🏳️‍🌈🏺2-gay in History💊🏳️‍🌈

An Open Letter to the Red-pilled

Sunday was National Coming Out Day.

Coming out starts small. It's like taking a little pill after accepting that the world is wrong — that all its expectations are clothes that don't fit you. You start to leave the world you know and the life you were supposed to want, and you step out into a new one.

You wake up to the fact that you aren't, can't be, and maybe never wanted to be what the world told you you are. You start discovering who you actually want to be and what actually makes you happy. Coming out to yourself is the greatest thing you will ever do, and nothing is quite the same after. You leave the system taking with you only what you want.

And in over the course of a decade a bi guy, a gay guy, and two trans women wrote the three stories that straight men have been quoting ever since, all of them trying to say the same thing…

So to all the alt-right, the red-pilled, the manosphere, locked-in Life-maxxers, or whatever you call it.

Come out

Here's the thing: you're halfway there already. You sense something is wrong with the world, with its unfair expectations of you, and you're not imagining it. The system is rigged against you.

Capitalism runs on men and leaves them chewed up and hollow. It treats masculinity like a lever it can pull whenever it needs more labor, more obedience, more aggression, more sacrifice — and it rewrites what "being a real man" means every single time its needs change, without ever once asking what you need to feel whole, happy. It wants you angry. Then it decides where to point you. The rage, the sense of being cheated, the feeling that you were sold a bill of goods you only thought you wanted — all of that is justified.

But the people profiting off your pain have been aiming your anger at the people they're afraid of. You've been pointed at targets who should be your allies. At women, at feminists , at queer people, "wokeness," at academics, at unions, at a dozen other scapegoats they'll swap out whenever one stops working.

Those are easy enemies compared to the actual machine — compared to the people making money off you staying angry and alone and weak. Which is exactly the scam the red pill was supposed to wake you up from, but it’s just another system of control wearing the costume of escape.

Because that's what that 1999 movie was actually telling us. Waking up to the real world. Realizing the life you'd been handed was built to keep you docile while something else fed off you. Realizing you'd been living as a person you were assigned to be instead of the person you are and deserve to be.

Queer people have a name for the pill you actually wanted. We call it coming out. It is like waking up into wonder.

Just look at the stories the right-most corners of the internet revere:

—American Psycho. Patrick Bateman is a man cosplaying the man he's been told he should be. Perfect suit, perfect business card, perfect apartment, perfect rage — and nothing underneath but the performance. He doesn't snap in spite of the pressure to be a certain kind of man. He snaps because he obeyed it completely. The one person in that book who isn't performing for anyone, who is just uncomplicatedly himself, is Luis Carruthers — the gay guy Bateman looks down on. Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote it, is bisexual, and he built the entire novel as a scalpel aimed at '80s Wall Street status culture: the same "prove your worth by what you own and who you dominate" economy that modern right-wing media repackages and forces down your throat today.

—Fight Club. The narrator invents Tyler Durden because he can't find any other way to feel like a man worth being. Durden is magnetic because he says out loud what society only implies while keeping deniability: fight, dominate, want nothing, need no one. Even I understand the appeal. But the book does not end with Durden winning. It ends with the narrator seeing what that persona cost him and choosing to put it down. He comes out to himself — as somebody smaller and more vulnerable than the character he built. Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote it, is gay. That ending is the explosive truth, not the wreckage after it.

Two men who had to work out who they actually were, writing the definitive novels about men destroyed by pretending. What would gay men know about it? We were raised on the same programming you were — don't cry, be tough, G.I. Joe — and then held at a distance from it. That othering is exactly what gives us expertise, a kind of “double-consciousness": being forced to see yourself through the eyes of a system you're standing outside of. You learn the machine's blueprints when it tells you you're defective.

—The Matrix — the birthplace of the red pill itself. A story about a man living a life that was assigned to him, under a name that isn't his, carrying a nagging certainty that something about his existence is fundamentally wrong. He takes a pill, wakes up, chooses a new name, and becomes who they actually were the whole time.

It was made by Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Both of them are trans women. Lilly has said outright that the trans allegory was there from conception — it's the essence of the film.

The most-quoted metaphor in the manosphere was written by two trans women about the experience of transitioning.

So I'm not asking you to become someone else. I'm asking you to notice how much of "who you are" was handed to you by people who profit from you staying exactly this angry and exactly this alone — and to ask whether the pill you took actually woke you up, or just moved you into a seemingly different dream with the same landlord.

You already sensed it. It's why these stories grabbed you in the first place. There's something true in them. The system wants you to believe the story is about someone stealing your masculinity, your birthright, your place in line. But every single person who wrote these masterworks was telling you to walk away from the whole arrangement — to get out— not to get angry at whoever they've scapegoated this week.

Coming out — really coming out, to yourself — is what breaks their hold. It's why the system is so afraid of us. We don't fit a machine that spent centuries learning to make men work, fight, and die for someone else's money and power. They cast us as the enemy so early that we stopped buying what they were selling. That isn't our weakness. It's the exit.

Come out. Out of the darkness, the hatred, the exhaustion. It is so tiring trying to be the man society tells you to be — to perform, to exceed, to dominate, every hour of every day. Be yourself. Love yourself. People will love you for who you are, without pretense or artifice.

The women who wrote your favorite metaphor already walked through that door and tried to hand you a pill to wake you up.

Come out, to the real world

I tried so hard to live up to the myth of masculinity myself and only once I came out to myself, stopped trying to be the man o thought I should be that I realized I already was exactly what I wanted to be. It’s joy beyond words to just stop trying to preform masculinity and starting to just live as the man you are. Free.