Okay, first of all, what is this???
A bald eagle — one of the primary symbols of American nationalism — with a fresh set of nails and lashes, decked out in Pride flag colors, wearing a leather harness. Below, the phrase, THESE COLORS DON’T RUN, a play on an old military slogan used to express courage during wartime.
You might be tempted to read this as a clever subversion, but reading an image doesn’t just involve looking at the image itself — we also need to know who made it, and the context in which it was published.
The yassified bald eagle was created for Pride month by the Human Rights Campaign, an organization started in 1980 as a PAC to support gay-friendly political candidates, which went on to be influential in the fights for both marriage equality and the inclusion of gay and lesbian people in the military.
The HRC drops this image as the US sits on the precipice of what could very easily become a third World War, with absolutely ravenous megalomaniacs in charge of the Executive branch and fully supporting an ongoing genocide in Gaza.1
In May, the White House put out a Marvel-movie trailer for the US military where former FOX News host and current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says:
“No more electric tanks. No more gender confusion. No more climate change worship. We are laser-focused on our mission of war fighting.”
Considering the Trump administration’s positioning of queer people as threats to the nation, reading the yassified eagle as a patriotic slogan thrown back into the face of America’s oppression is, again, tempting!
But, for that to ring true, the creator of the image would have to actually be fighting to change what makes America oppressive. The HRC, however, is sponsored by the US weapons manufacturer Northrop Grumman, which has supplied both the Israeli military and ICE.
One of the HRC’s main projects is their Corporate Equality Index, which ranks how friendly businesses are to their LGBTQ+ workers. They gave both Northrop Grumman and fellow bombs-maker Lockheed Martin perfect Equality scores this year.
“In line with Jasbir Puar’s notion of homonationalism,” Holly Lewis writes, “American imperialism after Obama’s election moved from rampant homophobia to encouraging the integration of queers with the hope of selling liberal progressives on the project of endless war.”2
The scholar Rahul Rao has argued that capitalists now view queer inclusion as good for business,3 with global monetary funds like the World Bank even denying funding to countries that are not sufficiently gay-friendly. He calls this ‘homocapitalism’, and HRC’s Corporate Equality Index is a perfect example.
They are ‘making capitalism friendly to queers but also rendering queers safe for capitalism,’ Rao writes. This is based on an understanding of homophobia as ‘merely cultural’, which promotes ‘a liberal politics of recognition while ignoring or marginalizing redistributive concerns.’4
Homophobia and transphobia are not just cultural ideas — they arise from material conditions. So what does that mean for our politics? Here are a few readings that I’ve been chewing on this Pride month.
#1: Capitalism and Gay Identity
In 1993, the historian John D’Emilio argued against what he called ‘the myth of the eternal homosexual’ — the idea that gay people have always existed, everywhere and through all time. It may be a comforting idea, but it’s ahistorical.
Homosexual behavior can be found throughout history, but no one was identifying as a homosexual person before the mid-20th century. D’Emilio argues that the ability to claim a gay identity in the US did not exist until capitalism had progressed to such a level that it became possible for people to leave their families of birth and create communities organized around their sexualities instead.
Capitalism eroded the family, so people left the family to be gay, but then — plot twist! — the Right turned around and blamed gay people for eroding the family!5
#2: A Short History of Transmisogyny
Similar to D’Emilio, historian Jules Gill-Peterson also disagrees that trans identity is eternal, and she’s dissatisfied with psychological explanations for violence against trans-feminine people. In this book, she argues that transmisogyny began as a form of statecraft.
She starts with the invention of trans panic, which she locates in the nineteenth-century British assault on the ascetic hijras of India. British colonial officers did not understand the third-gender hijras, but were nonetheless morally offended that they wore women’s clothes, and saw them as a threat to the empire.
So, the British made up a story about them being ‘male prostitutes with a secret government’ in order to justify policing and destroying their livelihoods:
“The colonial state appointed itself the political right to exterminate hijras to satisfy panicked British moral order… doing so meant ending the hijra way of life, but it also empowered men — namely, police officers — to look for and attack hijras in the street. Their sexualized femininity thus became the target for violent punishment in a way that would recur countless times around the world in a similar pattern. It was in this widespread panic and trans-feminization by the state that individual men learned to experience and wield trans panic, too. Psychology followed the example of the state.”
In another chapter, Gill-Peterson shows how the liberal gay rights movement disavowed street queens like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who wanted the movement to focus on material issues like policing, incarceration, and poverty instead of upper-class concerns like recognition and inclusion. Street queens were not pushed out of the gay rights movement after Stonewall because of identity, she argues, but because of ‘a political difference rooted in class.’
