But even some progressive gay white men say they feel alienated from a movement they see becoming more radical, particularly online, where the tenor of conversation is often uncivil.
Hot take: I’m honestly, vocally sick of settler-gay men who demand that you handle them with kid gloves when their entire existence within the community is an existence blanketed in microaggression at best, when they’re not being outright full-on macroaggressive about someone that ‘doesn’t fit their “preference”’; and I’m genuinely glad people are starting to talk about it.
Yes. Middle class gay and lesbians got a moment of peace and turned their back on everyone else. It’s been this way since the end of Stonewall.
Middle class gay and lesbians got a moment of peace and turned their back on everyone else.
Crazy that they pulled that shit and then turn around and act like they should still have a place at our table; like nah, they decided to go play collaborationist with the State Department and now these cracker motherfuckers are slapping rainbows on bombs and Stars of David on Pride flags. There’s no pride in it for me anymore; I’m ashamed these traitorous sellout motherfuckers are what the actual international community, no crackerverse sees Pride as.
Every time I see some settler-queer, Amerikan or Israeli, using the Pride flag as just another tool of gentrification, it makes the bile rise in my throat; leaves me in a state of “well fuck. No wonder they hate us, if our enemies present our standard to their enemies.”
it’s honestly why I don’t go to Pride. I went once and felt extremely out of place. it’s not a celebration of queerness. it’s too sanitized and gentified. they were celebrating cops and I felt sick.
the Floyd protests felt much more like actual Pride. virtually everyone who wasn’t Black was queer and every march took the time to remember the names of our dead, those who the cops senselessly kill again and again. we were there as a unified community in solidarity, not to support some fucking colonizers, slavers, or those who do their dirty work, but to spite them. that show of solidarity built deep inroads with the local Black community and we went back to our roots, remembering where Pride began.
I’ve had to get into open fights in LGBTQ+ safe spaces on campus about how the statement “it’s okay to be white” , i.e open Nazi propaganda positioning white people as a persecuted identity, was not something to take as a heartwarming message or something you’ve always wanted to hear.
There are explicitly anti-assimilationist and anti-pinkwashing Pride protests that were much smaller but sometimes they have been attended by big names and I tend to feel much safer in that crowd.
I just wish it didn’t take one of our own getting hashtagged by swine to get that proper sense of solidarity, tho. It doesn’t surprise me-- I don’t forget where I am-- but it shouldn’t take a goddamn body, goddamn innocent blood, to get that same sense Pride was originally meant to enshrine.
