Are you currently living in the United States? Have you caught a terminal case of the gay?
Let me spill the tea, hunty. At best you have six months to slay before you get slayed.
Do you prefer having LGBT civil rights? Then you might be a NARCISSIST. (horn noises)
We all know there’s not a single character trait worse than being selfish, and there isn’t a more surefire sign of narcissism than being concerned with your own rights. According to this book I read in college, everyone is always being super sincere when they accuse other people of being narcissists. I mean, Sarah Z just did an entire episode explaining that everyone’s obsession with making selfish monsters out of everyone on the internet is the truest sign of a healthy and kind internet community.
The very sweet, nuanced people of the internet are of course the most hinged when it comes to talking about politics. Actual hinged people have the great online advice that you shouldn’t feed the trolls. I put out a short-ish video about the anti-voting left who pretend to not understand that there are two outcomes in the 2024 presidential election: A Trump administration of a Harris administration. Some of them pretend one of the third-party candidates polling near zero can win. Some of them pretend a revolution is going to happen that obviously isn’t going to happen and that they make no effort to bring about besides being rude to people on the internet. Now you could be uncharitable and come to the conclusion that these types aren’t actually political leftists who care about anything but are instead concerned only with their ability to be assholes online. A handful of the commenters on that video claimed that a Trump presidency and its harms to LGBT rights don’t matter. It would only be a slight difference.
Do I have to spend time going over how that’s stupid and bad faith? I assume not. I have a video detailing how Project 2025 wants to criminalize trans existence. In my video over the GOP’s entrenched homophobia, I talked about the GOP’s support for conversion therapy.
There’s been this concerning attitude since October 7 2023 among some on the left that LGBT rights are unimportant, bourgeois, marginal, and selfish to care about. Why is this? I think it’s time to do a bit of a deep dive and see if I can diagnose myself with narcissism in a video essay for the horrible sin of caring about my own human rights.
DSMR 1 - GRANDIOSE MINIMIZATION
Let’s briefly talk Chappell Roan. I know, booooo, boooo. Wasn’t that a fantastically horrible time to be on the internet? Long story short: Chappell Roan took to TikTok to complain about the 2024 election, the suffering of the Palestinian people, and the pressure being put on her to talk politics. I have thoughts on it all, but I don’t think it’s all the particularly interesting and it was played out to death online in a way that quickly devolved into stan wars and people of every persuasion using Chappell as an excuse to shout at other people on the internet to get asshole points from assholes who agreed with them.
In response to Chappell’s comments, specifically a vague sort of both sides-ism, drag queen Kiki Ball-Change, excellent name, tweeted out: “One side wants to ban drag and it’s not the democrats. Hope this helps!”
Kiki was, of course, correct. Republicans by and large in the United States don’t care about the first amendment, and they’re sexist and queerphobic. Because of that, they’d like to ban drag. Consider Texas, where Trump-Appointed federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that drag performance is not covered by the first amendment in a ruling that appears to completely butcher the first amendment because, as demonstrated by the Trump-appointed judges in the 11th circuit who ruled conversion therapy bans are unconstitutional, conservatives don’t seem to care at all about the First Amendment and will invent novel or debunked legal theories so long as they get to harm queer people and queer expression.
Unfortunately for Kiki, she committed a few cardinal internet sins. First: she used one of the most annoying phrases on the web “Hope this helps!” Everyone hates it, but everyone loves to use it. It’s such a nicely condescending phrase that it's delicious and infuriating. Second: she commented on a thing where a celebrity is involved. I don’t care if people critique or defend famous people. I do get concerned when the level of critique starts to turn into a dogpile. But fandoms, stans, tend to be quite vicious. Watch what happens in the run up to the Grammies this year. Billie, Ariana, Beyonce, and Taylor stans are going to be absolutely cruel to each other over which celebrity should win an award in a subjective artform that has no right answers. Third: Kiki made the suggestion to online leftists that the Republicans are worse than the Democrats. And fourth, perhaps her biggest sin: she suggested that queer rights are important and the differences between the two parties over those rights are also important. For these four deadly sins, twitter went x-rated in its holy hatred and white-hot discourse. She had to go private and eventually delete the tweet due to all of the harassment she got for pointing out that the GOP winning would cause harm.
