This pie chart of the groups listed on the website of Chicago Pride, which was held last month. The actual portion of a modern major-city pride parade that is specifically about LGBT+ communities and their struggle is tiny. As was seen with the legalization of same-sex marriage, a portion of the least radical sections, whose demands avoid issues of class and race, are now a market for the same regular capitalist crap as everyone else. This pie-chart shows an event about the queer community, but dominated by corporations, politicians, and institutions that are still in the hands of white, heterosexual men. Being “gay-friendly” and marching in the parade has gone from being a political and moral statement to something to put in the annual report brochure.
Never mind that millions of queer individuals, who don’t fit into the gender binary or the heterosexual institutions like marriage that form the narrow bounds of acceptability. The renaissance of alternative pride events attests to the contradictions of the mainstream ones. Simply put, the forces of capital cannot share a stage with radical, anti-oppression, anti-capitalist groups. Any event with fancy multinational conglomerate sponsors has to be swept clean of ideas and ideologies that challenge the basis of racism, homophobia and transphobia. To the newly gay-friendly corporation, things are also best done without a serious conversation about intersectionality, an issue that is often ignored even in non-corporate settings (for instance, a long-running conflict in the feminist movement about who sets the tone, and how oppression is not uniform among all female-identified people). The new capitalist LGBT+ construction is simple (not really interested in most gender identities and sexual orientations), uniform, and commoditized.
But this is the battle that all civil rights movements have to eventually deal with. Martin Luther King is often used in commercials these days, after all.
Unspoken Politics 