Dear fellow homosexuals,
My buddy back home in L.A. just got accosted by strangers for being gay. Called him a faggot. On the street. In broad daylight... in L.A.
So, here we are.
It doesn't matter if we saw it coming or who saw it and when. The backlash is here.
I know you all see it. It won't go away on its own.
We've got a moment to meet here: a community to protect--not just for ourselves now but for the future. Progress to hold onto, to salvage where it can't be maintained. So much sacrifice was made for that progress. The least we can do is look alive and hold the line.
The “LGB" TQ+ Establishment is not going to help us.
HRC, Trevor Project, GLAAD... The "gay rights" groups are no longer in the gay rights business.
They've chosen something else. They've chosen the extremism and intolerance of gender ideology that’s gotten us into this mess.
They're not even into protecting gender non-conforming future gays. They're content to see them sicken and waste. Don't count on them having mercy, much less time for the grown-up gays who won't be called "queers."
Don't count on Out Magazine or The Advocate to speak to all gays of all political, cultural, and ethnic stripes to help build that solidarity, that brotherhood, that sisterhood of common homosexuality that bound us and brought us through such impossible times before.
They won't even tell the truth about those times anymore. They've stopped covering them. They've stopped covering us. Like the big box nonprofits, they're loyalty-bound to more lucrative interests than the scrappy, ordinary business of ensuring gay civil rights.
Ask any one of the melon-faced little politicos at the NGOs what we should do – we concerned homosexuals, watching history repeat itself, watching the hard-fought gay rights movement unspool and unravel under all of this unfamiliar weight before we even see a single one of our rights codified into law.
And see how long it takes them to correct you. "LGBTQIA+ Rights Movement," they'll advise you. "You concerned, QUEERS," they will say.
We can sink further into this mire. We can let ourselves be dragged down further. To the gays who have succumbed to cowardice, gays who are desperate to stay a surf on the mainstream, gays who like fitting in: I get it. I don't blame you. Most of us in this resistance were you; some of us for a long time. We're in no place to judge, and this LGB resistance will always be open to you.
But please recognize that this has nothing to do with hate or rejecting anyone. Least of all, the legacy transsexual individuals who acknowledge the reality of their condition and are having their peace upended by this hateful extremist ideology as well. This is only about protecting each other and the next generation of LGB people from the fallout of this highjacking.
We are in a dire moment and have no choice but to meet it.
Political parties, corporations, pop and flash and fashion, validation, safe spaces, journeys, parades, self-celebrations for no reason -- those things haven't been our downfall, but they're what our downfall came dressed in.
We need to come together now before things get worse, -- before this emerging homophobic renaissance starts to do more than just harass and yell. Before our supreme court cases get overturned, before the erasure of sex - the rejection of reality key to acknowledging our existence gets codified into law. -- Before we enter another era of widespread "queerbashing" against homosexuals and our Supreme Court rulings get overturned, we need to figure out how we deal with this crisis.
We need to figure out how we right the ship and get what was won for us in the Supreme Court codified into law.
We were so close to seeing that fight won. In an era where many are unaware that we haven't reached the finish line of having our civil rights codified into law yet, homophobia was becoming a mere curiosity. We didn't have far to go before it was a memory, a story, a myth.
So when my buddy is being hassled, menaced, called a faggot under the broad, bright sun of Los Angeles, something has gone wrong.
It's our responsibility to fix it. And not just for us.
This extremism, this homophobic ideology, which has corrupted our institutions and has falsely claimed to be about us for far too long, has put our progress into retrograde and lost the goodwill and tolerance of our fellow Americans.
The gay rights movement was not about setting ourselves apart or being cheered on by our friends and neighbors for our homosexuality. It was about making homosexuality as incidental and inconsequential as heterosexuality. That was the goal, and we were damn close.
The rights currently on loan to us via Supreme Court rulings are a gift hard-fought for us by gays and lesbians who knew that they would not live so long to see their courage and sacrifice bear fruit. If we can't win this fight and get those rights codified, our solemn obligation- and the very least we can do- is to hand that gift down to the next generations fully intact so they can get across the finish line.
Suppose we keep failing to attend to the strategic and disciplined movement building that brought gay liberation from the taboo and criminal to the landmark Supreme Court rulings of 1996, 2003, 2013, and 2015 in scarcely half a century. In that case, we can expect further atrophy.
How would we let that happen? How would we look in the face of those generations of gay men and women who have yet to grow up when it's time for them to come out? Worse, how can we look in the face of those gays and lesbians who are right now, today, looking at what is being sold as "queer" life and staying in the closet? How can we blame them?
How will we blame them when bullshit like what happened to my buddy back in L.A. becomes the norm.
And it will. It will not fix itself.
That's what's at stake.
I don't have the solutions, but the solutions are out there — they are ours to find together.
We have slain much bigger dragons, but we've done it together, complete with all our differences, aware of how much we need each other and each other's good faith. We can slay this one, too.
Resist.
It may mot have been well known or freely promoted buy people aged 18 and up have been transitioning for a long time. From the perspective of brain development "youth" could mean up to 25 years old. Homophobia never went away it just became less acceptable in more contexts but now it appears all over the place often wearing the face-paint of 'Righteous Queerdom." We need to start calling out gay lesbian and bi erasure. Complain to anyone will listen, especially if they are in government or media that calls itself news
Complain that the giant BS initials erase us rather than include us! Put up stickers. Print off copies of the LGB Alliance 'Don't Call Us Quuer' report and show it or mail it to people. If we stay silent they will never know?
Us Lesbians been fightingbthis ALL ALONG. Before gay men would even admit to this or sided with the Trans against us. The Gay Male Communities have far more ower politically and economically and still intact. Ours are not unless we go extremely remote on private Land.
First MTFS gate crashing into the Lesbian communities after their failed marriages to het women. Then our Butches starting in the 1990s being convinced sometimes by these MTFs they must be dudes...and it becoming trendoid in the young 20 something crowd Then in the 2000s and 2010s the Raid Onset Gender Identity bs in schools where groups of girls decide to transition together....I been fighting this BY AND FOR Lesbians 30 plus years!! Gay men until recently largely were no help. .Till they realized young hetro/ bi FTMs were wanting to crash THEIR spaces and identify as " gay men". And just like many MTFs, no bottom surgeries...not that they worked: they dont.
So your pal may have been harassed..As a Butch Dyke I been harassed too over my lifetime as a Lesbian!! I known FOR YEARS the backlash is coming. But in this town I am persona non grata
All the young Butches done transitioned. And ANYBODY NOT BUYING GENDER IDEOLOGY is suspect or accused of being a " hater".
I stood u to the Trans with orger strong women in Madison Wisconsin, many of them Lesbian who stood up. We were shouted down. With bullhorns and white noise but we refused to be silent. That was April 2022 for " Let Women Speak"..But the trans and gender crew only got more and mpre violent over time towards women.and outspoken.Lesbians.
The reckoning is at hand. We NEED our allies.
- In.Solidarity,
- The FeistyAmazon