Because I quote tweeted Kiki to talk about my concern with all the homophobia and transphobia being blasted out by supposed leftists, I can still see all the quote tweets people made. Over and over people call drag “dress up.” That’s all it is to them. It’s silly little games that are unimportant, who cares if they’re banned, who cares if drag bans will be used to criminalize trans existence. There’s a genocide going on and if banning drag stops that, we’ll take a drag ban. Hold on, I’m getting a call. “Herrow? Oh, that option isn’t on the table? All of these people are just expressing fantasies of banning drag? There isn’t an anti-drag anti-Israel candidate running and all of those quote tweets were probably in bad faith?” They hung. What a weird call to get.
We’ll get to the fictions and lies about this in the next section. What I want to focus in on is the minimization of drag, of transness, or gayness. In response to Kiki and other people, one popular tweet I saw going around read, “...both sides are garbage but with one you can sit at a drag queen story hour while she sends weapons to israel, so you rainbow capitalism girl power yass slay faggots get to sleep easy.”
Did you notice the slur there? “I don’t like it when you worry about gay rights, so let me call you a faggot. This will prove that I’m progressive and not a homophobe.” Great job.
The minimization strikes white hot here. Back in 2016, this “liberals only care about going to brunch in peace” thing was a line of attack certain people on the left used and have continued to use when liberals correctly point out that the democrats are better than the republicans and its better when things are, well, better. I know that’s insane logic on my part. Better equals better? Mind blown.
I’ll talk about the use of slurs by supposedly leftist people in a later section and I have a whole video going over that phenomenon. Let’s start with rainbow capitalism. The suggestion here is that by having Harris lose and letting the Republicans come in and destroy gay rights, capitalism will somehow fall. They’ll do a revolution, I guess. Only, no, they won’t. We don’t have to pretend like the cosplay revolutionaries are serious. So then what happens? Well, we get discourse every single year about how corporations supporting pride during pride month is a bad thing that shouldn’t be embraced. Suppose corporations are getting shat on by the left for expressing queer support and by the right for not hating gay people. In that case, they might make the calculated cold hearted move to stop celebrating pride or supporting queer initiatives and nonprofits. Project 2025 advisory group the 1792 Exchange swoops in crying fiduciary malpractice for donating to the Trevor Project or supporting non-discrimination laws. Companies start to pull away from embracing queer rights. On one hand, this does somewhat prove the thesis of the rainbow capitalism people: their messaging will go where it seems like it’ll get them positive press. On the other hand, the backing away showcases, to the general public, a backslide in general support for queer people. If every retail store got rid of their rainbow collections in June, people would see that as a declaration that Pride Month no longer matters. Less support, even greedy-minded support, is less support. That makes it easier for conservatives to harm queer people. I understand the underlying critiques of “rainbow capitalism” but its reversal doesn’t seem to be resulting in a better world like these online LARPists want us to believe. Instead, it results in backsliding on queer rights, queer support, and donations to queer-supporting charities like the Trevor Project.
How about, “Oh no, poor you, they’ll ban drag brunches.”
The attempted ban in Tennessee redefined adult cabaret to include “male or female impersonators.” What do transphobes consider trans people? When Magdalene Burns called trans women “blackface actors,” the same comparison the university president in Texas used to describe drag shows, do you think they give a shit that drag queens and trans women are not synonymous? No, of course they don’t. As far as they’re concerned, trans men are drag kings. Trans women, to them, are drag queens. Drag bans are attempts at criminalizing trans people being in public or being around children just in general.
This is not an instance of, “Oh no! You poor liberals won’t get to go to drag brunch.” It’s, “Oh my god, trans people are being arrested for being in public.” It’s “all drag performers will lose their livelihoods.” It’s “holy shit, they’ve gendered clothes, so now a woman in pants is a male impersonator.” In a sexist society where gender roles exist in any way, shape, or form, restrictions on drag will inevitably result in restrictions on gender expression of both cis and trans people. Yes, such laws would be obviously unconstitutional. But when Trump’s appointed judges have a habit of making up their own ideas about the first amendment in order to harm LGBT people, why should we go in with the idea that Republican attacks on queer people would be struck down by the courts?
