that platform to say things like, “Gay couples shouldn’t adopt.” And that gets through to people.

JK: He gains credibility by saying some common-sense things, and then he extends that into outright homophobia.

AZ: Exactly. I talk to a wide range of people—even though I’m currently mostly based in Ukraine, when I’m in Toronto, I have politically diverse acquaintances. Many are socially progressive and genuinely kind. They want to support trans and gay rights, but they’re uncomfortable with the excesses of recent trans activism. And they don’t know how to express that discomfort.

If the LGBTQ community can’t speak to those people, can’t give them a reasonable middle ground, I fear they’ll drift toward figures who are outright hostile to gay people. Look at what happened with young, straight men in the West. For over a decade, they were vilified—told their masculinity was toxic, that they were the root of all problems. And many of them turned to the Right, drawn in by toxic figures like Andrew Tate, simply because no one else offered them a positive vision of manhood.

If you tell a boy he’s inherently bad because he’s a man, and you give him no healthy alternative, he’ll find one—even if it’s harmful. I think something similar is happening within the LGBTQ context.

Gay rights, I fear, are becoming collateral damage. And I’m not the only one who sees this. There’s a growing awareness within the LGB community that trans activists—who’ve held the reins for the past decade—have been disastrous in many respects. There’s an increasing desire among some gays and lesbians to assert themselves as a distinct community. Not all, of course. But some want to say: “Let the trans movement do its thing, but we’re going to pursue our own advocacy now. Because we don’t want our rights jeopardised by another group that refuses to listen and insists on pushing a highly impractical political agenda.”

JK: Could you explain something to my listeners—though maybe you don’t know the answer. Whenever I see trans-themed activism in Toronto, particularly during Pride, there’s often a morose tone to it. I think last year they had something called the “Transgender Day of Resilience.” I was on the subway that day—it was packed with people coming back from the event. There were a lot of masks, anti-Israel paraphernalia, and oddly, many had canes. There’s also a trend of people claiming disabilities that seem... somewhat performative.

Can you shed any light on the cross-fertilisation of radical ideologies—like Middle East politics, public health activism—and how they get folded into queer or trans activism? It’s all quite strange. You infiltrated the Christian rally in 2019—have you done something similar with these groups?

AZ: Honestly, it would be much harder now. I’m fairly well-known at this point, and I’m not well liked in radical queer spaces.

JK: You look more Christian than trans, I have to say.

AZ: [laughs] Right. And frankly, I wouldn’t want to risk being assaulted by Antifa types. Not that it’s likely, but it’s definitely possible.

JK: So you’re more afraid of “Transtifa” than the Christians?

AZ: Yeah. Funny you say that—going back to 2019, I was already known as a centrist or centre-right gay guy. I had the entire gay community on Facebook and was constantly debating people. For example, I argued that cutting ties with the police was a bad idea. Marginalised communities should cultivate good relationships with powerful institutions for self-preservation.

JK: And that position made you a fascist in their eyes?

AZ: Exactly. I was called a fascist multiple times. The far-left didn’t like me, even though at the time I was actively doing LGBTQ advocacy. In fact, I had just launched Toronto’s “Big Gay Bus”—a commuter bus wrapped in queer content, with the interior turned into an educational installation. But that still wasn’t enough to satisfy the radicals.

JK: Because in their eyes, it was a Menshevik bus, not a Bolshevik one—ideologically impure.

AZ: [laughs] Precisely. I was just not radical enough. No matter what I did for the community, I was still treated with hostility. So if that was the situation in 2019, I can’t imagine what it would be like now. I don’t want to sound self-important, but enough people know who I am that I’d be concerned about attending one of those protests.

JK: Toronto can be a small town in that kind of context.

AZ: Exactly. All it takes is one person whispering into someone’s ear to compromise your safety. But let’s focus on this performative disability trend—it’s actually quite interesting.

JK: You know what I mean, right? The canes, the affectations, the exaggerated limps…

AZ: Oh yes. This all goes back to Tumblr culture in the early 2010s. Tumblr was an incubator for far-left politics that later migrated into universities. It fostered a worldview where victimhood conferred social status. I had friends who were deep into that culture—one began walking with a cane, performatively disabled. Later they identified as trans. They were also autistic. They really fit that stereotype.

JK: You also see things like oversized headphones, phobias of sensory input—it’s like a whole cult of vulnerability.

