LGBTQIAPX2Y1ZJKLM[N]RS{T}VW!%#&?+++ —Enough!

Neoliberalism and the Erasure and Marginalization of the Gay Community

Aug 06, 2021

ESSAY 1: (In a series) Links to other essays in the series are at the end of this essay.

INTRODUCTION:

Largely up to this point, in all the cases I know of, but perhaps there are exception of which I don’t, the rejection of Alphabet Soup ideology has occurred when some Alphabet Soup scolds have pushed some intrusive impacting absurdity into Gay life.

In 2014 Drag Queens are banned from a 2014 Glasgow Pride parade and there is a backlash. Lil Nas X in 2021 is attacked on Twitter for being transphobic because he, in response to a homophobe, says he “liked dick.”

The counter response from the Gay community and others is to in one way or another point out that the Alphabet Soup scolds are absurd and perhaps an ad hoc argument is constructed. What isn’t understood is the deep ideological roots of these invasive assaults on Gay life, the invalid nature of the ideological justifications of these intrusions. The underlying fallacies of these assaults on the Gay community are not presented and so there aren’t really effective counter arguments. This is because there isn’t any Gay centric thinking and ideological development of a Gay consciousness movement. The Alphabet Soup with its developed arguments, narratives, vocabulary and definitions runs over the Gay community.

Another response to the Alphabet Soup plays right into their hands. That is to adopt reactionary arguments of reactionaries against one aspect or another of the Alphabet Soup ideology. Besides the obvious problem of aligning with the enemies of the Gay community, these arguments are just that, reactionary and invalid.

The Gay community’s strategy can’t be based on the repression of others. It won’t work and it would discredit any gay centric focus and any program of Gay consciousness. Rather there needs to be a co-existence respecting all parties. Basing your liberation on the oppression of others is a path to disaster. However, this doesn’t mean acceding to unilateral demands either.

Then there is the LGB Alliances which still conceptualizes themselves as an Alphabet Soup, but just wants a lot less of it or a different formulation. One member wants to suppress drag queens, but not from a trans perspective but a Lesbian feminist perspective. I just want to leave the drag queens alone.

Nor is separatism a valid path. The Gay community lives in the world and lives with others. Often there would and should be alliances of interests, but these should be alliances built with an independent Gay community agenda pursuing its own interests not imposed from above by academic elites or various ideologues.

We can expect that this state of affairs of neoliberal management of desire with its negative impacts on the Gay community through the agency of Alphabet Soup ideology to continue unless we develop a radical ideology in opposition to neoliberal management of desire.

I haven’t worked out all my thoughts in regards how the Alphabet Soup has worked against the Gay community, but I am starting to identify some of the components and workings of the Alphabet Soup agenda and develop a radical theory in opposition. I unfortunately don’t have time to do all the reading of the theorizations of the Alphabet Soup that I would like. However, I think some of the failings of the Alphabet Soup ideology are somewhat obvious and I will start with those failings. Hopefully, my writings will get others involved with the deconstruction of Alphabet Soup ideology.

This essay will be the foundation stone of the resistance to the Alphabet Soup and will be the basis of my later writing on specific issues.

As my thinking and theorizing advances, I will likely be re-writing or expanding this essay where it exists online. I really haven’t developed in my thinking what counter measures might be adopted. I think that effective counter measures require that we first understand what has happened and from that we will come up with our counter arguments and counter measures.

THE ALPHABET SOUP:

The letters keep getting added It was originally Gay, then Lesbian and Gay, then Lesbian Gay and Bisexual and by the time T for transgender it became a list of letters LGBT. The list of letters got longer. Not necessarily in this order, “Q” was added for “queer” resulting in LGBTQ. Then “I” for “intersex” and “A” for asexual was added for LGBTQIA.

Then the list exploded and different series of letters came into existence. There was LGBTQQIP2SAA for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Pansexual, 2S for Two Spirit, A for Asexual and another A for Ally. That is one series.

Another series is LGBTTQQIAAP which is for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Ally, Asexual and Pansexual.

Another series is LGGBBTTQQIAAPP for Lesbian, Gay, genderqueer, bisexual, bigender, transgender, trans, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, agender, pansexual and polyamorous.

Often a “+” is added on a list of initials to indicate there are other identities that exist beyond the initials used.