But let’s think about drag itself. A drag ban would not merely stop drag brunch. It would require an authoritarian crackdown on art as a whole. Think of all the times Bugs Bunny got in drag. Think of all the musicals where drag plays an important part. Female impersonation is even part of the Iliad. Mulan technically involves male impersonation. A drag ban would necessarily involve bans on showing that film. It sounds like this reduction to “brunch” is merely an attempt to say queer rights do not matter because these people don’t care about them.
Twitch streamer Hayxtt tweeted out, “sorry guys, the global south has to be slaughtered in mass so that a white queer in bushwick can have drag trivia.” We’ve diversified a bit by going from brunch to trivia. If only someone said all this concern with gay rights was just about drag bingo, we’d have a holy trinity.
Following the war crimes Hamas committed on October 7 and the war crimes Israel committed afterward, various identity-based groups came to together to declare support for the Palestinian people. This included Queers for Palestine. Now of course, hardcore supporters of the current Israeli government and/or anti-Palestinian racists came out of the woodwork to ridicule queers for Palestine by pointing to Hamas’s anti-queer policies. The obvious and correct response that many people went with is: being a bigot should does not make you deserving of death. Others, though, like Stanzi Potenza, decided to go with, “Okay, but there are homophobes in the US. Let me equate the two.” It is not illegal to be gay in the US. You can get married in the US. You can adopt children in the US. You can transition in the US. There are homophobes here and there is work to be done and homophobic Palestinians do not deserve to be murdered because no one deserves to be murdered.
Famously not-reactionary, totally based leftist Shoe On Head went with “woahhh ur telling me a predominately muslim country in the middle east doesnt support gay marriage? That’s crazy. I bet they dont even celebrate asexual awareness week”. I agree with the broad idea. Being homophobic does not make you deserving of death. What Shoe did here, though, was minimize gay rights down into marriage and “awareness.”
You know who thinks gay marriage is bad and trivial and a distraction from leftist politics? Prolific anti-gay rights Yasmin Nair, writer for Current Affairs. You may remember her from her twitter meltdown after she implied Pete and Chasten Buttigieg picked their adopted children from a catalogue, including claiming they used a surrogate when they had not. According to her and Current Affairs, queer rights are trivial and perhaps even bad because they aren’t going to go around causing the downfall of capitalism, the destruction of America, and their blessed glorious Revolution.
In the comments on a video I made about the small anti-voting segment of the left, someone said that the differences to domestic civil rights in the US under a Trump presidency would be marginal. They remained adamant when I pointed out the vast differences and harms Trump posed. They remain “marginal.”
It is only marginally worse when homophobic parents, guardians, priests, and family members can subject their gay children to the psychological and emotional torture that is conversion therapy. It’s only marginally worse to put forward a national Don’t Say Gay bill. It would only be marginally worse to ban drag and gender non-conforming expression. Allowing discrimination against LGBT people in healthcare and employment would only make things marginally worse. Project 2025 is sponsored by groups that want gay sex criminalized and any and all discrimination against LGBT people, including denying someone a hotel room.
Here’s the question. Are these people minimizing the gay rights and trans rights movements and struggles because they think it serves them rhetorically or because they actually think LGBT rights don’t matter? Or am I narcissist for thinking these things matter? Let me check twitter real quick. Oh, caring about queer rights actually makes me an uncaring fascist.
DSMR 2 - RATIONALIZING AVOIDANCE
If I’ve learned anything while dealing with my own traumas and mental illnesses, it’s that when minimizing things doesn’t make them go away, next you’ve got to attack them with cold logic! That always works. Rationalizing can never be an actual symptom of mental illness, surely!
So let’s look at the logic here. In the last section, people talked about how they would gladly exchange gay rights for an end to Israel’s cruelty against the Palestinian people. That’s ho professional do-nothing, bad faith actress Briahna Joy Gray frames it. She tweeted out, “Because supporting genocide is worse than banning drag. This doesn’t have to be either or. Dems would be MORE popular and electable if they imposed a weapons embargo on Israel AND protected LGBT rights/drag etc. They’re choosing to make you choose.” Is that an option in November? Let me check my notes… No. There isn’t an anti-gay, pro-Palestine candidate. It’s not an option, Briahna. You aren’t being asked to choose between gay rights and the Palestinian people. You’re being asked whether gay rights get to continue. This is just people complaining about having to consider the health and well-being of queer people.
