This is originally from an entry on my Medium blog
As another Pride month comes to a close, I’d like to spill my thoughts on a long-polarizing topic within the LGBTQ community: Allies
…or, as I prefer to call them: “All-Lies.”
Why do I call them “All-Lies”? Well, my view of the general presence of“All-Lies” in the LGBTQ community can kinda be summed up by this:
Here, we have a straight, cisgender (from what I gathered by his Twitter feed) couple visiting an LGBTQ event (San Francisco Pride 2016) and basically opting to…well, do that. After just a day or so, he deleted the original tweet because he couldn’t handle the backlash, but stood firm that people were making a big deal out of nothing, because of course he did. Now, I could deep-dive into the racial aspect of a white woman feeling so entitled to a (visibly) Black man that she grabbed a handful of his crotch without his consent (i.e. sexual assault), even knowing that he had the authority to haul her off to jail if he wanted to — and of course, he didn’t, because Black man and white woman— but that’s not the point of this piece.
I wanna first address you cisgender, heterosexual (cishet) people who like to visit our spaces and show your entire ass. This kind of behavior is reflective of a long-running issue that many LGBTQ people have seen with cishet folks (particularly women) who come into queer spaces and events. While many cishet people visit LGBTQ venues out of genuine support and “allyship” for their queer and trans friends, a lot of cishet women have taken to these spaces, as they’ve found that the lack of cishet men grants them a certain amount of safety that they often don’t find in hetero-centered spaces — i.e. the comfort of being able to freely dance with your friends however you want without having to worry about man forcing himself on you when that’s not the kind of attention you’re looking for. This is all perfectly understandable…however, a lot of y’all have taken that freedom and safety, along with your straight, cis (and in most cases, white) privilege, and often opt to use our spaces as your personal playground to completely center yourselves, to the detriment of the queer people, whose safety these spaces are supposed to be centered around. For another example of this, see bachelorette parties.
Of course, the men aren’t off the hook, here…not by a long shot. First…
The rest of this entry can be read in the original post on Medium >>>