Gay Pride Month and the Gay Day Parade, or Gay & Lesbian Parade has now become just Pride Month and the Pride Parade.

The list of initials has become so long most everyone doesn’t remember them all, and the lengthy lists vary. The term, “Alphabet Soup,” has come into existence as a somewhat mocking reference to these many letters. Why these different sexual minorities should be grouped together or constitute a community isn’t questioned.

In many ways this Alphabet Soup has resulted in the erasure or marginalization of the Gay community, if not its atomization, and a denigration of its concerns. Many of the new letters are chronically complaining about or denouncing the Gay community.

The social and community experiences and customs and folk beliefs of the Gay community are denounced and Gays are lectured by Alphabet Soup scolds.

Before reviewing discussing the Alphabet Soup phenomenon it would be interesting to see how another class of minorities organizes themselves and group themselves.

RACIAL AND ETHNIC MINORITIES:

February is Black History Month in the United States. It isn’t People of Color Month, or Black, Indigenous and People of Color Month. May is Asian American & Pacific Islander Month, and Hispanic Heritage Month is from September 15th to October 15th, and November is Native American Heritage Month or American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month. There are likely other months for other groups’ heritage and history.

All these groups have common enemies, white supremacist and racists, and have common interests in terms of civil rights and reparations for past injustices committed against them by the United States government’s white supremacist policies.

Yet the months remain separate and no one is proposing a People of Color Month. Neither is there a movement to lump all these different groups into a single set of initials such as BIAAPIHNAANPOC for Black Indigenous Asian American Pacific Islander Hispanic Native American Alaska Native People of Color.

It is understood that these communities though they may share some common historical experiences and have common interests, also have separate historical experiences and differing cultures and importantly have different institutions. What is very important to note, these groups have independent institutions, historical, cultural, and activist, which are not adjuncts or subdivisions of movements outside their communities. For example, there are African American Democratic clubs and similarly Republican clubs, but there are independent groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, (NAACP), which is self-directed.

If there was an effort to put these ethnic and racial groups together in an Alphabet Soup of sorts, these groups wouldn’t stand for it. They have enough group cohesion and self-direction that they could and would resist such an effort.

Unlike the Alphabet Soup there isn’t the endless addition of groups to the agenda of specific organizations.

Also, African American groups tend to adopt names that assert an over-arching commonality. There isn’t some title incorporating the phrase, “Afro-Caribbean, African, and African American” lest anyone feel excluded.

The NAACP doesn’t need to add additional letters into its acronym to represent additional groups and can and does have a specific focus for the group for which it was founded. They aren’t being exclusionary of other groups. If the purpose of the NAACP doesn’t cover another group’s interests, they are free to form a group with their own focus. Different groups of differing histories and interests are not forced together in aggregates. Differing groups can work in coalitions them having to be fused together.

Also, importantly racial and ethnic groups define who they are and don’t permit others to define who they are. Individuals who declare they are trans African American (Rachel Dolezal) or trans Korean (Oil London) are simply not accepted as being African American or Korean respectively and are subject to condemnation for doing so. Though Critical Race Theory says that race is a social construct and in the field of cultural geography it is a generally accepted understanding that nations are imagined, that they are social constructs, no academic or cultural leader would dare defend the idea of trans racial or trans ethnic identity or denounce those who reject it transracial or trans ethnic identities.

However, transracial ideology may not continue to be confined to the madhouse of Medium writing and BIPOC may be just the seed of a lengthening list of initials. I leave it to racial and ethnic minorities whether they think this is good or bad, it isn’t my call, but I think it might be coming.

HOW WE GOT TO THIS STATE:

We don’t have autonomous Gay organizations. The Gay liberation fronts and the Gay activist alliances have long shut down in the 20th century. The Gay Academic Union is long since defunct. What has remained are various organizations which were parts of larger non-gay groups. There are the LGBT Democrats and Republicans concerned with supporting the Democratic and Republican Party agendas. There are Queer Studies departments or it is within Gender studies programs serving the needs of academics and the politics of gender studies.

A lot of intellectual activity concerns advancing an Alphabet Soup agenda that is constructed to support larger political agendas operating in society in general.

There is no Gay consciousness movement and no Gay centric thinking focused on the needs and interests of the Gay community. There is a lot of condemnation of the Gay community when it resists the Alphabet Soup agenda.