What are the options in the 2024 presidential election? Well, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump could win the presidency. Could Jill Stein win? No, despite Joy Gray wants to pretend to believe. Her polling shows she doesn’t have near enough support to win and, of time of recording, there’s not enough time for a serious candidate to make the necessary rise in the polls, so there’s no chance for someone like Stein who isn’t serious and doesn’t give a shit about winning. Sorry to the anti-Semetic conspiracy theorists like Nemat Sadat who want to pretend otherwise. Can Cornel West? He has the same chance of winning as Kanye West. How about the PSL ticket? Hahahahahaha. If you know there’s a PSL ticket, you’re too online. If a whole bunch of people abstain, will they throw out the Constitution and try again? I have a friend in law school right now. Let me text him real quick. He told me to stop doing this bit; it’s getting annoying. If Harris loses and Trump is elected, will the disappointed liberals fall in line under the LARP-y revolutionaries who claim to be the only true left? Will they do that before Trump starts Trumping around as a JD Vance, Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 puppet? Pretty obviously not. The revolutionary left has not put in the work to build that sort of movement and seem to just assume embracing pain will cause people to join them because they don’t want to put in the work to actually convince anyone of anything.
Okay. So the election will only result in either a Harris or a Trump presidency. We’re not on the verge of a revolution, and none of the other candidates has a shot. So we have a machine where any action will result in the outcome H or T. Is either candidate promising to support Hamas? No, because while Trump is dumb, neither of them is that dumb. During the debate with Biden, Trump used “Palestinian” as an insult. The GOP platform says no one who is or supports “jihadists” will be admitted into the country. You probably know how conservatives in the US function. What do you think that means? Do you think any expression of support for the Palestinian people or any opporistion to Israel’s overuse of force would prevent someone from entering the US? That’s what it sounds like to me. So if Trump won’t be any better on Palestine than Harris and seems like he would actually be quite a bit worse, what’s the math that’s going on here? You get H or T. But let’s make the equation easier. Let’s say Trump and Harris would be equally horrible on Palestine and all foreign policy: Ukraine, Taiwan, Cuba, so on and so forth. But Trump promises mass deportations, an illegal cruel usage of the Alien Enemies Act to accomplish those deportations, and a rollback of queer rights. Conservatives are anti-abortion, pro-child labor, anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-free speech, anti-art, anti-protest, anti-education, anti-healthcare, anti-regulation, anti-green energy, and anti-climate control mitigation. Wow. It sounds like one of those options will harm vastly more people and through that harm, make it much harder to fight to lessen global harms and fundamentally change the system.
I guess I should steelman their argument a bit because everyone like a man of steel, so strong, so… hard. And clean! So if we assume that a second Trump presidency would not be meaningfully different than his first despite all evidence that it would worse, we can calculate that he will cause harm, and he will cause lasting damage, but ultimately we’ll survive. DSA membership will go up. More people will turn into Chapo and the Deprogram or whatever other dirtbag podcast you prefer. And, more importantly, democrats will learn that Biden’s handling of Israel is unacceptable. Genocide is a line in the sand and they have to do better. The democrats will be forced to pivot left on foreign policy and not simply domestic policy. Maybe we’ll lift the embargo on Cuba. We’ll get less bearish on China. And then… Well, leftists disagree on a lot of foreign policy with some thinking that imperialism is fine if anti-American states are doing the conquering. Hm. But the democrats will learn a painful lesson, come out swinging into the next election, and together with the left, destroy the Republican part in 2028. Liberals will be willing to fight with all their might. Things have to get worse before they get better. Or, alternatively, Trump will destroy the remnants of the Republican party and the Democrats will become a sort of catch all centrist party, leaving room for PSL or DSA or some other small sect to become the second party, one where the left has true power.
Now, will that happen? No. Probably not. PSL is allegedly a sex cult, the Green Party has proven to be unserious, the American public is allergic to the word communist and the American Communist Party doesn’t seem to care about changing that, and DSA continues to shoot itself in the foot over and over again. I’m sorry to say, having sects within your org saying we have to commend Hamas kind of destroyed your political future. The American public aren’t going to entertain you after that. You’d have to squash the IC, Red Star, MUG, make clear that your union busting was a shameful mistake you are ashamed of, and build an atmosphere of being able to talk to each other online without acting like DSA members aren’t the most vile creatures other DSA members can imagine.
