What Have We Become? - A Portmortem of Pride 2025

This post is from the Queer Stuff category.

“Way up way up we go

Been up and down that road

Way up way up, oh no

We gon’ burn the whole house down”

• AJR, Burn the House Down

Last month marks the fifty-sixth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots - the day that Manhattan police raided the Stonewall Inn, one of the few places in New York City where openly queer people were allowed at the time. Subjected to inspections, arrests, and brutality, the crowd of gay patrons finally decided they’d had enough; for six days, they fought back against the raid as others joined from nearby and the mob grew. Once the now-iconic crossfire of bricks ceased and the dust settled, with riot control forces left trapped inside the building, a new era of queer activism began.

Organizations like the Gay Liberation Front formed to take a more public approach to the fight, and a sentiment of uncompromising rebellion spread through gay communities. We have these events and people to thank for modern queer rights, but we must now ask ourselves, have we lost the spirit? In this new age of increased acceptance and inclusion, have we become complacent with the oppression that remains and subdued once more by an attitude of compliance? More importantly, now that we live in a time when we can be openly queer without the imminent risk of police raids, has the fundamental meaning of being queer changed for the worse?

As bad as things still are, at least far fewer of us are at risk of homelessness, violence, and legal issues (for now). The hidden cost of society’s increased acceptence towards queer people, however, is that more and more of the queer community has skipped an important step: losing faith in society’s normative ideas. Don’t get me wrong - the progress we have seen is amazing and worth every bit of the fighting it takes to achieve - but what was once the most basic part of the queer movement is leaving us. Now, many queer people still retain a level of faith in normativity of gender roles and society’s structures, and rather than “cutting out the core” of these ideas, they merely select queer culture as an aspect of societal structure.

Back when being openly queer could lead to exclusion and possibly punishment, the strain between one’s own identity and the way society viewed it forced a choice: either repress oneself or reject normative society - there was no middle ground. Many modern queer people still think this way, but the assimilationist concessions we are now afforded have led many others to sidestep that crucial faith-breaking moment. Two major effects have come from this phenomenon: queer infighting and strengthened conservative arguments.

Within our own communities, there has been an increase in “border wars” between different types of queer identity who latch onto some normative ideas as a way to justify their rejection of other ideas without a need to reject the core concept of normativity. For example, we sometimes see binary trans people reinforcing a binary notion of gender and fighting against non-binary people because those binary trans people have constructed their view of being trans around the binary. We also see gay and lesbian people attempting to exclude bi and pan people because, although they have rejected heteronormativity, they have not yet rejected the idea that orientation need not be strictly tied to one gender. Biphobic arguments often also inadvertently reinforce gender roles. It is also common for even more widely accepting queer communitied to exclude asexual people because they have defined themsevles in terms of their specific labels rather than in terms of being outside of cisheteronormativity.

With this movement of queer culture from being outside of normative society to being a different part of it comes a new argument from conservative opposition: that we are no different from them because we are just yet another culture in the pot. Unfortunately, if we continue this trend of keeping some level of faith in normativity, they are not entirely wrong here; parts of the queer community have become “just another slice of society.” If we want to come back from this and avoid being “no different from them,” we need to return to our outright rejection of the core concept of normativity.

I don’t say any of this to discredit how far we’ve come or the change we have achieved, but rather to warn of where we may end up if we go too far into assimilation. I understand that assimilation can be a useful tool for progress, but we must remember that it is just that: a means to an end, not an idea that we should define ourselves in terms of. Being queer under normativity is a losing game, so let’s remind ourselves not to turn that tool into a weapon against each other.