A Petty, Counterproductive Insult to Queer Americans

On the first day of spring, House Speaker Mike Johnson was happy and braggadocious. In describing a continuing resolution to avert a government shutdown, Johnson “touted as a conservative win a provision he said the deal includes banning the LGBTQ Pride flag from being flown over US embassies,” according to Bloomberg. The Biden White House seemed to be comfortable with giving up acknowledging queer people at their embassies just a few weeks after using his State of the Union speech to declare “my message to transgender Americans: I have your back.” Well.

Many queer people seem comfortable with this exchange. The journalist Erin Reed, for example, casts this trade as a good one that kept dozens upon dozens of far more destructive anti-LGBTQ provisions out of the deal. In a manner of speaking, of course, she is right: it really could have been a lot worse. But, as the mixture of triumphalism, grudging acceptance, wariness, and anger continues to filter out into the community, much of the discourse has shifted very markedly toward a rigid tone policing about queer people expressing alarm and dismay at the decision. I want to address why, even if this was the best deal that could have been salvaged from the mess, the instinct to shout down disappointment is a bad one.

I think the queer reactions to this deal can be broke up into three broad buckets:

1. a pragmatic, “it could be worse” approach
2. anger at the concession
3. agreement that the pride flag is bad, so losing it at embassies means nothing

I mostly come down on 2, with acceptance for 1, which is probably not a huge surprise. I strongly oppose 3, for reasons I’ll share below. And, no matter where you stand on this, the frenzied how dare you express any negative feeling about this reaction from many Biden supporters has been and will continue to be deeply offputting and counterproductive. Finally, I want to explain why even if position 1 is the most tenable, it needs a lot of extra steps we haven’t seen to be viable for progressives. So let’s go.

For starters, there is the pragmatic approach, which tends to empasize the stemming of loss. This is a natural reaction and probably the closest to what Biden’s team was thinking: what meaningless symbolic gesture can we bend on to save the bulk of what we want? In that sense, it is textbook liberal politics. But I also think this represents bad strategy for two reasons: the endless bad faith of Mike Johnson and the ongoing stream of insults to peripheral constituencies. Without belaboring this too much let me summarize:

• Bad Faith Johnson: Since the Republicans gained a majority in the House of Respresentatives they have struggled to pass budgets. This has partially arisen from their inability to pick leadership: Kevin McCarthy’s brief, disastrous tenure as Speaker lasted until October, when yet more turmoil cast him out of the seat and Mike Johnson eventually took over. Since Johnson’s ascension six months ago he has not passed a budget. Instead, he has strung along the government (and the country) through a series of continuing resolutions, or CRs, that expire every few months. This has given him enormous leverage in being able to threaten shut downs faster than the annual budgetary cycle normally allows. Biden’s team already allowed this process to continuously grind down immigration policy until everything he had promised (“a more humane immigration system”) was dead. In other words, Johnson won by using CRs to grind concessions out of Biden until he had won the issue. Biden is now allowing Johnson to run the same playbook on LGBTQ rights: minor concessions that seem immaterial at first, until panic strikes at the thought of a shut down, then conceding almost everything to keep the lights on. It worked before, so why not again?

• Insulting Your Base: For months, American Muslims have been angry at Biden for how strongly he has sided with Israel during the humanitarian catastrophe that has resulted from Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza. While Americans remain firmyl pro-Israel, it is a conflict most human rights expert agree either is a genocide, or is really close to being one, such that the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to take more proactive steps to avoid charges of genocide. Naturally, many Muslims are upset by this, and in Michigan they have made strong symbolic votes of no-confidence in Biden during the primaries. A similar dynamic is at play with Black Americans, where young people in particular have expressed deep disappointment in his presidency and thus his support in that community is wavering. Both of these are constituencies who can make or break swing states like Michigan or North Carolina, so even marginal changes in support can have profound consequences for the 2024 election. Adding demoralized queer people into the mix, at least 7% of the population if not more, only places further pressure on the big tent of constituencies needed to overcome the power of white nationalism animating the Trump campaign. Is it smart to concede away issues important to all of the minority factions on your side? I certainly think so.

