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Honorary Whiteness and the Alt-Right Gay Community [1]
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Date: 2025-09-14
As a continuing theme of my efforts to bring attention to what I feel is a major blind spot on the Left, I want to expand upon the allure of young white gay men to the Alt-Right.
One needs to understand the concept of ‘Honorary Whiteness’ and its affirmation of whiteness as a powerful and destructive false social construct.
Throughout American history, many demographics that are now accepted as ‘white’ in America weren’t always so and despite being percievably white — notably Irish, Polish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants. They were not accepted mostly due to some intersectional aspect, like their language, culture or religion — particularly Catholicism and their non-acceptance was often regarded in racial terms that were extensions of terms reserved for blacks like ‘white n****r’.
Some of these discriminated European immigrant cultures have a history of marching alongside black and brown people for Civil Rights, but as they eventually became accepted and assimilated into white ‘American’ culture their participation in the Civil Rights movement dropped off and became a shadow of its former glory.
In every culture around the world where there is an oppressive majority caste system based demographic, there is a natural desire among the minority demographics to ‘fit in’ to escape their oppression. There is a tendency to ‘show out’ to the hegemony by demonstrating they are every bit capable of imitating the worst instincts and impulses of the hegemony to prove themselves worthy of assimilation, and it eventually worked as long as there was sufficient cultural or physical affinity.
As an example, even Black folks have been guilty of ‘showing out’ throughout history in the light-skinned/House Negro vs. dark-skinned/Field Negro dynamic. However, Black folks could never and will never fully integrate with the white hegemony no matter what they do. They could only at best, earn honorary whiteness based on some intersection of class, wealth, intelligence, or degree of cultural assimilation.
One notable example is the curious story of Sarah Rector, a black girl who struck oil on land that she inherited from her Creek ancestors:
As news of Rector's wealth spread worldwide, she received requests for loans, money gifts, and marriage proposals, though she was only 11 years old. Due to her wealth, in 1913, the Oklahoma Legislature made an effort to have her declared an honorary white, allowing her the benefits of elevated social standing, such as riding in a first-class car on the trains.
These young white gay men and women of the latest generation are no strangers to this social dynamic — they are ‘showing out’ to the American right wing white Christian hegemony in the absence of their understanding of the pain and suffering that the old LGBQT guard endured that resulted in the Civil Rights victories that these young adults now take for granted in hopes of being fully assimilated by virtue of being white.
Little do they understand how deeply entrenched religious bigotry is in America — particularly because too many American Christians do not have the progressive view of the Bible where Jesus nullifies the stoning of gays to death in the Old Testament.
As a result, they will only be honorary whites at best as long as there is political gain to be had from their political exploitation. For many of them, just being honorary whites is good enough, despite it being nothing more than a Stockholm Syndrome relationship. This is self evident in the existence of the Log Cabin Republicans and in despite of their rejection by their own party, and it is self evident in the Alt-Right.
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