“It takes no compromise to give people their rights…it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.”
- Harvey Milk
Although there are LGBT members of all ethnic identities and genders, the image most people have of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community consists of a gay, White man. This disconnect between the reality of the diversity of the group with the representation of it proves problematic for the unrepresented members of that group. Originally, Whiteness of the LGBT movement developed from a long history of artificial, forced representation of the LGBT movement as a mainstream, assimilated group. Since then, the movement’s class interests and political activism of wealthy, privileged, White gay men has established and solidified this image by seeking out respectable, “normal” issues such as gay marriage and gay adoption. Though the promise of freedom has come to many members of the LGBT community with expansion of rights for partners, the legalization of gay marriage in many states, and the legalization and destigmatization of gay sexual acts, racial minorities in the LGBT movement continue to experience repression from other members of their very own LGBT community. These recent LGBT victories in the expansion of rights have created tremendous changes for LGBT individuals, but, interestingly, these steps towards equality have come through legal avenues. Harvey Milk, the gay rights activist from the 1970s, advocated a different approach to achieving social equality—social advancement. For him, change could also happen on the streets with individuals rather than solely on the Capitol with politicians. The prevalent idea today is that “through the mechanisms of civil rights litigation the courts can be the engine of progressive social change” (D’Emilio, 10), emphasizing the role of laws and courts in mandating change as opposed to achieving it through the population first, which Harvey Milk wanted.
What is particularly problematic about this new, legal approach, however, is that rights along these legal avenues are being pursued by primarily White, middle class individuals. These are the most privileged groups in society and thus the ones most able to fund such legal campaigns. Plaintiffs in cases for marriage equality are typically economically well-off so when they focus on marriage issue, they are forgetting that marriage for many low-income individuals would actually give fewer benefits since low-income couples may lose public benefits that as individuals they would receive. Therefore by directing all of the efforts of the LGBT movement behind these cases, the movement is abandoning individuals who do not wish to get married and privileging only those of whom who would benefit from this. The issue with this is two-fold since firstly, these legal avenues rarely feature minority voices, but in addition to just limiting whose perspective can be heard on the national stage, this approach may actively exclude minorities in other arenas by diverting limited funds away from other social campaigns and towards litigation. Since financial support of one comes at the expense of the other, this leaves social programs—many of which advance intersectional concerns that many minorities have—underfunded, which prevents minority voices from entering the public stage.
Through unequal representation of the diversity of the group in legal challenges (which have become the primary battleground for LGBT activism), gays and lesbians of color are marginalized further within an already marginalized group. For their rights, for their respect, for their freedom, the leaders of the LGBT movement have not yet conceded their privileged status to campaign to enhance the experiences of the entirety of the population they allegedly serve. The movement has focused on navigating the courts and middle class institutions instead of achieving ground-level change by supporting social programs for queer communities of color. Due to this focus on privileged concerns, queers of color, or LGBT-affiliated people of a minority racial background, have felt out of place in these highly-White LGBT organizations. The movement, they believe, has abandoned their race and class issues, leaving them without a space to express their political concerns.
Issues of racism, sexism, and classism are untouched in the LGBT movement which has recently focused on equality through legal avenues instead of fighting social stigmas and advocating larger social acceptance. I argue that due to this unsatisfying course of action which leaves out alternate voices, LGBT individuals of color have become frustrated with the movement’s approach. Minorities have since capitalized on this frustration to increase diversity in the ranks of these organizations in an attempt to shift the movement from one that wages single-issue campaigns to one that seeks social acceptance and equality for all LGBT-identified people. First, I will examine the history of the LGBT political movement and how this pervasive Whiteness was created through the early years of gay politicization in the mainstream. Then, I will discuss the experiences of White queers and queers of color, reflecting how this Whiteness has created a place of comfort for White individuals and has excluded people of color through explicit and implicit means. Finally, I will show how minorities challenge this racial hierarchy in an attempt to restructure the LGBT movement to align with larger social goals of the entirety of its members instead of focusing on single-issue campaigns.
