Dale Carpenter, the author of the definitive account of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case striking down sodomy laws, told me that the winning legal team “consciously eschewed argument rooted in sexual liberation in favor of arguments that emphasized commitment, love, and family—and especially the idea that lesbians, gays and bisexuals are ‘just like’ heterosexuals.” The integrationist lawyers had to overrule their separatist colleagues who had “urged that the final Supreme Court briefs mention BDSM and other sexual subcultures as deserving specific constitutional protection.” After the historic decision was handed down, many separatists objected that it didn’t go far enough. One Columbia University professor wrote a law-review article dismissing Lawrence as mere “domesticated liberty.”

Like the African American civil-rights movement (which had its own separationist analogue in the form of black nationalism) before it, the cause of gay equality has been most successful when its spokesmen and women addressed the American majority as fellow citizens seeking the same rights and responsibilities they take for granted.

Now that it possesses cultural and political power, the gay-rights movement is reverting to the control of its radical element, with many in the vanguard bent on upending the American social order that only recently accepted it. Success has lowered the stakes; responsible leaders (including many of the moderate and conservative gays who played an unsung role in the movement’s success) have retired from the fight, clearing the field for the sort of culture-war topics roiling the left at large.

Under Trump, the gay-rights movement is beset by mission creep. Just what are we trying to accomplish anymore, and on behalf of whom? The ever-proliferating set of sexual and gender identities one encounters is a direct result of the radicals’ hold over the movement. Take, for example, the Wesleyan University Open House, which once described itself as “a safe space for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderfuck, Polyamourous, Bondage/Disciple, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism (LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM) communities and for people of sexually or gender dissident communities.” Gay is passé.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the prevalence of the word queer. Once the sort of epithet that William F. Buckley Jr. would forever be ashamed of uttering on national television, “queer” is now affirmatively deployed by homosexual and heterosexual alike despite the discomfort it still causes many gays—due not just to its history as a slur, but the political and lifestyle radicalism it connotes.

And again, there’s the uncomfortable merger of sorts with the transgender movement. As a demonstrative example, the most recent Pride edition of the pioneering gay magazine Out is devoted largely to transgender issues and doesn’t featuring a single living lesbian within its pages. Although many gay people are sympathetic to the transgender cause, it nonetheless sometimes comes into conflict with gay concerns, as in the case of transgender participation in women’s sports. Martina Navratilova, one of the most prominent lesbians in the world, was denounced as a bigot by transgender activists for arguing that “it’s cheating” that “hundreds of athletes who have changed gender by declaration and limited hormone treatment have already achieved honors as women that were beyond their capabilities as men.” As she explained later, she was merely trying to ensure that “girls and women who were born female are competing on as level a playing field as possible.”