Drop the T - The Deadly Consequences of Gay Respectability Politics

Unfortunately, it's very likely that much of what you know about the gay rights movement in the United States is wrong. But it's not your fault you were being lied to. In fact, it's likely that you still are. And based on those lies, it may seem to you that there is a new and increasing division within the LGBTQ+ community. People claim there are swaths of lesbians and gays who are fed up with all these new trans and queer people co-opting their movement and their identities, latching on to the

progress that they made in the fight for gay rights, and then setting that progress back with every hormone imbibed in every gender role spat on. But are these legitimate concerns based in reality? Are the people who are claiming this just sensible gays and lesbians acting in good faith? Let's hear them out. “More revisionist gay history by the trans Brigade. The more you lie about LGB history, the more it becomes obvious you need to lie because it's the only way you can justify transjacking LGB

T groups to make them all about you. LGB drop the T.” “Says Richard, whose head is so far up his ass he can't see the vileness of the trans Taliban slash Davidians, erasing our proud gay history and culture. The LGB is already against the TQ+. I'm a lesbian.” Hi Lesbian, I'm Caelan. Gay /Them. “The TQIA+ who were not invited to the brunch in the first place, but just showed up one day whining; Don't you know who I am? Trashed the place, pissed on the bathroom walls and made the neighbors hate u

s. That, my friends, is gay history. This is a historical nonsense, of course, But I will be showing up to every brunch now whining; (real bitchy) Don't you know who I am??? “The LGB needs to drop the t Q Plus ASAP. It's a force teaming that is turning a lot of people against the LGBT due to the unhinged behavior of the ideologues slash extremists: the QT+. LGB equals legit sexual orientations. TCU plus alphabet soup equals regressive homophobic misogynist furries fetishists child grooming, chil

d mutilating spicy straight AGP made up genders woo woo. Drop the TQ+. The LGBT aren't about all this crap being pushed and forced down our throats. This is your brain. This is your brain on gender critical ideology. Just say no. Now, there's one aspect you may not see when other people discuss this. The truth about what goes on behind the scenes in the groups that reject any connection between the LGBs and the TQs. Yes, they're incredibly anti-trans, but they're also just anti-gay. Luckily for

you, and so very unluckily for me, I've now been undercover in these groups for over two years. So while in public they may say something like this, “The LGBT community started going to hell in a handbasket when it added the TQ+ for the spicy straight who felt left out during gay pride. Now renamed Pride so that once again the straights can play.” In private, it's often much more insidious. “Women defend male homosexuality and say it doesn't impact anyone else and is no one else's business when

they have been let out of their pen and now run roughshod over our innocence. Only one small example of one small sub example of how they do this. Something being abnormal is an argument to investigate it. When we investigate homosexual behavior in males, we find some very nasty stuff. I mean, partying all night with ten different men in your anus is no one else's business until you stop at the blood bank on the way home in the morning.” As far as situations go that never happened, this one nev

er happened like the most. But the fact that this was said in a group that explicitly is in the ‘LGB drop the TQ’ camp, Gender criticals, it exemplifies exactly what the movement is based on. It's the exact same thing that all anti gender and sexual minority movements are rooted in; hatred, fear, disgust and upholding the systems that demand that everyone assimilate in order to survive. And pulling the mask off of this movement, laying its true face bare for all to see. That's the part I can pl

ay. That's what I can do. I mean, at this point, that's what I do. And I need to do something because seeing the damage they're doing, the lies they're telling, the actual harm they're causing, it literally keeps me up at night. At a time when people are being violently murdered for having a pride flag up in their store or for the crime of being black and gay while dancing. Seeing people try to divide our community with lies and erasure instead of uniting us in solidarity with the truth? I can't

sit idly by and keep my mouth shut. So that's why we're here at what I've been ironically calling the Musée du Gay, because all that's needed to unmask their lies can be found right here. Because this place, it's built out of our collective memory, out of our joys and our pains, our wins and losses, out of the lives saved and the lives lost in the fight for liberation. It is of us. For us; the ephemeral now corporial, and yours to experience if you want it. Right through that door is where you

'll find your museum docent for the day. And you're lucky because today we have a special guest, Sarah from the Leftist Cooks. After your tour, check the information below. I think you'll find yourself wanting to see more of her. The truth of this is simple. It's indisputable. And it's right here waiting for you. All you have to do is step through that door. Nearly everything is socially constructed. This isn't controversial and it isn't necessarily easy to understand, but it is essential for ou

r purposes. So to start, let's look at a rainbow, a symbol of the Gender and Sexual Minority, or GSM, community, in a lot of the western world. Our Pride rainbows have clearly defined colors which symbolically mean different things. But if we look at an actual rainbow, at the visible light spectrum, we can start to see how color itself is a social construct. What I mean is: those of us who aren't colorblind may see color the same way, but there's no true point on the spectrum at which one color

ends or begins. Why do we have a word for orange, for example, and see that as a separate color from red? But we see light blue and dark blue as types of blue? We decided that the area between yellow and green is ‘light green’ rather than ‘cloudy yellow.’ And it's very hard to determine where the cut off points between colors are. I think it's easy to imagine a world where we conceive of dark blue as a color separate from blue, its own unique color, one that people could pick as their favorite,

and which we can decide clashes or matches with other colors. Color happens when we perceive light as bouncing off of objects in a certain way. In that way it's real. But everything about it, how we name it, and perceive it, and interact with it; that's all a social construct. So, of course, is being gay, being trans, being ace, and being queer. Not because we're signaling that we're woke, but because if something as simple as the way we perceive light is social, then of course something as comp

lex as the way we perceive and relate to ourselves and others, that's going to be socially constructed too. We have too much history to cover to get into the details of anything really prior to Stonewall. So this is going to be a very quick overview. I expect some of you are sick to death of the standard Western lineage of homosexuality, of Plato talking about his affection for teenage boys, or of Sappho talking about her male and female lovers, or the Roman Emperor Elagabalus preferring to be

called ‘Queen,’ using she/hers and offering a reward to anyone who could figure out how to give her bottom surgery. Some of you too will know that in much of the world, being gay or trans was so routine that to name them to create a separate category of greenish yellow would be strange. GSMs just existed. But if we're sticking to Europe, this all changed with Christianity. The rule of Emperor Justinian The First rewrote laws for the Byzantine Empire. In one of his amendments, Justinian decreed t

hat the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was not about hospitality, consent, or wealth hoarding, but instead was a parable about gay male sex. And with this new interpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah, lots of places in Europe in the Middle Ages began to condemn the idea of men having sex with men. But we still didn't really have a conception of the category of ‘gay.’ This change relatively recently, at least according to the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Foucault draw attention to the infl

uence of the Catholic emphasis on confession, naming one's sin and voicing it aloud, and argues that in coming into the 18th and 19th century, this led to a change in ideology where sodomy went from being an act to a type of person. “As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, Sodomy was a category of forbidden acts. Their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The 19th century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood in addition to

being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him, at the root of all his actions, because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle. Written immodestly on his face and body, because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular na

ture. We must not forget that the psychological psychiatric medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a type of interior androgyny. A hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temp

orary aberration. The homosexual was now a species.” A rather unromantic start for our category of ‘gay.’ Homosexuals are men who have sex with men. And as Foucault states, a large part of the reason that they are bad is that they’re feminine. They’re men doing a feminine. It's important to say here that contemporary homophobia is not solely predicated on a hatred of femininity. The system of hatred has evolved and become culturally enmeshed in more insidious ways. But Transphobes sometimes argu

e that people who transition are doing so to escape homophobia. This ignores that there are whole separate biases against trans people that slam into them the second they step out of the closet. But also, the bigots here have this backward. A trans woman is not escaping bias by being feminine. Most of the hatred of her is foundationally based in exactly that same thing. It is femininity performed by the ‘wrong kind’ of body, a gender performance said to be entirely irreconcilable with sex. But b

ack to our history lesson, you all may be asking: uh, where are the lesbians? The Bis, the Transes, the Aces? Surely this is indicative that we have a social contagion! There used to just be one word and now we've got a whole long mouthful of an acronym. I will remind you to think about colors of the Rainbow and social constructs these 18th and 19th century conceptions of identity have evolved, just as there were probably always people who we would contemporarily call gay men before the concept

existed. Many of these gay men would probably have preferred to be classified as bi man or non-binary people or trans women, had the labels and corresponding concepts existed. Gender and sexual minorities of all stripes have always existed, but our words for their identities haven't. Writing Years later, the interdisciplinary queer scholar Teresa De Laurentiis would point out that establishing male homosexuality first and then creating other sexual identities, using gay men as a reference point

, further marginalized and flattened our experiences; a bias which we're going to see over and over on this tour. “The discourse of white gay historiography and sociology added on women as an afterthought, with little or no understanding of female socio-sexual specificity. Lesbians and Bisexuals finally got a bit of notice in the late 1800s and early 1900s with the work of physician and eugenicist Henry Havelock Ellis. Gay men had been established as being men doing femininity, so when Ellis de

cided to write a tome on homosexuality called Sexual inversion, he argued that lesbians were just women doing masculinity. He wrote about bisexuals, too. At first, for us, he used the label ‘psychosexual hermaphrodites.’ Again saying that bisexuals were the result of doing gender poorly, this time not due to masculinity or femininity, but dangerous androgyny. But he revised this in the third edition of his book and instead used the term bisexual, possibly under the influence of his wife, the ope

nly not straight non-monogamous socialist Edith Lees. Don't mistake Ellis for an ally, though. Though his tone is compassionate, Ellis was a devout racist and passionate eugenicist, He was one of the first to argue for the born this way narrative, saying that sexuality was inherent, and invertedness, homosexuality, was clearly inferior. Ellis spent large parts of his work focusing on global cultures and argued that the prevalence of homosexuality amongst non-English ‘races’ was indicative of gen

etic inferiority. White English people, he argued, were less likely to be homosexual at all, and if they were, at least they had the decency to be ashamed about it. Ellis didn’t argue that homosexuals should be overtly killed or sterilized. He was quite sympathetic to the idea that we should be able to live our lives with dignity. However, he thought it imperative that we pair off with each other and not have children. In reading his book, which largely consists of case studies from people all o

ver the world, it might strike you as deeply likely that some of the people Ellis profiles would probably think of themselves today as trans. A person he speaks to who I'm going to use gender neutral pronouns for, recounts a childhood of always being a girl when playing with friends, of wearing skirts and wigs and dresses, even signing up to theater productions to have access to socially sanctioned femaleness, but also, of being humiliated and bullied by their peers and family. As an adult they

spend their life trying to hide these bits of themself, talking with friends as to whether they're passing as their assigned gender and ruminating on how they could better pass. As they said, “the sting of the bullying lasted, though, and led me more than once to ask intimate friends, both men and women, if they considered me at all feminine. Every one of them has been very emphatically of the opinion that my rational life is distinctly masculine. Being logical, impartial, skeptical. One or two

suggested that I have a finer discrimination than most men and that I take care of my room somewhat as a woman might, though this does not extend to the style of decorations. One man said that I lacked sympathy with a certain grosser manifestations of masculine character, such as smoking. Some women think me unusually observing of women's dress my own is by no means effeminate.” As Ellis continued his research and continued speaking with inverts, he came to the conclusion that besides lesbians,

bisexuals and gay men, some of the people were also trans, and he didn't think of trans as just extremely gay, but as categorically different. A third sex. But as with everything with Ellis, some of this sounds good until you scratch the surface because Ellis was by this point also a Freudian and may have been the first person to argue for what has come to be known now as autogynophilia. A disproven explanation for transness, which has been used to justify untold harm. It would have been so dif

ferent had we had our conception shaped not by Ellis, but by his contemporary the German physician Magnus Hirschfield, who based his work on a more empirical understanding of gender and sexuality. He was an advocate for gay people, trans people and ace people. His clinics use preferred pronouns and conducted gender reassignment surgeries. He was one of the first targets of the Nazis as they came to power, and much of his work has been lost after he was exiled and his library burned. This brings

us to the pre-Stonewall era, where gay rights groups organized under the term Homophiles. Gay activism of the 1950s had heavily and overtly focused on assimilation. On, as lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis, stated: “promoting the integration of the homosexual into society.’ Before Stonewall, the Mattachine Society had been the biggest homophile group. They were founded by communists, but a decade prior to Stonewall, they were usurped by conservative assimilationist with policies like c

reating a conventionally gendered dress code for their protests, where women were instructed to wear skirts and dresses and men were told to wear suits. The goal was reform, not revolution. Dick Leitsch, an openly gay journalist and Mattachine activist, wrote in his coverage of Stonewall that prior to the riot, assimilationist had believed they were making headway integrating into the status quo by focusing on respectability politics. But this was changing. It was the 1960s and the revolutionary

movements we shamefully allowed the mainstream to dismiss as ‘hippie counterculture’ were focused on fighting back and disrupting rather than perpetuating that same status quo. Riots were getting more common. There was one at Cooper Donuts, at Dewey's, at the Baltimore Pepper Hill Club. There was this day in 1966 at Compton Cafeteria, an establishment where the staff routinely called the police on their trans customers who were arrested for cross-dressing. On one such night, the police attempte

d to arrest a trans woman for loitering. She responded by throwing her coffee at a cop, kicking off a disproportionately violent response from police and sparking San Francisco's modern gay rights movement. But for many, Stonewall was the event that flipped the switch from the politics of assimilation to politics of liberation. Before you head into the next room, I want you to conjure up what you know about the famed riots that took place at the Stonewall Inn on that early morning in June 1969.