Although there are LGBT members of all racial and ethnic groups, LGBT organizations are overwhelmingly shaped by a mainstream White identity. The normalization and mainstreaming of the LGBT population was part of an effort to challenge pervasive beliefs about the LGBT community that labelled these individuals deviants from society. After this air of respectability was created, then the class interests of this group soon dominated the attention of these LGBT activist groups. The focus of the movement became marriage equality, which left other routes to equality less pursued and underfunded. Soon, the political agenda for the majority of the LGBT movement began to ignore issues that predominantly affect people of color such as HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns and improvements to health care, thus aligning with the wants of only a wealthy, White subset of the diverse LGBT people they serve.
An early part of this creation of a White identity occurred through the gay advertising market, which paid no attention to advancing racial social justice issues, so only White men were depicted. The images used in advertisements from this period reflect Whiteness and maleness, which are two identities that are “the very norms against which ‘identity’ marks its difference” (Chasin, 223), thus they are the most privileged LGBT individuals already. The use of the most privileged groups is part of an attempt to appear mainstream and challenge “the dominant culture’s perception of the minority” (Bernstein, 537) which at the time saw LGBT people as being different and strange. Normalizing the LGBT community was particularly needed given that LGBT individuals faced centuries of stigma, including associations with immorality, illegality, and perversion. There was a time when “psychopath served in part as a code for homosexual” (Freedman, 103), thus, showing non-threatening White men as the image of what it means to be LGBT challenged ideas that labelled gay individuals threatening, perverse, and dangerous since other White men are typically not associated with these words. By emphasizing the mainstream characteristics of the LGBT community, these marketers focused on the similarities that existed between heterosexual and homosexual individuals—showing how even members of this stigmatized groups had some familiarities and privileges given that they are White and male. Since Americans are inundated with images of predominantly White Americans, then to appear just like everyone else, the depictions of gay Americans must also highlight these similarities. The symbolic choice of which identity and images should be used to depict the LGBT community preceded a very real tangible idea that grew out of this racial depiction about what LGBT people stand for and wish to accomplish.
In the political arena, this same principle that White is familiar applies, so Whiteness pervaded the political representation of the LGBT movement. Access to the ears of legislators came from the creation of an LGBT image which emphasized similarities to those in office as opposed to differences. This visual image of White men is used because it contains an “air of respectability,” choosing to depict the LGBT community not as a diverse range of genders and races, but merely as the “affluent gay male” (Teunis, 270). The members of these campaigning organizations have an “almost uniform whiteness” so as to look familiar “to those who command power in the halls of government and business” (Chasin, 133). By appearing to be the same race, LGBT members of these activist groups can relate to people in power by sharing at least one common aspect of their identity—being White and often being male. This allows these organizations to advance their agenda through these members of Congress or other government workers more easily since there was no racism or sexism to get in the way of being respected. Though homosexuality was not accepted in the early 1970s when gay politicization started, the privilege that being male and White brought at least provided a basic framework for these individuals to gain access to political leaders who would respect them for being of the same race and gender as them. Early leaders of the movement realized that to effect legal change, they had to appeal to members of Congress who, at the time and to this day, are predominantly male and White, which lead to the political image of the organization also becoming predominantly White.
Because the image of the LGBT movement came in the form of a White man to many of these legislators, the political ideologies that the movement campaigned for also became Whiter. The “political representation of gay identity often amounts to white people and gay men” (Chasin, 193), thus ideas concerning racial equality and the intersection of being LGBT and a member of a racial or ethnic minority group do not abound in these national gay organizations. Most political agendas for activist groups are based on the requests of the donors. For the LGBT movement, many of these donors hail from “a loose affiliation of millionaire and billionaires” (Vaid, 60) who are predominantly White men, thus their ideologies (rooted in Whiteness, maleness, and wealth) dominated the conversation. Since these organizations serve as a gateway to the LGBT community for most members of Congress, and they present a wealthy subset of the community, then members of Congress only hear these privileged ideas and believe that the LGBT movement only desires these types of changes.