QUEER —AN IDENTITY THAT STARES AT STRAIGHTNESS:

“Queer” is still a slur, it is elitist, it is atomizing of the Gay community, it is another way of saying deviant.

As stated earlier in the various Alphabet Soups now presented to use, LGBTQ, LGBTQI, LGBTQIA, LGBTQIAP+ and I am sure there are more, Q stands for “queer.” We now have queer studies and queer this or that.

It has three problems.

1. It is a slur which has been imposed on Gays by elites and persons involved with the production and consumption of avant-gardism without consideration of the feelings of the broad masses of the Gay community.

2. It is straight-centric. All these communities under this umbrella term are define relative to a certain narrow heterosexuality. It is another way of saying deviants without saying “deviants.” It is an identity which stares at straights to define itself.

3. Assimilation. It drives an assimilationist political program. Whereas the great majority of Gays need job and housing civil rights legislation, the agenda is to push marriage and marriage with adopted children for Gays instead. This is not something that meets the needs of the great majority of Gays, but is an assimilationist political program driven by straight-centric identities, where being Gay is a personal variant from straights and not Gay centric.

Queer first was adopted as a supposedly non-slur by a militant group Queer Nation on the basis that it co-opted the term and disarmed homophobes.

https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/queer.php

This article in the Columbia Journalism Review above refers to this Newsweek article about Queer Nation below.

https://www.newsweek.com/what-queer-nation-202866

Queer has been since been adopted by academics and the Gay establishment as an all-inclusive term.

One of the claims for adopting the term by Queer Nation was that they were co-opting it. From the Newsweek article.

Former OutWeek

editor:

Michelangelo Signorile and three New York activists founded Queer Nation last year, fed up with ACT UP’s focus on AIDS. The idea quickly caught on in other cities. Queer Nation wants to spread the word that gays are tired of being “bashed,” literally or otherwise, and aren’t going to take it anymore. By co-opting the word “queer,” QN claims, they have disarmed homophobes. “Queer Nation makes everybody else look reasonable,” says gay San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts.

Certainly, a spirit of militancy needs to be adopted and the author has over the years lamented that enough Gays aren’t militant and all too often are begging for acceptance. This usage of the term seems to be just throwing a slur back into the face of homophobes. The intention was good.

IT STILL IS A SLUR:

The claim that it disarms homophobes is obviously at variance with the facts. Anti-Gay agendas do not depend only on a particular anti-Gay slur or even a set of them. They are the instruments of choice of some individual anti-Gay people, but hardly the only instruments used to attack Gay people, or the deadliest ones. Generally, their use discredits anti-Gay individuals. Anti-Gay agendas that are really deadly or dangerous to Gays avoid these words, at least publicly, the use of these terms. Anti-Gay Evangelicals like to say, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” The Catholic Church has an ongoing agenda against Gays, but you won’t hear the Pope uttering slurs or for that matter any bishop uttering slurs. Anti-Gay groups know that using slurs undermines their agenda and builds public sympathy towards Gays.

It is fairly obvious that the adoption of the term of “queer” by Queer Nation was an act of bravado and positioning themselves as radical. It is the production and consumption of radical identity. It is also the production and consumption of avant garde identity. Perhaps you could proclaim this identity while wearing a “Rage Against the Machine,” t-shirt. (Musical group whose name was a statement that they rage against the establishment.)

From this it has been adopted by those who wish to be progressive or seen as progressive. Reference to the Gay community or Lesbian and Gay community now disappears into the Alphabet Soup with “queer” being the short quick term for this Soup.

It has been adopted without considering the sentiments of the broad Gay community at large. It is a term which has considerable negative sentiment, and its use by these hasn’t really reclaimed it. It might be used by one Alphabet Soup person speaking to another, but it wouldn’t really be tolerable spoken by a straight person and especially intolerable spoken by someone anti-Gay.

Of course, there will be those who will want to adopt it, for they want to be avant garde and radical too! Look at me, look at me, I am just the most radical thing!

It is instructive to review what other minorities do in terms of self-naming and naming of organizations and fields of study.

Is there any religious minority that uses a slur in its title? Are there any Jewish groups that use a slur in their name? Are there any minority civil rights groups that use a racial slur in their name?

You certainly won’t find an N-Word Studies Department in any University Anywhere.

