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Re: The Left Needs to Come Clean - The LGBQT Community Has Shown Us The Way [1]
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Date: 2025-09-14
Since there are some people in the Kos community who take offense to my earlier diary and are missing the greater point that I am trying to make, here are a couple articles that back assertions in my earlier diary to prove this is a real concern.
As these articles will explain, gay white men have played a significant role in the Alt-Right movement in inflicting the greatest damage when it comes to drawing young white men away from the Democratic Party. The extent of this damage has yet to be fully assessed.
My point is that we need to acknowledge this reality and what it means. What this means is America needs a much more nuanced perspective of politics: that minorities are not monoliths.
Even a small percentage of any minority group belonging to the Right can have a destructive effect on the Left as these articles will show.
These destructive members of historically marginalized minority groups — whether LGBQT, black, latino/hispanic, neurodivergent etc. — ANY one of every minority group — should not be allowed to hide under the cloak of the popular but false assumption or prejudice that they are members of the Left, whether liberal, progressive, or the Democratic Party.
This false popular assumption that minorities are a monolith is the driving force behind the Right wing’s mass hysteria to eliminate the Left.
To allow these destructive minority members to hide behind the popular false assumption that minorities are a monolith is dangerous, and even fatal to the progressive movement — we must begin speak up and teach the American public that not every shooter who turns out to be gay is a Left winger. Not every minority shooter is a Left winger either, because minorities are not monoliths.
This is an outdated perspective that is based on Civil Rights Era framing and language, and it should have been left behind in the 20th century — remind America that the Democratic Party hasn’t always been friendly to the LGBTQ community in its passage of DOMA and DADT. Point out that the Great Replacement Theory — the driving force of the global white supremacist movement — was coined by a gay white man.
The right wing has evolved to co-opt the language of the Civil Rights movement, turning our strength into a weakness — casting themselves as the victim of ‘anti-white oppression’ to great effect in their use of our own Civil Rights era arguments against us to dilute its effect on the court of public opinion.
The 21st century solution to this problem is to evolve as well by changing our language by claiming the authority of the founding principles of this country — inalienable individual rights.
The LGBTQ movement has shown us the way and demonstrated this point in its use of legal precedent that the black Civil Rights movement argued in court to win their freedom, because it was an inalienable rights argument.
This is the path forward into the 21st century because it is not only an appeal to authority on the strength of the founding ideals of this country, it is also a bridge that connects every American citizen by teaching them that EVERYONE benefits when any minority’s rights are protected.
The current Civil Rights era framing and language fails in the 21st century because feeds into the dangerous public perception that minorities are monoliths. When someone says ‘black rights’ or ‘gay rights’ a lot of people who aren’t black or gay feel alienated. It is bad marketing that feeds an impression that the Left is ‘anti-white’ , ‘anti-majority’ among uninitiated political observers and where the Right is drawing their strength.
Think of how ‘White Lives Matter’ got ahold of a lot of middle of the road white people who would have otherwise been allies of Black Lives Matter. Bad Marketing.
Learn to say ‘inalienable individual rights’ instead — it is the exact same thing but with a more uniting connotation. It forces America to determine the motives of minorities as individuals instead of an example for an entire movement or party.
And especially when a shooter happens to be a minority.
Tyler Robinson may or not be gay and his roommate may or may not be transgender.
Even if it turns out to be a false alarm, it could happen one day.
When it does happen we need to be ready to get in front of it more effectively, as this is an existential threat for the entire Left as well as the American experiment if we don’t counter this effectively.
Fear of a “great replacement” lurks in the consciousness of the growing far right and fascist movements of the West. It was there motivating Anders Breivik’s terrorist attack in Norway in 2011, and again at the 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi demonstrations in the infamous slogan “Jews will not replace us.” And it was there in the Pittsburgh massacre, the Christchurch massacre, the El Paso massacre. In the wake of these events, the slogan keeps popping up in the U.S. and international news and with it the name of its author, Renaud Camus.
Why is far-right ideology taking hold in LGBT+ communities?
According to a 2020 study conducted by the Williams Institute, approximately 9 million LGBT adults are registered voters, 15% of which are Republican and only 50% are Democrats. Like my recent peer reviewed journal article in Sexualities, some of the findings of this report make sense, while others seem to contradict conventional wisdom about the individuals so studied. For instance, sexual orientation is considered an insignificant part of identity for LGBT+ Republicans, yet 38% of this sample thought being an LGBT was a personal shortcoming. This recent report highlights a significant divide that has existed and persists within the LGBT+ community — whether we have moved beyond the shared experience of marginalization that gave rise to the movement, or if we have entered into a “post-gay” era. However, gay men have played a pivotal role in promoting some of the most discussed topics in conservative politics — including an idea known as “the great replacement” theory.
It may shock readers to learn that a gay French socialite and artist named Renaud Camus coined the “Great Replacement” theory, an idea which has been promoted in far right circles. The gist of the “Great Replacement” is the idea that whites are being replaced at a rate such that they will be the minority by 2050; and moreover, that liberal politicians are attempting to accelerate this “replacement” through liberal immigration policies. Camus has been photographed proudly marching alongside Neo-Nazis, making him an even more bizarre figure than openly gay conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
While the gay and LGBT+ community may seem like an odd place for the seeds of right-wing extremism to take root and sprout, the culture that has been built post-Stonewall is one that has been increasingly commodified and, as such, increasingly exclusive. An additional mechanism that has allowed far-right ideology to seep into the gay community comes, ironically, from the successes of the gay rights movement in promoting gay marriage. The term post-gay was used initially by Paul Burston, a British News Journalist, who, when interviewed, said he “meant it tongue-in-cheek, not in the way it has been taken recently.” The term was later used by several high-profile figures, including an interview with James Collard in Out magazine who used the term to divorce himself from political ideology. In a post-gay era, brought on by the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, they argue that one’s sexuality is distinct from one’s politics.
This is also a good paper:
In Love with Masculinity — Understanding Gay Men In The Alt right
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