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.
But even some progressive gay white men say they feel alienated from a movement they see becoming more radical, particularly online,
Gen Xers getting old. Mad that the kids don’t want to assimilate. Acting like intersectionality has no place is erasing, uh, a lot of the people who were at Stonewall. No respect for conservative gay people of this type. Boggles the mind that you can be oppressed by the state like this, and then stop giving a shit the second you’re allowed to marry. Does the experience not give you ANY sympathy for anyone who isn’t a white, cis, able bodied, neurotypical man?
[Rosendall] said protesting police presence at Pride overlooks decades of work spent improving relations between the D.C. LGBTQ+ community and the police force; the department even has an LGBTQ+ liaison and is considered a model for inclusion.
Some of the most insufferably chuddy gay men I have ever known basically decided to drop all pretenses of caring about the rest of the LGBTQIA+ community the moment gay marriage was legalized.
How you can be a chud but also a gay man is kind of beyond me too…
Collaborationism is very real and has happened all over the world throughout history. You only need to look at the history of colonialism to see exactly how the oppressed will help their oppressors so long as they also benefit somewhat from it.
Oh I know, it’s just confusing and infuriating how people will desperately try to be “one of the good ones” and such…
There’s a certain literal vampire gay billionaire that is like the high lord of all chuddery and seriously said that if women never got the right to vote in the US about a century ago, the Le Singularity™ would have happened by now.
Does the experience not give you ANY sympathy for anyone who isn’t a white, cis, able bodied, neurotypical man?
This goes all the way back to the early suffragette movement where voting rights were to be extended only to white middle/upper class women.
This is simply the core ideology of liberalism. Capitalism cannot function without social antagonism - someone has to be exploited. You literally cannot take that out of the equation. And if equality is extended to every social group, who else but one set of people are you going to blame the ills of society on?.
[Rosendall] said protesting police presence at Pride overlooks decades of work spent improving relations between the D.C. LGBTQ+ community and the police force; the department even has an LGBTQ+ liaison and is considered a model for inclusion.
the best part is the follow-up:
“There’s a risk of behaving in a totalitarian mindset,” he said.
freedom is when cops. totalitarianism is when no cops. It takes decades of work to reach a theoretical conclusion this profound
“A risk of behaving in a totalitarian mindset” by not bowing to cops. Who is this clown, seriously?
When you get your ideology from political cartoons in the newspaper
Yeeeeeah I don’t know what had me throwed more, the Gen Xers who tapped out as soon as they got the right to marry and started pulling the ladders up behind them, or that wretched invertebrate simpering for swine about “oh wah we spent so much time ‘improving relations’” when they should’ve been spending time leaving the swine in outlines. Just more evidence of settler-queers being the weakest link
[Rosendall] said protesting police presence at Pride overlooks decades of work spent improving relations between the D.C. LGBTQ+ community and the police force; the department even has an LGBTQ+ liaison and is considered a model for inclusion.
god go fuck yourself. if this is who I think it is, he stood between counterprotestors and literal neo-nazis celebrating at a bar - not with his own body, but by lining up other cops. even the fucking cops on the line had the decency to cry over what they were doing.
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Oh yeah I 100% agree with this. Tbh I would extend this to damn near the entire LGBT community because I’ve faced some of the worst discrimination against me for being a sometimes impolite trans woman. There’s so many ‘queer housing collectives’ that are “AFAB only” because clearly trans women don’t need anywhere to live. This is a bit of a different issue (since I’m very white) but it personally drives my ass up the wall. The whole ‘having to treat people with kid gloves’ and microagression galore is something I have so much fucking experience with, and even run into on this site too sometimes 🙄
Uhh sweaty my ex boyfriend was abusive and yelled at me so I have trauma over hearing AMAB voices so speaking while trans in my presence is a misogynistic hate crime. No I’m not transphobic, why do you ask?
Oh my god I almost told you to kill yourself and then I realized what this was responding to and that you were doing a bit. Well done.
Such is the price one must pay for not using tone indicators
I should have guessed from the sweaty but idk maybe I’m delerious from hunger so I missed that lol
*I’m on my way to get food rn
😌
For real, it seems to be an awful idea to be anything less than perfectly polite as a trans woman. I do it sometimes by accident and sometimes deliberately… I haven’t experienced anything bad relating to this on here yet, but generally people lose their shit at you so quickly and with such ease.