#3: The Future of Trans Politics
In a recent post about why he wants to send ICE to major US cities, Trump said that ‘Radical Left Democrats’ (hilarious) are trying to destroy America through ‘Open Borders’ and ‘Transgender for Everybody’, which at first glance, might seem really fucking random to link together.
But this 2019 essay by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Nathaniel Dickson explains how it actually makes perfect sense:
“It is no accident that trans people and migrants share the dubious honour of being points of fixation for the far right. Transition and migration are both situated at the intersection where national imaginaries cross individual ones.
Fascism imagines the nation as the extension of the body of the fascist — his power, his righteousness, the hegemony of his identity and his place in the world. This fiction must work hard to obscure its own bad logic, and it falters every time a trans person enters a restroom.
Both migration and transness interrupt and threaten the fiction of a coherent nation-body relationship. The geographic displacement of migrants brings the national border and the idea of national identity into question. Transition doubles the insult by producing a crisis at the bodily level, thus threatening the idea of a natural and orderly relationship between the body, the family and the state.”
#4: The Politics of Everybody
I quoted this Holly Lewis book above, which attempts to build a bridge between feminism, Marxism, and queer politics. I haven’t finished it yet but I feel like it’s already reorganized parts of my brain. It’s dense enough for the academically-inclined, but she’s also kinda funny in a sardonic way, and there’s some really beautiful sections like this:
“An inclusive political understanding of ‘everybody’ is a simple affirmation that we can logically deduce that the world is a whole – a flickering, pulsating movement of birth and death, of appearance and disappearance, of social relations that are at once real and mutable. Once we accept such a politics, we can either fall on the side that says this universe needs to be purified, segregated, and ordered, or the side that says that beings are equal in their infinite complexity. The only question that remains after that is: ‘Which side are you on?’”
For a TLDR, skip to the last section, Ten axioms towards a queer Marxist future, or see this interview.
All of these readings share similar conclusions: D’Emilio didn’t think queers being scapegoated for destroying the nuclear family meant we should turn around and become pro-nuclear-family again, but rather, that we should fight for things that make it easier for everyone to live outside it — abortion access, welfare, publicly funded daycare, and ‘structures beyond the nuclear family that provide a sense of belonging.’
Gill-Peterson, in a recent interview, said that we need to focus on a ‘bread and butter’ approach to trans politics that ultimately also benefits the entire working class, like economic stability and healthcare, instead of vague liberal platitudes like ‘trans joy’.
At the end of her book, she draws on the views of the travesti, a group of trans-feminized people across South America who embrace being ‘the most woman’,6 and believe in fighting for a politics that are ‘good enough for everyone, not perfection for some and suffering for others.’
Likewise, Gleeson and Dickson argue for a trans politics of reassociation — aka affinity, aka solidarity. Liberal identity politics would have us believe that being queer or trans or gay are irreducible differences that can only be allied with, but never truly understood. Socialists know that camaraderie across difference is not just possible, but necessary, in the fight for a better world.
“They create false dichotomies among the needs of the working class and a supposed queer lobby whose needs they see as frivolous. Healthcare or inclusive language? Labour rights or mixed bathrooms? We want everything.” — Rojo del Arcoíris, Towards a Queer Marxism
the most popular comment-section meme on TikTok right now: “it’s my first world war, kinda nervous”
Lewis, The Politics of Everybody
a similar argument is popular now about including neurodivergent employees based on being able to profit from our ‘superpowers’
Rao, Global Homocapitalism, 2015
“Every society needs structures for reproduction and childrearing, but the possibilities are not limited to the nuclear family. Yet the privatized family fits well with capitalist relations of production. Capitalism has socialized production while maintaining that the products of socialized labor belong to the owners of private property. In many ways, childrearing has also been progressively socialized over the last two centuries, with schools, the media, peer groups, and employers taking over functions that once belonged to parents. Nevertheless, capitalist society maintains that reproduction and childrearing are private tasks, that children “belong” to parents, who exercise the rights of ownership. Ideologically, capitalism drives people into heterosexual families; each generation comes of age having internalized a heterosexist model of intimacy and personal relationships. Materially, capitalism weakens the bonds that once kept families together so that their members experience a growing instability in the place they have come to expect happiness and emotional security. Thus, while capitalism has knocked the material foundation away from family life, lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual feminists have become the scapegoats for the social instability of the system.“ (D’Emilio)
“What if trans feminism meant saying yes to being too much, not because everyone should become more feminine, or more sexual, but because a safer world is one in which there is nothing wrong with being extra?” (Gill-Peterson, pg 143)
This was excellently written and thought-provoking. Thank you!
Homocapitalism is so real, living in a country that has homosexuality criminalised it's wierd to see how any loophole (such as don’t ask, don't tell behavior) is used to extract a new customer from tourists they'd never want as citizens.
Also the ww3 jokes are so insensitive, not sure if that's relevant but I had to say it somewhere.