Will the Democrats pivot left if Harris loses in 2024? Will they conclude that foreign policy is of utmost importance? Well, I don’t know. What we do know is that abortion is a winning issue. It’s insanely important to voters. We know that extreme anti-trans positions are a losing issue. So there’s a chance they continue to move left on social issues. Biden’s attempts at forgiving student loans didn’t really earn him any points with the left and neither did his pulling out of Afghanistan. There is, though, a chance. There’s a chance that liberals will grow more militant, angrier, more willing to be led by a leftwing populist promising the sort of hatred the online farleft loves because populists are stupid and easily bought by pretend anger. But, yeah, there’s a chance that the base will start to move left under a Trump presidency. There’s a chance the Democrats will take the threats and promises of the left more seriously.
And Trump will cement his control of the judiciary. We’ll witness how much of Project 2025 will pass his administration. We’ll see pregnant women die preventable deaths due to lack of reproductive care. We’ll see increased attacks on queer people, including rollbacks of conversion therapy bans. Trans people may well be criminalized. The showcased lack of care his judiciary picks have for the First Amendment could well lead to an expansion of obscenity laws which would lead to criminalizing porn and erotica. Education in this country will be thoroughly destroyed. Thousands upon thousands of people will be deported. We may well go to war with both Mexico and Iran. Russia will take Ukraine and China will take Taiwan. Protestors will be beaten in the streets. The National Guard will carry out deportations. Federal lands will be opened up for logging and mining. Taxes and consumer prices will go up. If Project 2025 is whispering in his ear, children will get maimed working dangerous jobs. JD Vance is a sexist asshole. Couches will be fucked.
So. You get H or T. A Trump win might cause policy shifts within the Democratic party. It’s a gamble. A gamble that will cost Palestinian and American lives. Will it make the world better? There’s a slim chance. But it’ll definitely make it worse for a bit.
Is it rational to choose a Trump presidency over a Harris one if you’re anywhere on the left and actually care about other people? No, it’s not. It only makes sense if your only goal is cruelty.
DSMR 3 - the cruelty of others
Let’s talk slurs.
I did a video a while back over Noah Schnapp. Or, rather, because I don’t really care about the kid one way or the other, that time popular gay twitter user HeyJaeee called him a faggot and got thousands of likes for using a homophobic slur but wokely. That entire video has my thoughts on the matter but to sum it up: saying you’re reclaiming something doesn’t mean you’ve reclaimed it in every instance. Using it for its slurrage still makes it a slur. Using it with vitriol makes it a slur. Using it as a slur is weaponinzing homophobia. Weaponizing homophobia is the same as saying that homophobia is a neutral thing that can be good when deployed against the bad gays. Saying bad gays deserve homophobia emboldens homophobes. Congrats. You just played yourself.
Here’s a test: replace the slur in what you’re saying with a different word. Does it make sense still? The tweet was: But that fag Noah Schnapp still has a job? Sometimes we use fag to just mean gay people. Hey fags and Hey gay can be the same thing. But that gay Noah Schnapp still has a job? Well that sounds homophobic. What if we go But that gay guy Noah Schnapp still has a job? Eh, still sounds homophobic. Sometimes we use it to refer to our gay friends. But that bestie of mine Noah Schnapp still has a job? While that would actually be a funnier way of putting it, OP seemed to want the mean girl points the original got him, and this change doesn’t seem to fit that on top of the fact that random twitter man probably does not know and is not friends with Noah. Sometimes we use it to mean stereotypically feminine or flamboyant. It can be a stand-in for sissy. But that sissy Noah Schnapp still has a job? That sounds homophobic and sexist. But that flaming homosexual Noah Schnapp still has a job? Again, much funnier, still homophobic. It’s almost like the OP was not using fag in a reclaimed way. It’s almost like he was using the slur as a slur because he wanted to use a homophobic slur and get celebrated for it by mean girls on twitter. It’s almost like some of these people only care about internet points and being dicks.
In part one, I mentioned a tweet. Let’s revisit it briefly. “...so you rainbow capitalism girl power yass slay faggots get to sleep easy.” Is that reclamation? No. It’s not. It’s using a slur to use a slur and pretending that homophobia is leftist.