I find the acceptance of my womanhood is often entirely contingent on my being subservient. I have actually had people hold that over me basically daring me to stand up for myself so they could revoke my womanhood.
They do hate it when you speak up for yourself, kinda like how misogynistic men in general seemed to hate it when women spoke up for themselves. Hmmm…
Yeah but cis women generally don’t immediately start getting treated like a man so it’s extra special.
I find the acceptance of my womanhood is often entirely contingent on my being subservient.
oh hey, gender roles
Yeah, it’s the perfect example of transmysogyny. Women already suffer from being seen as “difficult and bossy” and “overly emotional and melodramatic” where a man showing the exact same behavior would be viewed as “assertive” and “strong-willed”. As a transfem, this gets compounded by our womanhood being doubted and made conditional in the first place.
When ever I communicated with my abusive ex to try and establish boundaries I was basically doing violence against them. I wish I was joking. Everyone else was okay with this because they were a wittle innocent afab flower with more mental illnesses than me.
these “AFAB only” queer spaces are a nightmare for me as a masc-presenting trans woman. all semblance of allyship, even from other transpeople, goes straight out the window. i think the overall pervasiveness of transmisogyny in society makes it so that the TERFy “trans women are nasty men” narrative picks up traction even among other queer people.
This is probably a very specific form of discrimination but I’ve seen much more hatred towards pan people like myself from gay and lesbian people, even bi people, than from cishet people. That’s probably because homophobes don’t bother to learn what pansexuality is, but it’s very upsetting to me to have seen fellow queer people throw me under the bus because they think I’m 'looking for attention" or whatever.
To me, being pansexual means I’m attracted to people regardless of their gender, and being bisexual means I’m attracted to all genders. It’s a small difference to people who aren’t bi or pan but to me it’s very important. So seeing queer people say that I don’t fit in with them just makes me feel awful.
I feel like so many white, conservative gay people forget what it was like to exist as an LGBT person just 10 years ago
Intersectionality is so damn important
And they’re still trying to outlaw homosexuality today. They haven’t stopped.
Not 10 years ago, even now in the vast majority of the world
Well of course, but white liberals conceive of the world as whatever is happening in the west
Absurd to say, but we’ve gotten to a point where it’s no different than a straight man saying he’s LGBT. Like what exactly are you doing for LGBT liberation at this point besides being the equivalent of a scab?
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 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.
yep, unbelievably depressing
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.
begging people to read The Gentrification of the Mind
Ooh, picking that one up
check out https://hexbear.net/post/296565
comrade @notfutomes@hexbear.net started on an audiobook of it (and there’s an ebook link too), but they seem to have abandoned it for lack of interest or something
I need to read that book, I want to find out exactly where the stereotype about LGBT acceptance becoming a “rich people thing” came from.
This is something that’s been pretty clear for quite a long time. Easiest example I can point to is that time the HRC threw the trans community under the bus to try to push for gay rights instead. I’ve been very keenly aware of the divide from the time I was a babby transfemme. I’ve hated the idea that we should assimilate into society and even back when I couldn’t articulate it, knew that shit was fucked. There were some really cool guys I knew in college, and there were the allies and other gay men that saw transness as a bit of a goof and not worth respecting.
Patriarchal male supremacy asserted itself within lgbt movements and continues to fight for its own supremacy over other sections of the community.
Advocates are white male supremacists. Supremacism is the enemy.
Oh we’re so back baby
You have my condolences in dealing with the folk you’ve had to today.
Using broad statements like “white gay men are hindering our progress” is othering and alienating. I’d hope people would rightfully call that out if you wrote “black trans men are hindering our progress”.
As a white gay man I’ve been intimidated by police at my home and harassed and threatened for being gay as recently as a few months ago. I can’t be openly gay with my partner without fear of being killed.
It fucking sucks to be othered by leftists in an era where being visibly gay can get me hurt or killed.
I’m not asking to be handled with kids gloves. I’m asking leftists to not do the same thing as conservatives who paint entire minority groups as “guilty” of some offense with their words.
Using broad statements like “white gay men are hindering our progress” is othering and alienating. I’d hope people would rightfully call that out if you wrote “black trans men are hindering our progress”.