I am angry at this concession, even as I admit that pride flags are not really a daily bread and butter issue for queer people, but rather symbolic politics. This is also why some queers in the 3rd group, which rejects the need for pride at all, aren’t terribly upset at the deal. To understand why, we need a hopefully very short detour into queer intellectualism.

There is a lot of argument in queer intellectual circles about what queer means, which is summarized, sort of, in this Chronicle essay about queer studies. Queer negativity has a long history, and it is possibly THE origin of queer theory (though that is a different topic). Scholars like Leo Bersani became well known for rejecting assimilationist norms like monogamy, marriage, and respectability as false promises that ignore the reality of queerness. Other scholars rejected the presentist focus of Bersani to instead look at futurity, grappling with HOW we can have futures when society is organized around heterosexual reproduction. In “No Future,” for example, Lee Edelman argued queers, as a group defined by its deviation from the norm, do not have futures the way heterosexuals imagine. Developing a future orientation means developing a reproductive orientation, which he rejects as too limiting and too heterosexual.

That debate slowed down in the 2000s as assimilation became the default stance of queerness in the US. Scholars like Michael Cobb and Martin Manalansan have written about how formally legalizing marriage made the non-married gays feel even more marginalized and excluded. The era of assimilation with the state posed different challenges for queer people. In “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism," Lisa Duggan criticized the assimilationist tendency of right wing gay men like Andrew Sullivan as rejecting the uniqueness and heritage of queerness in a bid to seek approval from a heterosexual society that will not ever treat him as normal. And Jasbir Puar developed the idea of homonationalism to describe how governments use token or facile tolerance of some queer people to paper over more serious acts of violence and abuse. In her argument, the language of queer acceptance is state propaganda, in other words, and not liberating society from oppression.

The homonationalist critique has been extended a lot in the 2000s as some small concessions to queer existence emerged from legal and political debates in the West. Because of the war on terror, these scholars linked normalizing queer people with endless militarism and imperialism. There are decent reasons for this: Islamist violence against queer people in Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria has been used to justify US military intervention there that kills civilians. The fact that close US allies also engage in state violence against queer people (Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Turkey, Hungary, Kenya, Uganda, Singapore etc.), is ignored for geopolitical concenience. It makes the commitment to rights feel hollow.

There are other currents within queer intellectualism that could inspire why some queer people are hostile to the flag. The queer of color critique, which has been ongoing for decades, questions how non-white queer folk can really take pleasure in queerness when their racial identities remain oppressed. Queer theory has a lot of discussion about being unpleasant: explorations of being “severe,” of embracing monstrousness, grappling with waste and trash, expressing negativity, and so on. Sara Ahmed’s “Feminist Killjoy Manifesto” is oriented around taking an active stance toward justice even, of perhaps especially, if that means upsetting people.

I’m in danger of this being a lit review. So let’s say here that queer theory never really settled on whether LGBTQ Pride, as an annual event of public celebration, was good or bad. Arguments against pride circle back around to supporting US state violence as a condition for being accepted, arguments for focus on symbolic violence and representation. All of these can be reasons why queer people reject the pride flag and don’t find its suppression in law very alarming: it doesn’t feel like a loss to them.

However, I happen to come down on the side of symbolic politics, and I think we do need to grapple how they are meaningful in a mediatized culture. Over the summer I wrote about how symbolic violence toward queer people was shifting into real world violence, as the hate campaign toward Dylan Mulvaney grew into bomb threats, brandishing guns, and vandalism. I wrote:

Lots of queer people roll their eyes at the elaborate Pride displays companies put on each year. We all know they don’t really mean it, and that can be grating. At the same time, American society is defined by consumerism. Our social values, our religion, our politics – all of it is filtered through purchasing. That means Corporate Pride, however annoying, has real value as both symbolism and cash-driven behavior. That is why the fascist terrorists have targeted pride displays.