At Brandies University it is still Judaic studies, not k-word studies.

Proponents of the word “queer” will point out that African Americans do use the n-word. What isn’t mentioned by these proponents is that within the African American community there is also considerable resentment against the practice of African Americans using the n-word by other African Americans. It is used privately and it isn’t used formally. Also, it would be really be an inflammatory situation if a white person used the n-word, and further, if the white person said it was okay because African Americans use the term there would be a strong backlash and has been a strong backlash.

African Americans who are militant often have names which incorporate the term “Afrikan” to denotate militant identity, but not the n-word.

I am sure that defenders of the term “queer” might search the Internet and find some marginal African American group using the “n-word,” there is bound to be some such group, but the generally and overwhelming and nearly universal practice is that African American groups don’t use the n-word in their names.

Also, there is no effort to find any comprehensive slur for all non-whites to name some general civil rights group. You won’t find any radical minority alliance wanting to be the Mud People Alliance. (Mud People is a term for non-whites by certain white supremacist groups.)

Why do minorities refuse to use slurs for organizational names and for university studies departments and why does the Alphabet Soup of LGBTQ etc. find it acceptable? Minority groups have strong identities and are a community and elites know that they need to respect this and couldn’t get away with adopting some racial slur to play at being avant garde. Gays don’t have strong group coherence and so recreational radicals can impose identities upon us.

QUEER, A STRAIGHT-CENTRIC WORD:

The term “queer” is straight-centric. A group of widely different groups are lumped together whose commonality is they aren’t straight. The word “queer” reduced being Gay as just being some variant from being straight.

With the invention of genderqueer, I suppose there can now be straight individuals with heterosexual desires who are not normative in some supposed gender expression.

The term has evolved such that it includes anyone who isn’t some manifestation of 1950s TV show heterosexuality, but even then, I am expecting some scholar to publish some paper, “Queering the ‘Leave it to Beaver,” Show.” Perhaps at some point we will have to include an “S” for straight into the Alphabet Soup. Or perhaps there will be some field expedition to track down the last totally straight person in some rural remoteness.

In this Alphabet Soup, disparate groups and types, some existing in communities and some not, existing instead as individuals, with concerns and issues that may not be common, which may or may not see each other in everyday social life, are thrown together in one big heap on the basis that they aren’t straight, that they are “queer.”

There are Lesbian bars and Gay bars and Lesbians and Gays represent real communities with neighborhoods and social venues for them. There are Lesbian and Gay bars having floats in the “Pride” parade. There is literature, movies, art specifically for these two communities. They each have their own language usages and practices. One of the more obvious development is that they are more and more separate communities.

However, for these other groups, do they even exist as communities or have specific cultural practices? To what extent do asexuals exist as a community? Do they have a slang and specific ways of saying things? Is there an asexual neighborhood? Asexual cultural productions? What is the intersection of asexuals with the Gay community? What are their life challenges and experiences versus the Gay community? I am sure there are likely to be some tangential intersection. The author found online a site which had the comments of asexuals who identify as Gay, complaining that Gays think about sex too much. There was an interview with an asexual guy by a public radio channel who thought that the Pride Community needed to be toned down because it was too sexual and upset him. [I will have a link to an article on asexuals by myself which refers to these two items at the end of this essay.]

But largely the Gay community is nearly entirely a different community with different issues from the asexuals and there are even conflicting needs in opposition to each other.

Intersexuals, do they form a community like Gay people do? Do they exist in sufficient numbers to do so? I don’t know. The fact is that their existence is largely outside the experience of most people in the Gay community and Gay people will learn about them through the same media that others do. This is true of asexuals also.

As for bisexuals and pansexuals, (Has the discussion of these two terms and what they mean relative to each other ever come to an end?) do show up in the community. Their life choices are very different than Gay people. The life trajectories of male pansexuals and bisexuals are not within the Gay community but travels through the straight world visiting the Gay community when the individual sees a need.

Though there is some overlap, both Gays and bisexuals are potential victims of laws against same-sex sexual activities and discrimination against same-sex couples, but they have radically different life choices and issues. Also, bisexuals often face persecution only in as much as they are acting homosexually. There is no government and never has been a government in which homosexual acts are legal and heterosexual acts are legal but an individual practicing both would be prosecuted.