False equivalence.
As a white gay man I’ve been intimidated by police at my home and harassed and threatened for being gay as recently as a few months ago. I can’t be openly gay with my partner without fear of being killed.
No. You’ve be intimidated and harassed for being gay, being white or male has literally nothing to do with it.
When it comes to the patriarchal dominance over the lgbt community though, the being white and male part actually matters, because it’s that group doing it. You’re even doing it right now by getting upset that your dominance as a white male is being questioned. This is a supremacist reaction that should be looked at introspectively.
I strongly agree with you that the white maleness matters there. After calming down I realize I clearly said a lot of ignorant things in my argument.
There’s a reason we call them reactionaries.
It’s an interesting issue and talking people round from that reaction is difficult. Ultimately nobody wants to take away the fact that you definitely do experience expression for being gay but that the white men are overly represented and have overly dominant voices within the lgbt community to the point of harming other causes because they don’t think to shut the fuck up from time to time, in fact they’re happy to talk about what they think of other causes, even directly harming them with shit.
This happens in smaller subsets too. For example the same fragile reaction occasionally occurs among trans women, who are overly dominant within trans circles and some (not all) have a fragile reaction to this being pointed out rather than working to reduce that dominance and elevate trans male voices.
But the white male reaction is a very similar one to the same fragile white male reaction that occurs among cis people when you raise women’s issues. Which is why the whiteness is specifically highlighted. There’s different issues with black men, but their experiences and issues are quite unique to their intersection and their skin colour doesn’t usually enter into their issues patriarchally unlike white men for example when you get into white men and racial fetishisation.
It’s very difficult to have these conversations because people often have these reactions when their power is questioned, especially when it’s power they don’t want to acknowledge.
They are called reactionary because they think the past is better than the present or future.
Not because they are reactive
This is not the marxist usage. The marxist usage of the word is as a descriptor of the monarchist opposition to revolution, referring to the opposition as the reaction to the revolutionaries of 18th century france purely in a materialist way as a literal reaction to the existence of revolutionaries being a change in the material conditions provoking a reaction.
This in turn informs all other marxist usage of the phrase, referring to various forms of reaction to conditions that the left creates.
Not going to lie. What you wrote does not read easily
Sorry.
The point I am making is that the marxist usage actually IS about people having a reaction to something. Reactionaries are a reaction to certain material conditions, these conditions are produced by the left (marxists) in most cases. For example critique of white male dominance in society produces a viscerally angry political opposition in some people who recognise consciously or unconsciously that it means they lose power. These people are what we call reactionaries in this context.
Whether or not they believe in RETVRN is actually irrelevant. They don’t have to believe that returning to the past is better. They just have to be reacting negatively to something clearly progressive. There are a tonne of people in our society who aren’t regressive but are also definitely reactionaries that angrily oppose everything we want.
The liberal definition removes materialism and just tries to say “they’re people that want to return to the past”. Mostly because liberals do not want to do materialist analysis as they recognise it’s not beneficial to them.
This is probably still difficult to parse. The point here is that the marxist definition is not really the same as the liberal definition. They do this to a lot of our language, much like “working class” means something different to liberals compared to marxists, “imperialism” too.
Monarchist reaction to revolutionaries of 18th century France who represent a change in material conditions.
The primary point of the response, I think, was to refocus reactionary away from “the past” and towards material conditions.
In the case of this thread it has to do with white people reacting to their place being questioned. White queers benefit from increased representation, increased safety, even if it doesn’t feel that way to us, and generally being the biggest ethnic group in queer spaces. And other stuff too.
Yea it is because they are reactive. The origin of the word is the reaction against revolution.
Past isn’t magically bad and future isn’t magically good. Time isn’t linear progress
lmao i come in here and of course you’re doing the stupidpol “but what if you replaced white with black” argument
Agreed. That is a terribly selfish argument for me to make, and I apologize for it.