Using their privilege of being predominantly White and male, most LGBT organizations focus on their own class interests, thus ignoring criticism of racial disparities in their LGBT movement. These class interests include focusing on marriage equality and targeting bans on gays in the military. These two reforms were heavily covered in the media and featured stories of White individuals who were unable to marry or who were unable to serve. Media interest focused on how normal these values were and related them to aspects of mainstream people’s lives. Thus, this marginalized groups capitalized on appearing assimilated, focusing on adapting their White, middle class identity “to gain legitimacy by playing on uncontroversial themes” (Bernstein, 537) like marriage or having children or serving in the military. Today the movements avoids discussing ideas like gay liberation or challenging the idea of the nuclear family—both of which were themes present earlier in the 1970s yet achieved no success because they were LGBT-specific and so oppositional to mainstream ideas. From the failure of these ideas, the movement realized that sympathy could not be drawn out from the greater public if they continue to push for marginalized ideas, particularly ones that stand against the values of the mainstream population. Instead, the themes being pursued today are relatable and, since the individuals covered in media portrays of these stories were mainstream, they lead many to sympathize with discriminated LGBT individuals.
Yet marriage does not actually benefit all members of the LGBT community, since “marriage penalizes those who are struggling economically” (D’Emilio, 15). The reasoning behind marriage and partner benefits has been to fix inheritance laws, yet for those with little capital to pass on, this benefit does not have much magnitude. For low-income individuals, this potential benefit does not outweigh the public benefits that low-income partners would lose from being married. Two low-income individuals can receive better public benefits than they would as a married couple, thus marriage for these people would do harm financially. This is not to say that the symbolic power of marriage, which many activists has described as a certain type of magic (Windsor) is not significant. There is something to be said for the symbolic achievement of being married and what its denial means for the status of being LGBT in America, which is why marriage equality should be pursued to some degree as part of the wider LGBT movement. The issue with the current approach to achieving marriage equality lies with the fact that the plurality of LGBT activism’s resources have gone towards a cause that would not benefit everyone instead of using resources to equally work towards the various issues that its constituent members face.
But it is in pursuing non-controversial themes that the movement depicts itself as “generally privileged and powerful” (Vaid, 40), which fails to acknowledge how marginalized the group is in other domains of life. Focusing on marriage and adoption or the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell allowed the movement to present itself as part of the mainstream since these are aspects of life that people can relate to regardless of their sexuality, failing to acknowledge that other issues exist that are also LGBT specific. People have framed the battle for marriage equality as if it were the final campaign against LGBT freedom. President Obama remarked that “the fight to secure marriage equality is the defining element of our generation’s search for greater freedom” (D’Emilio, 17), which suggests that this is the final obstacle that the LGBT community faces. This reasoning overlooks a wide swath of the population who would continue to face other obstacles related to intersectional identities with their class background, gender, or ethnicity regardless of whether or not marriage equality was achieved. What these proponents of marriage equality have done is not only throw support behind gay marriage initiatives (which alone would be acceptable if other issues were being pursued) but elevate gay marriage to a place where it appears to be the final frontier for change and widespread LGBT acceptance. In doing so, “proponents of marriage have associated the LGBT movement with […] privilege pure and simple” (D’Emilio, 1) because they are not thinking of low income individuals or queers of color who face unique issues that will continue to exist beyond the marriage equality campaign like widespread homophobia or a lack of successful HIV education.
Given that this movement is an identity movement, it should focus on addressing concerns that the entirety of people with that identity face. By focusing on specific campaigns that are based on White, middle-class interests, the movement has shifted from one that seeks freedom to one that seeks legislative change. As an identity movement, the primary focus of the LGBT movement should be to resolve alienation, yet “alienation or marginalization within the movement is doubly problematic” (Stone, 157). Pursuing gay marriage is not an issue in and of itself, yet moving a large share of limited resources only to this one initiative has been problematic. D’Emilio believes that the movements’ resources have been spent on this marriage issue that “while emotionally powerful for many, is not at the structural foundation of homophobia and gay oppression” (D’Emilio, 17), implying that the movement has strayed from its true focus which should be achieving social change and wider acceptance for the entire community (not just White individuals).
All LGBT members are at a higher risk of harassment and discrimination for their gender identity or sexual identity than cis-genders, heterosexual people are. This treatment starts early, with LGBT-affiliated children “still disproportionately targeted for harassment and discrimination in schools” (Ma’ayan, 91). Yet despite harassment’s prevalence for both White queers and queers of color, support groups and organizations that attempt to alleviate alienation and tackle discrimination disproportionately service White individuals. As with the movement as a whole, these organizations and LGBT social institutions reflect Whiteness, which isolates queers of color who have no parallel space to develop in.
