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.
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
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?
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.
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.
begging people to read The Gentrification of the Mind
@Civility@hexbear.net right now, shaking their damn head.
Oh we’re so back baby
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You mean liberals. Not white gay men.
I don’t think I requested an amendment; I’ll thank you to stay out of my inbox with any further you might have.
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 🙄
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.
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.
Some of these replies are a bit defensive
“but what if you replace white cis gay men with black trans lesbians? Doesn’t sound so great anymore huh!” -this thread unironically
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.
As a whitish person, white people stop sabotaging class solidarity challenge: difficulty level super fucking easy, why are you still doing it?
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.
