Pride, Bigotry and Pinkwashing
The radical roots of Pride and why solidarity is so relevant today.
As Pride month ends, it is now a yearly tradition for right wing reactionaries in the media and on social media to recite their tired complaints about the queer⁺ community. Everyone has heard the rather exhausting “I’m fine with gay people, but why do they have to shove it in my face?” line or the unwitting “Why don’t our veterans get a month?”. Since conservatives have suffered an overwhelming defeat in the court of public opinion on gay rights, they naturally shift attention to the more vulnerable trans people and drag queens. The same irrational arguments used against gay people are now being recycled to target trans people, namely the ‘coming for your kids’ narrative. Luckily this is proving to be a losing issue for conservatives and active opposition, while strong now, will certainly fade. Today, there are still many tangible issues that the community faces such as trans healthcare access, lack of HIV/AIDS treatment, queer youth homelessness, and outright discrimination. As queerness becomes more widely accepted in society, passive ‘allies’ embrace rainbow capitalism; corporations join Pride parades while politicians and celebrities send out their sanitized Pride month post. In an isolated sense, these gestures benefit public acceptance but the power they have is not used to fundamentally help the queer community. Perfectly exemplified recently when Budwieser paid a trans influencer to promote their beer in a video and after receiving backlash from bigots, the company apologized and withdrew their support. With Target’s pride merchandise, they scaled back much of it this year, moving it to the back of stores in response to bigots threatening employees over it. Gilead Sciences Inc made a Pride post stating their “united support for LGBTQ+ communities globally” this June despite profiting off selling HIV/AIDS treatment and recently being sued for antitrust violations that kept generic versions of their drugs off the market. During a time where queer and especially trans people need all the support they can get, corporations giving into pressure from bigots only emboldens them. However frustrating this unethical behavior is, this is a feature of neo-liberal capitalism, not an error.
When the market naturally incentivizes profit over everything, firms will make any unethical decision necessary if it generates greater profits. A very simplified theoretical example of this; a biotech company is deciding whether to research and develop a better hormone treatment for gender transitions with less side effects. During their cost benefit analysis, they notice that another firm with a similar product faced protests from religious zealots and they find that the market for the product is smaller than their other drugs. Since it will not make enough profit to satisfy their shareholders, they ultimately find it is not worth pursuing even though it would materially help thousands of people. This is the same reason that companies almost never lobby for social issues. Disney, who was under attack in Florida by the far-right, still gives republicans plenty of lobbying money and failed to defend Florida’s queer community, until an employee protest forced them take a stance. Now someone may not be convinced that firms should care about social issues and say that these are examples of the market responding to demand. But what about every other medical treatment? Is it ethical for ‘the market’ to decide things like what drugs we research? What happens when firms decide that cancer is more profitable to treat than to research and cure?
This is a symptom of an emerging issue in queer politics; the phenomenon called whitewashing, which happens with all of American history. It is the deliberate or accidental manipulation of history by simplifying and removing context which covers up complexities, malevolence and immorality. For the queer movement, this has been coined ‘pinkwashing’ or ‘rainbow-washing’ where masses of passive supporters join, the movement is mainstreamed and then it's corporatized or misrepresented. The celebration of Pride in particular has been politically sterilized and is now far from its original historical context. The first Pride was not a parade but a radical protest which rebelled against the police state that discriminated against queer people. It was very much an intersectional protest too, having mutual solidarity with the Black Power movement and the anti-war movement. Taking part in the riot were poor, homeless, and working class people of many marginalized groups, black, brown, transgenders, drag queens, gays, prostitutes, and cross-dressers. This is cited as the foundation of modern queer liberation in America and much of the world.
This radical history can be forgotten today, and this is not to say Pride cannot be celebrated without radical politics, it certainly can. The problem comes when queerness is co-opted by corporations and those who refuse solidarity to marginalized peoples. Today, you can find many openly gay conservatives who oppose trans inclusion or weaponize their identity to be Islamaphobic. There are gay republicans who align with conservatives who oppose gay rights and think being gay is a sin. And to caveat, gay openness regardless of personal politics, is always a good thing; a hand should always be extended to them as long as they abandon bigotry. An increasing problem is when self-perceived allies who weaponize bigotry. It’s not too common but, especially on social media, many allies will suggest someone is trans derogatorily or use homophobic language and slurs. There is the process of reclaiming slurs within the queer community but as allies, bigotry cannot be used to fight bigotry. Then comes the most disturbing problem: pinkwashing genocide.
This past weekend there have been many Palestinian protests and demonstrations at Pride events. The protest centers on solidarity; that there cannot be Pride in genocide. Knowing the history of Pride, it is no coincidence that one group of marginalized people would protest for another group of marginalized people. The context of this genocide goes back over a century. I discuss the history and context in more detail here⁺ . Tensions have been escalating for decades and it has very little to do with religion, as western media has subtly propagated. It has to do with there being two distinct states with a massive imbalance of power. The people of Gaza live under an authoritarian military party as well as being under Israel’s apartheid that leaves much of the population impoverished and food insecure. When discussing the morality of Israel’s actions, apologists will state a sort of argument that Israel is a just and dignified democracy that is liberating the uncivilized Palestinian people. Then the extension is to queer rights to say that Palestinians as a whole resent queer rights because of their perceived religious extremism, a sentiment which is strategically propagandized by Israel to gain the support of the west. The problem comes first in the conflation that rich democracies are incapable of abhorrent atrocities, directly contradicted by the United States’ war crimes throughout history. The other is that Israel's current government is currently ruled by a far right ultranationalist party containing many high ranking members who are strongly anti-queer. Another ironic contradiction is when these claims are made by pundits who themselves are opposed to the queer movement namely evangelicals christian-zionists. The notion itself is very flat in reality; the people of Gaza, like everyone on Earth, are not ideologically homogeneous. They exist under an authoritarian military party which mandates Islamic fundamentalism. This is to say the people of Palestine are not inherently opposed to secularism and social freedoms, it's that they have no choice. Even in this context, there are still far better legal rights and conditions for women and queer people in Gaza than propagandistic media would like you to believe. This media is created knowing that western people already have a preconceived idea that Muslims are inherently violent and intolerant. It becomes especially disgusting when a queer IDF soldier, standing on the bombed rubble of Palestinian homes, presents a gay flag reading ‘in the name of love’ proclaiming it the first gay flag to fly in Gaza. The simple reality is that no queer liberation can come to a people that are dead.
The first Pride was about the liberation of all people, no oppressed peoples can be excluded. In 1971, civil rights figure Frannie Lou Hamer famously said “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free” echoing Dr. King’s “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” an idea that is just as relevant today, as it was back then. Without solidarity, there is no Pride.
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