HuffPo Writer Says LGBTQ Movement Too Obsessed with Gay White Candidates

June 6th, 2018 1:56 PM

Once a victim, always a victim. Just like when you give a mouse a cookie, no matter how much ground the LGBTQ movement gains politically, it always finds a new way to be a target of discrimination.

On June 6th, the Huffington Post published an article by Professor Jessie Daniels with the headline “More White LGBTQ Candidates Won’t Help All Queer People Get Free.” Daniels wrote in the piece that even though “more openly LGBTQ candidates are running for office than ever before,” inequality issues in America still have a long way to go because a large part of the LGBTQ movement favors white male couples.

“The Victory Fund [LGBTQ political action committee] ― Parker, its board of directors and its operational team ― is a predominantly white-run organization,” Daniel worried. “And most of the candidates it has endorsed are white too.”

Apparently, the terror of the white male looms behind the biggest gay rights victories of the past 20 years. The Matthew Shepard Act, even though it addresses hate crimes against “actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin of any person,” is still plagued by the image of “a sympathetic white cisgender gay male victim,” which of course “reinforces the idea that gayness is always white,” according to Daniels. Matthew Shepard was a white gay student at the University of Wyoming who was brutally murdered back in 1998.

Even the United States v. Windsor decision is not free from the menacing corruption of white male supremacy. Daniels wrote that it “was about the right of a person to pass property to a spouse when one dies” and consequently it followed that since “it’s harder for white women and people of color to accumulate wealth, that means white gay male couples are going to benefit most from that policy.” Fun fact: even though Windsor went to court concerning her dead partner’s will, the decision was that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional, declaring gay marriage legal for everyone in the country. Hint: that includes black couples.

The victimhood of the black LGBTQ community, however, is still strong, Daniels argued. Queers need to follow the lead of black women instead of gay white males. The reason, of course, is President Trump. The “Trump effect,” which is the increase of racism caused by Trump’s vulgar, abusive comments, poses a threat to the LGBTQ movement.

“White gay people are not immune to the Trump effect,” warned Daniels. On account of this, white LGBTQ candidates in office are “not sufficient to create real change” because a “real politics of liberation must find a way to connect people who share values about sexuality, economic inequality and racial justice to one another.”

Even though she is a white woman, Daniels ironically assumed the credibility to speak on a subject like this (though she is a lesbian). After all, she is not immune to the Trump effect either.