One case study examines a young, White girl, named Tetra, who identifies as a lesbian. Like all queer youth, this girl is “in a unique position as members of a marginalized group which their parents and families are not inherently a part” (Ma’ayan, 91). For people of color, they are members of other marginalized groups and are often taught some skills by their parents to combat some form of prejudice—often racial. As a White girl, Tetra is without even these skills, yet manages to navigate middle school with relative ease due to leveraging her other social capital—intelligence and Whiteness. Because of a supportive family and natural talents, she combats harassment. Yet part of her success comes to her from the Gay Straight Alliance at her school which provides emotional support within the school itself. These organizations are critical to the mental well-being of thousands children in high schools throughout the nation, but as we will also see, these are the same organizations that fail queers of color. Though successful for Tetra, these “support” groups fail to substantially support members of minority groups as other case studies will demonstrate.
In a comparable queer youth program in a high school, minority students felt excluded from discussions because of the pervasive Whiteness it adopted. This weekly support group for LGBT students assumed a primarily White identity that attracted only several White girls, which left minority LGBT students without a place to discuss their unique issues that occur with the multiple intersections of their identities. At this school, must as it was in Tetra’s, these meetings provided a forum where people could discuss the issues they face inside the school, however, here it drew in primarily White girls who discussed their relationships instead of discussing broader queer-themed issues. One gay, black boy remarked that in that support group, “there’s nothing there for me” (McCready, 45), reflecting that the group, in its exclusivity, also created its own walled-off community that he felt apart from on both gender, and more significantly, racial lines.
As shown above in the conflict between the gay, black boy and the primarily White lesbians in the school queer organization, many support programs find the intersection of multiple identities difficult to address, which then privileges “White students whose identities are viewed as normal and more understandable compared to queer youth of color” (McCready, 47). Because of this difficulty in addressing the concerns of minorities, these spaces adopt the identity of these White students, focusing on their issues and becoming selective for that group. This is part of a larger issue for all identity-based movements which “undermine the social justice for which they strive by […] alienating prospective members from multiple social identities” (Lanzerotti, Mayer, & Podwoski, 3). Not only are these organizations privileging some groups, but ultimately failing the movement at large by only supporting a subset of the community. By only supporting queer identity, these organizations fail to assist queer youth who have additional issues that do not fall in the realm of gender identity or sexuality. Issues that affect the general public such as poverty or language issues affect queer individuals as well. The LGBT movement, however, has ignored these issues, yet to many any one of these issues that could halt a student’s academic development is “a queer issue because the success of any queer student at school is a queer issue” (Ma’ayan, 96). Social justice for queers of color, many minorities believe, can only be accomplished when other forms of justice are accomplished, thus these support groups should anticipate non-queer specific issues like having a lower socioeconomic status and respond to them in addition to discussing queer issues. If these spaces only discuss queer issues, they privilege students who only face queer issues due to their superior status in the racial and economic hierarchy in the United States. Queers that have queer issues (such as gender issues and sexuality concerns) in addition to concerns over poverty or literacy or home life have no space to express all of their concerns and how they intersect, which leaves them apart from any LGBT support group and struggling to develop on their own.
In addition to implicitly excluding youth, these programs have the added harm of halting the exploration of the three spheres of identity that gay minorities inhabit. Gay minorities live in three communities, “the lesbian and gay community, their ethnic or racial community, and the society at large” (McCready, 45), which leaves them struggling to balance the three given that they are rigidly defined and strongly independent communities. If these children were exposed to the “diversity of gay identities” then their development will be enhanced since they will see role models who have achieved the sense of balanced identity they are hoping to form (McCready, 48). In order to be a completely functioning member of their minority community as well as the queer community, individuals must have stable footing in all three of the spaces they inhabit. Failure to do so can lead to social isolation from one of them or failure to thrive in the mainstream context, both of which can affect the mental health of individuals. Because of the Whiteness of these support groups, not only are minority members excluded from the LGBT community, but they are also denied a guided, therapeutic, supportive space in which to reconcile their identities and find a place for their gayness in the black community or their blackness in the mainstream society, etc.
