Gather around friends. On this last day of Pride month, let me tell you a story about why White Gays

Gather around friends. On this last day of Pride month, let me tell you a story about why White Gays™ are terrible and why QPOC are justifiably wary of those who profess to be our allies.I recently broke up with a friend.I’ve reached a point in my life where I just don’t want to deal with bad behavior from the people in my life anymore. I’m all for reaching out, educating people, and the sort of daily activism that often takes place at the level of personal one-on-one conversations. I’m also 100% done with being friends and/or romantic partners with people I need teach to respect the basic humanity of others. You can get Activist Aye or Friend Aye who also happens to be an activist, but not both. So I broke up with my friend.You can read the conversation for yourself in the pictures above, but what shook me was how little it seemed to matter to him. He wrote, “No worries I am not hurt”. This was our last interaction. And maybe that’s a testament to how gentle I was trying to be, how kind I was trying to be. Courtesies I often do not always have the energy to show strangers who say these very same things. But it seems, our friendship, like the lives of QPOC, were disposable to him if they became inconvenient. We were friends, but he didn’t value our friendship enough to fight for it. He didn’t respect me enough to consider why I think this issue is important enough to sever a friendship over. Apparently, his ability to continue to date and fuck according to his racist tropes was more valuable. If you can’t tell from our exchanges, I was genuinely shocked to hear him say the things he was saying. Right before this final exchange, we were talking about police presence in NYC Pride vs. Toronto Pride, and the radical history of Pride. He seemed like an ally. He is also a Ph.D. student at a very liberal Ivy League school studying Asia. Based on every interaction I’ve ever had with him, I assumed he was down. But I suppose that’s the trap of White Gays™. They are oppressed too, you think to yourself, but they are still just a white and just as male as any other straight, cis, white man, so they’ve likely internalized and normalized the same racist, transphobic, and sexist ideologies. They are all for equality in the abstract until it starts to affect them personally. *When I wrote that the “trans” as adjective vs. as noun thing was minor, I was trying to head off any defensiveness that might come on his side from me picking on grammar and terms. I think using correct language is really important, but practically, in situations like these, that often needs to come after the humanity of trans people, no matter how they are referred to, is first taken as an established fact. Unfortunately, that often means engaging in strategies like this.  -- source link
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