I have a gay son.
I have a bisexual daughter.
(Two different fathers. One straight, one pretending to be bi to get attention. I have no idea how this works.)
Many of the normal people and famous people I’ve loved, liked, respected, or enjoyed over my lifetime have been some part of the LGB community.
I am so fucking done with Pride Month.
…Look, don’t mistake me. Unlike a lot of people who think Pride Month was invented yesterday for the purpose of shoving half-naked drag queens in the faces of three-year-old children, I understand its original intent and some of its history. I am absolutely, 100% behind the campaign for equal rights for people who are, sometimes or all the time, same-sex attracted. The way we have historically treated gay men and lesbian women in particular has been absolutely shameful. I’m grateful that I have lived long enough to see this changing for the better. The work’s not done, but it seems mostly headed in the right direction. Mostly.
“Okay, so what are you complaining about?” Fair question. Read on.
Where the hell did all the straight people come from?
I have gone over the differences between sex and sex class and gender on this Substack, exhaustively. I have written an essay about this, in fact. So when I say “straight people” I mean people of one sex class who are wired to be sexually attracted to people of the other sex class. We all know what “straight” means. Even if some of us want to play dumb.
So. By REAL-LIFE standards, all of a sudden we’re seeing Pride events and formerly LGB-focused organizations taken over by blue-haired straight people who, because they attach certain labels to themselves and their partners, want us all to believe they are not straight or in straight relationships even though one partner’s plainly got an innie and the other’s obviously got an outie.
Y’all know we can actually see you, right?
Straight (adult) people attending Pride events? Fine. Straight people pretending Pride is about them? Fuck off.
Gender identity is not sexual orientation.
A lot of us, regardless of sexual orientation, have been talking about this behind the scenes and have concluded that when same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, the LGB-rights organizations felt they no longer had a purpose, so they glommed onto the gender identity movement to justify their continued existence. So far, the evidence seems to back up that theory.
I gotta say, though, that it clangs on the nerves to see corporate social media accounts droning “love is love!” on June 1 while hyping up trans to the exclusion of lesbians and gays when gender identity is not remotely about “who you love.”
A popular terf radfem on Twitter, Tiffany (remember Tiffany? I love her), put it this way:
L = who you fuck
G = who you fuck
B = who you fuck
T = what the fuck
I kind of understand why T became attached to the LGB movement. A lot of people think the original “trans women” were gay men trying to blend in and live their lives like normal people. I’ve since heard that that’s a myth, but if enough people believed it, that would have been enough reason for LGBs to accept trans people at the time, because it seemed like a lot of them were the aforementioned disguised gay men and also lesbian women who couldn’t feel accepted as women.
But it has never made sense from a practical standpoint. If someone who is identifying as trans was homosexual or bisexual when they started, obviously the LGB-rights movement was already for them, but there was never a reason to include trans as a part of the movement because it’s not a sexual orientation. And now that so many straight people are adopting trans as an identity, it’s even less LGB-aligned.
And also…
Including trans in the LGB movement and Pride is introducing homophobia into homosexual spaces.
If you can’t see what I’m talking about then you have been performing support for trans people to get attention but have never actually listened to what they have to say.
“A lot of gay men are gay men as a consolation prize, because they couldn't be women.” - Juno Dawson
I grew up hearing people saying that gay men were sissies (so: women) and lesbian women were trying to be men. I’m Gen X and Dawson is a millennial, but we only have a seven-year age difference. He probably heard a lot of the same messages I did.
There’s a myth going around that only millennials are “transitioning” or only Gen Y is “transitioning” or only Zoomers are “transitioning” but Gen X is smart enough not to. Untrue. There’s a guy from my high school who was a year ahead of me and is now pretending to be a woman. Although he was always very much into women, I remember him telling me he’d had an affair with another guy and that if he’d kept it up much longer, the other guy would have “turned [him] gay.” So: bisexual. And I’ve known a couple non-het women who decided they were Not-Women, too: one lesbian, the other bisexual. There’s a pattern here. Before there was gender-identity social contagion, there was internalized homophobia, and that’s what got my generation in terms of “gender transition”. Thankfully, not a lot of them.
But the pressure has mounted. Even Urban Dictionary has an entry for genital fetishist. Which, like gender identity, does not actually exist; fetishes have to do with NON-sexual objects of desire. Genitals are about as sexual as it gets.
Basically what you have in the gender-identity community is a kind of enforced bisexuality — or pansexuality, as they’re calling it now. They have zero tolerance for monosexual (only attracted to one sex) people and they are quite brazen about saying so. This is not a healthy environment for homosexual and bisexual people who have only recently found something like acceptance in the Western world. Why is this unhealthy environment being fostered at Pride? It has the opposite effect.
What the hell do they think L stands for?
I am heterosexual and so I don’t know everything about the history of Pride or the LGB rights movement, but I kind of get the impression Pride has never been 100% accepting of lesbians.
It’s even worse now. Now, rather than just treating lesbians as some sort of exotic and slightly annoying species at the fringes of the parade, Pride is about labeling straight men in long hair as “lesbians” and banning lesbians for protesting this.
All through the 1980s, lesbians took care of gay men who were dying from AIDS when no one else would touch them. This is how you thank lesbians. Keep ‘em classy, fellas.
Talk about going way off the fucking script
When did fetishes become equated with sexual orientation? Because they’re not at all the same thing. Dudes wanting to dress up as dogs and walk around on all fours on a leash with a “tail” butt plug up their asses are not the equivalent of lesbians, gay men, or bisexual people. Especially if you want your Pride event to be family-friendly.
And then there were relationship styles. Those are not sexual orientations either and certainly are not the opposite of heterosexual. Straight people can also lose interest in sex (you are not “asexual”; that word means something already) or only want sex with people they love or not be interested in romance or whatever. What next, are we going to decide left-handed pizza-eaters belong in Pride too, just for being left-handed pizza-eaters? Get the fuck back in your lane.
Et tu, Corporate America?
I can’t take you businesses out there seriously when you put up rainbow logos all month long but you never have shit to say about Women’s History Month. Especially when your “pro-LGBetc” policies are so blatantly anti-woman. Please do not try to pit me against my lesbian and bisexual sisters because you are so busy simping People With Genders. You’re the one who will lose.
—
I can’t speak for the LGB community on this but IF Pride is even still necessary, or IF LGBs want to celebrate it in commemoration of their historic struggles, that’s cool with me. But it’s either that or we need to have a conversation about dropping it entirely if it continues being a cesspool of cosplaying straights and sexual perversions and grooming kids and forcing the non-straights into guilt by association. Because I’m already hearing the grumbling, and it’s only going to get louder. And it never ends at just grumbling.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find my barf bucket.
You took the words right out of my mouth and wrote them so eloquently