A lot of queer people online do this because using the f-slur as a slur gets you a lot of internet points from people who would cheer at untucked fights on Drag Race like it’s a sports game. Matt Bernstien refers to conservative and transphobic gay guys as fags over and over. When Sugar and Spice did a starbucks ad, supposedly leftist people went insane on the internet due to the hallucination that was the Starbucks boycott. No, Starbucks had nothing to do with Israel. The boycott was based on misinformation and a desire to be rude and wrong online. In response to them doing that ad, a bunch of people called them fags over and fucking over again. Drag Race seems to really attract the kind of people, viewers and queens, who like to use faggot as a slur against the bad gays who supposedly deserve homophobia.
It’s very reminiscent of all the supposedly progressive people bringing back the r-slur and using it liberally against anyone who disagrees with them on anything. It’s almost like there are edgy reactionaries who want points for edgy reactionaries and don’t really care. They want to be cruel. They need to be celebrated for their want to be cruel. I guess that trend deserves its own deep dive.
Suddenly some of this pushback against concern for queer rights makes sense. These aren’t all people making deliberate though mistaken political calculations. A good amound are edgelords who are probably homophobes embracing the homophobic future of a Trump presidency because they don’t care and might actually prefer homophobic policies.
An examination of these sorts of posts also reveals a heavy sense of resentment against queer people, gay men specifically, with the idea that if you put “white gay men” in front of a homophobic statement, you’re suddenly absolved of homophobia. Is homophobia rational? No. Is it acceptable? No. Will making the lives of queer people worse make the lives of Palestinian people better? No. Will embracing homophobia bring about communism? No. Will it win the moment for progressives? No. But will it at least make embarrassed conservatives who cosplay as leftists feel better? Maybe.
Speaking of embarrassed conservatives.
DSMR 4 - the selfishness of others
To segue, here’s a tweet on the Chappell Roan of it all by DSA member Comrade Sanchez that uses a slur and accuses people of being narcissists. He said, “‘fuck Kamala, yet fuck Trump a bit more too, so I’ll vote Kamala if I have to, and nothing else, and will protest her everyday forever afterwards,’ is THE mainstream youth opinion, but Hell’s Kitchen-dwelling faggots with 6-figure e-mail jobs are too self-obsessed to get that.”
Isn’t it so fun to call gay people who diagree with you the f-slur? Wow, such reclamation, heckin good homophobia. Sorry I’m getting a phone call from my lawyer friend. I’m being sued for emotional damages for referencing doge in 2024.
So Comrade Sanchez is giving off homophobic vibes here, but it isn’t just for the slur. If you spend time around ultra left or campist places on the internet, you might have come across this idea that queerness and queer rights are bourgeois decadence. Or, to put it another way, the selfish designs of the evil rich in the west trying to force the poors to capitulate to human rights. You might’ve seen people like Caleb Maupin claiming that being anti-imperialist requires being fine with homophobia. To claim gay rights are human rights and non-negotiable is apparently a weapon of the bourgoisie.
Noted extremist who did actually bomb the Walmart Calla Walsh tweeted, and then deleted, “I’ll be the first to defend my queer people but we have to stop pretending queerness, especially in the West, is inherently revolutionary. Some of yall are some of the most liberal, individualist, decadent people holding the revolution back. Imperialism = the primary condition.” According to Calla, caring about LGBT rights is selfish. If you don’t want to be harmed, you are selfish. The screenshot she included is of a guy who posted, “Not to belittle the importance of freedom in all aspects of life, but some of you think wearing a mini skirt is equal or even more important to fight for than stopping a genocide, some think kissing their same sex partner in public is equal if not more relevant than stopping a genocide. Some just want to party and not be bother with a genocide.” Did you note all the minimization he, and by extension Calla, pulled there? Drag, trans rights, being gender non-conforming, and being a woman able to wear you want are melted down into “wearing a mini skirt.” Marriage, health care, the ability to exist free of discrimination, and existing as queer in public is turned into “kissing their same sex partner in public.” All of it is then thrown into a bag and called “partying.”
Queer rights have become a “party.” It is selfish to party, after all. Parties are expensive and decadent and selfish. How dare you party? Don’t you know, whether or not you have queer rights is the same as whether or not you go get drunk at the club on a Thursday.
Calla hasn’t yet deleted a post retweeted by fellow dumbass Q Anthony Ali which puts LGBTQ+ rights” in scare quotes, calls them “Western frameworks,” and claims not supporting Hamas is morally wrong and you better on board with any group who slaughters civilians and is rapidly anti-gay as long as the oppose the West in some way shape or form.