If you were asked: who was there, what went down, and why, would you feel confident in your answers? What about the following nights of demonstrations and anti-police actions? What do you know about that, and where did you hear it? It seems quite a lot of people have quite a lot of different stories, different versions. Who threw the first brick? Was there a brick? What relevance does Stonewall even have in the larger movement? Many would believe they have the answers to these questions, but how

many of them are right? It might seem as though we all have to have to ‘both sides’ the issue. People all remember things differently, and it was so long ago, there's no way to really know. But that's not exactly true. The records exist, but like so much of our history, they're tucked away only to be seen by people who choose to go hunting for them. And that's exactly what Sarah did. So what really happened at Stonewall? Let's find out. The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar in Greenwich Village. It h

ad started to cater specifically to gender and sexual minorities in 1966 and gained a reputation for being one of the only gay bars in the city where people could slow dance together. As romantic as this sounds, it wasn't a naive paradise; the bar, like many gay bars in the state, was run for profit by the Mafia. The drinks were outrageously expensive and the patrons risked being busted by the police or blackmailed by the mob. But they had nowhere else to go. There were other gay bars in the ci

ty, homosexuality itself was legal in New York, but many aspects of being queer were criminalized, including the masquerading laws which punished cross-dressing. Trans people, as well as femme gays and butch lesbians, which punished cross-dressing. trans people, as well as from gays and lesbians, were routinely arrested and imprisoned under that specific charge. For years, the official policy of the State Liquor Authority was to refuse licenses to gay clubs, claiming gay people got up to indece

nt conduct. To circumvent this, Stonewall Operated as a private club, asking patrons to sign in and keeping very little liquor on the premises. Still, police would find pretenses for the raids, such as to investigate cross-dressing or to simply claim that the bar was skirting those intentionally discriminatory liquor laws. Raids were so common that the patrons and operators of Stonewall had their routine down to a science: flash. the lights, empty the bar, let the police take the scant amount o

f alcohol on the premises and reopen the next day by restocking from the store of alcohol kept off site. But on the night of June 28th, 1969, things went a little differently. The New York City Public Morals Division squad began the raid at 1:20 a.m. People were shoved against the walls, the lights on the dance floor flashed. Police commanded that everyone line up and show ID. Under the guise of investigating masquerading, some were asked to undergo an inspection of their genitals. Though most p

atrons were allowed to leave, the staff, as well as those who were deemed to be cross-dressing, were detained. Usually police would immediately throw people they'd caught into patrol wagons. But that night the wagons were late. Patrons who hadn't been captured stayed outside, and then people on the street joined the crowd. According to most witnesses, the police began roughly hauling patrons towards the arriving wagons. This included Stormé DeLarverie, a biracial butch lesbian drag king who was

being detained for her male attire. Sources differ on precisely how she failed to comply, but most agree that in response to her complaining, she was clubbed on the head with a baton hard enough that she bled. She claims she punched the cop in the face. Reportedly, the first punch of the night, and turning to the crowd yelled, Why don't you guys do something? As one anonymous person wrote in a letter at the time, everything went along fairly peacefully until they tried to arrest a lesbian who l

ost her mind in the streets of the West Village, kicking, cursing, screaming and fighting. She sent the whole crowd wil. Berserk! Another anonymous writer wrote into an underground publication saying, We joined in with some who wanted to storm the van, free those inside, and then turn over the van. But no one was prepared for that type of action. Soon, the van pulled out, leaving the street unguarded. A few pigs outside had to flee for their lives inside and barricade themselves in. It was too g

ood to be true. The crowd took the offensive. The cat in the t-shirt began by hurling a container of something out the door, then a can or stone cracked a window. Soon, pandemonium broke loose. Cans, bottles, rocks. Trash cans. Finally, a parking meter crashed the windows and door. Cheers went up. A sort of wooden wall blocking out their front plate glass windows was forced down, and then with a parking meter a ram, in went the door. The cops inside were scared shitless, dodging projectiles and

flying glass. The orgy was taking place. Vengeance vented against the source of repression. Gay bars, buts, kids victimized and exploited by the mafia and cops. Strangely, no one spoke to the crowd or tried to direct the insurrection. Everyone's heads were in the same place. We chanted. Occupy. Take over. Take over. (F-slur) power. A common myth is that Marsha P Johnson threw the first brick at Stonewall. This was something she denied. But as is often the case, it may have a grain of truth in

it. History is a field of compiling and interpreting. Memory is fallible, and there is a serious bias in the types of events people think are worth preserving and who they allowed to speak to them. And Marsha died more than 30 years ago under mysterious circumstances, which we'll get to. In this project, we've tried to rely predominantly on primary documents written at the time, but of course those have survivorship bias. So we've also used accounts from activists recorded years later. And if th

ose conflict or are absent, we've used secondary sources which are usually peer reviewed for more than one location. One thing we do know about Marsha P Johnson is that she kept bricks in her purse. We know that because she once fought back against an aggressive cop by swinging her brick filled bag at him. Legend. It’s also possible that on night two, Marsha climbed a lamp post and dropped her brick filled handbag onto the hood of a police car, shattering the windshield and rendering the car ino

perable. On night one, though, Marsha had said she wasn't at the bar when the riot started, but came when she heard it was happening. Joining her friend Sylvia Rivera, who was only 17 at the time. The narratives that Marsha threw the first brick or that Sylvia threw the first Molotov cocktail; they're less factually true, but more emotionally true as Marsha and Sylvia became pivotal figures in the activism that followed. Word had spread. The Stonewall Inn, burned and covered with graffiti saying

: “Drag power,” “Gay Power,” and “They Invaded our Rights,” decided to open again the very next night. A crowd of thousands arrived clogging the streets and chanting slogans like “Gay Power,” and “We Shall Overcome.” General leftist and black rights groups, including the Black Panthers, showed up in solidarity with their gay comrades. The militarized arm of the police force, the Tactical Patrol Force, arrived to clear the protesters and the fight began again. Protests continued every night for d

ays. The Village Voice printed a summary of the events using slurs and homophobic tropes, including calling protesters the forces of [F-slur]. In return, protesters moved outside their office and threatened to burn the building down. The night we remember a stonewall may have been a riot, but the event started a full scale rebellion, a serious break from the previous gay rights strategy. Greenwich Village, where the Stonewall Inn was located, had long been a black neighborhood, previously known

as Little Africa, and many of Stonewall's patrons were People of Color. Many of them were also trans Leitsch, writing at the time, described what Stonewall meant to people. This club was more than a dance bar, more than just a gay gathering place. It catered largely to a group of people who were not welcome in or cannot afford other places of homosexual social gathering. The Drags and the Queens, two groups which would find a chilly reception or a barred door at most of the other gay bars and cl

ubs, formed the regulars at Stonewall. To a large extent the club was for them, apart from the GoldBug and the ‘One Two Three,’ Drags and Queens had no place but the Stonewall. While the main gay rights groups, the homophiles, were headed by middle and upper class cis white people who could push for assimilation into the status quo, the patron at Stonewall never could. This was a mafia owned club which blackmailed its patrons. The people who attended were Black and Latine and trans and poor, and

they had nowhere else to go. If they were going to organize, then liberationist politics were their only option. In fighting back during and after Stonewall they were no longer asking to be quietly tolerated. They were demanding that everything fundamentally change. Stonewall was a catalyst for organizing. During the protest, establishment groups like the Mattachine Society met and aligned themselves with the police and instructed queers to stop protesting and instead to maintain peaceful and q

uiet conduct. In the wake of Stonewall they fell out of favor, replaced with liberationist groups like the Gay Liberation Front. The first Pride event was scheduled on the one year anniversary of Stonewall, and thousands joined the march. Sylvia and Marsha founded STAR, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, an activist organization advocating for the rights of drag queens, sex workers, unhoused trans and queer people, and trans and queer people who were poor. They focused on providin

g housing to homeless youth who Sylvia and Marsha cared for themselves, and also organized around supporting trans people, imprisoned under cross-dressing laws. In STAR’s manifesto, they write a list of demands, including the right for all people to have full autonomy over their bodies, an end to harassment of gay and trans people over the way they dress and present, an end to policing of gender and sexual minorities, and government recognition of gender changes. It's a good time to stop and no

te that the term transgender had only recently been coined and wasn't yet in popular use. Instead, the term transvestite was the umbrella term for all trans people, as well as people who were gender non-conforming. The STAR Manifesto ends with this point: We want a revolutionary people's government where transvestites, street people, women, homosexuals, Puerto Ricans, indigenous people, and all oppressed people are free and not fucked over by this government who treat us like the scum of the ear

th and kill us off like flies one by one and throws us into jail to rot. This government, who spends millions of dollars to go to the moon and lets the poor Americans starve to death. Power to the people! S.T.A.R. Star. It would be a lie to say that Liberationist were winning, however. While the early organizing was revolutionary, Conflict began to foment between those who wanted gay people to quietly assimilate into the existing power structures and those who wanted to work for liberation. Th

e debate was happening at a micro level, as we can see in this clip from the first ever Pride March. But as the thing today is concerned. I mean, it's all right to say what you feel as long as you keep it at an intellectual level. I mean, all of this orgy stuff and all that is I think it's kind of ridiculous. You know, I’ll tell you-- (second speaker) If straight people can do it, why can't we? No, really straight people can do all this carrying on and holding hands and kiss in the park. Why can

't we do it? (First Speaker): All right. (second Speaker) They aint no better than I am. (FS): I'm not talking about kissing and holding hands in the park, but, I mean, like, I (Third Speaker): he’s talking about liberalism (FS) No, I'm talking about some guy dropping his pants. All right? I mean - (SS) So? They're asking people to fuck in the park. Women and men. (FS) All right but that doesn't mean we have to do it. It gives us a bad name (SS): That means that we should have the right to do

it. If they can do it, we should be able to do it if we want to. (FS) If we want to get a bad name for ourselves. You’re right (sarcastic?) The fight was happening on institutional levels as well. Shortly after its founding, the Gay Liberation Front, or GLF, raised $500 in funds from a community dance and gave the money to the Black Panthers in a show of solidarity. As one of their senior members, cis gay men, Bob Koher reportedly argued at the time: “Think about every time you yourself ever op

pressed black people just by being white in a racist world. Think about that. That is why we need to give this money to our sisters and brothers in the Panthers.” This donation angered conservative members of the GLF who had previously been in the Mattachine Society. They broke off to form the Gay Activists Alliance, a conservative, white middle class group, solely focused on assimilating. As such, they explicitly distanced themselves from black or brown civil rights, as well as from the fight f

or trans liberation. When the community, including members of STAR and the Queens Liberation Front, worked to put together the proposal for Intreo 475 an anti-discrimination proposal, Members of the Gay Activists Alliance argued that it should only advocate for the rights of cis gay men and cis lesbians and should not include trans people, calling them too extreme. Though STAR and the QLF both opposed this change, their members still collected signatures for the proposal to appear on the ballot.

