This insight contains references to homophobic and transphobic slurs and violence against women. Introduction At present, our understandings of misogynist inceldom centre around cisheterosexual men and women, failing to account for how queer and non-binary identities are targeted and delegitimised through users’ male supremacist rhetoric. The most extensive work engaging with constructions of queerness in the misogynist incelosphere are from Kelly and Aunspach (2020) and Vallerga (2024), whose analyses centre on compulsory (hetero)sexuality and the disparaging of lesbians within the main misogynist forum, respectively. This Insight explores the queer roots of contemporary misogynist inceldom, juxtaposing this with the community’s staunch stance against queer identities. Drawing on results from my doctoral work tracing identity-based harm across three forums for self-identified incels, this Insight explores how LGBTQ+ identities are constructed as degenerate, deviant, and duplicitous, connecting these narratives to wider trends in anti-LGBTQ+ extremism. Inceldom and its Queer Roots Despite its preoccupation with heterosexual gender relations, the contemporary misogynist inceldom has its roots in queerness. Originally coined by a queer Canadian woman named Alana, the term and its subsequent identity stems from an early peer-support website and email listserv aimed at people struggling with involuntary celibacy she created in 1997. While its userbase skewed male and straight, Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project afforded LGBTQ+ users space to discuss the interplay between their queerness and inceldom. The website explicitly recognised these intersections, with hyperlinks on the site’s landing page directing users to articles titled “Gay? Lonely? Or Both?” and “The Secret Closet”, both written by Alana herself. While the most visible and vocal incel communities continued to amass userbases of predominantly cisheterosexual men, some queer people still participated within larger community forums, but were likely to face down-voting or bans for discussing their own experiences. Other LGBTQ+ users carved out their own spaces to discuss the unique intersections of queer identities and inceldom. Though many of these spaces are now defunct, subreddits like r/Gaycels and r/TransgenderIncels, alongside active incelosphere-adjacent spaces like r/LGBTForeverAlone, centred the nuances of dating while queer, providing empathetic discussions that users felt were often missing in cishet incel spaces.
via gnet research: “Degenerate” Queers and “Chadsexual” Sapphics: Anti-LGBTQ+ Rhetoric in the Incelosphere