AZ: Exactly. Now, if we loop this back to trans identity: Historically, trans people had a relatively consistent clinical presentation. Most were natal males who exhibited gender dysphoria from an early age—three or four years old—and that dysphoria persisted into adolescence. By fifteen or sixteen, you could reasonably say: this person is probably trans.

JK: And just to clarify—this isn’t what’s sometimes referred to as autogynephilia?

AZ: No, not at all. That’s something else entirely. What I’m describing is not a fetish. These individuals have had consistent dysphoria since early childhood. Calling that a fetish doesn’t make sense.

JK: The politically correct term would be “paraphilia,” I think. But yes, you’re talking about something distinct from, say, someone like Eddie Izzard in the UK—middle-aged males who identify as trans much later in life, often in ways that appear very different.

AZ: Exactly. The traditional model of being trans wasn’t about sexualised roleplay or cosplay. It was about persistent, long-standing dysphoria. And most reasonable people had sympathy for that group, because it genuinely sucks to feel like you’re in the wrong body.

But then, in the 2010s, something new emerged. You had thirteen, fourteen, fifteen-year-olds—often girls—with no history of gender dysphoria suddenly identifying as trans. Often their friends were doing it too. Many of them had mental health comorbidities: autism, bipolar disorder, trauma. Some had been sexually assaulted. Identifying as trans became a way to escape or cope with that trauma.

JK: OCD is another common comorbidity.

AZ: Yes, exactly. For many, being trans became a way to feel normal—or to reinvent themselves. It offered a clean break from a painful past. That’s why there’s such an emphasis on “deadnaming” being taboo. Changing your name symbolises leaving that past behind. If you were bullied for being an effeminate boy, for instance, and you say, “I’m not a failed boy, I’m actually a girl,” that becomes a way to reclaim dignity. But ironically, it’s a homophobic impulse.

JK: Yes. If the solution to homophobic bullying is to say, “You’re not gay—you’re actually trans,” then the movement itself is, ironically, reinforcing homophobia.

AZ: Precisely. And this is something we saw at the Tavistock clinic in the UK. That’s the shorthand name for the gender identity clinic that was eventually shut down because of serious concerns over the care they were providing. They were putting children on hormones and medicalised transition pathways far too quickly. Some of the cases were frankly absurd—like young autistic boys identifying as Asian women.

JK: Wait—white boys identifying as Asian women? After too much anime?

AZ: A lot of anime, yes.

There’s a great book about all this called Time to Think by Hannah Barnes. She’s a journalist at The Times, and she interviewed around sixty clinicians who worked at Tavistock. Many of those clinicians were themselves gay and had entered the field because they wanted to help gender-distressed youth. They weren’t right-wing ideologues. But they saw what was happening and were disturbed.

These gay clinicians would hear things like a boy saying he wanted to have sex the “right” way—or girls saying they felt sick at the idea of being lesbians. Instead of exploring whether those were cases of internalised homophobia, they were fast-tracked into transition. Some of the clinicians joked that at the rate they were transing gay kids, there wouldn’t be any left.

So yes, the concern that the new trans movement has become homophobic isn’t baseless. The influx of these new, often traumatised, trans-identifying individuals dramatically changed the trans community.

AZ: For example, previously, most trans people were natal males. With this new wave, the majority were natal females. And it changed what it meant to be trans. Before, being trans required a real commitment—you went on hormones, pursued surgery, and had gender dysphoria. That was the “transmedicalist” view: to be trans, you had to exhibit clear clinical signs and pursue medical transition.

But with this influx, the definition of transness became more amorphous. Dysphoria was no longer necessary. You didn’t owe anyone any particular gender expression. You could use any pronouns. So someone could be a bearded male using he/him pronouns, and still call themselves a trans woman. Which makes no sense.

Essentially, because the definition of transness became so vague and unregulated, it became easy for people to latch onto the identity and exploit it for social capital—especially in subcultures where being oppressed is a kind of currency. So when you see people at marches with canes, or expressing exaggerated fear of COVID, or claiming trans identities without any medical transition—these things all stem from the same psychological roots.

JK: Though to be fair, I think many of them sincerely believe they have these conditions. It becomes a kind of idiom for expressing emotional pain and social alienation. When you’re young and you don’t feel loved or admired—or when people ignore you on social media—this framework gives you a vocabulary for expressing all that. It’s not necessarily cynical. It’s just the language available. But I can see how, for someone who’s gay and relatively content with that identity, this new language would feel completely alien.

AZ: Yes. And for the people immersed in that language, it becomes a deeply entrenched part of their identity. It’s an effective coping mechanism to a degree. So if you suggest that they might not be the same kind of trans person as, say, a traditional transsexual, they don’t see that as a discussion. They see it as genocidal. As bigotry.