Alright good response, sorry I was a bit rough on you but we’ve done this rodeo before a lot
They aren’t broad enough statements. It’s white queers generally too. I am currently watching white queers in union leadership ignore all union bylaws and undermine democratic processes while making it a very unwelcoming environment for bipoc. Guess who they blame for lack of participation? I’ll give you a hint… It’s certainly not blame directed at themselves. And after the 3rd and 4th time it’s brought up there is still no hope for change beyond booting people from their positions. We need better solidarity and better leadership in our organizations and it seems white queer folk are just as prone to repeating the routine racist mistakes that other whites make and are equally stubborn about self criticism. It really undermines our organizations when people refuse to read the room while making it about themselves. We all need an annual mandatory history lesson on how often white people fuck it up for everyone. That includes white queers.
White people aren’t a minority.
Not until I’m done at least
Is POCERL a thing? People of Color Exclusionary Radical Leftist? Because I feel like I’m being told I’m not self flagellating performatively enough by a bunch of POCERLs and straight white people
Is POCERL a thing? People of Color Exclusionary Radical Leftist?
Every organization I poked around before finally finding an org made up near-entirely of my folk certainly felt that way. Bunch of “class-war-only, no talk of liberation or reparative justice here, we don’t want to ‘alienate’ the ‘allies’ by making them do too much introspection”-type beats and ain’t no melanin on the leadership. Ain’t no melanin in the speakership. Ain’t no melanin in the planning rooms. Just ‘sit down, shut up, and toe the party line’ on some rebranded-DNC shit for us, so I’m gonna say yeah, that feels like it’s a thing.
When this stops being reality, that’s when I stop. When white people stop weaponizing their privilege, in straight or in queer spaces, that’s when I stop. When I can count on a white queer to throw their body “on the gears, on the wheels, and on the levers” like we have to day in and day out, that’s when I stop.
Til then, I genuinely don’t wanna hear it, 'cause this is always the called-out settler response. This kind of response no longer sounds or reads as genuine.
I think it’s fair to say that folks who are singled out would feel and perhaps are in some conventions treated unfairly (‘speak to the individual’ and all that).
If you’re willing to have a discussion, if I made a claim like “You likely have deep-seated misconceptions, base beliefs, which would be difficult to change and difficult to engage with. If the hard work is put in to work towards a common understanding, it’s true you may not agree, however I believe strongly at present with the information provided like your conduct and statements, you are missing key details or an in-depth understanding and frankly if you were to attain a greater understanding (something we can hopefully agree is always possible, though not always worth the time, or convenient) your beliefs would be more inline with mine than they are now.”
That’s a non-starter right? That’s essentially what I’d like to communicate and, of course anecdotally (and informally through others) the case is such a statement is ignored.
If it’s ignored like, 20 times, would you say it is appropriate to begin being unsavoury and less prosocial as other comrades are? Their conduct seems entirely reasonable to me, and has its own uses. Something I won’t really dive into because I think it would amount to bashing you and turning you into a strawperson.
What do you think? I’m genuinely curious as to what you might say and I think I can learn something, hopefully you can too, comeade.
Hmm, it is an interesting question. I fully admit I am in the wrong here, reacting as if it is a personal and homophobic attack.
I think our mutual life experiences have lead us to perceive certain behaviors as abusive even when the intent was not there from the other side. From that misunderstanding, mutual anger is born. I am someone that has no queer support network. I am relentlessly punished by my community for not conforming. I am threatened with violence. I perceive someone calling out my identity with the abuse I suffer at the hands of that community.
When someone claims the right to “punch up” I perceive it emotionally as being personally stomped on.
I get irrational, and emotional. I then say stupid things I come to regret. I fully understand that were I rational, I would not perceive this as a serious personal attack.
Thus, I fully agree I am in the wrong. I would only ask for understanding that this is born out of abuse by the society that we as leftists mutually oppose. Resorting to personal attacks seems pointlessly hurtful in this case, because it doesn’t serve any purpose besides making both genuinely upset sides more upset.
Well, I would certainly like to validate your experience. I think at times folks can get self-righteous (god knows I do) and in their crusade they can cause hurt to folks who have more in common than not.
It feels like that may be the case, if so it sucks
Power to you comrade, you got folks here who are rooting for ya.
Gotta keep the left infighting. Unfortunately it’s very easy to do.
White Gay Mafia
The secret sauce is liberalism. I’d argue that’s the core ideology, not the quazi-racial construct of whiteness… though when it comes to world view and politics they may as well be synonymous. I’ve run into a fair share of black and brown queer people who parrot the anti-radical talking points like they grew up in white NIMBY neighborhoods with zero self awareness.