Yet beyond being forgotten in spaces, queers of color are sometimes silenced even when they are remembered. For one black woman, “when Black lesbians and other women of color were thought about, Diane felt the focus was on ‘reaching out’ to them rather than having women of color involved in leadership roles in women’s group” (Loiacano, 23). Therefore, despite considerations being given to that specific group, leaders only superficially consider their concerns, failing to include them actively. At the national level there is still this failure to actively include these minority voices instead of merely passively accepting their presence. This lack of active concern manifests itself as frustration for many individuals of color who believe that those in power have a “profound ignorance about issues of racial power” or “white skin privilege” (Schulman, 11) that even if they attempt to include minority voices, they fail to accurately understand the entirety of the problem given they do not live it. By not understanding imbalances in racial power and privilege, any attempts to address diversity issues can only touch the surface of these issues. Therefore, any “solution” that is given to minorities over their issues is superficial and does not tap into the systemic racial hierarchy—instead alleviating symptoms of the problem instead of crafting solutions for the entire problematic racial structure. This approach in LGBT organizations is marginally better than the institutional failure experienced in schools to target queers of color, but still only shallowly addresses concerns instead of fixing underlying issues that minorities feel exist.
Beyond institutional support, however, similar issues of reconciling queer identity with one’s skin color has proved difficult for people who feel they are either unwelcome or forgotten by the larger community as a whole. For many gay men, “there was pressure to fit one of these [gay] stereotypes, which are generally based on White male standards” (Loiacano, 23), which included patterns of behavior, speech, and dress in order to be an accepted member of gay society. The image of what it means to be gay has roots in Whiteness given that early images were White and male, so these “standards of beauty set forth by the gay male community also stand in the way of acceptance for Black gay men” (Loiacano, 23). Non-White racial groups have also been oversexualized and objectified by gay men which leaves many feeling they are parts of the gay framework that do not have voices, just bodies. In addition to being silenced, many people of color are harassed by white gay men, who often grope and hypersexualize African American gay men. Some men of color have expressed that their interactions with White men have made them feel “sort of like you’re not human” (Teunis, 271), which is a lowering of social status that parallels the silencing of their voices in the movement as a whole. Not only do organizations not support and foster ethnic identity in tandem with queerness, but these organizations and community accidentally (and in some cases purposefully) exclude and stigmatize members of ethnic groups even further.
Choosing one representative identity to reflect this movement lead to some institutional failures in addition to symbolic misrepresentation of the group, both of which have caused a remobilization to promote diversity in the ranks of the LGBT movement. Legislative failures in the political arena have been seen by many as an issue that reflects a larger lack of civil rights support for many LGBT issues that would perhaps be righted with a more diverse constituent body in its leading organizations. Lack of diversity has been seen as the culprit of some mainstream failures as well as the reason why other LGBT issues have not yet been publicly visible beyond the wide media-coverage that surrounds issues of gay marriage and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. To address these setbacks, there are a number of different strategies currently being employed to improve diversity among the LGBT community’s organizational system including expanding partnerships with other civil rights organizations and fixing internal issues within LGBT organizations.
Because of the relatively small size of the LGBT community, the success of LGBT activism at the ballot box rests in the hands of allies who could turn out to vote in their favor. This dependence on allies puts the movement in a critical position, since “weak alliances are a critical obstacle to our movement’s ability to enact pro-LGBT policies at every level of government” (Vaid, 42). Yet because the LGBT community fails to address intersectional issues that would provide overlap between their mission and that of other civil rights groups, many organizations are unwilling to partner with LGBT organizations because they find no common cause to fight for. Another issue is that the LGBT movement “generate[s] powerful anti-gay opposition” which makes the partnership less favorable for Latino or Black organizations which already have some opposition from the mainstream on the basis of their race or ethnicity. Yet allies may find a partnership with the LGBT movement compelling if the benefit outweighed the cost—meaning that if the LGBT movement accurately addressed the issues of the ally, then the extra support the LGBT movement could bring to the potential ally could outweigh the backlash the group would face from anti-gay opposition. This, however, has proven unlikely to happen because of the way the LGBT movement has positioned itself as a predominantly White organization. LGBT organizations “are not regarded as valuable partners to [their] allies” since they do not have a history battling the issues of these potential allies such as classism, racism, or sexism—instead taking an assimilationist route that flaunted the privilege of a select few of its members. This lack of a marginalized history then makes them undesirable as allies since they have shown no explicit commitment to tackling the same issues that feminist or ethnic civil rights groups work on.
