EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION
Homosexuals and gender-confused individuals should embrace “queer joy” as a way to withstand attacks from “white Christian nationalists,” according to a University of Kansas law professor.
“I contend that queer joy as resistance is just one strategy for resistance, one that ought to be pursued alongside other tactics of resistance,” Professor Kyle Velte argues in a paper published on SSRN.
Velte lists a number of supposed infringements on the “rights” of LGBT people.
Among these are Supreme Court rulings that found artists, such as bakers and website designers, cannot be forced by the state to use their skills to promote so-called same-sex “marriage.” The law professor also criticized the 2021 case Fulton v. City of Philadelphia which affirmed social service providers cannot be forced to place kids in same-sex households.
“The impact of these decision[s] means that some vendors and faith-based social service agencies may refuse to serve LGBTQ people,” Velte wrote.
The professor also criticized the 2025 Supreme Court ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor which affirmed parents, including Muslims, Catholics, and Jews, had a right to opt their kids out of pornographic public school lessons.
Equally disturbing to Velte are passed or proposed laws to keep men from walking around in girls’ locker rooms or beating them up in sports.
These rulings and laws are a “rollback” of the “civil rights” of “LGBTQ” people, she argues.
Velte wrote:
In sum, over the past decade and in response to LGBTQ civil rights victories, a coordinated campaign led by advocacy groups aligned with the white Christian nationalist movement has sought, with much success, to rollback the many civil rights victories won by the LGBTQ rights movement over the past three decades.
This movement is bolstered by the usual suspect: conservative media.
She specifically cites Fox News, Newsbusters, and Townhall as some of the purveyors of “outrage.”
“This negative framing of queer and trans people by conservative media, including social media, certainly influences right-wing politicians, pundits, and ordinary citizens,” the professor claims. “That discourse creates a false impression for the larger society that queer and trans people cannot or do not experience positive emotions like joy.”
Cognizant of identity politics, Velte connects the alleged oppression of gender-confused men who are not allowed to walk around naked in a women’s locker room to the actual suffering of black Americans under slavery.
“Beginning with slavery and continuing to the present, the oppressive and violent machine of American white supremacy has dehumanized and pathologized Black people,” she writes.
However, she does clarify the situations are not the exact same, writing:
[A section of the paper] advocates for a theory of queer joy as resistance that builds on the history of Black joy as resistance from slavery to today. In building upon Black history to inform queer and trans resistance, I do not [intend] to equate the horrors of slavery and its still present aftermath to the experiences of LGBTQ people in the quest for queer civil rights
But there are ways to connect the issues, she says.
“Moreover, in analogizing queer joy to Black joy, I do not seek to erase LGBTQ people of color; in fact, the intersectional experiences and insights of queer people of color should be centered in the project of cultivating queer joy,” the professor argues.
She says that “queer joy” is not the only solution – “queer rage” can also be important as well, the scholar concludes.
