How Queer People Became Marketable: Pride Month, Establishment Co-Opting, and Rainbow Capitalism

First off, Happy Pride Month, other queers :3

This post isn't a denouncement or disownment of pride month, but rather an attempt at revitalization for a movement sorely let down in the modern sense. Pride Month came out of the eruption of the Stonewall Riots in 1969, a sudden burst of queer militancy and resistance after reaching a tipping point of repression in our respective communities for decades past, with passive resistance proving ineffective. Homosexuality was punished legally since the 1920s, and social stigma was only heightened by the Cold War's "lavender scare," which painted queer people as "more susceptible to being spies for communist governments," banning them from government positions (many key NASA engineers and designers were fired by James Webb out of these policies). The eruption of these policies turned into a fight for democracy, the right for self determination and freedom from repression, in the streets. The Stonewall Riots had up to 1000 queer people fighting in the streets against the police attempting to destroy one of the few places they could find community in. A year after the outbreak of the riots, on June 28th, 1970, the first Pride Parade was held in LA and Chicago.

Within a couple of years, more and more cities held pride parades on June 28th, and hundreds of gay liberation organizations were made across the US. In the following decades, queer people would continue agitating for equality in perception and opportunity, as many openly queer people were restricted from obtaining jobs, loans, legal marriages, and the likes. The 1980s had the largest blow to queer solidarity, especially among (conditional) allies. With the AIDS crisis intensifying and president Reagan both being inactive in quelling the crisis and making it worse by calling it the "Gay Plague." Queer people continued to advocate for rights while demonstrating throughout this entire period.

In 1994, the Clinton Administration enacted the policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" for queer people in the military; you can serve in the military if you stay closeted. Ironically, while this policy was still in effect, June was declared Pride Month by Clinton in 1999 while over 5,000 service members had been discharged under DA,DT up to that point, 1,000 just that year (1). While federal recognition has been a major positive for the legal recognition of queer rights, eventually gaining the right to marriage in 2015, this killed the revolutionary militancy of the movement; it had been co-opted as many other social movements with revolutionary potential have in the past. The Civil Rights March on Washington was meant to be a display of rage and militancy by the southern black man, a revolutionary display of the necessity of change in American society. The March was later adapted by the "upper-class" black leaders, and later co-opted by the white man, becoming an advisory board for the event and there the event was whitewashed and toned down (2). It's a tale that comes to eat up a social movement so much it's genuinely depressing to think about. When the Stonewall Riots were started by police brutality and contained multiple fights with police, it's a betrayal of the movement to see police participating in pride. A queer policeman a traitor to his own community (and his class as a whole). From 1999 forward, queer militancy has been significantly reduced, as it was co-opted by the establishment. When a social movement is co-opted by its oppressor, those who fight against the capitulation to the system are seen as "fringe extremists" and the rest are able to "act" from their bedrooms, gaining a sense of activism by just expressing ally-ship from afar, or even worse, seeing the movement as over and achieving its end goal.

Queer liberation went from a revolutionary form of militancy, fighting for basic recognition and the end of a system that has oppressed them for hundreds of years to a single month of the year that queer people are allowed to speak up, but only if it can be done through light reforms. Solidarity with queer people is now selling pride flags, changing social media logos, and hiring a couple extra queer people for diversity at one time of the year. Don't think that these corporations actually care about queer people either, they found that it was more profitable to sell to queer people than to alienate them. It's not solidarity, it's sales. Queer people need to realize that the struggle for queer liberation isn't about liberal government recognition, but rather the fundamental system of capitalistic hierarchy that created the basis of the oppression of queer people. The bourgeoise created the view of the perfect person, he who is a straight, cisgender, white male. All forms of bigotry, from racism to xenophobia to homophobia, comes through bourgeois class structures, and the only refuge from these forms of oppression is to topple these structures. The only true avenue for queer liberation and liberation from all other forms of oppression is the socialist state; the state run by the working person, for the working person; the destruction of the landholding bourgeoise with their regressive view of society.

Corporate sponsors and police (state sponsors of violence) do not belong at pride, and must be reclaimed as a militant revolutionary movement. Only through true militancy and rejection of the forces preventing progress will liberation be achieved.

1. This isn't to say that it's a positive thing that queer people are serving in a military of a nation who does not care for them. As a queer person, I would never serve in the military because it firstly goes against my values to fight for an imperialist machine built off of bloodshed and genocide, and second because the government cares not for me in the slightest. The purpose of that statement was to show the hypocrisy of the Clinton administration, declaring pride month while discharging thousands from the military for being queer.

2. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Chapter 15