This included Sylvia, now age 18, who was arrested while she was collecting those signatures in Times Square because she was dressed as a woman. As a side note, when Sylvia appeared in front of a judge, the officer who arrested her didn't appear in court, but the judge refused to dismiss the case after being upset at Sylvia's gender presentation. Sylvia was arrested multiple times that year for masquerading or female impersonation. Still, despite her commitment to solidarity, the GAA refused t

o support any of the actions of STAR as they deemed the homeless youth or “street people” to be undesirable. At the 1973 Pride celebration, the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, three members of STAR found they were cut from the speaker's program and were asked to walk at the back of the parade. Though the raid on Stonewall had been motivated not just by homophobia but by racism and transphobia, assimilationist groups had argued that it was important for the queer community to play resp

ectability politics. Having white, middle class, and gender conforming people be the most visible. As trans exclusionary radical feminist Jean O'Leary read a speech advocating that the gay rights movement should exclude trans people; Sylvia, who was not speaker, pushed her way on stage and gave her now famous speech. I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I had been thrown in jail. I've lost my job. I've lost my apartment. For gay liberation. And you all treat me this way? What the fuck

’s wrong with you all? Think about that. I do not believe in revolution, but you all do. I believe in the gay power. I believe in us getting our rights, or else I would not be out there fighting for our rights. That's all I wanted to say to y’all people. If you all want to know about the people that are in jail. And do not forget Bambi L’Amour, Andorra Marks, Kenny Messner, and other gay people in jail Come and see the people at STAR House on 12th street on 640 East Twelfth Street between B

and C Apartment 14. The people are trying to do something for all of us And not men and women that belong to a white, middle class, white club. And that’s what y’all belong to! Revolution now! Sylvia: Give me a ‘G!’ Crowd: G! Give me an ‘A!’ A! Give me a ‘Y!’ Y! Give me a ‘P!’ P! Give me an ‘O!’ O! Give me a ‘W!’ W! Give me an ‘E!’ E! Give me an ‘R!’ R! Gay- (sobs) Gay Power (through tears): Louder! Gay Power! Afterwards, O'Leary took the microphone back and began accusing Rivera of being a man

in a dress. Lee Brewster, a drag performer and founder of the Queens Liberation Front, stormed the stage to interrupt her, saying, You go to bars because of what drag queens did for you and these bitches tell us to quit being ourselves? The crowd fell into chaos, as Sylvia later said: Marsha and I fought for the liberation of our people. We did a lot back then. We did sleep in the streets. Marsha and I had a building on Second Street, which we called STAR House. When we asked the community t

o help us, there was nobody to help us. We were nothing. We were nothing. We were taking care of kids that were younger than us. Marsha and I were young and we were taking care of them. And GAA had teachers and lawyers, and all we asked was to help us teach our own so we could all become a little bit better. There was nobody there to help us. They left us hanging. There was only one person that came and help us. Bob Kohler was there. He helped paint. He helped us put wires together. We didn't kn

ow what the fuck we were doing. We took a slum building. We tried. We really did. We tried. Marsha and I and a few of the other older drag queens. We kept it going for about a year or two. We went out and made that money off the streets to keep these kids off the streets. We already went through it. We wanted to protect them, to show them that there was a better life. You can't throw people out on the street. After her speech at Pride, Sylvia went home and attempted suicide without her ability t

o work, STAR fell apart. Despite explicitly cutting rights for transpeople from their anti-discrimination ballot measure, the GAA was unable to get it passed. In 2015, the historical film Stonewall dramatized the riots. It intentionally excluded trans women of color from its portrayal of the uprising in order to better appeal to straight people. And the film centered on a straight-acting cis, white, gay man. The assimilationist rhetoric of today is not mirroring that of the past, it is the sam

e. The very same gay people who today are claiming that the community is being overrun by loud queers; they would have been saying the same thing during Stonewall. If they had had Twitter, you know they would have been posting disavowing the riots Just like the Mattachine Society did, painting in huge letters over their window: “We homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the village.” Writing all over your front window is like an an

alog pinned tweet. And those assimilationist who now claim Stonewall was their moment from their movement are wrong. Stonewall was revolting, as in a revolt against the system that was trying to crush them into assimilating, but also to assimilationists, it was revolting, as in disgusting, a flagrant display of depravity from those who made the movement look revolutionary. Cars smashed, fires started, windows broken. How would they ever get to be seen as just like normal people if the bad gays,

the nasty queers were acting like criminals? There's this idea that you can fit yourself into this cookie- cutter version of one of the good gays. But if you've ever used a cookie cutter, you know how it works. You have to flatten yourself out and then leave most of you behind. In this case, your voice, your autonomy, your pride. In the battle between our community and those who wish to see it destroyed, assimilationist are on the sidelines cheering when one of us goes down. And yet, as durin

g the gay rights movement, the loud queers aren't only fighting for themselves, but the assimilationist as well. Because when the Overton Window on liberation moves, is pushed forward, it benefits all of us. Just like Sylvia organizing for the homophiles and getting arrested for it, the radical liberationist to whom marriage is an archaic and patriarchal institution, still stood beside those gays who wanted nothing more than to be married to their partner. Liberation is about freedom for the ent

ire community. Assimilation only serves the minority of the community that would already be assimilated if not for this one thing. Assimilationism versus liberationism is easily understood as fighting for our self versus fighting for all. But a more thorough examination finds that you cannot advocate for assimilation politics without also advocating for direct and obvious harm to those who do not agree or those who do not comply. Assimilating into a society requires that you act as a society do

es, and assimilating into a homophobic society will at times require you to participate in, or at the very least, stay silent during, the homophobia you witness. For instance, if your culture is saying gay people are coming for your children, then you say it too. The world can be a terrible place. There's so much injustice, so much pain, and so many hierarchies that almost everyone could be at the bottom of one. And the purpose of assimilation is not to change this in any way. It is simply to fi

nd a way to reduce the amount of time spent at the bottom, even if it means always being just one single rung up the ladder. Assimilationist don't want the world to be a better place. They just want to find a place amongst the suffering to call their own. There is, of course, some temporary and limited protection attained by one's assimilation. Maybe you can keep your job while the other gays get fired. Maybe you can maintain that tumultuous relationship with your parents while your gay or tran

sister gets kicked out, made homeless. Maybe you can convince the kids at your university to let you play on the team while you stand by and watch as everyone else like you gets harassed until they quit. You're only defense is: I'm just like you. I want a partner and kids just like you. A white picket fence and a purebred cis het retriever just like you. And while that may work for a while, maybe you can convince them eventually you will reach the limit of their tolerance. Maybe they happened t

o see you kiss your partner in public and find themselves revolted. Or maybe you mentioned you want to adopt and they realize they're disturbed you'd want to bring a child into that lifestyle. Or you invite them to your wedding and they decline. You're nice enough, but they can't pretend to support your sins so flagrantly. You may be able to temporarily assimilate by being one of the good ones, but that is never victimless. By positioning yourself as one of the good ones, you are always pointing

the finger of blame away from you somewhere else. Because if you are good by comparison, then by comparison someone is bad. I can understand why fear may drive someone to hide. I can even sympathize with the rationale of being so scared that you end up vocally supporting hatred against people like yourself. But I cannot excuse it. It isn't ethical. Cowardice is understandable, but the moment it begins to harm someone else, it stops being a personal choice and edges towards upholding violence an

d oppression and stymieing progress. So yeah, maybe you can assimilate to being seen as one of the bad ones. Maybe you can assimilate out of being the immediate target of hatred. And after Stonewall, that's what many of the people involved in the leading assimilationist organizations did. Progress slowed to sort of tepid stasis, a truce only one side was interested in. The assimilation made themselves smaller, less demanding, and thus allowed the tempestuous atmosphere to dissipate somewhat. Bu

t this left the community vulnerable, reduced its political power, quieted its voice. You can not find true safety by assimilating into a system that wants you dead, that will let you all die if they could get away with it. And they could. And they would. There are things assimilation can offer an individual protection from, but as soon would become very clear, AIDS was not one of them. The assimilationists had won control of the institutions, but they weren't winning much else. Supreme Court d

ecisions like Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld a Georgian law making consensual gay sex illegal, were still the norm. But AIDS changed things. Before we get to that, we need some groundwork. We suspect now that AIDS had been floating around the US since the early 1970s, with IV drug users being strongly impacted. But ‘junkie pneumonia’ was not taken seriously by the health establishment. Racism and classism combined to marginalize drug users. And while they were dying from what we now know, was

AIDS, epidemiologists largely ignored the disease. The first epidemiological assessment of AIDS was published based on a case study of only five people from San Francisco, all gay men. The CDC reported on the cases, saying: “the fact that these patients were all homosexuals suggests an association between some aspect of a homosexual lifestyle or disease acquired through sexual contact.” A 1992 paper by medical historian Gerald M. Oppenheimer wrote on the epidemiological failure to address AIDS,

pointing out that five people is too small a sample size to make this generalization. The conclusion was reached because of rampant institutional homophobia and the then popular theory that hepatitis may be a gay disease. The framing necessarily cut out the heterosexual victims of AIDS who were present from the start. The CDC's own 1981 estimate guessed that at least 22% of those with AIDS were straight. Still, researchers focused their work on gay men with a perception of deviant gay lifestyles

guiding their hypothesis. Conceptualizing AIDS as a gay disease meant that the gay community was the one that was studied and surveilled. This means they functionally ignored the women and straight men who were also dying of AIDS. In a critical work, Professor of Medicine Paula Treacher summarized the 1980s medical and research community's ideas. “1. AIDS is caused by multiple and violent gay sexual encounters. Exposure to countless infections and pathogenic agents overwhelms the immune system

2. AIDS is caused by killer sperm shooting from one man's penis to the anus of another. 3. Gay men are as sexually driven as alcoholics or drug addicts 4. AIDS cannot infect females because the virus cannot penetrate the tough mucous membranes of the vagina. 5. Women cannot transmit AIDS because their bodies do not have the strong projective capacity of a penis or a syringe. 6. Prostitutes can transmit the virus because their contaminated bodies harbor massive quantities of killer microbes.” If

a disease was showing up in gay men, then it was probably a gay disease. Maybe something linked to the unnatural deviance of gay sex? Maybe even a punishment from God. People working at the time began to call this disease GRID, standing for Gay Related Immune Disorder, though it was also called gay cancer. We know now that sex can be a vector for the spread of HIV, the virus which causes AIDS. But the framing reflects a real bias that steered the conversation away from actionable prevention meas

ures. Because HIV only spreads from a handful of sexual activities and the chance of it spreading can be reduced by engaging in lower risk activities, by using condoms, and nowadays by using PREP. Writing at the time, one activist stated: “Gay people invented safe sex. We knew that the alternatives, monogamy and abstinence, were unsafe, unsafe in the latter case, because people do not abstain from sex. And if you only tell them, just say no, they will have unsafe sex. We were able to invent safe

sex because we have always known that sex is not, in an epidemic or not, limited to penetrative sex. It is for this reason that assimilationist attitudes about the formulation of gay politics on the basis of our sexuality is so perversely distorted. Why they insist that our promiscuity will destroy us when in fact it is our promiscuity that will save us. As the 80s crept on, more and more people started to die. This is an essay on inter-community tension. So we are going to be focusing on our c

ommunity members. But it is important to state definitively that this community tension would not have been an issue if not for a deeply homophobic society. It is understandable, truly, to have people butt heads over questions of strategy when the consequences were so dire. As our community looked death in the face, politicians and epidemiologists and media figures celebrated it. White House aide Pat Buchanan said: “The poor homosexuals, they have declared war on nature and now nature is exactin

