Yesterday, I went to a website of a vegan restaurant and was met with a luscious image of rainbow cupcakes. “Happy Pride, capitalism!” I almost thought.
As I wrote in 2019, I am very uneasy with the mainstreaming and co-optation of Pride, and of queerness in general. In truth, rainbow cupcakes and the rainbow-washing of corporate logos still surprise, disorient, and anger me. My queerness has nothing to do with buying products; it is radically at odds with corporate power and the white supremacy that is inextricable from that power. My queerness—that is, the merging of my sexuality and politics—has everything to do with tearing down the status quo and building a radically different world than the one we currently inhabit. And I hate that it has become something to be consumed like cupcakes.
In her excellent New York Times op-ed, “Cops Don’t Belong at Pride,” author Roxane Gay defends the decision by organizers of the NYC Pride parade to prevent police officers from marching as a group in uniform (to be clear: they can still march unarmed and in civilian clothes). Gay cites the police’s long history of brutalizing the queer community, and specifically the violence, hostility, and indifference by police toward Black trans women and other Black and brown people. She also writes:
We are a sprawling, unruly community. As we continue to think about who belongs at Pride, questions, and, inevitably, controversies arise. Some people, for example, want to exclude the kink community or at least expect kinky queers to tone down their public expressions of sexuality to make Pride more family-friendly. This kind of respectability politics is nothing new. There have always been calls for the L.G.B.T.Q. community to neuter the sex from our sexuality, to temper our flamboyance, to bend to heterosexual norms. Let’s be clear: We should not have to contort ourselves to make straight people comfortable with our lives. Assimilation cannot be the price we must pay for freedom.
Even with the LGBTQ+ community, there has always been a divide between those who advocated for respectability politics, and those who insisted on queerness as a radical, visionary alternative to the oppressions and constrictions of the status quo.
And even though the wash of rainbow everything and the presence of cops at Pride might seem to indicate that respectability politics are winning, I am inspired and emboldened by all the radical queers I know. Anti-racists and abolitionist queers, artists and rabble-rousing queers, healers and magical queers, high femmes and kinksters.
So, my contribution to queer pride month in this new-moon missive is a brief and not at all comprehensive list of some radical queers who currently are inspiring me to keep on keeping on. Some of them might be familiar to you, some might not be.
Patty Berne, disability justice organizer, artist
adrienne maree brown, emergent strategist, pleasure activist, writer, facilitator for Black liberation
Ching-In Chen, poet, community organizer
Franny Choi, poet, organizer
Malkia Devich-Cyril, writer, activist for Black liberation, digital rights, and collective grief.
Ejeris Dixon, organizer, strategist
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Black feminist scholar, poet, author,
Duriel E. Harris, poet, author, performance artist
Dori Midnight, healer, writer
Mia Mingus, disability justice and transformative justice organizer
Chani Nicholas, astrologist
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, disability justice organizer, poet, writer
Susan Raffo, bodyworker, writer, healing justice organizer
Toshi Reagon, singer, composer, musician
I’m going to stop there, because I could spend the whole month of June making this list. I’d love to hear from you: Who did I miss? Who are the younger radical queers, trans and nonbinary organizers, asexual activists I should know and follow? Who are your favorite radical queers?
Community/Announcements
As some of you know, I practice slow internet and am on social media only sporadically. Which means I’m not always up on the latest news. I am only now getting caught up on the ways that Substack (the company that makes the platform I use to send this newsletter) has solicited and paid right wing, anti-trans writers thousands of dollars to use their platform. Some writers are leaving Substack because of it, and I’m mulling over what to do myself. More on that soon, perhaps.
In the meantime, thanks to new subscribers over the past two months, I have been able to add a $25 a month donation to the Transgender Law Center, “the largest national trans-led organization advocating self-determination for all people.” For now, while anti-trans writers are using this platform to advance their agenda of hate, I’ll be using this platform to help advance trans liberation.
As always, thank you for reading, subscribing, and being an amazing community. I hope you have a wonderful, radical Pride month. And I’ll be back in your inbox on the full moon on June 24.