I’ve run into a fair share of black and brown queer people who parrot the anti-radical talking points like they grew up in white NIMBY neighborhoods with zero self awareness.
That’s turncoat misleaders; we’ve been dealing with their like since
Jim Crowliteral Amerikan slavery. Back then, you could just count on it being the house slaves; nowadays, anyone will tapdance for a couple extra bucks regardless of where they stand on the gradient.
Hey folks, just want to drop some keywords for folks who want to do more reading - Though it’s never directly mentioned (which is weird because this fight is at least fifty years old and has always had two fairly well defined sides and there are libraries of scholarship and zines about it) this is part of the ongoing conflict between Queer Liberation and Queer Assimilation. Searching either term will lead to to scads of text going back decades, literally generations.
Also, it’s always worth re-reading the Combahee River Collective statement, which is mostly cited as the point where “intersectionality” as a concept started.
yes exactly this. i just did a lot of research on assimilation and liberationist currents in the queer community for a class very recently. i think i’ll compile some of the resources i found and share for those who don’t know this history once i get up later.
ok so these sources delve into assimilationist and liberationist history, why the split occurred etc.
Beyond Pink or Blue (Leslie Feinberg Speech) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaRF0Ohb1mg
these journal articles go into more depth and give further historical context to what Leslie is mentioning in hir speech.
Gay Liberation: How a Once Radical Movement Got Married and Settled Down https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/https://www.jstor.org/stable/24718619
Queering the Panthers: Rhetorical Adjacency and Black/Queer Liberation Politics https://files.libcom.org/files/CorriganQueeringthePanthers2019.pdf
The Queer/Gay Assimilationist Split: The Suits vs. the Sluts https://monthlyreview.org/2001/05/01/the-queergay-assimilationist-split/
i also wanna call attention to a book that comrade YearOfTheCommieDesktop shared in this thread. I haven’t read the Gentrification of the Mind but it looks like a great read and recommendation that is very relevant to these concepts.
all of these are introductory and US-centric so definitely do more research but I think its important to look and fully understand this history so that you can point out similar sentiments of assimilationist and homonormative rhetoric within queer spaces.
all of these sources are historical but queer liberationists haven’t stopped fighting and more often than not, there are anti-assimilationist queer orgs trying to build momentum to re-establish our roots everywhere.
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Some of these replies are a bit defensive
It’s become v evident to me a not insubstantial chunk of Hexbear haven’t truly investigated their relationship with their settlerhood, or how it’s affecting the way the way their moves are perceived. All I know is I find it unacceptable. Like, I have deadass left would-be organizational efforts over fragility like what I’ve seen today.
it can be hard for some people who self-identify as communist/leftist/socialist/progressive and open-minded/tolerant as can be to accept they might have some unintended blind spots or double standards. They may agree in the abstract, but often recoil and have a long de-railing tangent when you actually confront them on a specific.
Like the most common way that white people center stuff on themselves doesn’t involve explicitly racist speech. It’s just hogging the attention and making every point that makes them uncomfortable or feeling targeted into a giant logical debate with walls of text and idealist thought experiments. The “not all white people” argument is a prime example, where there’s some critique ongoing and the conversation gets derailed into people arguing whether it’s about 100% of white people or only guilty white people excluding good allies.
White people can be good allies but they need to not make it about themselves and not do this derailing conversation.
As a whitish person, white people stop sabotaging class solidarity challenge: difficulty level super fucking easy, why are you still doing it?
“but what if you replace white cis gay men with black trans lesbians? Doesn’t sound so great anymore huh!” -this thread unironically
Sometimes coming to an unfortunate realization about yourself or a group you align with feels like a slap in the face, and a slap in the face usually causes a reaction whether it’s warranted or not. It’s good to be aware of your own reactionary behavior, and we often make it seem like being reactionary is the greatest sin of all, but sometimes otherwise good people just need a minute to work through it. We don’t all have perfect ideology all the time, and while it’s good to expect the best of your comrades, sometimes giving them time and kindly pointing them in the right direction is better than abrasively calling them out.
@Civility@hexbear.net right now, shaking their damn head.