Why did Calla use scare quotes there? Why did she frame queer rights as Western? It’s because Calla is a homophobe. In my video over leftist homophobia, I talked about her need to pretend China isn’t homophobic and how her and her fellow tankies have to dismiss the concept of human rights because otherwise some of their favorite shitty countries would have to face actual criticism, like Russia’s mistreatment of queer people and the CCP’s entrenched sexism and homophobia.
Connecting a few threads together here because I am a gay man and so obviously I am great at braiding: The people who claim it’s selfish to care about gay rights, the people who call gay rights “partying,” the people who minimize gay rights, the people who scare-quote gay rights, they all tend to frame it under the idea that queerness and queer rights are individualist decadence. They see joy in queerness, and they hate that.
Let’s look at noted psychopath Suki’s Mom. She tweeted: “white western queers (as derogatory as possible) trying to browbeat colonized people into supporting their fav girl boss genocidaire demonstrates the hyper-individualist, decadent, selfish politic that has overtaken western queer identity/culture.” Suki is a homophobe.
Jorge of the DSA IC, who you may remember as being the one retweeting calls for ethnically cleansing Israeli Jews, said of the 2024 election and people voting for Kamala, “‘oh what about x or y domestic issue’ so what you are saying is Palestinian lives matter less than American lives. This is objectively what the argument entails.” No, Jorge, it isn’t, but he knows this. It’s just that being on the DSA IC apparently requires one to be a bad faith actor incapable of engaging in actual politics.
So over and over anti-voting far leftist people push the idea that queer people caring abotu and voting over queer rights is selfish. We already discussed how there are only two outcomes available come the end of the 2024 election: a Trump presidency or a Harris presidency. All of these people understand that a Trump presidency would be worse for everyone. They don’t care about that though. They care about gaining internet points. See how easy it is to claim someone else is being selfish? Except, here’s the thing, they aren’t putting forward any idea of way to get what they want. If it’s selfish to vote for queer rights, at least we will succeed in getting those and fighting for them. Will these people get a free Palestine through a Trump victory that will hurt queer people? No. But it makes them feel bad to have to think about the consequences of what they’re pushing, and they’d rather not feel bad. This is, of course, all about their feelings. No one ho disagrees with them could ever be acting in good faith. They’re the main characters of the universe after all.
This idea of queerness being a party, selfish, decadent, really rubs them wrong because of the idea that queer rights leads to celebration and happiness. They can’t have that.
Even before October 7th, a lot of these people made the same arguments. Securing gay marriage was bad because gay people became less likely to die in a revolution that wasn’t happening. Class reductionist types view social issues as distraction from class warfare. Are they right? No, not at all.
It’s very easy to see how you cannot secure economic freedoms without queer rights. They like to say marriage is trivial but marriage, in the US, is tied up with: insurance, banking, taxes, adoption, wills, estates, and more. Do you know why our elders fought so hard for gay marriage? When the AIDs epidemic ravaged this country in the 80s and 90s, queer people were turned away from the hospital rooms of their dying partners. Imagine your loved one is sick and dying and in pain from a disease the world is telling you is a punishment for your very being, and you cannot sit beside them and hold their fucking hand. Not for anyone’s health or safety, but because of homophobia. Imagine then that they die and their next of kin despises gay people. You don’t get to see their body or say goodbye. You don’t get to go to the funeral or have a say in how or where they’re buried. I have very little patience for this minimization that entirely ignores our history and the hardfought battles that many people did not survive.
Without non-discrimination laws, you could be fired for being gay or trans. You know the economic impact of that? You don’t have fucking money.
How about conversion therapy? What’s the economic impact? Well, being tortured sure does change how much you’re going to have to spend on therapy for the rest of your life. It will affect your ability to find a partner and, obviously, having a partner increases your household wealth. That’s if you survive, by the way. Your economic outlook won’t look too great if you can’t work because you’re a corpse.
Charlie Markbreiter wrote an article for The Nation trying to bothsides trans issues so as to convince people not to vote for Harris. His reasoning? Her policies would benefit wealthy trans people. And we’re too hysterical about how Trump might harm trans people. So obviously the trans folk worried this election are the selfish elites who can’t care about anyone else. Donald Trump is a transphobe. Project 2025, staffed and advised primarily by Trump officials, calls for the criminalization of trans people. Project 2025 wants it to be illegal to talk about or make art about trans people. Project 2025 thinks it is a sex crime for trans people to be around children or for children to know anything about gender identity.
