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.
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.