Kameny especially prized, among his many accomplishments, his slogan “Gay is good!”—a proud claim that homosexuals are heterosexuals’ moral as well as legal equals. He wasn’t excluding anyone by using the word gay. He didn’t mean that gay is good but lesbian, bisexual, and transgender are not. He believed he was fighting for the values that define all Americans—the values he had fought for in combat during World War II. Gay rights, to him, meant American rights. Human rights.

A generation younger than Kameny, I came of age accustomed to the phrase gay and lesbian. Later, when LGBT arrived, it seemed cumbersome and artificial, but its inclusive aspirations struck me as honorable. So I learned to live with it.

In the past couple of years, however, I have come to believe, at long last, that Kameny was right. The alphabet-soup designation for sexual minorities has become a synecdoche for the excesses of identity politics—excesses that have helped empower the likes of Donald Trump. It’s time to retire the term and find a replacement. I propose a single letter: Q.

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Like a lot of historical wrong turns, LGBTQ means well. As gay people fought the stereotype of brokenness, homosexual came to be seen as clinical and pathologizing. Gay, by contrast, had a long linguistic history and no pseudoscientific baggage. In Kameny’s heyday and my youth, that seemed just fine. But the male and female homosexual populations differed in some ways, and so gay became gendered to complement lesbian. By the early 1990s, when some of us founded a group for homosexual journalists, we didn’t think twice about calling it the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.

Meanwhile, as recognition grew that trans people faced discrimination and ignorance comparable to what homosexuals endured, the addition of T made gradual inroads. By 2007, when gay-rights advocates decided to make their support for a federal antidiscrimination bill conditional on the inclusion of protections for transgender people, it was clear that the gay-and-lesbian and trans movements had become politically joined at the hip; including the T made undeniable sense. Bisexual people, concerned that their issues would be overlooked, also sought acknowledgment, and their initial was stapled in too.

And so the unwieldy four-letter acronym reigned. It had its advantages. It signaled factional inclusion to those inside the movement, and factional solidarity to those outside the movement. In that sense, it was good politics and good symbolism. But it wasn’t stable. Factionalism rarely is. As activists and theorists sought to cover every base, they recognized asexuality and intersexuality and various other identities by coining LGBTQIAA+, LGBTTIQQ2SA, and other telescoping designations. Lately LGBTQ seems to have become the norm, on the assumption that Q, for queer, can stand in for all the rest.