The Only Spectrum That Frees Us

Why the deepest queer political divide is not left against right but the individual against the collective, and why that reframing may be the most diplomatic move we have.

At LevelUp in Chicago this summer, I kept returning to a single diagram. It redraws the political spectrum most of us carry in our heads. In place of the familiar line, progressives to the left, conservatives to the right, everyone else scattered between, it proposes a deeper axis. At one pole sit authoritarianism, irrationality, collectivism and determinism, together with the orders that grow from them: communism, socialism, fascism, theocracy, nationalism. At the other pole sit liberty, reason, individualism and agency, and the classical liberal tradition built to protect them. On this map the tyrannies are not opposites at all. They are neighbours, quarrelling only over which collective to enthrone. The framing is Objectivist in origin, and its provocation is bracingly simple. Left and right are surface weather. The real climate is set by one question: does a person belong to himself, or to the group?

The familiar map: the horseshoe folds the far left and the far right towards one another.

Let me be honest about the instrument before I use it. Political scientists will rightly protest that a single axis flattens a great deal; most contemporary models of ideology run along two dimensions or more, and the claim that fascism and communism are near neighbours remains contested among historians. I do not offer the diagram as settled cartography. I offer it as a lens, and a lens earns its keep by what it brings into focus. Hold it up to our own house, and something long blurred becomes sharp.

The deeper axis: one line, one question. (Kiyah Willis, Levelup 2026)

Two politics, one family

The queer world has inherited its own left and right, and they are increasingly at war. On one side stands a politics of belonging that would fold us into the nation as respectable citizens: married, patriotic, safe. Its critics have given it precise names. Lisa Duggan called its cultural face the new homonormativity, a public image of prosperous, monogamous domesticity that asks nothing awkward of the surrounding order, and Jasbir Puar traced its geopolitical shadow in homonationalism, the conditional embrace of certain queer subjects by the security state, purchased at the expense of racialised others. On the other side stands a politics of liberation that treats respectability as betrayal and guards the boundaries of authentic queerness with real vigilance.

Each side carries genuine goods. The first understands the human longing for home and continuity, the wish to grow old somewhere without apology. The second understands that solidarity is not sentimental but structural, and that a movement is judged by how it treats its least protected members. Neither is villainous. Both are family.

But run them through the deeper axis and something clarifying happens. A politics does not drift toward the authoritarian pole because it is left or right. It drifts there the moment it subordinates the individual queer person to a collective that may overrule him, whether that collective is the nation, the church, the market's moral majority, or the movement itself. When belonging is made conditional on disowning another part of the family, that is collectivism. When authenticity is enforced by excommunication rather than by argument, that is collectivism too. The costume changes; the premise does not.

What the individualist pole asks of us

The individualist pole asks something different, and it asks it of everyone equally.

First, it treats identity as a matter of agency rather than determinism. To be queer, on this view, is not to be assigned a demographic and handed a politics to match. It is a fact about a particular life that a thinking person integrates by his own reason and his own chosen values. No one is obliged to hold a given opinion because of whom he loves or how he lives. The gay conservative and the trans anarchist are each exercising the same sovereign faculty, the right to author one's own life, and that shared faculty runs deeper than any platform. Ayn Rand, of all people, gave the thought its sharpest edge in her 1963 essay on racism: the smallest minority on earth is the individual, and those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

Second, it makes reason, not force or fervour, the medium of our disagreements. This is where the individualist frame turns out to be the diplomatic one. If persons are ends in themselves, then the only legitimate way to move them is to persuade them. Excommunication, intimidation and the manufactured shame that circulates so freely in our discourse are not merely unkind. They are quiet confessions that one has run out of arguments. To commit to reason is to commit to treating even the cousin you find intolerable as someone who might be reached rather than crushed.

Third, and decisively, it bars the initiation of force. Here Objectivism completes an inheritance it draws from Locke, for whom legitimate government exists to secure the life, liberty and property that no man may take from another, and from Jefferson, for whom governments are instituted to secure unalienable rights and derive their just powers from consent. No majority, and no minority, may compel. The same principle that protects a settled couple's marriage protects the most marginal person's right to exist unmolested. Rights are held by individuals, one at a time, or they are not rights at all; they are permissions, revocable the moment the collective's mood turns. A queer person who understands this will guard the freedom of the queer he disagrees with as jealously as his own, because he grasps that they are, in the end, the same freedom.

Two honest concessions

An argument this tidy owes its reader two concessions.

The first concerns community. It would be a slander on queer history to hear individualism as a case against togetherness. The bar cultures that sheltered us, the chosen families that raised us, the mutual aid networks and ACT UP affinity groups that kept people alive through plague years: these were collectives in the plain sense of the word, and they were among the most beautiful things our people have built. But they were voluntary. They were entered by choice, sustained by love and left without a firing squad. The axis does not divide the solitary from the social. It divides association by consent from association by conscription. On that reading, the queer commons is not an objection to the individualist pole. It is its finest exhibit.

The second concession concerns the mapmaker. Rand herself, in a notorious answer at Boston's Ford Hall Forum in 1971, pronounced homosexuality immoral and disgusting. The prejudice was hers; the principle was not. A framework that grounds rights in the sovereign individual cannot coherently carve out an exception for the individuals its author disliked, and later Objectivists have largely conceded as much. This is, if anything, the deepest lesson the diagram teaches. Ideas outlive the blind spots of the people who first drew them, and the honest response to an inconsistent philosopher is not to burn the map but to finish it.

The trader and the family table

None of this requires that we agree about marriage, markets, pronouns or God. That is rather the point. The liberty pole is the only position on the map wide enough to seat the whole quarrelling family, precisely because it does not demand agreement, only that no one reach for the coercive lever to settle the argument by force. It replaces conquest with what Rand called the trader principle: dealing with others neither as masters nor as slaves but as independent equals, by free, voluntary, uncoerced exchange, in matter and in spirit alike.

“A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.”

Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics”, The Virtue of Selfishness (1961)

So I would gently invite every queer reader, wherever they imagine themselves on the old left and right line, to find themselves instead on the deeper one. The question is not whether you are progressive or conservative. It is whether you will meet the person across from you as a sovereign individual whose life is his own, or as a unit of some collective whose approval he must earn. Only one of those answers has ever set anyone free. It happens to be the answer that also lets us, at long last, stop conscripting one another and simply coexist.