g an awful retribution.” An article in the New York Times proposed: “everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to protect common needle users and on the buttocks to prevent victimization of other homosexuals.” The attorney general, Edwin Meese, had sanctioned the firing of any staff member who could be gay for fear that they might have AIDS. And President Reagan refused until 1987 to even say the word. We may like to think of the gay community as instantly uniting agai

nst this new disease, but it did not. With assimilationist in control, the initial response at the institutional level of the major rights groups was to reinforce respectability politics. White, middle class, assimilationist, gay men were all too happy to blame AIDS on community members who were more marginalized. Randy Shilts, an openly gay journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, used his platform to condemn liberationist, arguing that they had made “promiscuity central to the raucous gay m

ovement of the seventies.” The book he wrote about AIDS blamed bathhouses and loose morals for causing the disease. He focused on a flight attendant as his case study a patient anonymomised as patient “Out of California,” shortened to Patient O (letter), which Shilts misread as Patient Zero. As in, the first person to have AIDS in the US, which he very much was not. Shilts levied huge amounts of blame on him, inventing a narrative of a sociopathic man spreading AIDS around the country. The book

reads like a true crime novel. Patient Zero was a homophobic caricature. Our more contemporary knowledge of the incubation period of HIV paints a different picture. The men Patient O slept with almost certainly all had contracted HIV before him. While gay men reportedly spat on, like literally spat on, Shilts whenever he walked down the streets of the Castro district for perpetuating homophobia, the book capitvated the straights. It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks. I

t was adapted into a film by HBO. Patient Zero was one of People magazine's 25 Most Intriguing People of 1987, along with Princess Diana, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev. But Shilts wasn't the only assimilationist replicating homophobia to attack his own community. Charles Ortleb’s publication, The New York Native, was the only gay magazine in New York during the early part of the AIDS epidemic. Ortleb steered the paper towards homophobic explanations for AIDS, blaming the gay lifestyle. In

1987, he published a piece by AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg, who said of AIDS, “We don't have a new disease. It's a collection of old diseases caused by a lifestyle that was criminal 20 years ago. Combined with bathhouses, all these infections go with lifestyles which enhance them.” Or there's Larry Kramer. He wrote the play The Normal Heart about AIDS. Playing to straight audiences, the play was a massive success. Here is some of the play's dialogue. In it we're supposed to empathize with the

character of Bruce, Mickey: “You know, the battle against the police at Stonewall was won by transvestites. We all fought like hell. It's you Brooks Brothers guys who..” Bruce: “That's why I wasn't at Stonewall. I don't have anything in common with those guys, girls, whatever you call them” Micky: “And how do you feel about lesbians?” Bruce: “Not very much. I mean, they're something else.” The play also contain lines like, “I am sick of guys who can only think with their cocks.” And “The gay le

aders who created this sexual liberation philosophy in the first place have been the death of us. Why didn't you guys fight for the right to get married instead of the right to legitimize promiscuity?” As AIDS activists and academic Douglas Crimp pointed out at the time, Kramer was not at Stonewall. While Kramer’s play was gaining press for making straight people weep, Crimp responded in turn: “How is it that for four years, the deaths of thousands of gay men could leave the dominant media enti

rely unmoved, but Larry Kramer's play could make them weep? Kramer's character, Mickey, was right in saying that it was transvestites who fought back at Stonewall. What he did not say was that those guys in Brooks Brothers suits very soon hounded transvestites out of the movement initiated by Stonewall because the gay good citizens didn't want to be associated with those ‘guys, girls, whatever you call them.’ Now, in 1988, what AIDS Service organizations are providing transvestites with safe sex

information? Who is educating hustlers? Who is getting safe sex instructions printed in Spanish into gay bars in Queens that cater to the working class Colombian immigrants? It is these questions that cannot be satisfactorily answered by a gay community that is far from inclusive of the vast majority of people whose homosexual practices place them at risk. Kramer's summary dismissal of transvestites in the Normal Heart is followed by his assumption that lesbians will show no interest in the AID

S crisis. Not only has Kramer been proven dead wrong, but his assumption is grounded in a failure to recognize the importance of a gay political community that has always included both sexes. In spite of the very real tensions and differences between lesbians and gay men, our common oppression has taught us the vital necessity of forming a coalition and having negotiated and renegotiated this coalition over a period of two decades has provided much of the groundwork for the coalition politics n

ecessitated by the shared oppression of all the radically different groups affected by AIDS. But the question Larry Kramer and other gay men should be asking in any case is not “what are the lesbians doing to help us?”; but rather: “what are we doing to help the lesbians?’ ” The bitterness from the liberationist community was put more succinctly in this quote from Martin Duberman: What is there left to say about this gruesome, senseless killer AIDS? Except that the wrong people are dying, Those

who gave themselves incautiously to experience, to life the risk takers, the inventive ones. The fearful ones who literally sat on their asses, still sit. But the divide couldn't last. The perception of queerness as linked with disease led to an increase in stigma, discrimination, and harassment. The government was doing nothing to fund research on prevention or treatments or cures. People were watching friends unable to afford medication or denied treatment at hospitals for fear of contaminatio

n. Senator Jesse Helms was proposing an amendment that would prevent the CDC from disseminating any educational resources or prevention material on AIDS that could encourage sexual activity outside of straight monogamous marriages. Basically, no pamphlets, no condoms. And to be blunt, conservative gays found that monogamy doesn't protect against AIDS, if one of the people in the couple is infected. Soon, even the Brooks Brothers gays, like Randy Shilts, began to contract and die from AIDS. So t

he community mobilized. The first big response was the AIDS Memorial Quilt unfurled during the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. with a panel for every death. With a panel for every death, the quilt was two football fields long. Impossible to ignore. The assimilationist did win one thing with this, though; that the candlelight vigil for the victims be led by parents of the dead. Their partners were excluded. Also in 1987, activists founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power

, ACT UP, as a merger of assimilationist and liberationist activists. Larry Kramer, someone who represents the assimilationist side, founded the group with a speech proclaiming that on the current trajectory, two thirds of gay men would be dead in five years. ACT UP was deliberately confrontational with nonhierarchical anarchist principles. They wanted experimental drugs released. They wanted needle exchanges and condom distribution. They targeted bigotry and apathy coming from the Catholic Chur

ch, the US government, and the mass media. They disrupted mass in St Patrick's Cathedral. They broke onto the set of the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour while it was live and chained themselves to the news desk proclaiming: “the AIDS crisis is not over.” These actions weren't without consequences. People at ACT UP would routinely be arrested. This could have more dire consequences for different members of the group, like for nonbinary intersex activist Kathy Ottersten, who was arrested for an ACT UP ne

edle exchange, for interrupting anticondom church services and for protesting (Judge) Scooter Libby in D.C.. But even with the risks, the actions continued. At Stonewall 20 Rally, ACT UP marched down the street chanting: “Arrest us, Just try it. Remember Stonewall was a riot.” The activism included lesbians who were still thought to be unable to contract AIDS. And the lesbians., the fucking lesbians, just thank God for them, because I really don't think we could have done it without them. The he

althy people getting together with the angry people with AIDS and just doing it all, it saved lives.” They weren't just allies, though. Women were able to contract AIDS, for the record, but the criteria had been written exclusively around men. And because the symptoms can manifest differently, many women were not diagnosed with AIDS, some dying without being told. After the CDC changed their criteria, the amount of women who were recognized as having AIDS doubled overnight. And of course, ACT UP

included trans people. Some of them you'll know, like Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera. Others you should have heard of but might not have. Like Connie Norman, a trans woman who spent her time agitating to allow needle exchange programs and protesting the racist policy of L.A. home health care providers who refused to go into neighborhoods with black and brown people after dark. When she died, members of ACT UP dumped her ashes on the White House lawn as a final act of defiance against a host

ile government. ACT UP was an organization comprised of gender and sexual minorities. We know it included intersex people, queer people, lesbians. Some members had HIV. Others were at risk. And still others were less likely to contract it, but were there in solidarity with the rest of the community. So if you weren't aware that ACT UP included trans people, it might be because they weren't abnormal. One activist remarked that in the time when trans people could be treated as curiosities, ACT UP

was notably chill. “Within ACT UP the trans community, we were just one small group that could just come in and not have to be trans all the time. We could just be people like everybody else in the room and for somebody to feel normal in their skins for the first time in their lives and they're 45 years old. That to people is- you could given- Oprah, could have given them a car and it wouldn't have been special in the same way.” But as with all things ACT UP had some internal issues. Larry Kram

er, who was never the leader but nonetheless influential, accused ‘the community’ of resenting the white and wealthy members of ACT UP. Activist Keith Cylar a queer black man who was head of ACT UP's housing committee, went as far as saying that ACT UP was a racist organization as they tended to universalize challenges faced by white people but saw those faced by people of color as niche and unrelated to AIDS. The assimilationist strategy of putting educated white members as speakers has led to

portrayals of the organization which have continued to center those narratives, including How to Survive a Plague, and Philadelphia. And this, in some ways has carried on to how we think of AIDS now, because people still get HIV. People still die of AIDS. Even ACT UP still exists, and they are desperate for people to engage. There have been phenomenal advancements, but there are barriers to access. In many places, needle exchanges are illegal, and so people still get HIV from dirty needles. Clos

eted queer teens are afraid their parents will be contacted if they try to access PREP, and people still die because of governmental neglect. Like Roxana Hernández, a Honduran trans woman who, when seeking asylum, was intercepted by ICE and put in a freezing facility called ‘The Ice Box’ though she had both HIV and pneumonia, and consequently she died. She had contracted HIV after being gang raped in a transphobic attack and had feared for her life in Honduras. But though she was vocal about he

r medical vulnerabilities, immigration still put her in a situation that likely caused her death. Keith Cylar, The ACT UP alumni who classed ACT UP as a racist organization, has said that our ignorance about contemporary HIV/AIDS is too because of racism. Because AIDS isn't thought of as a gay disease so much anymore, but as a black one. And so as a community, our attention has waned. Charles King, founding member of ACT UP and Widower of Cylar, put it this way: “I really, truly believe that the

LGBT community officially abandoned AIDS with Sullivan's article One plagues and in the New York Times. And the reason they abandoned it was for them. It was over. It was now a black disease, not their disease.” But before we move on, there are other groups I want to profile who were active in the eighties and nineties because ACT UP wasn't the only organization fighting AIDS. And the others I want to mention, like Queer Nation and Fed Up Queers are more in line with the liberationist side of t

he split. It's relevant that liberationist groups of this era organized under the label Queer and I want to make a detour into what Queer is, what it means, because some people still use queer to be a shorter version of LGBTQIA+. And while that's tempting, that's not quite right. In fact, flattening the term to be a catchall is borderline offensive. Because the term Queer is rooted in a challenge to Eurocentric conceptions of gender and sex and sexuality. The originators of Queer Theory were la

rgely People of Color, pushing back against colonialism and its essentialist narratives. People like Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lourde, Tomás Almaguer, Ekua Omosupe, Félix González-Torres and Barbara Smith. Queer Theory was built from a recognition that forms of oppression are mutually reinforcing. It is from these thinkers that we can understand the concept of heteronormativity and argue that imposing a heteronormative gender binary is strategically critical to settler colonialism. Queer, then, is

a political ideology inseparable from identity. Instead of using a term like gay, which can be said to reproduce heteronormativity, queerness as a label subverts the insistence that we fit into distinct and easily explicable boxes. Queerness is definitionally anti-racist, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist. It pushes back against ableism, saneism, neurotypicality. It is foundationally anti-assimilationist, remaining defiant in a refusal to comply with domination and the imposition of power struc

tures. “Queer leadership is not about organizing people. Instead, it's the principle of individuals leading from their difference, their creative uniqueness, not to assimilate into the dominant culture, but to liberate and elevate those oppressed by the dominant status quo.” Robert McRuer, an activist and academic who is foundational to the development of both Queer Theory and Crip Theory, put it a lot more succinctly. “To be queer is to contest America.” And that is exactly what queer nation in

