Some people really need to step back and realize what really started the LGBT community. Why we specifically came together in our activism.
It wasn’t a bunch of people saying “oh wow we’re weird together” but a group of people coming together who faced similar circumstances of homophobia+transphobia. People who were being murdered by their government. People being put on the streets, losing their jobs, and losing their lives.
Watering down our history of it was a bunch of weirdos who wanted to be weird together ignores everything we’ve been through making us have to group together. Ignores the whole generation of voices lost in the AIDS crises. To murder. To police raids. To being thrown out of their homes. These acts are what made us come together out of survival. Not because we wanted to join a club.
This is a very misleading strawman version of the queer movement. NO ONE is saying that the LGBT grew out of
“oh wow we’re weird together”. No one. Never happened. Not a thing. What people did say (annd it involves long and complicated words so I understand why some Tumblr users would express it differently) was:
This movement that we build to fight police brutality and job discrimination and violence from our families and mass death through lack of medication is failing its most vulnerable and focussing instead on those within our community who are easiest to present as acceptable rolemodels to.
We are failing trans people, we are failing LGBT POC, we are failing LGBT people in sex work, and more.
A couple of white middle class cisgender gays and lesbians are trying to take the fast lane to safety and acceptance at the expense of everyone else in our community.
This focus on assimilation into the American Dream, into capitalism, into the nuclear family, is not helping us. It is maintaining the systems that are making our lives unbearable. We are marginalized, but on the margins we can see quite clearly what is hurting us and we can organize with other marginalized people to survive. We need to reject trying to be seen as normal and we need to reject infighting about who belongs with us. We need to see our differences as a good thing and focus on destroying the systems that are killing our most marginalized.
That’s the queer movement.
