Why the LGBTQ+ Community Should Be Listening to Mark Carney

As a member of the community who’s seen the world change more times than I care to count, I’ve been sitting with Mark Carney’s recent Davos speech. Now, Carney isn’t usually the first person we look to for “queer theory,” but listening to him talk about a “rupture” in the global order—the end of a “pleasant fiction” and the beginning of a “harsh reality”—it struck a chord.

If you’re like me—a bit of a “tarnation” at heart, someone who has survived the jagged edges of history and built a life out of the fragments—you’ll recognize the feeling he’s describing. He’s talking about a world where the old rules don’t work anymore, where being “good” and following the “rules-based order” doesn’t actually buy you safety.

For the LGBTQ+ community, that’s a lesson we’ve learned the hard way for decades. Here is what I think we can take from Carney’s “Message to the Middle.”

1. Compliance is Not Safety

Carney was blunt: “Compliance will not buy safety.” He was talking about middle-power countries like Canada trying to please great powers, but the metaphor for us is crystal clear. For a long time, the mainstream “strategy” for queer liberation was respectability politics. We thought if we dressed right, stayed quiet, and proved how “normal” we were, we’d be granted a seat at the table.

But Carney warns that the “rules” were always a bit of a fiction. When the political winds shift—when the “hegemons” of the status quo decide they no longer need us or find it profitable to target us—those rules vanish. We are seeing it right now with the rollback of rights across the globe. We cannot rely on the “goodwill” of the old order to protect us. Our safety isn’t something we can buy with good behavior; it’s something we have to build with collective power.

2. “If You’re Not at the Table, You’re on the Menu”

This was Carney’s most stinging line. In the geopolitical world, it means middle powers need to stop acting like observers and start acting like players. For our community, it means we have to stop being a “special interest group” that people talk about and start setting the agenda.

In this new, fractured world, being “middle-of-the-road” or passive is dangerous. We have to be “principled and pragmatic.” We need to diversify our alliances, look inward to strengthen our own community “infrastructure” (our health systems, our legal defenses, our mutual aid), and ensure that when the “great powers” of politics are carving up the future, we aren’t the ones being served for dinner.

3. Nostalgia is Not a Strategy

I love this line from him: “The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

It’s easy to look back at the 2010s as a “golden era” of progress and wish we could just go back to that “pre-rupture” normal. But Carney is right—that world is gone. Trying to rebuild the past won’t work because the foundations have shifted.

Instead of mourning a world that maybe wasn’t as safe as we thought, we have to look at the “fracture” and see it as a place to build something “better, stronger, and more just.” We don’t need to return to a world where we were tolerated; we need to build a world where we are foundational.

4. The Power of the “Greengrocer”

Carney alluded to Václav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” specifically to the greengrocer who takes down a sign he doesn’t believe in. Carney argued that when we stop “performing” for a system that doesn’t serve us, the illusion of that system’s power begins to crack.

As queer people, we are experts at “performing.” We’ve spent lifetimes masking, code-switching, and pretending to fit into structures that weren’t built for us. Carney is telling the world what we’ve known all along: there is immense power in refusing to play the part. When we live authentically—when we “take down the sign”—we aren’t just being “out”; we are dismantling the “pleasant fictions” of a society that demands our subordination.

The Bottom Line

Mark Carney’s speech was a wake-up call for nations, but it’s a manifesto for those of us living on the margins. We are in a “rupture.” It’s messy, it’s scary, and it’s loud. But as a community of survivors—of “tarnations” who have seen the rubble and kept walking—we know how to navigate a fracture.

We don’t need a “rules-based order” to tell us we exist. We need each other, we need “strategic autonomy,” and we need to be the ones holding the pen when the new rules are written. Because, as Carney said, from the fracture, we can build something more ambitious.

Let’s get to work.