tended, under the assertion that the US was foundationally heterosexist, their name connotes a nation of queers, people opposed to homophobia, biphobia, transphobia and the patriarchy. Queer Nation grew out of ACT UP but strove to be more confrontational and explicitly liberationist. You may know them from one of their protest chants: We’re here, we’re Queer, Get used to it. Or two, four, six, eight, How do you know your kids are straight? Queer Nation organized flash mobs of people to invade st

raight bars and host kiss ins, to dress in over-the-top drag and walk into suburban shopping malls, to run queer centered sex education campaigns to take back the night. Most controversially, they engaged in outing people who were outwardly homophobic and privately gay or bisexual. As one of their founders, Michelangelo Signorile, put it: “The so-called journalistic ethics that they adduced against outing, I realized, were dreamed up a long time ago by straight white men to protect the world of

straight white men. They were arbitrary at best, bogus at worst. Many of these editors were hypocrites. They themselves had outed in the past when it was to their advantage, when they perceived it to benefit straight society. For years, the media had no problem reporting the names of closeted gay private citizens who had been arrested in dubious public restrooms sting operations. These were victims of society's homophobia, and their lives were ruined and destroyed. The lives of private individua

ls, not public figures, and the lives of people wrenched from the closet for all the wrong reasons. When it was a public figure who was involved in hypocrisy that was detrimental to gays, however. Those same editors ushered in their privacy arguments and spoke of careers being ruined so they wouldn't have to deal with this uncomfortable issue.” This included Pete Williams, the press secretary for the Pentagon, during a time when it was barring LGBT people from serving in the military and ruining

the lives of service members who were found out. When Silence of the Lambs was released, a film the community protested for having some very transphobic messaging, they outed its star, Jodie Foster. And through the publication OutWeek, they were one of the loudest voices in exposing Father Bruce Ritter, a priest who had been accused, though not legally tried, in grooming and sexually assaulting a number of vulnerable teenage boys. Queer Nation was obsessed with praxis. Under the slogan Queers

Bash Back, they would patrol the streets looking for gay bashers and abusive cops. They showed up at eviction protests. They educated their members on racism and had plans on how to protect Queer People of Color in situations where the police would get involved, like having them sit closer to the center of the group during protests. They weren't the only queer activists at the time either. There was LABIA: Lesbians and Bi Women in Action. There was UBIQUITOUS: Uppity Bi Queers United In Their Ov

ertly Unconventional Sexuality. There was Queer Planet, which doesn't actually stand for anything, but was still a cool group. But you know the rest of the story. Too many people died because of homophobic medical neglect. Hate crimes against queer people were up at the time and there was so much stigma against them that it's probably no coincidence that this was when Marsha P. Johnson, mother of the Stonewall Uprising and AIDS activist, was found dead. Many people believe she was murdered. We'v

e only looked at two events and only scratched the surface of either. There are others we could talk about. Horrible ones, like the death of Matthew Shepard, or the Pulse nightclub shooting. Or assimilationist wins like legalization of gay marriage or letting gays serve in the military. There are liberationist wins too, though. More people are out now. That was always a big goal. Laws against sodomy were struck down in Lawrence V. Texas, and we even allow a gender designation of X on passports.

Looking at the archives of just these two events. There is a lot of sadness, but you know that story. It is often a mistake to focus on just the sadness. It flattens us into pitiable things rather than what we actually are. People who fought; passionate, smart, and empowered activist. activists Activists who had too much dignity to beg for crumbs and instead demanded a fair share. There have always been some in the GSM community who are willing to cut out their more marginalized comrades in ord

er to appease a homophobic society or win some small concession. But there have also always been others who have refused, who have been brave, and that is our lineage. So if the reality of the situation isn't that the gay, lesbian and bisexual community is having its liberation movement co-opted by nefarious outsiders, why are there some gays and lesbians claiming that it is? Well, the party line is that only a select few Gs and Ls are brave enough to speak out, to withstand the barrage of hate

they'll get from the woke queers and non-binary goblins. (Whispered): It me, I both So despite their numbers being so small, actually, everyone else also feels the same as them. It's quite a leap of faith they're expecting you to take with them, especially since on one side we have the majority of LGB people, including historians and activists, saying that trans and queer people have been involved in this fight since the beginning, and are intrinsically woven into the fabric of the community. A

nd on the other side, we have a few LGB, and even more straight cis people, saying: no, that's wrong, and I'm not even going to try and provide evidence or reasons to support my claim. I'll just say that even you don't believe it. So why should I be forced to argue with a liar? This rhetoric is very convincing if you already happen to hate queer and trans people and also hate, like, um, thinking. So why do they do this? Because they're bad actors with bad information and even worse motivations.

Running through the loudest proponents of this movement, it's largely cisgender heterosexual people speaking over gays and lesbians and pretending to speak for them. In my opinion, Joanne Rowling especially does great harm to the community, given how often she does this and the incomprehensible size of the audience she does it to. Innumerable gay people have been in touch with me to say exactly this. Like women, they especially lesbians, are under attack for not wishing to be redefined and for

refusing to use ideological language that they find offensive. Me when I can't count to 40, I bet it's pretty numerable, Joanne. But there are, of course, assimilationist gays and lesbians who make their livings and get their names out there by attacking queer and trans people, by positioning themselves as above reproach, the ones who try and climb their way out of the hole we're in by standing on the backs of the queer and trans people they insist are beneath them. One of the first gay men with

a large social media platform to sound the alarm over queer and trans people, making it difficult for gays and lesbians to gain acceptance was Milo Yiannopoulos. I support this campaign wholeheartedly. Drop the T from LGBT. Milo is a former writer for alt right website Breitbart, who Rational Wiki calls, among other things, a professional victim, a self-described professional troll, a Gamergate figurehead, alt right provocateur, men's rights activist, Transphobe, literal advocate of pederasty,

and former 15 minute celebrity who believes that all of this is excused by being homosexual. Though since 2021 he has identified as being ex-gay. Since 2023, Yiannapoulos has claimed to be having a “hard time being ex-gay,” but it's consoling himself with rabid misogyny and other bigotry. Surprising absolutely no one, Yiannopoulos endorsed Donald Trump for president, who he refers to as Daddy. It's not lost on me that one of the people who kicked off the ‘Drop the T’ movement would say something

like this: “I would love to be cured. Who wouldn't want to be cured? Of course I want to be cured. I've tried to pray the gay away.” One of the more recent versions of this was Alexander Braham. “The real reason gay men distort the history of Section 28 and demand LGBTQ propaganda as taught to children. They enjoy a steady stream of fresh meat appearing on their gay sex apps. It is the collective grooming of children who would otherwise grow out of the confused phase.” “I've been to a dozen gen

der critical events and only met three Nazis.” “Marriage is between a man and a woman.” “I’m more likely to believe in a flat earth than a trans woman who has changed sex.” While Bramham is mostly now known for his amazing demonstration of why people still believe in concepts like karma. “LGB drop the T” (a slight but satisfying “ompfh” sound) (uproarious laughter) (Curb your Enthusiasm theme music) He's also been someone that the movement has used as a shield from criticisms that it is in itse

lf a homophobic backlash to the Overton window shifting on gay rights. But once again, Bramham himself is no advocate for gay rights. He refused to get married to his now ex-partner as marriage is between a man and a woman and as recently as a few months ago, was identifying as an ex-gay. Or Julie Bindel who, besides going after bisexuals for being sexual, hedonistic, straight people trying to seem exotic, once defended her decision to call herself a lesbian because she refused to be partnered w

ith men by saying, “We are not destined to a particular fate because of chromosomes” and who now claims queer and trans people are the ones co-opting the gay movement and that chromosomes definitely decide your fate. It's startling how many of the LGs who want to drop the TQs have opted into or out of the community. They purport to have an intrinsic right to speak for. To be honest, I have as much right to speak for lesbians as Julie Bindel, as I am not a lesbian either. And of course it's not j

ust LGB people they use as shields. They'll always trot out one of a handful of assimilationist trans people who will agree with their rhetoric and serve as a person they can point to as the community's voice of reason. An example of which is Blaire An example of which is Blaire White, who makes her living off of being one of the good ones. “I'll never forgive the LGBT community for allowing the slippery slope argument I grew up hearing from Christian conservatives to actually come true.” “Neve

r underestimate the LGBT community's ability to make literally everything about them.” But what they prefer to a trans assimilationist, though, is someone who is detransitioning. Who is willing to say: I was trans. And I'll tell you what really happens. I'm on your side. The newest prominent trans defector is Oli London, who has been all over the media promoting assimilationist anti-trans rhetoric. But he has a different experience and they're entitled to that. But my issue is the trans activist

s that have hijacked the LGBT community and are causing real harm to the LGBT community by pushing gender ideology on children, by forcing women out of women's spaces. That is my issue. I don't have an issue of trans people. I have many trans friends. My issue is with the radical gender ideology.” Oli London is, well, a mess. He first became news when he decided to literally become someone else by copying their face through plastic surgery. And then when that didn't satisfy him, he decided to be

come a different person through more plastic surgery. And then when the attention from that started to fade, he spent like three months claiming he was a trans woman, only to then detransition a stunt that he used to launch his book. And finally, for the first time in all his career, he's now being invited on to mock other people instead of as the butt of a joke he's not in on. Well, partly. Then there are recent groups that have formed to push assimilationist rhetoric, notably the now infamous

Gays Against Groomers. Jaimee Michell is a lesbian and amateur public speaker, she's the face of Gays Against Groomers. Prior to running Gays Against Groomers, Jaimee Michell had a social media presence one might call problematic. If problematic means the posts on your social media are like photos of literal swastikas and photos from inside of Nazi events. When the post from her old social media recently leaked, she claimed what most people would do. She was hacked. If you want to believe that t

he hacker was also posting photos of her with her friends on the same day they were posting Nazi imagery that's up to you, I guess. I personally believe she made those posts in part because much more recently she was reposting propaganda from the Proud Boys on her telegram. The Proud Boys are a far right neo-fascist organization that promotes and engages in political violence. She states that as a lesbian she wants nothing to do with the current LGBTQ community. I'm gay and I call them out all t

he time, their disgusting mob of degenerates and I want nothing to do with them. Started the hashtag #NotMyCommunity years ago. We must separate ourselves from the fringe, but extremely loud radicals who have hijacked our community and attacked kids in our name. The gay community is not a monolith. The vast majority of us are opposed to this sick agenda. We exist to make the public keenly aware of that.” But she still feels comfortable speaking for us. These people are what you might call “Pick

