Words by JJ Croucher
Design by Yosef Phelan

It's 2018 and I’m on my year abroad, sunbathing on Venice's Lido.. I'm on my front, propped up by my elbows – my chin rests in one hand and in the other a cigarette lolls. Smoke curls up inside my sunglasses. Everything smells of Ambre Solaire and fast-drying mortadella.

I turn to a girl on my Erasmus programme – she's saying something to me that I can't hear. My mate's sand-clogged Beats Pill is pumping reggae into the late afternoon and a chorus of children are screaming, eking out what they can from the time before dinner.

"What?" I say.

"You're so sassy," she repeats.

My shoulders have turned the colour of strawberry yoghurt and are dusted with the vestiges of cystic acne. I'm in stained Topman boardshorts, chuffing on a Camel Blue – I don't do my hair before I leave the house. I have no f*cking clue what she means.

" – it's iconic."

I say thanks and resume sunbathing, quietly scanning my body for any sign of the diva she sees, wondering whether it's Drag Race or Queer Eye that has addled her mind.

This Pride Month, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times published strikingly similar opinion pieces; Matthew Vines' "I'm Gay, Not Queer. It Matters" and Ben Appel's "I'm Gay, but that doesn't make me 'Queer'" are both public denouncements of their authors' queerness. They position specifically queer identity as a political or ideological force and pit it against their "gayness" – for the authors, a neutral, essential state. It is the politically amped-up, anarchistic "Q" in the "LGBTQIA+" that threatens to roll back their hard-won gay rights, and they're not happy about it. This brand of respectability politics is well worn – the closer we are to normal, the better chance we have of being able to live normally.