Substantively, this lack of partnership between the LGBT movement and other civil rights movements has played out in various legislative cases across the nation, where support for a given ballot initiative or protest against a court ruling were limited to the narrow group that is encompassed by LGBT organizations—primarily White individuals. Across the nation, LGBT supporters “have not organized to meaningfully engage racial and immigrant communities” (Vaid, 42), which has limited the scope of who turns out for these critical moments in LGBT civil rights decisions. In the case of Proposition 8, a ballot initiative in California that sought to put a ban on gay marriage, the LGBT movement was criticized for having lost in part because “the campaign for [their] rights did not know how best to organize the people of color communities in California” (Vaid, 42), which proved to be a major failure substantively but also psychologically for millions in the United States given how progressive the state of California typically is. Without the support of organizations that knew how to mobilize racial minorities, this ballot initiative and a similar election in Iowa failed, thus failing to advance LGBT rights because of a lack of minority mobilization and support.
The failure to reach members of a minority group could be solved by expanding the issues on LGBT organizations’ agendas to include “non-gay” issues (Vaid, 40), which would appeal to more allies. The LGBT movement originally focused on liberation, which included widespread social changes that advocated more sexual freedom and more societally-condoned ideas about what love can be. As time went on, however, the movement “consciously chose legal reform, political access, visibility, and legitimation over the long-term goals of cultural acceptance, social transformation, understanding and liberation” (Ward, 4). These long-term issues would be compatible with those being fought by race, gender, or class-based activist groups since they all advocate for wider social changes, yet the movement chose instead to pursue issues related directly (and in some cases, solely) to the LGBT community such as marriage equality and challenging Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Changing this mindset would then refocus energy from only battling legislative battles on gay issues to also spreading awareness and challenging the status quo of American society—which includes heteronormativity (which relates directly to the LGBT movement) but also features White supremacy, male privilege, and classism, which are challenged by other civil rights organizations.
Allies could also be secured through LGBT support of LGBT-friendly candidates from minority groups. In mid-size cities the LGBT population is not a cohesive as it is in large cities, yet it is still fairly substantial, thus the LGBT voting bloc should rally around “pro-LGBT people of color leaders at the state and local level” to help them secure votes and enter office (Vaid, 66). This would help strengthen “trust and reciprocity” between the local LGBT community and local community of color which would manifest itself in future voter turn out for the other’s issues and continued support and out-group ally ship between candidates from either voting bloc—LGBT or the community of color. Winning an election would also provide the symbolic win of showing that people of color and LGBT members can enter office, which would allow future victories to more easily, or plausibly, occur.
Another approach to expand the mobilization of minorities is to include minorities in the leadership roles of LGBT organizations, thus instead of depending on the leadership of ally groups’ to serve minority members, the LGBT organization could itself directly do this. These strategies should “call attention to race, class, and gender diversity to promote inclusion and power-sharing among their ranks” (Ward, 6) thus shifting the power and voice of the movement away from just wealthy, White men to include lesbian, minority, or working class perspectives on issues. The forty largest LGBT organizations have this problem of unequal representation, since though 32% of their staff is of a minority, only 25% of its leadership board is (Vaid, 64). By encouraging power-sharing between ranks (which would naturally bring dialogue from the more diverse membership constituents to the more White leadership), ideas could flow from the people they are serving (the constituents who are also more diverse) to those in power (more White, but capable of effecting change). This type of cross-rank dialogue would eventually lead to the promotion of low-ranking members to these leadership boards.
Such cross-rank discussions would also help with the issue of forging new allies, since inevitably the ideas of classism, sexism, and racism that partner organizations faced would arise. If active inclusion of minority members’ perspectives in the various LGBT organizations that exist happened, minority issues would be discussed and vocalized more frequently. As a consequence of their discussion, these ideas would inevitably enter the platform of the movement and, as discussed above, allies would be attracted to the LGBT movement over this shared agenda. In order to attract allies who are needed for national success, the movement needs to diversify its campaigns, its allies, and its members. Diversifying its membership may work to simultaneously cause the other two goals, thus most LGBT organizations are currently establishing racial quotas and restructuring their boards to listen to and eventually absorb minority perspectives.