As dumb as Corporate Pride is, in American society Corporate Pride is a milestone for how society views us: are we a valid part of the culture and therefore safe for marketing? Objectively, we are: polling consistently shows strong acceptance for pride marketing and queer existence in ads and other forms of public communication. We are not controversial! But as the shrieks for violence against us remains in the public sphere, legitimized by a wave of bigoted laws in state legislatures and normalized by media industry completely unmoored from its ethical grounding, it is clear that majority support is not enough. Without some other powerful institution stepping in to defend us, there is no countervailing force against the Republican-led pogrom against queer people. Corporations are, however dismaying it may be, one of those powerful organizations. When they cave to a small number of violent extremists and choose to erase us through some opaque market calculation, it is a stab in the back.

I still believe this, and it is where my deep disappointment with Biden lies: not that he’s holding some line and doing what he can (to me it’s clear that he is). It’s that as he makes concessions he doesn’t explain himself. Relying on surrogates to leak whispers about deliberations is not speaking to the public. On this embassy pride flag thing, Biden made a calculation to concede symbolic politics to stop corporeal politics from getting into law. Okay, fine. But we learned about it not from Biden explaining the difficulty of government, but from Mike Johnson bragging about taking the queers down a notch.

The reality is, we live in a symbolic culture shaped by media. The Biden team concedes on symbols like the pride flag but does nothing to replace them. If they work to shore up support for us elsewhere, they don’t tell us about it. The sneering response to disappointing in this CR concession, “well do you want a government shut down instead,” which flooded my social feeds last night, only demonstrates my point: Mike Johnson has not passed a budget, ever! He is using the constant threat of a shutdown to grind concessions out of the White House. I think it’s bad to reward that, and it’s bad to reward that without explaining to the people it affects why you did so. More to the point, saying “this is a fight and it’s the best we could do before deadline” would actually dispel a lot of anger here. The WH’s studied indifference to use the bully pulpit, to engage with the country through the media that shapes its culture, looks the same as not caring what we think, and it has real consequences. From a story about why Biden’s support among Black Americans is faltering, is this piece of insight that mirrors how many queer people feel:

“When I sit in focus groups with young Black voters and ask what [Democrats have] done to make their lives better, they’re hard pressed to come up with an answer, despite this administration delivering on much of the Black agenda,” Woodbury said. “That’s the communication challenge that we have a year to overcome.”

But a communication challenge can only be overcome by communication. What we need is assurance about where the line will be held. On immigration, Biden’s team started very far apart from where they ended up. Mike Johnson’s thousand-cuts approach successfully killed off humane immigration policy for years. Letting him chip away at queer rights SHOULD make us upset. It is clearly a first step: Republicans have tried to strip the flag off Stonewall, at the state level they want to erase any acknowledgment of us from public buildings, they compare the flag to ISIS. The Republican efforts to erase us weren’t defeated by this CR, only delayed. But because Team Biden refuses to hit back - there is no press conference blaming Republicans for their own stonewalling, there is no constant drumbeat in the daily briefings about this, and it is not being pushed to the analysts on talk shows - it really isn’t clear if they plan to hold the line. It feels like abandonment, made insulting by the empty words of support in a speech.

So, I remain angry at this trade, not just because of its immediate symbolism, which is also very bad, but because it mirrors the first step of his caving on immigration policy. Death by a thousand cuts resulted in Democrats and Republicans converging on a single, violent immigration stance that will kill innocent people through indifference so widespread it becomes malice. I don’t find that trade meaningless, or a victory, or even a net-good, even if it kept the government’s lights on for a few months. What I see, instead, is the message that we are disposable, and that our existence in society will be traded for a temporary gambit that won’t solve the larger problem (which is Republican anti-governing). People are obviously entitled to think how they wish, but I do wish they would also stop yelling at me to shut up and vote when I bring this up.