What's Love Got to Do with This? The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Desire

There are words we inherit without questioning them. Love is one of them. We repeat it as a promise; a weapon; an apology. We endlessly chase it through apps, bars, pews, and pixels, convinced that we will finally be chosen, seen, and completed. But what if the thing we have been calling love—the rituals, the rankings, the performances of desire—is not love at all? What if we have been doing something else entirely: a choreography of scarcity; a theater of hierarchy; a longing shaped by systems that never wanted us whole?

In queer spaces, where love was supposed to be a kind of refuge, we have built new architectures of exclusion. We have mistaken the language of hierarchy for the language of affection. We call it "preference," "type," or "taste," but often, we mean that we have learned to desire through the eyes of power. We inherit the standards that once erased us and replicate them, believing that to be wanted is to be free. This essay does not claim to know what love is—that would require a certainty I neither possess nor trust. Instead, it names what love is not. Because sometimes, the only way to reach truth is through negation, by stripping away the myths that have been mistaken for meaning. Love is not the scarcity we worship as taste, not the beauty we weaponize as power, and not the anatomy we rank as worth. What follows, then, is less a definition than it is an undoing. It is a quiet refusal to keep calling harm by love's name.

The Illusion of Option

We have learned to mistake scarcity for selectivity, hierarchy for taste, and exclusion for desire.  With endless profiles, infinite swipes, and a supposed democracy of attraction, the gay world tells itself it has never been freer. But what masquerades as freedom is often a finely tuned architecture of rejection. Dating apps promise abundance but deliver a performance of worthiness: curated torsos, filtered smiles, bodies auditioning for approval. The marketplace of desire, coded as liberation, is in fact a mirror of the same structures queer liberation sought to escape. Whiteness, masculinity, youth, and muscularity remain the currencies of visibility.

James Baldwin once wrote that "love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within" (The Fire Next Time, 1963). But what happens when the mask becomes the market — when desirability itself depends on adequate performance of the norm? Within the illusion of endless choice, we find only new forms of scarcity, where to be chosen is a privilege and to exist unseen is a quiet exile.

bell hooks reminds us in All About Love (2000) that "the practice of love requires the acknowledgment of intersectional oppression." Yet much of gay culture, seduced by neoliberal fantasies of self-optimization, transforms desire into capital. Profiles become résumés of worthiness. "No fats, no femmes, no Blacks, no Asians" — a slogan of exclusion masquerading as preference. This is not love. This is branding.

Beauty as a Caste System: When Attraction Becomes Religion

Beauty, in the gay imagination, has become both idol and ideology. The altar is Instagram; the worship is comparison. Here, beauty is not pleasure but proof—proof of belonging, of worth, of having made it out of shame and into desirability. Audre Lorde warned that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (Sister Outsider, 1984). Yet queer aesthetics too often borrow those very tools. The smooth white body, disciplined and symmetrical, becomes the icon of perfection. Brown, Black, fat, femme, trans, or disabled bodies are rendered secondary—fetishized when desired, erased when not.

This beauty economy operates like a caste. It sorts, ranks, and disciplines desire, establishing invisible borders between the worthy and the disposable. "Pretty privilege" dictates access to intimacy, safety, and even community. The pretty body is not just admired—it is believed. It becomes moral, aspirational, and therefore, marketable. bell hooks wrote, "there can be no love without justice." Beauty without justice, then, is domination with better lighting. When prettiness becomes a prerequisite for recognition, love turns from revolution to aesthetic. To love becomes to worship the hierarchy that denies love to others.

The Weaponization of the Penis and the Ass: Anatomy as Hierarchy

If beauty is the face of hierarchy, sex is its weapon. Within gay male culture, the very body parts meant for pleasure—the penis and the ass—become tools of classification. "Top," "bottom," "vers," "hung," "tight"—categories meant to communicate preference become a taxonomy of power. Michel Foucault observed that "power is exercised through the production of desire" (The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 1976). Gay sexual scripts, despite their transgressive veneer, often reproduce the same hierarchies they claim to subvert. The top performs dominance; the bottom is feminized and shamed for receptivity. The phallus, instead of being an organ of pleasure, becomes a symbol of legitimacy. To penetrate is to possess. To be penetrated is to risk erasure.

But as Audre Lorde insists in Uses of the Erotic (1978), "the erotic is power." Not domination, but knowing—an energy rooted in connection and freedom. To de-weaponize the penis and the ass is to reclaim that erotic as sacred, as mutual. Pleasure should not be proof of power; it should be the practice of freedom. Love is not the marketplace of desirability where bodies are commodities. Love is not the mirror that demands perfection before reflection. Love is not the phallus mistaken for divinity, nor hierarchy mistaken for taste. Love is not the algorithm that erases difference under the guise of freedom. Love does not rank. Love does not audition. Love does not brand.

To name what love is not is to make room for its possibility. We can love more honestly when we stop mistaking harm for intimacy. Baldwin once urged us toward moral clarity: if we confront the nightmares of our own making, we might "end the racial nightmare" and "change the history of the world.” For queer communities, that call resounds still—to confront the economies of desire that mimic the systems of domination we inherited.

Toward a Different Practice of Desire

This essay refrains from defining love because, as Lorde wrote, love is a "process of becoming.” But perhaps we can begin by unlearning. Love is not scarcity disguised as taste. It is not beauty deployed as a border. It is not sex performed as power. Maybe love begins in refusal—the refusal to accept that our worth depends on being wanted. The refusal to confuse attention with affection. The refusal to inherit systems that thrive on our loneliness. To love, truly, might mean learning to see each other without the filters of fear, shame, or hierarchy—to desire in a way that does not devour. As Baldwin reminds us, love "takes off the masks.” The task before us is simple and devastating: to stop mistaking the mask for the face.