In forging its identity, the LGBT movement chose to depict itself as White and affluent in an attempt to assimilate to the norms of the society in which it was being created. Gay politicization began in the 1970s and in order to advance the goals of its constituents, LGBT organizations began to show themselves only through the image of their most privileged members. The goal of this was to appear like those in power in an attempt to draw out sympathy and eventually convince these leaders to produce change for the group. In veering into a predominantly White image, the movement also adopted a predominantly White set of goals and standards. This White ideology finds itself at odds with members of ethnic minorities within the LGBT movement, because in the predominant images and goals of the movement, minorities do not see their faces, their communities, or their concerns present.
This decision to depict the LGBT movement as a predominantly White group was also a concession to a type of activism that sought not to change public opinion or society’s standards, but enact legal change. By choosing to focus on legal changes for White issues, the movement failed to address social issues that minorities face regardless of which laws exist. The struggle for marriage equality has become the defining image and goal of the LGBT movement yet it is a goal that does not accurately meet the needs of most of its members and it is a goal that will only produce legal change. Daily homophobia and other issues such as access to healthcare and HIV prevention remain struggles for all individuals—regardless of whether or not they benefit from marriage equality or other LGBT-friendly laws that are currently being pursued.
As a movement that seeks acceptance for all individuals with that identity, the LGBT movement should focus on crafting greater acceptance for the entirety of its community. Instead, the movement has found itself tackling issues that singularly affect it—like the denial of marriage to same-sex couples and the rejection of gays from the military. Yet the negative experiences of LGBT individuals do not solely come from anti-queer sentiments. Daily issues and struggles for any individual could come from their racial identity, class identity, and religious identity. The same is true for LGBT individuals, yet the movement has focused on enhancing the experiences of its members only in the attempted easing of queer-related harassment and discrimination. There has been no attention paid to erasing poverty or sexism among the ranks of the LGBT movement, since those issues are considered to be under the realm of other identity-based activist movements.
By failing to address these other issues on their own and failing to partner with organizations that tackle these issues, the LGBT movement has failed to address the needs of the entirety of its members. Not only has it failed intersectional issues that connect race and class with sexuality, but it has also failed its own goals to end queer discrimination since a failure to form allies has lead to losses at the ballot box when LGBT issues were on the line. These failures for both minorities within the minority and for the entire community as a whole have prompted new diversity measurements that attempt to create a space that is more actively inclusive of minority voices.
Such initiatives should eventually lead to a more balanced organization that would combine the needs of minorities with the more privileged concerns expressed by the LGBT movements’ current leadership. This shift should eventually lead to an approach that combines the court-based actions taken by White members with the predominantly community-based concerns that minorities have over education and health. A combination of these two goals would lead to a dual approach that simultaneously pursues court cases that grant legal rights and protections and awareness campaigns that challenge existing hierarchies of race and class. This would then tackle the primary issues shared by all queer individuals (through court cases) and address a second set of issues primarily faced by members of minorities in the LGBT community (through awareness campaigns).
With this approach, the movement would finally be addressing what Harvey Milk wanted decades ago. The movement would tackle the societal norms as well as the laws that cause repression in American society for the LGBT individual. The focus would be on discriminatory laws that ban access to marriage as well as homophobia that occurs in classrooms and on street corners. Neither of these is more problematic for an LGBT individual than the other, which is why the two must be fought together. Harvey Milk said that rights, respect, freedom, and repression can be gained apart from politics. While this is true, it is also true that laws can legally enact fines and punishments that could help set the stage for the societal transformation Harvey Milk wanted. Ideally, a more diverse coalition of minorities (who fight back against daily prejudice) and White people (who are legally seeking the highest form of sanctioned freedom and status that they are currently being denied) will each begin to understand the validity of the other’s concerns: since it is valid to desire safety on the street just as it is valid to desire legal recognition of marriage. A more diverse coalition can achieve these simultaneous goals because the movement would have a wider audience (from allies) and more avenues on which greater access to rights are being pursued (courts, Congress, and the people). This potential reality is the one in which the freedom and achievements that have been gained by the LGBT community can be felt by the entirety of its membership—no longer just limited to the most White and the wealthiest members who enacted and benefited from these changes. Minorities cannot fully benefit from recently-enacted legal LGBT protections until daily issues they face are at least eased or entirely erased. It is a privilege to only be facing identity issues that are rooted in being queer and it is a privilege that depends on being White, male, and wealthy, thus the LGBT movement must begin to address all of the issues faced by its community, regardless of whether or not it only affects queers.
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