ID: Drawing of a duck billed platypus underwater, they’re wearing a rainbow coloured t shirt and a pink bum-bag, and saying: “Ally is not something you can self-identify as, it’s a title that you earn. Let your actions speak for themselves!”
Credit: Sophie Labelle
ITT people are thinking this post is about them, but it feels like it’s more targeted at the “The A is for ally!” types. (Thinking A in LGBTQIA is for ally instead of asexual.)
Why not both? 🤷♀️
I feel like the two groups are close to a circle in a Venn diagram - privileged people there to make it about themselves (in the form of self aggrandization and claiming non-existent victimhood and marginalisation) rather than about the marginalised people they claim to support (and only do superficially and entirely conditionally).
I hope you realize part of the reason politicians are now getting ready to make gay marriage illegal again is because people like you pushed for this. You lost the unimportant “filthy” centrists.
You wanted to make sure that any kind of rude, disagreeable people understood that you no longer needed their hesitant help and incomplete acceptance. You didn’t need or want support from people who only sort of accept you, that you don’t want or need their help preserving your capability to legally even be some kind of gay.
The gay community in the last decade has ended up fundamentally misunderstanding what support is.
They think it means friendship and participating in protests and emotional support. The reality is that you should desperately want some support and also from the hesitant and questioning. You should have strategically worked to gain their support.
The people who stand up for you in a group and say, “Hey, they’re not that bad!” are fucking VITALLY IMPORTANT to your continued freedom and survival.
But you’ve lost them, so now a few not so cruel people in an Arkansas town hall are keeping their mouth shut while the really cruel ones go on and on. The woild-be-kinda-allies don’t really like trannies and that freaky kind of gays who parade in leather chops, but they still used to speak up and try to appeal to compassion and defuse people’s enthusiasm and strategizing when they started talking about “doing something” about the gays in town. They didn’t really like gay everything about the hay movement, but they didn’t want them to get hurt and harassed either.
The actual raging homophobes want to help conservatives push to make gay marriage illegal, start reinterpreting public indecency to include being visibly gay with your partner in public, start following and arresting them. Beating and killing gays as feds look the other way. Et cetera.
You feel like you don’t need mild compassion, you feel like you need only allyship from those who unconditionally love and accept you and all your queer friends.
You’re an idiot who fumbled the game and is about to lose your rights. You and most of your friends are idiots.
Now ban me and make sure you don’t have to think about this again.