Our Queer community is steeped in “identity politics.” Over the years we’ve claimed “homophiles,” simply Gay, then a bit more inclusive with Gay and Lesbian. We’ve been Same-Gender Loving. The LGBT banner felt more inclusive, but we were just getting started! LGBTQ? LGBTQ+? LGBTQIA? Sure!

There are plenty of letters in the alphabet, plenty of creative community-minded thinkers who will continue to hone identities. As the celebrated Vulcan maxim goes, “Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” I’m all for it! After all, just like exclamation points, those letters are free.

We’ve been navigating these identities for ages, but the phrase “identity politics” is possibly triggering for some. The notion that folks will align themselves by a particular identity definitely is.

The standard definition, thanks to Merriam-Webster, is “politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to propel their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group.”

Or, going back to the phrase’s origins, according to Wikipedia, we have the 1977 Combahee River Collective of Black, lesbian, feminist socialists, which reads, in part, “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics…. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.”

“Levelly human.” What a wonderful sentiment. I’m sure the Vulcans would agree.

In the past couple of weeks, there’s been no ignoring identity politics. Especially if you consider, as the astute Matthew Yglesias did in a 2015 piece, “The truth is that almost all politics is, on some level, about identity.”

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The Kamala Harris presidential campaign has been having so much fundraising fun with this idea, kicking off a series of community Zoom calls with Black women in late July. There were similar calls with Black men, rural Americans, “cat ladies,” South Asian women, and Grateful Dead fans. The Human Rights Campaign organized an LGBTQ call. I donated during the “White Dudes for Harris” call. Why not the HRC call? Scheduling, I suppose. Plus, out Sec. Pete Buttigieg was on the White Dudes call! Like Harris, Pete and I can be two things at once. White and Gay! Like Walt Whitman, we contain multitudes. Everyone does.

It was the WD4H call that truly seemed to trigger some white dudes on the right.

The Fox News Digital headline read, “‘White Dudes for Harris’ virtual meeting roasted online: ‘Most Beta gathering in history.'” A “beta,” according to Urban Dictionary’s most popular definition is, “a male who, instead of being alpha and manning up, completely bitches out.”

The sillier part of that story didn’t include the “beta” quote. Instead, right-wing radio host Jason Rantz offered this: “There’s nothing more ‘progressive’ than self-loathing White guys with low self-esteem, man buns, and a gender studies degree…thinking if they sign up for something as condescending as this that they’ll make their first Black female friend and maybe get a date.”

Granted, I’m no fan of man buns. But have you seen Rantz?? I had to look him up. Oh, my God. He’s critiquing a hypothetical political persona while looking like a cartoon. This is not me being lookist. Rather, Rantz has chosen to present himself with a ridiculously outsized — seemingly dyed — pompadour that painfully emphasizes his Eddie Munster widow’s peak, just atop scene-stealing eyebrows that looked to be expertly shaped and may be eligible for their own political identity.

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You might even say Rantz looks weird.

In a countercultural sense, “weird” has been a comfortable political identity for me. When you’re right at home with “queer,” weird is not far off. But as MAGA becomes ever kookier, more mainstream folks have taken to calling out their weirdness. And Team Trump is not having it. They want nothing to do with their collective freak-flag, thinking they represent what is “normal.” They flatly refuse “weird” as a political identity.

Royce White, MAGA’s Minnesota candidate for senator, for example, is not at all happy with his governor, now Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, calling out right-wing weirdness.

“We’re weird? You freaks support pride festivals where grown men are getting pissed on and sucking each other off in public,” White posted on X. I’ve witnessed those acts, but certainly never at a Pride festival.

White, meanwhile, is caught up in a campaign-finance complaint from 2022 that mentions a $1,200 spend at Miami’s Gold Rush Cabaret strip club, according to Minnesota’s Star Tribune. “A sexy, fun provocative experience inside the 15,000 square feet club with multiple stages, full liquor bar, VIP areas, spacious conversation rooms, and VIP whale rooms,” reads the promo. “As a full nude strip club, we have Gorgeous female entertainers performing fully nude every night.” Sounds fun! But what the heck is a “VIP whale room”? Is nothing out of bounds for these deviant straight weirdos?

In this same news cycle, Donald Trump’s grasp of identity politics made an ugly appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention July 31, where he stumbled through a diatribe about Harris being Indian. Or Black. Or one first, the other second, and maybe back again. It was embarrassing for our country, whose greatest strength is its diversity. If you can’t see that, you’re metaphorically color-blind, and not in a good way.

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At the Olympics, gender identity — which the right has made excruciatingly political — has taken center stage. The Washington Post offered incredibly entertaining coverage on August 5 of a press conference regarding female Olympic boxers Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu Ting of Taiwan. The International Boxing Association was set to offer evidence fully discrediting the competitors’ female identities.

Rather than evidence, the conference presented a Rudy-Guiliani/Four Seasons Total Landscaping-level clusterfuck culminating in a supportive teammate of Khelif’s shouting down the supposed panel of experts, waving an Algerian flag and leading reporters out of the room.

For context, the July 15 issue of Popular Mechanics mentioned new research regarding our “Last Universal Common Ancestor” (LUCA). While the research regarded the time of LUCA’s origin, that’s not as important as stopping amid this political season to remember that we’re all essentially cousins. We could even welcome every other bit of life on Earth to the family reunion.

Our planet is plenty crowded, whatever the pro-natalists say about birth rates. On one side of the divide, we’re not worried about falling birth rates while there are plenty of people to go around. More than ever! On the other side, there are those who fear being “replaced” by people they see as too alien. But when you consider that you’re quite likely related to that bird overhead, that cat on your lady-lap, or the bacteria in your guts, how could any human being really be that alien to any other?

As one side has fun with identity politics and celebrates diversity, the other builds walls and uses “diversity” as an insult. Nobody is the “other” to any meaningful degree. Superficial differences are inconsequential relative to how we treat each other, particularly if we’re ever to evolve past tribalism.

Any possibility of “greatness” is in our future, not our past. We’ll only get there by embracing the other and accepting everyone as “levelly human.” To not acknowledge that — or worse, to fight against it — is, in a word, weird.

Will O’Bryan is a former Metro Weekly managing editor, living in D.C. with his husband. He is online at www.LifeInFlights.com.