I felt the need to comment on this piece in the Globe and Mail in which Sky Gilbert announces that, since the game isn’t going his way, he’s going to take his gay ball and go home. “I am no longer gay,” he writes, “I quit”.

As Gilbert isn’t terribly explicit about what he means by “defecting and/or just resigning from the club”, it’s probably safe to assume this is just a punchy bit of rhetoric to make for a dramatic headline. After all, you don’t get invited onto CBC radio for writing an op-ed about how you’re vaguely annoyed with the direction the queer community is moving in but hey, what can you do?

Nonetheless, the headline irks me, not because sensational rhetoric generally obscures otherwise worthy arguments (of which Gilbert has some), not because it ambiguates sexuality, identity, behaviour, and community, and not because it provides fuel for conversion therapy wingnuts. It irks me because it’s just such an asinine thing to say.

It seems the last straw for Gilbert was a TV gay couple who were portrayed as – shock, horror! – “a pair of nice, overweight, unattractive middle-class men”. It’s not clear what Gilbert, a university research chair who is neither svelte nor stunning nor, by any accounts, a raging asshole, would prefer. Should all TV gays be mincing Jack Macfarlands? Blue-balled Wayland Smithers‘? Campy Kurt Hummels? The latter is probably my favourite character on television right now – an unflinching sissy with great courage of conviction. But as far as I’m concerned, there’s room for other types of gays, in tvland and the real world (which also has room for more spontaneous production numbers, if anyone is listening).

It pains me to say it, but everyone, even the gays, have the right to be boring. Not that I encourage it. But I also don’t see deviance as the sole privilege or responsibility of queers. If gays want to settle down, move to the suburbs and live humdrum domestic lives, that’s fine by me. Well actually, it kind of makes me sad. But no more than when straight people do it. And if straight people want to bend gender and eschew societal expectations, welcome to the party.

Gilbert’s “personal solution” to changing gay demographics is to break away from the label entirely and call himself ESP (pronounced “espie”), short for Effeminate Sexual Person. Acronyms are already something the queer world needs like a hole in the head, and Gilbert’s is also two-thirds redundant: who isn’t sexual, or a person?

It all feels like the word games of political correctness that Gilbert faults in the first place (also to blame: Twitter). But it’s just being antagonistic to wield one’s identity as something that is entirely political and not personal. You can’t change your spots – or decide that you’re going to call your spots Orbicular Super-dermal Markings (OSM, pronounced “awesomes”) just because you don’t like what the other leopards are doing.