The two sides are very clearly not the same. But by painting worry about trans issues this election as selfish and elite, Markbreiter gets to close his eyes to the harm that would be caused by a Trump presidency.
Is it selfish to care about gay rights? To care about trans rights? To recognize that there are only two options, a Harris Administration or a Trump Administration, and that one would be far worse for everyone?
No. But accusing everyone else of being selfish sure is a great way to demonize anyone who disagrees with you.
DSMR 5 - catastrophizing
You need demons if you’re going to have a rapture. Sorry, I mean a totally real heckin revolution that’s definitely on the verge of happening and would definitely only result a communist victory without untold suffering and hardship. If everyone is suffering, then they’re more likely, the idea goes, to engage with political violence. That’s why they’re pretending there’s an option on the table to exchange queer rights for Palestinian statehood. Because they desire queer rights to fall away so that more people will suffer so that more poeple will be ready for revolution.
DSA co-chair Megan Romer has tweeted about how there was revolutionary sentiment during Trump’s presidency that DSA failed to effectively funnel into a revolution. Were we on the verge of a revolution? No. Is DSA in the position now to lead a revolution? Also no. So we aren’t aiming towards an actual thing people think will actually happen. We’re looking at a holy violence, a rapture.
If you imagine these people as embarrassed evangelical conservatives, things start to make more sense. You call queerness decadent and individualist not only because you’re a homophobe, but because you’re an ascetist. Ascetics believe the self-denial is the only good. You must deny yourself pleasures. You must suffer. Suffering is holy. Suffering is repentance. But it’s not. It’s just suffering. A desire to increase suffering, to inflict it on people as punishment for not having bought into the revolution you make no effort to convince people to join, is evil. Sorry about it.
This seems to be a form of catastrophizing, a defense mechanism where you make something as bad as it can be. “You say Trump will be worse! You have evidence that he will harm more and more people, but I don’t want to confront that, so I’m going to say there’s no way Palestinians can have it worse.”
Maybe this is because I’m primarily a horror writer, but… That’s a harsh lack of imagination. Can things get worse for Palestine? Yes. By quite a bit. Trump could encourage Israel to go in harder on its worst impulses. It could encourage Saudi Arabia to step harder on Yemen. It could declare war with Iran. If it goes to war with Iran, a Trump admin could concievably claim that Hamas is an extension of Hezbollah and put American troops on the ground in Gaza. If American troops engage in Gaza, Trump has an easier path to rounding up Palestinians living in America under the Alien Enemies Act which he has promised to use for his mass deportation goal. If the Houthis respond by attacking more civilian ships willynilly while pretending they’re doing it for Palestine, Trump may turn around and say attacking US citizens is grounds for war and attempt to rally congress to support that declaration. Things are always capable of getting worse. The Middle East is not currently the site of a global war fought by strongest nuclear powers. It could be. It could always be worse.
Conclusion
Despite the past few election cycles being filled with certain leftists crying foul over people shaming them into voting for Democrats, they’ve now taken to their own form of vote shaming. To vote for Harris is selfish. It’s supporting genocide. To care about queer rights is selfish. They know there isn’t a revolution coming and they know the Green Party and PSL have no shot at winning. They know it will either be Harris or Trump because they aren’t idiots.
But they’re trying their level best to convince the rest of us elsewise.
Anywho, did I successfully self-diagnose as a narcissist because I care about domestic policy and the differences between Trump and Harris and recognize one of those two will be the President in 2025 and have read Trump and the GOP’s proposed policies of harm? Sometimes I think I’m cute, so, who’s to say.
If there’s one thing to take away from this, it’s that it’s totally healthy for us all to be so angry and quick to call everyone else self-absorbed monsters, especially when it’s playing into elite effette stereotypes of ya olde homophobia. Sorry, my lawyer friend is calling me. Hello? You called me. No, yeah, I had to end on this bit as like a callback. Get it? That low effort pun has reserved me a spot on death row? Okay.
Sorry kittens, got to go. Daddy’s got a date with a zip-zap-zop.
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