Me”s because my term heteroapologists never took off. If the term Pick Me sounds harsh, your ears, I totally understand. But they do in fact outwardly admit that that is the reason they are doing what they are. For the approval of conservatives, all because they just wanted to be accepted. It felt good and felt really good. Like being seen by a lot of like right wing creators I used to watch and I felt like I was one of them. I felt like I was going to be like Candace Owens and, you know, get

my own show on The Daily Wire and be a pick me and own that title. And it's just all like, for what? And these pick me assimilationist are then not only used by cis straight people as a shield against criticism, but as a cudgel used to beat others down. And all the cis straight people who champion assimilationist rhetoric do it. Get your shit off our flag. Get your shit off our flag. What is the shit in the tweet J.K. Rowling is promoting to 13 million people? The shit is human beings. Everyone

who died of AIDS, gender and sexual minorities of color, and all trans people. To Rudy and Joanne: the people who died of AIDS are not shit, people of color are not shit, and trans people are not shit. But anyone who would say they are needs to stop projecting. If you wonder why this was added to the flag you have assimilationist to thank for this. Their ahistorical retelling and whitewashing of our history are the reason people needed a reminder of whom the community is made up of. And it's no

t just cis white assimilationist gays and lesbians. Speaking of: there's also Fred Sargeant, what he would call a Vichy gay who the assimilationist like to hold up as an authority on the movement. Because as his bio on Twitter says, he's a Stonewall veteran. Fred did in fact, work for at least a few years as an activist, although to what degree he's mostly unwilling to say. But these days, it seems he spends his time obsessed with going after gay, queer and trans people on Twitter, by the looks

of it. It's his banner, his bio. There are hashtags and his location is literally: State of LGB. Cut out the TQ. If there's one thing a gender critical boomer is going to do, it's be completely obsessed and equal amounts of cringe. What does that mean? What is a Stonewall veteran? Well, I asked. I went to reach out to him on Twitter and asked for clarification on these points. But he's blocked me. So instead, I sent him a request for verification on his website. He did not email me back unfortu

nately. He did, however, immediately make three posts about me from behind that block on Twitter, which makes his inferring I'm a coward. A little more bittersweet. Erm, sans sweet. “One of the things that transgender historical revisionists try is to get interviews with their targets. This guy prides himself as someone who goes undercover to get his scoops.” I love how scoops makes me sound like April O'Neil. I've never actually used that word in this context, but I think I'm going to start. He

has neither the intellect nor the courage for the true undercover work, as both he and I know. He sent me an interview request this morning without knowing that I decline almost all such requests, especially when they look like they were written by a confused junior high school TRA. It took a few seconds to find his earliest solicitation to his followers from yesterday.” Correction: I did not send an interview request. I asked for clarification on one single thing: his participation in the rio

ts. He could have answered that in ten words or fewer, such as: I participated in the riots. Here's a link. Something I would imagine anyone who participated in the riots should feel more than comfortable doing all these years later. It's a bit odd that someone with nothing to hide would seemingly make so many attempts to, well, keep things hidden. So we'll have to rely entirely on what is available in the archives. If Stonewall was a riot and Fred Sargeant claims to be a Stonewall veteran, what

does that mean to you? When you hear that someone was a veteran in a riot, tell me if this is what you picture. And remember, this is based on what people have been able to find. Fred refused to clarify and as of right now is probably still busy tweeting at people who disagree with him, basically telling them he wants them to die. So yeah, tell me if this is what you picture: a man standing about 50 feet away from the Stonewall entrance with his lover. Not participating in any physical anti-pol

ice action. Watching Marsha P. Johnson dump trash all over a cop car and telling your lover who tried to support the rioters by yelling “gay rights” to shut up. And then just a few years later, becoming not just a cop, but eventually a police lieutenant. This man speaks with such authority on things he clearly has no understanding of. He's an unreliable narrator due to his extreme prejudice against liberationist queer and trans people. We were not led by drug addled, homeless, mentally ill, crim

inal drag queens. Marsha Johnson always said he was a gay man. Get off the Internet and read a history book. It won't hurt you. At least have the decency to wait until we're all gone before you rob us of our history.” You know what, Lieutenant Sergeant, which, by the way, sounds very stupid. You might benefit from reading a history book as well. But given how bitter and petulant your blinding hatred and ignorance is, I can't make the same claim that it won't hurt you. You claim that Marsha Johns

on was a gay man. Then why would Marsha say this in an interview? (Kohler): “You'd be considered a preoperative transsexual, then? You don't know when you'd be able to go through the sex change?” Marsha: “Oh, most likely this year. I'm planning to go to Sweden. I'm working very hard to go. I don't know what I am if I'm not a woman.” So anyway, about reading that book. Try this one where Marsha outright states that she is a trans woman who is planning on getting surgery. I'm focusing on this bec

ause one thing that assimilationist revisionists love to do is claim that Marsha P Johnson was not trans in order to push their narrative that trans people have no history of the Stonewall riots. They attempt to use the “posthumous transing” of Marsha as proof positive that trans people are co-opting the gay rights movement. The problem is that they're either ignorant or lying, or both. If Fred can't even be bothered to read up on the people he's speaking about that actually are documented to ha

ve participated in the riots, I find his credibility sorely lacking. At the end of the day, I think you can imagine how I feel about an ex police officer who stands on the back of an anti-police riot as his claim to authority. It's likely his tweets about me were an attempt to intimidate and harass me or get his followers to, which some have. He is known on Twitter for being quite unhinged and vile towards anyone who speaks up about him in any way that doesn't hold him up as a hero. He has denie

d that lesbians were targeted in the Holocaust, which he then retracted because someone clearly demonstrated that he was talking out of his ass. Even goes as far as to like tweets claiming that Marsha Johnson wasn't at Stonewall at all, despite him saying that he saw her there that night. In fact, from his own accounts, Marsha seems to have been more involved in the riots than he was. The lengths this white homosexual assimilationist movement will go to to erase a black trans woman from history

is disgusting, transphobic, and flat out racist. After reaching out to him for comment, he made numerous tweets about me, including going six months back in my Twitter history to quote, tweet me to mock the fact that after I was hate crimes by three men beaten and called a (f-slur) and left disabled for months, I had become suicidal. And this is all because I asked him to verify his claims of being a Stonewall veteran. Him becoming a cop makes a lot of sense because any challenge to his authorit

y is met with upholding systems of violence. But the homophobes and transphobes, they don't even need an ahistorical transphobic pick-me like Lieutenant Sergeant to use as a shield when they can't find an actual lesbian or gay person to use, they simply lie. And I said it to a man the other day on a train, and actually I did self-identify as a lesbian. So to all lesbian women out there, I'm very sorry, but this man on a train said serving me and he had a lanyard. And I said, Can I just say I fin

d that lanyard really offensive as a customer here because it's an anti-woman symbol as far as I'm concerned. And he said, Well, as a gay man, it's about inclusion and diversity. And dah-dah-dah-dah-dah. So I went as a lesbian. That's the only time I've ever said it in my life, and I hope I'm forgiven. But I just went well as a lesbian, I find it deeply disturbing. And nobody ever wore a lesbian badge Pretending to be a lesbian so you can harass and denigrate a gay man for wearing a lanyard? LG

B (Whisper): The B is for Brave This is the majority of this movement distilled into one clip. But putting aside the disgraced activists, the mediocre author, and her pal Nazi Barbie, there are threats that appear to have more power, specifically an organization that gains credibility through attaining charity status. The LGB Alliance. Which is why, when Sarah and I first started building this, it was something a bit different. Originally, we intended to focus specifically on the LGB Alliance, a

n anti-bi, anti-queer, anti-trans hate group dressed up in a charity costume. I can only describe as the party city tier. The project's working title was LGBA Exposed. We gathered available evidence about the org; FOIA request that had been made public, collated screenshots exposing them, demonstrating that though they claim to be in support of LGB people, they were anti-gay, anti-bi, and anti-woman. But showing you these, it doesn't further our liberation. It doesn't do anything to dissuade th

e people who support them because they know exactly who the LGB alliance are. All the information is already out there. Links in the description. So we began to feel as if this project was a losing battle. You cut off one head and three more appear. We were being too narrow, too temporally locked, making a video solely about the LGB alliance would lose its usefulness immediately after releasing it because the bad actors change quickly with their talking points. Their motivations? Those are nearl

y static. And so months later, we agreed that in order to combat not only the LGB Alliance's misinformation, cowardice, and campaign of ahistorical nonsense, but also do the same for the next org that slithers out of the depths, we need to stop cutting off heads and instead we needed to zoom out, step back and refocus on the heart of the issue. We needed to lay out the history of our movement, connect the words of assimilationist past to the movements present, and then lay them bare for what the

y are: submissive, cowardly lies. Ahistorical distractions that are more than easily disproven, dispelled, and then dismissed. And that's exactly what we're going to do. One, sexuality and gender aren't the same. Why lump them together? LGBTQ Plus is not a community at all. We're disparate populations that have been forced team together despite having opposing values and goals. Sexuality and gender are two different things, and ever since the TQ was added, the gay community's reputation has been

once again ruined. We are two different communities with different goals. That has nothing to do with each other. LGB Sexuality. T Gender Dysphoria. Because of that, we should not be grouped together because we are not the same. You can't conflate gender identity with sexuality. They are two radically different things. It's because of this difference that I support the Drop the T movement as gender identity is bugger all to do with LG and B Sexual identity and gender identity are not the same t

hing. That's true. But to use this as a reason as to why the community should be cleft in twain is both reductive and ridiculous. Sexual minorities and gender minorities are not the same. But in the fight for liberation, they are more similar than dissimilar by miles. When people place stigmas and restrictions on us, they're almost entirely around maintaining gender roles constructed and enforced by heteronormative society. Being a gay man is wrong because men are meant to be men, which means th

ey have to be masculine in order to attract a good woman. Being a butch woman is wrong because women are meant to be women, which means they cannot be masculine as that is reserved for men, people they should be submissive to. Being trans is wrong because men should act like men, and women should act like women. And if these rules are broken, that will signal the end of humanity itself. The apocalypse is nigh. Like super nigh. Gender, as well as gender non-conformity and expression, are inextric

ably linked to sexual identity. Often your sexual identity is formed around your gender and the genders you're attracted to. Being a gay man, even a hyper masculine one who assimilates, is still going against the gender roles and expectations of men, even if they think they'd be accepted regardless. I like being a gay man. Only wish was the 1950s when people kept their lives private and men were gentlemen and women were ladies. But the people in this movement who aim to divide the community are

often the same ones who want to distance themselves from any aspect of the community they think may draw ire towards them. They think I'm assimilating to earn my tolerance. I'm working for it. Why won't you? They look at those who push boundaries, who refuse to clip their wings, and instead of uplifting them, drag them back down. They emulate all the bullies of a bigot, all the bastards who did the very same thing to them. They want us to be quiet, to be complacent, to take the crumbs we're give

n and say thank you. That's enough for me, sir. And anyone who doesn't do that needs to be excised from the community. Remove like a tumorous growth. And usually it's the femme gays, the gender fuckers, the queers. God, do they hate the queers! It's amazing how much they hate them. Well, how much they hate us. Me. I've had 20-year-old gender critical gay men and 60-year-old gender critical straight men, tell me that queer is just the new term for ‘spicy straight.’ Me. Me Me. Baby, if I am spicy

straight, then these ‘We’re Gay Not Queer’ people are freaking ‘over-boiled potatoes’ straight. Not even my spine is straight. I was called gay before I could spell the word. What they usually mean by ‘queer means spicy straight’ is: I don't think bisexual people in relationships outside their gender are valid in their identity. Because let's make one thing clear. When they say LGB drop the TQ, they do mean LG drop the TQ, also, there is no B. These people treat bisexuals like the other vowels t

reat y. Only included when it fits their narrative. Hashtag LGB without the TQ because LGB is not a mental health condition. Because LGB is not a fetish. Because LGB is not about being a spicy straight LGB does not belong with to TQ+ cult. Most of what these young people are identifying as is TQ alphabet soup crap, spicy straight, blue haired nonsense precisely to identify out of being LGB. The LGB alliance is desperately needed to fight for the rights of these young people, particularly before

medicalization. You are mixing up LGB and the spicy straight TQ+, most LGB want nothing to do with a range of paraphilias that have been tacked on to our movement. I want nothing to do with the spicy straight alphabet add ons. LGB represents same sex attracted people. Thankfully, we now have the LGB alliance to advocate for us. The TQ+ contingents are homophobic interlopers, hoping for legitimacy by riding our coattails and we are saying fuck off. And by imposing straightness on people trying t

o operate as queer, they are reinforcing the sort of racist imperialist garbage that created our oppression in the first place. All the way back with Ellis describing us as individual categories of freaks and noting that white people were less likely to be freaks than anyone else. To follow the assimilationist lead is to reinforce gender conformity and to doom yourself. They think that if they separate themselves from those who cross boundaries and live loudly, they will somehow be safer. Being

called tumerous for your bravery by the most timorous members of your community, Is surprisingly painful. Because it is those who break boundaries and norms that push the wheels of tolerance and acceptance forward, who press what people see as other or unusual. But if they got what they wanted and one day everyone saw LGB people and TQ people as entirely different communities, the Overton window on gay acceptance slams shut and now they have no scapegoat. There's no one to point at and say; sure