The issues transgender people face is nearly an entirely different set of issues that Gays and Lesbians face. There is collision between the two groups as transgender denounce Gays and Lesbians because they won’t consider having sexual relations with them.

ASSIMILATION:

The Alphabet Soup is composed of those who have widely divergent identities, some identities have communities, and some largely don’t exist in communities. They may have some common interests, primarily religious zealots and sexual conservatives as enemies, but they also have very divergent situations and can have conflicting interests also.

Queer is an erasure of these different identities into one class with an over-arching commonality that they aren’t straight, that is that they are deviant from the larger group of straight people. It is equivalent to adopting one word for Hindus, Muslims, Taoists, Buddhists, Jews, Shinto, and others to just slop them together in a bucket as non-Christians. Actually, this is what Christians used to do, and it was another slur, “Heathens.” Probably not a word that non-Christians will want to reclaim either, but then again, they have a sense of self-worth that would prevent this, nor are they marginal in society such that this can no longer be imposed upon them by elites.

The use of the term queer is atomizing. That is, it considers being Gay or Lesbian as just an individual identity and private sexual activity that is not straight and not having separate communities or separate cultural practices, like the religions just previously mentioned, such that lumping them together with the rest of the Alphabet Soup wouldn’t make sense. To mash together these different groups and individuals it necessitates a conceptualization where they are atomized into individuals. They are just individual members of the tolerant neoliberal society with these individual different practices which the neoliberal state says is okay along with the rest of the Alphabet Soup. As individual types they are put all in one slop bucket to be managed under one header by social welfare agents and a portfolio of types defined and described by academics in their journals.

It is a disintegrating force against the formation of Gay and Lesbian group identity and cohesion by relegating Gay and Lesbian identity to being individual practice as part of a queer community which exists as a grab bag of individuals in the neoliberal state instead of self-defining and directing communities. This queer grab bag of individuals isn’t really a common community excepting for social welfare agents who provide services for different letters of the Alphabet Soup and academics who want a broad portfolio for their studies.

When you conceptualize Gays as being variant from straights in term of personal sexual practice then you tend to think of what Straight people have that the Alphabet Soup doesn’t. This drives a politics where Gays can adopt and Gays can get married and be a close imitation of straight family. It is a goal where respectability Alphabet Soup people can hope to channel Gays and other recalcitrant elements into respectability with these ersatz Straight lifestyles. Meanwhile the Alphabet Soup hasn’t gotten job and housing civil rights passed for LGBTQXYZ which not only is needed to support this imitation straight life but is vitally needed by nearly all Lesbians and Gays. Instead, we have same-sex marriage which isn’t really of use to the great majority of Gays who are not likely to be ever married, in a society in which marriage is in precipitous decline. Marriage is increasingly an upper class and middle upper-class thing. I only want to briefly mention the issue of marriage here as one example of the politics that Alphabet Soup ideology drives with its use of the word “queer.” I hope to more critically examine it in another essay.

“QUEER” NEEDS TO GO:

It can be argued that all these letters of the Alphabet Soup should be allies. Arguably there are many cases where this is true, but allies are when different groups self-identifying as different work together on specific issues, not homogenized as not-straight and not assuming that all interests of each of the Alphabet Soup letters are shared by all the Alphabet Soup groups.

The word Queer needs to go. It precludes Gay centric thinking and Gay consciousness about the real lives we as Gay people live.

CONCLUSION:

Members of the Gay community will be alienated by an Alphabet Soup which is a bunch of scolds condemning the Gay community. The movement which will purportedly have responsibility for rights in which the Gay community is supposed to benefit will be a movement largely disconnected from everyday gays. It will not focus on what the needs of the Gay community are, and in some cases will be injurious to the Gay community, such as wanting to ban drag queens because of trans complaints, or ban fetish and prohibiting the distribution of condoms at Pride Parades because of respectability Gays.

The Alphabet Soup is dismissive of the community experience, concerns, and folk culture of Gay people instead choosing to lecture as academic elites.

The Alphabet Soup will not be focused on Gay community development and culture since the building of Gay group identity works against Alphabet Soup identity.

Not explained in this essay, but will be later, the Alphabet Soup ideology is inherently sexually repressive.

If only to shut up the scolds we need to develop a Gay centric Gay consciousness movement.

A meme for your use. At the end I have links to page of images you can us.