JK: The rhetoric becomes apocalyptic. Ironically, if you wanted to carry out a long-term genocide, sterilising people would be a good way to do it—and that’s what many of these policies actually do.

Let’s talk practicality. In mainstream LGBT organisations—as with any activist group—those with the most extreme and emotive rhetoric often dominate. If someone comes along and says, “We got gay marriage twenty years ago; let’s enjoy that,” it’s not a very sexy message. But if someone says, “No one is free until everyone is free—including Palestinians, non-binary people, and trans individuals,” and throws in slogans like “smash capitalism” and “reimagine the family,” that kind of radical sloganeering resonates more. It has momentum.

Even if they’re a minority, their message spreads because it’s romantic and morally charged. So how do you push back on that? Because from what you’re saying, it sounds like you represent what seventy, eighty, maybe even ninety percent of people in the LGBT community actually think. But it’s considered taboo to say it aloud. What’s your position? Do you see any hope?

AZ: It’s going to be difficult. But before we talk about hope, let me offer a framework to understand why LGBT organisations tend toward radicalism. There are three main factors.

First, the type of person who chooses to work in this sector is often someone who views their queerness as central to their identity. If you’re incidentally gay or just want to live your life, you’re probably not going to work at a gay community centre—especially when nonprofit jobs don’t pay well. But if your entire identity is built around being queer or trans, you’re more likely to gravitate to that space. And people who define themselves by their identity are more likely to hold radical beliefs.

Second, there’s the social and moral capital that comes with being a crusader. I think of The 519 in Toronto, for example. At the apex of LGBTQ acceptance—around 2019 to 2021—they somehow became even more radical. They catastrophised everything, acting as though they were under siege. And I got the sense that, like certain religious leaders, they needed the world to be a scary place so they could position themselves as saviours. Their power depended on the perception of danger.

JK: Like a cult. Cults say, “No one understands us. We’re persecuted.”

AZ: Exactly. If your relevance is built on the idea that the world is dangerous and hateful, then you have a vested interest in maintaining that belief—for yourself and others. Now, things are indeed deteriorating, so I understand concern about homophobia now. But back in 2020 and 2021, when things were relatively good, their behaviour was telling.

Third, financial incentives. After same-sex marriage was legalised in the US, LGBTQ organisations faced a kind of existential crisis. Marriage equality had been a very effective fundraising cause. Once that was achieved, they needed something else to rally support—and donations. So the causes they promoted became increasingly niche and radical.

If we now tell those organisations to be more moderate, we’re in effect endangering their most compelling pitch to donors. We’re threatening their financial health. Yes, they could pivot to community support—helping homeless queer youth, or providing sexual health services. But those things aren’t sexy. They’re harder to monetise. GLAAD and EGALE, for example, are heavily funded by private donors. But organisations focused on community support are largely dependent on public funding.

So when you look at all three factors—self-selecting radicals, the incentives of moral authority, and donor-driven financial pressures—it’s no surprise that LGBT organisations have grown more extreme. And unfortunately, that makes reform very difficult.

JK: So I guess that’s what you’re up against. If you tried to drive your “Big Gay Bus” around Toronto now, people would probably accuse you of running a transphobic bus line.

AZ: I mean, ironically, a lot of trans people were involved with that campaign. Some of the very people I featured on the bus are now definitely not fans of mine. That’s a bit sad. I do feel some regret over it. But things change. They’re still good people, even if they dislike me now. And I hope that eventually things might shift again. But it is what it is.

JK: I want to let you go now, but just before we finish—Adam, if people want to follow more of your work, what’s the best place to find you? As I said at the beginning, you write on a wide variety of issues: the Middle East, Ukraine—especially since you’re based there right now—and also on drug policy. We didn’t even get to talk about safe injection sites. That’s another huge topic we’ll have to save for another episode.

AZ: Yes, absolutely. If people want to follow my work, they can find me on X, formerly known as Twitter. My handle is @zivoadam—Z-I-V-O-A-D-A-M. I’m also on Instagram under the same name. Or you can find my writing on the National Post website. That’s one of Canada’s two national newspapers. You can even subscribe to my newsletter there to keep up with most of my articles, although I also write for other publications as well. But X is probably the best place to start.

JK: No Tumblr account?

AZ: No Tumblr.

JK: We’ll have to fix that. Adam, thanks for taking the time to talk.

AZ: Thanks for having me.