, I'm gay and I disgust you, but I'm one of the good ones! Because there's no good ones left. Except for maybe, maybe, the ones who keep silent, the ones who are respectful enough to hide it, keep it away from the kids. And back into the closet you go with no one to blame but you- Well, you know what? I'm not going to blame gay people for homophobia. That's their shtick Two: gay people were finally accepted before trans people took over the movement. The TQ+ has held us back from just being ign

ored and treated like we were normal. They've turned us into a circus show and our immutable characteristics into their identity labels. LGB scissor-emoji TQ+ It's no longer the LGBTQ+ movement. It never was. It's the TQ+ movement trading on the respect and goodwill the LGB have fought and bled for all these years. The sooner people stop using the term LGBTQ plus whatever else, the better. Better for the LGB anyway. Hashtag LGB without the T. What you've done for us is directly destroy the accep

tance we are finally getting from many of those that despised us. Those like you have done more harm Westbrook could ever hope to. That is all that you've done. Hashtag LGB, drop the T. All of this is a lie. To be fair, I don't know if they know it's a lie, but whether they know it's a lie is immaterial to whether it's true. We're going to need to address this in two parts because I want to be very clear about this. Gay people are still not accepted. They never have been and they still aren't to

day. I don't even know what accepted means to the people who claim this. By who? In which ways? To what limit? Is this legally, socially? Do they possess entirely equal rights in all regards? Is that set in stone? Were those rights constantly being fought for? Is that acceptance? Is this? Is this when they say acceptance, what they usually are referring to is this tepid tolerance only reserved for the specific gays who assimilate, but in a moment's notice it can all be taken away like that. Tha

t's not acceptance, it's a conditional allowance placed on your freedom. And the assimilationist know this, or they wouldn't be scared of liberationists damaging the movement. Is it acceptance when if you were to speak about your life and your partner's just like straight people do, you'd be told you were shoving it down their throats. Is it acceptance? When the act of walking down the street with your partner could get you killed? Is it acceptance when you have to attack and demonize people i

n your own community to earn said acceptance? Not to me. I want better. I want more. I want liberation from the system that they want tolerance from. I want freedom of expression. I want not to be scared to walk down the street. I want more from my community, not less. But people in the LGB assimilationist movement will see even extreme violence from straight cisgender people towards their own as an opportunity to attack us. On the same day, news broke that two men were stabbed in a homophobic a

ttack. They were saying things like this. This is backlash to the TQ+ suffered by the LGB. These sentiments, while abhorrent, are also deeply homophobic. They posit a world where LGB people have ever not been getting attacked by homophobic people. Ask the LGB people in your life if they've ever faced violence. Most of them are going to say yes. I was getting called slurs and getting my head smashed into brick walls and concrete sidewalks long before trans and queer people had increased visibilit

y. You know, maybe they should keep the TQ and say it's lesbians and gays and bisexuals who are tolerated and quiet. Maybe if they want to be all LGB, drop the T, then they could at least be honest and add a D for doormat or an M for mouthpiece because all their talking points are just regurgitated homophobia disguised with social justice language, in an attempt to point the finger at someone other than themselves. This is never more obvious or more dangerous than when it comes to how consistent

ly they agitate the groomer panic against gender and sexual minorities. Three: LGBs just want to be left alone, unlike the TQ+ who are grooming children. They're the groomers, not us. I was part of the early gay rights movement. I can tell you the trans agenda we see now was never what we fought for. In fact, it's the antithesis of what we fought for. We fought against the groomer pedo stereotypes. LGB must be separate from T. We are not the same. Um, many LGB people would disagree with you. It

is the trans terrorists who have hijacked that movement who are attempting to encourage vulnerable children to engage in self-mutilation and self-harm. They are with the parents on this one. Leave the children alone. Groomer. I can see why the LGB want nothing to do with the T. Y'all are pedophiles. This rhetoric of anyone who is gay, queer, trans is a groomer because they're influencing their children is not new. It's just going through a resurgence. Gender and sexual minorities have been calle

d groomers, at least since the Nazis started doing it, and it's never stopped. The groomer panic, even when pushed by people who claim to be lesbians or gays, is still just homophobia and transphobia and it's still being funded by the religious right and it's still anti-Semitic. Just because a gay man says I'm gay and I don't support this does not mean he's saying it because he wants what's best for the community. Usually they outright express they aren't part of the community. They blatantly do

everything they can to distance themselves from the community, then gain themselves fit to not only speak on it, but for it, over it. As a representative and sole spokesperson for a community, they've either left or always refused to be a part of. I'm not going to get too far into the weeds on this again, as I have an extensive two hour documentary I created on the Groomer Moral Panic, and it's available for free on YouTube. If you'd like to know more, just check it out. Link in the description

. But what I need to discuss here, even though I've done it at length before, is the egregious misrepresentation of what gender affirming care is, as well as the harmful myth that it is tantamount to conversion therapy for gay kids. For transitioning is the new conversion therapy. It's erasing LG people to make them straight TQ ad infinitum is based on homophobia, which is based on sexism. Absolutely cut the homophobic misogynists away from LGB. Stop trying to trans the gay away. Dress how you w

ant but hashtag LGB drop the T This huge push on youth to trans. It's honestly feeling like new conversion therapy. Oh you are female liking other females. You are a men wrong body. You like guys? You are a woman in men body. Congratulations on supporting the erasure of homosexuality and the new conversion therapy. Trans a gay boy into a girl who likes boys. He's now a heterosexual. And you have erased his homosexuality. Trans ideology is homophobic. The people who say this are amongst the most

dishonest and frankly, disgusting people in the movement. It is indisputable that conversion therapy was often focused on gender norms, stereotypes, and rigidly adhering to them. I first want to clear up several misconceptions around what conversion therapy looks like. To do this, we'll look at a book written for parents by the founder of Reparative or Conversion therapy. It's called A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. This book and Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, who wrote it, were recommended

to me by regulars in the Anti-trans parent group I was undercover in. Nicolosi claims that children who act like or claim to be another gender are what he calls pre-homosexuals, meaning that if their behavior isn't corrected, they'll eventually grow into adult homosexuals. He states this sign that your child may be a pre-homosexual, which he connects to GID gender identity disorder, a clinical term they used to use for homosexuals. Gender identity disorder: a little on the nose. He claims that

gender confusion is at the heart of the homosexual issue. It is through our maleness or our femaleness that we grow to maturity. He says that homosexuals will have these characteristics. One repeatedly stated desire to be, or insistence that he or she is, the other sex. Two in boys preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire in girls insistence on wearing only stereotypical masculine clothing. Three strong and persistent preference for cross-sexual roles in make believe play or per

sistent fantasies of being the other sex. Four intense desire to participate in the stereotypical games and pastimes of the other sex. Five Strong preference for playmates of the other sex. You might be thinking: Hey, that sounds very specifically like it's written about a trans kid more than a gay kid. Why isn't attraction mentioned even once? That's because gay conversion therapy and trans conversion therapy are the same thing. They work the same way; by pushing your child back into the rigid

gender roles they are breaking. Throughout the book, Joseph Nicolosi makes it clear that the path to preventing homosexuality is to prevent any incongruence between the child's gender expression and sex. To determine if a child may be a pre-homosexual, parents would be asked things like: Are you concerned about your child's behavior? Are you wondering if he or she may be displaying symptoms of gender confusion? He would say that to be of help to concerned parents, a therapist must not only be i

nformed about childhood indicators of future homosexuality, but he or she must also be sensitive and respectful towards those parents who desire to maximize the possibility of their child growing up straight. Therapist such as myself believe that healthy development requires that a person's interior sense of gender identity and his biology must correspond. He makes little mention of trans identities, though he clearly knows trans people exist. Instead, he sees trans people as a sub community of

homosexuals. Just further lost in their gender confusion. The final form. And while they address sexual attraction in conversion therapy, the focus is often specifically on how your perverse attractions are based in a gender confusion. The people promoting this narrative, this lie that trans kids are just gay kids being converted because straight people would rather have a straight trans kid than a gay cis kid. They're just showing that they know nothing of what conversion therapy truly is. Assi

milation as who claim that the parents of trans youth are somehow practicing conversion therapy on gay kids despite not knowing the child's sexuality betray their own deceit because they themselves are intrinsically linking gender nonconformity to sexual identity. If you want to know more about this. I covered it in my 2022 docu series reporting on the year I spent undercover in private gender critical Facebook groups. It's in part two. Assimilationist may believe that gay people who transition

and then become straight are just trying to assimilate into straight culture. But I would say that's projection. In fact, most trans people I know who would consider themselves heterosexual, are openly trans and as such do not get treated as a cis straight person would. They go from we can always tell when someone is trans to their transitioning gay kids so they can live a secret straights without batting an eye. Internal consistency and logic in their ideology is not a priority, which is why th

ey're so comfortable rewriting history from the history of Stonewall to the history of anti-gay slurs. Five. Queer has always been a slur. Gay has never been Queer is a slur. Just because straights and pedophiles say the word has been reclaimed doesn't make it so. A slur is determined by the recipient, not the deliverer. A little help here at Elon Musk? Gay is never been used as a slur the way queer has. I think we have a right to decide whether or not we want to reclaim a slur that literally ca

lls our sexual orientation strange. Like queer used to be a slur substitute for gay male. That's not how the new kids think of it at all. It's literally an in-group of mostly non-binaries who aren’t transitioning to anything and some trans. The only unifying thing they have is communism. Gay isn't a slur. You just want to force the term queer on gay men who don't want to be grouped under queer. This narrative is particularly asinine, almost as much as it is insidious to begin with. The way langu

age is used and interpreted differs by locale, culture, time period, and often even between neighboring neighborhoods. I am not and will never deny that people have used the term queer as a slur. I've had it use that way against me. But growing up I far more often heard the term gay used to demean and denigrate me. It was so widespread, so commonly used that way that they ran TV ads in an attempt to educate people on how equating gay with something stupid is harmful. Gay was a stand in for prett

y much anything you didn't like. Everything that was wrong, bad, nasty. But the people in this LGB drop the TQ movement pretend as if this didn't happen, as if their experiences are the only experiences that matter. But more than that, they're simply wrong. Liberationists have been taking back terms and symbols since the beginning of the movement. We took the symbols they attached to us during the Holocaust and turned them into a symbol of our perseverance. That said, we're still here despite ev

erything you've done to erase us. And that is often the intention of taking back language from those who have and would continue to use it to harm us, to force us into hiding. Assimilationist often want to distance themselves from that language because it is othering and they want to be seen as the same. Liberationists fight for a world in which being different or rebelling against the status quo isn't grounds to be hated, oppressed or harmed. I agree that if someone doesn't want to be called qu

eer, then they shouldn't be. But assimilationist don't offer the same grace they want the only narrative to be their own. Theirs are the only voices that deserve to be heard. I should clarify then that when I say the queer community, I mean just that. I do not mean assimilationist gays. I do not mean people who do not act in community with us. I do not mean Julie Bindle or Jamiee Michell, I do not mean gay men who alternate between: ‘Stop saying queer it's disrespectful, use gay’ and ‘I don't ca

re if you want to call yourself non-binary, You're a disgusting man.’ Queer has always been ours to use however we see fit. Those who reject it now would have rejected it when Queer Nation was formed. They never be willing to admit this, of course, as any mention of Queer Nation sends them into a tailspin. Misinformation and misdirection spewing out like smoke as cover for their lies. When you go to the account of someone who pushes this narrative, you were likely to find someone who pushes tra

nsphobia, vaccine misinformation, conspiracy theories -- so, anti-Semitism -- and overt anti queer sentiments, it's almost never just about what they want to be called. It's political. They're against queer because they're against everything that queer signifies. I will never call an assimilationist queer if they don't want to be. Partly out of respect for those who have been harmed by the word, but mostly because they don't deserve the honor. They don't fight against anything but my freedoms.

