Painbow | Pride Month Sucks, Don’t Call Me “Queer”, And Other Personal LGBT+ Rants
(This is a repost, the original was accidentally submitted incomplete. Thank you for your understanding).
NOTE: For reference, I identify as aromantic-asexual and demigirl (she/they pronouns).
It’s Pride Month.
Yay.
Just like Black History Month, an occasion I should feel personally honored and validated by just falls flat. But this time it’s… a little different. Back then I was content with ignoring the month in question, but now I feel much more motivated to write, partly because it’s been almost one full year since I started writing here on Medium (don’t worry, I have a special anniversary piece planned) and I eventually want to get enough followers to start making money off my content (unless that comes with limiting who can read what I write to the Members-Only setting; if that’s the case, it is less likely that I will be seeking monetization).
So join me as I go through and discuss various issues related to Pride Month and LGBT+ identity, all from my perspective, just as I did when I was first starting out.
Corporate Pride
My sibling Zeke and I visited the Towson Town Center in Maryland a couple of days ago. Despite not even being June yet (it was May 31), we counted at least six (6) Pride-related displays/promotions, including a Bath & Body Works fragrance called “Love Always Wins”.
Now, obviously I’m not the first person to be familiar with the concept of Corporate Pride, where companies don rainbow symbols in an attempt to market themselves as paragons of acceptance and progressive values.
Of course, I’m not the first person to catch on to their little game. The general public- both on the pro- and anti- LGBT+ sides of things- have been making jokes about the Corporate Pride phenomenon for a while now, and now more than ever, people have generally caught on to companies not practicing the tolerant, pro-humanity ideals they wear as a costume.
But there is another side to this argument, though, that the proliferation of Pride imagery plays a part in normalizing LGBT+ identities, or at the very least signaling that the cultural tide has turned enough that the LGBT+ community can be used for marketing purposes.
I can see both sides of this argument, but ultimately I refuse to give rainbow capitalists any of my mon- hey, that shirt’s only ten dollars? Nice!
Intersectionality
My first Medium article was “Flesh-Colored Rainbows”, in which I discussed concerns within the LGBT+ community related to race. Since then, the social tides regarding which identities are deemed the most “important” have continued to shift. For a couple of years leading up to 2016 the big hot-button issue was LGBT+ rights, then through the rest of the 2010s it was feminism, then at the turn of the decade everything became about race. Only now do things seem to be shifting back towards gender and feminism, at least from what I’ve been noticing.
As for the specific intersection between race and sexuality, why is it the LGBT+ community specifically being put on blast in terms of “stomping out bigotry in their ranks” and “you’d think a group that has experienced so much discrimination would be more accepting”?
From the way people speak, you’d think that homophobia within black communities (mainly due to high amounts of religiosity) was never a notorious issue (albeit one never encompassing all black people or communities), but ever since race became the most important issue, criticizing racial minorities for their bigotries (or for anything, really) is less acceptable.
From the way people speak, you’d think that the statement “no blacks, no Asians, no fatties” has only ever appeared on Grindr and other gay dating apps, but it’s become a hyperfocus among progressive pundits, as if a gay man who won’t date black people is worse than a straight man who won’t date black people, which it isn’t.
Then again, from the way people speak, you’d think there was such a thing as an LGBT+ community at all, at least in the traditional sense of the word “community”.
Again, there isn’t. Sure, there are other aromantic people, other asexual people, other demigirls out there. That’s not my problem.
The Whole “Queer” Thing
Now personally, I despise the label “queer”. Its historical origins and whether or not it’s “officially” a slur are only part of it.
Its historical origins are probably the least important part, to be honest. Not everything minority groups and activists claimed and did has to be preserved. Gandhi was notably sexist. Susan B Anthony was racist. TERFs originated from second-wave feminism. This isn’t a call to disregard the past and your movement’s accomplishments, it’s a call to not hold the past as sacred and activists as infallible.
The thing is, to discuss the word “queer”, its common use as a slur can’t be ignored. When this is brought up, people often say “but I don’t use the word to describe the whole community! I use it to describe myself!”. If this is you, I guess I can’t stop you.
But my main problem with the term is that it’s become an expectation rather than a choice. It’s not that seeing other people use “queer” as an “empowering” self-identifier makes me feel like I need to it too. It’s that it’s often used as a blanket term for the whole community… without the permission of the whole community. People who grew up being called “queer” as part of being viciously bullied in school are suddenly expected to not have a problem with this. It’s never personally happened to me, but I choose not to use the word out of solidarity.
“Queer” isn’t a good word or bad word, it’s a word. That said, it’s a word with a complicated history, and if people don’t like using the word to describe themselves or others, there’s nothing wrong with that.
So I’ll stick with LGBT+, thanks.
Do I Go To Pride Celebrations?
Honestly, I’ve lost my desire to do so. No, it’s not because aro-ace identities often go unacknowledged. I’m fine with that, because hey, at least I know that I exist!
It’s because I know that these events aren’t for me from an ideological standpoint. Nobody wants to support you when your disagreements with them get to be too much. And I just know that if I sat down with a handful of people from any of these Pride events, my views on everything from LGBT+ history to representation to policy proposals would get me ostracized. A certain amount of conformity is expected as far as the social and political aspect of the LGBT+ community goes. I don’t demand to be agreed with, it just gets lonely knowing that some people only like the idea of you.
I recognize that in saying this, I sound like a black conservative or a token gay Republican, but it’s different. My goals- equality and acceptance for all gender and sexual identities- are the same as the rest of you, I just seek different avenues to progress, favoring a tearing-down-and-building-from-scratch of society, rather than just putting “the right people in charge”.
I actually have been banned from LGBT+ spaces for saying so, but that’s a story for another day.
Just to clarify: If Pride Month (or Black History Month, or any such commemorative occasion for that matter) is a big thing for you, that’s fine. I’m happy for you. I just wanted to highlight my personal disillusionment with what my identity is supposed to mean in terms of how I think, speak, and act.
I guess I technically can’t escape being part of the LGBT+ community (it would be hypocritical of me to say otherwise), but I still stand by what I previously said in “Flesh-Colored Rainbows”:
…I propose that we let go of the idea of “communities” in a strict sense, because it creates expectations that real people will inevitably not meet. Not that we should stop communicating with people similar to us in various ways, I’m more referring to the idea that communities are organized groups, and that they all think the same and should be thought of in the same way.
(God, my prose has gotten so much smoother since then.)
Keep in mind also that I do not consent to anything I’ve said here being used as an example of “alphabet people infighting” or “the left eating itself”. If anything, this was written in an attempt to normalize disagreements among marginalized groups. That said, with the way in-group out-group bias shakes out (in which everybody in your group is driven by logic and reason, but everybody not in your group is irrational and driven purely by emotion and impulse), only time will tell.
So happy Pride Month, have a good summer, and most importantly, stay safe.
For this piece in particular, I would really appreciate if you left your feedback in the comments. Please let me know how you feel about about any of the topics I’ve discussed today.
Thanks so much for reading. Until next time, stay on the hook!