They don't stand for anyone but themselves. And they don't belong to my community because my community is one that should be comprised of people who want to lift ourselves out of the hole we've been put in without piling up each other's bodies to climb up. But most importantly, queer do not enter our community as a slur. It was our term for ourselves, and it was co-opted by those who wish to denigrate us. And it is those who deny this history, who attempt to erase it that are the ones who shoul

d be held up as an example of someone harming the community through ahistorical revisionism Using the word queer this way is wrong. 15 years ago, if I heard you say the word queer, I would have punched you in the face. This is laughably wrong. In gay New York, George Chauncey lays out its origins. By the 1910s and 1920s men who identify themselves as different from the men, primarily on the basis of their homosexual interests rather than their women-like gender status usually called themselves q

ueer. Queer wasn't derogatory. One man active in New York's gay world in the 1920s recalls It wasn't like racial slurs. It just meant that you were different. Well, Finch, a social worker who began to identify himself as queer while in New York in the early 1930s, recalled in 1931 that the word gay originated with the Flaming (F-slurs) as a camp word, used to apply to absolutely everything in anyway, pleasant or desirable, not as homosexual, and only began to mean homosexual later on. The word q

ueer as becoming or coming to be regarded as more and more derogatory and as less and less used by trade and the homosexual, especially the younger ones. And the term gay has taken its place. I loathe the word and stick to queer. And you know what Will? Pretty much me too. Throughout this video when referring to the LGBTQ+ community. I've mostly not called it that. I don't personally love that acronym. There feels like an intrinsic hierarchy in ordering the letters, in who and who is not shoved

off to the side, and that to expound on the other side of the plus symbol. I referred to the community as Gender and Sexual Minorities because it pulls the focus towards our liberation and our commonalities. Nobody is left out. Nobody is grouped under a plus sign and nobody needs to be added when new terms become common parlance. I'm not asking anyone else to adopt this terminology, but it is what I will be using going forward in my work. So now you know that when it comes to their rhetoric, you

're being lied to. You know who is doing it and their motivations. But you still might be asking, why do I even care? And more importantly, why should you? Why does any of this matter? Head on in and find out? Looking at our history, it's nothing new for us to have a group of people who want us to assimilate, to just be monogamous and get married and, I don't know, keep our wrists straight and our hair brown. To reduce being gay, to just the kind of genitals you have and the kind of genitals you

r partner has. To ignore our culture and history. Right now, some of those assimilationist gays are trying to gain brownie points by aligning themselves with transphobic straights. Deluding themselves that the only reason straights hate us is that we're colorful and don't do gender the way they want. Not only is that not true, but it is a nakedly disgusting way to treat our siblings. There are a lot of ways that the anti-trans LGB groups hurt LGB people. They reduce lesbianism to ‘doesn't like

dick,’ which is pretty offensive. Despite having a B in their acronym, They are often composed of people who have long records of biphobia like Julie Bindell, and they try to redefine bisexuality as attraction to people with binary gender presentation, something it has never meant, which erases half a century of trans inclusive bisexual activism. And they've aligned themselves with anti-abortion groups, something that hurts both cis lesbians and cis bi women Beyond directly harming LGB people.

The anti trans LGB groups and rhetoric have deeply bigoted views against other marginalized groups. If you want a more in-depth look at the philosophical underpinnings of this, you can look up the essay Sex and the Revolution by Myself and Neil Farrell on YouTube as the Leftist Cooks. State essay breaks down That essay breaks down some of the original transphobic radical feminist literature, which hate groups still cite as foundational to their ethos and philosophy. However, the important thing

to note is that the theoretical basis of lesbian and gay transphobia is linked with a host of other bigotries, including notably, anti-blackness, white supremacy, and particularly antisemitism. This is most apparent in their battle against Queerness, which they oppose both rhetorically and functionally. Queerness is liberationist. To identify as queer is to stand opposed to the status quo. And because of this, it is a threat to respectability politics and assimilation. If you've wondered why the

LGB dropped the T groups all advocate for dropping the Q too, this is why. They're also just anti-science in their clinging to grades school conceptions of sex categories, and their insistence that the Western social construction is the correct one. I actually look to see if anyone had done a paper on this topic, but I couldn't find anything in the academic record. So this is speculation. But I think it's interesting that the LGB transphobes seem to share a belief that the British conception of

sex and gender and sexuality is a correct one, that the Western subject is the universal one and all others are oddities who are striving to be universal. They seem to deny the global dominance of British conceptions as being the result of colonialism. Instead invoking the idea of common sense. Some will try to claim that their stances are based on science while ignoring that they are going against the broad consensus across numerous fields, including anthropology and sociology and psychology a

nd biology, fields, which I may note rarely agree with each other on anything, but which all support the idea that these categories are not inherent, but rather nuanced social constructions. But it means that these assimilationist are foundationally racist. That's something they can't deny if they bring a few token TERFs of color to their rallies. We already showed this isn't a new thing for assimilationist queers. It's also not new in terms of lesbian separatism, the ideology that some transpho

bic radical feminist orient themselves around. Lesbian separatism was and still is a very white movement. This was summarized succinctly in the statement by the Combahee River Collective, a group of black lesbian feminists writing in 1977. “Although we are feminists and lesbians, we reject the stance of lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly black men, women, and children. We have a gre

at deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society, what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we don't have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per say, their biological maleness, that makes them what they are. As black women, we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. We must also question whether lesbian separatism is an adequate and progressive poli

tical analysis and strategy, even for those who practice it, since it so completely denies any but the sexual sources of women's oppression, negating the effects of class and race. The statement goes on to talk about how white women have the privilege of seeing only gender oppression, because ultimately the concerns of white women get taken seriously. It bemoans the difficulties black women have had in joining the white led feminist groups, which are thought of as representative of mainstream fe

minism and says that it is white women's responsibility to rid themselves of white supremacy. Though there seems to be little drive from within many feminist spaces for women to do so. But I can't speak from personal experience about how the LGB drop the TQ movement is racist or anti-Semitic. I can, however, talk about Biphobia and how Biphobic thinking has impacted me as a bi woman. I don't like closets as a metaphor. Closets seem calm and peaceful. Instead, I find myself resonating with Fouca

ult’s conception of self surveillance. Trying to hide queerness is exhausting. And what do I get when I've successfully done it? I get to sit in a room with straight people. I get invited to girls nights where the conversation gets naughty and I am suddenly deeply aware that people do not know that I've slept with women, and if they did, the entire atmosphere would change. I have made friends while I've been in a relationship with a man, only to watch those friends literally start hanging out wi

th me when I started dating a woman. I find the obsession with policing trans people in changing rooms so particularly upsetting because I remember distinctly being bullied to bits as a middle school kid because the other girls were convinced I was checking them out before gym class. I wasn't out yet, and none of them were my type. But it didn't matter. They could tell and they could use this fact about me to label me as dirty and dangerous, even when all I wanted to do was get dressed in peace.

And often, when telling adults about the bullying, the thing they'd say to comfort me was: Don't worry about it. Let it roll off your back. It's not as if it's true. I know that many of the current LG drop the TQ organizations include Bi people, at least in their acronyms. But I also know enough to know that they don't really, because Bi people are inherently antithetical to their understanding of the world. A lot of the gay men and lesbian women in these movements are, let's be real, conserva

tive and self-hating. And a self-hating lesbian can at least say that she can't help it, that if she had the choice to partner with a man and be normal, she'd take it. Bisexual people blow that conception up, not because we actually get to choose whether we're a gender or sexual minority or not. We are. But because we could marry a man and be happy just as long as we never talk about our dating history or the people we've loved. Just as long as we present a straight kind of femininity. As long a

s we were willing to hide a part of ourselves forever. And my bisexuality isn't just bi, it's queer in the queer theory sense. And I imagine a lot of other bi people feel that, too. The relationships I've had with men haven't felt straight. I negotiate my gender roles. The sex I have isn't straight, and hey, most of the men weren't either. And yet, when I try and push back on this narrative, my perspective is erased. My identity isn't conceptualized as a specific, marginalized sexuality, but as

being sort of half gay. I might be allowed in if I behave myself and toe the party line. My privilege to be included could be taken away at any second. When I look back on the moments in my life that led to harassment, prejudice, violence; none of them are precipitated by a display of affection that would out my attraction to men. It was not my biological desires nor my political beliefs that led to my being beaten by three men on a dark street and left there on the ground as they walked away la

ughing. Leaving me disabled and unable to work for most of a year. it was my femininity. It was that I was discernibly different from how I was supposed to be. I was contrary, weird, you might say queer. I was a target because I was not, in fact, just like them. Assimilating itself does not harm others. Assimilationist rhetoric does. Assimilation serves the ones who need it the least first. Sort of like trickle down rights and anti triage. Except those at the bottom never get what they were prom

ised. And so when I hear arguments from assimilationist that the reason we should not be discriminated against, should not be harmed or denigrated is because we are, in fact, just like them, I know I am not included in that. Assimilationist arguments do not end with wider acceptance for all gay people. They end with a narrow group of those willing to make themselves smaller and less of a target, experiencing marginally less hostility. That hostility still finds a target, and that target is all t

hose who refused to assimilate or couldn't. When assimilationist speak of equality, they are not discussing that which would grant me true equality or liberation. They mean the right to act and live as straight people do, to do the things straight people do without consequence. And everyone who feels no desire to live that way, they are left to fend for themselves. So when I say that people in this movement, the LGB,drop the TQ ideologues, the assimilationists, gender critical people, when I say

they do not speak for me, I mean it many ways. They do not speak on my behalf as a gay person because they do not care to think of me before they speak, but also because their message is not my message. Their beliefs are not my beliefs, and their freedom is not my freedom. No, their message betrays me, their beliefs ignore me and their freedom is my closet. I am gay and they do not speak for me. Instead, they speak over me. They may speak about, but they never speak for me. I'm gay and they do

not speak for me. I'm bisexual and they do not speak for me. I'm gay and they do not speak for me. I am a lesbian and they do not speak for me. I am bisexual and they do not speak to me. I'm gay. I'm gay. And they do not speak for me. Do not speak for me. I'm bisexual. I am gay. And they don't speak for me. They do not speak for me. They do not speak for me. I'm gay and They do not speak for me. I'm bisexual, I’m bisexual, I am bisexual, and they don't speak for me. I'm bisexual. I'm bi I am gay

and they do not speak for me and they do not speak for me. I'm gay and they do not speak for me. I am a lesbian and they do not speak for me. I am bisexual and they don't speak for me. They will not divide us. They will not divide us. They will not divide us. They will not divide us. They will not divide us. They will not divide us. They will not divide us. They will not will not will not will not divide us. They will not divide us. They will not divide us. They will not divide us They will not

They will not divide us. They will not divide us. And they certainly won't divide us. They They will not divide us They do not speak for us, no matter how hard they may try. Assimilationists haven’t earned their place as sole representatives. Divided we are so much easier to conquer. It is our differences that make us stronger, better able to pivot and adapt, to progress. Language changes, communities evolve, and there is nothing more conservative than saying that progress is the enemy to the g

ender and sexual minorities out there. Whoever you are, do not let the assimilationist gays’ attempts to erase your history go unchallenged. Do not allow straight people like J.K. Rowling to endorse that trans people, LGBTQ+ people of color, and all those people we lost to AIDS, “are shit.” Our pains, our riots, our struggles. They are also our wins. Do not let them strip those people who fought for us of their identity, their personhood, their accomplishments. These are your heroes. This is y

our story. And nobody can ever take that from you. But we're not done. We are so far from it. And I'm sorry to say that the job of Liberationist gets increasingly difficult as assimilation as adopt the dog whistles and moral panics of those who would rather see us dead than see us thrive. But we have the truth. We have the allies and we have each other. And to the assimilationist who salivate on the boot against our neck when we're up against the wall, just tell them you're one of the good ones.

Maybe they'll be nice enough to let you go first. (sound effect of a shot) Projects like this take a lot of time, research, planning, and editing, which if you can't tell, I did myself. Everything you see on your screen, I did. There's no big team. Sarah did a lot of research. We both did writing. Our colleagues and friends recorded lines and then the rest is me sitting in front of the computer editing and doing CGI until I have to go to physiotherapy. Again. But they also take a lot out of me

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