A Rainbow Whopper Is Exactly What Gay Liberation Is, Actually

To celebrate gay pride month
(technically June, but stuff tends to happen all summer anyway) a
Burger King in San Francisco started selling something called a

“Proud Whopper.” It was just a regular Whopper in a
rainbow-colored wrapper. There was nothing different about the
burger. Inside the wrapper, a message read “We are all the same
inside.” We are all delicious hamburgers! No, we’re all the same
people inside. It was kind of a weird message because most gay
folks are “the same” on the outside, too. But anyway. Burger King
produced a little video about it and it went modestly viral.

Periodically, whenever a major business takes a hankering to
marketing to the gays, there is an outrage, and not just from the
religious right. Those guys get outraged about all things gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or even just friendly smiles from
straight allies. No, sometimes outrage comes from certain folks on
the old guard left who, despite having lived through it, don’t seem
to have a good understanding of where gay liberation was actually
going and are shocked that the parade didn’t end with the
dismantling of the capitalist economy and full-throated embrace of
progressive politics by all gay people.

This time outrage duty fell on Julie Bindel, in The
Guardian. The headline and subhead annoy from the very start:
“The Proud Whopper? This is not the gay liberation we fought for:
The gay community has bought into marriage, babies and big business
at huge cost to its radical potential.”
What radical potential is she going on about?

The gay community used to be defined by politics, but lesbians
and gay men no longer share a political base – only, in some
quarters, a social one. Rather than meeting on the picket line, we
meet on a commercialised social scene, in clubs often owned by
straight entrepreneurs, or at the annual gay and lesbian wedding
show.

Saying the gay community was “defined by politics” is a bit
vague. The gay community was defined because of politics,
as in politicians and government force denying gays their rights.
She seems to think that the only reason gay activists from the time
were considered radical is self-identification. That’s nonsense.
Certainly many (even most) gay activists like saw themselves as
radical, but it ignores the fact that those with the power—the
government, the police, the politicians—cast gays as radicals and
dangerous. The government considered the gay person living quietly,
peacefully at home just as radical and dangerous (if not more so!)
than the ones organizing in community centers and marching on
police stations or government buildings.

Because Bindel sees herself as a radical and probably found
herself surrounded with similar folks during her life as an
activist, she has mistakenly come to a conclusion of what the gay
experience is or supposed to be. She seems to think that “radical”
and “gay” are supposed to be synonymous:

This deradicalised version of gay life revolves around marriage,
babies and mortgages. Many gays have kidded themselves that bigger
and richer sponsors for our Pride events and charities means
acceptance rather than acquiescence; that it is a sign we are
reaching full equality.

But how can we be liberated when there are still daily attacks
on gay people, and when the school playground remains, in many
ways, hostile to gay pupils? Just last week a YouGov poll,
commissioned by Stonewall, found that 86% of secondary school
teachers had witnessed homophobic bullying.

Holy crap, those goalposts zipped by so quickly, they left
behind a cartoon-style puff of smoke. Gay liberation was once about
being treated as equal by the government under the law and not
being beaten by police in raids, getting hauled off to jail,
getting humiliated in the newspaper, and losing jobs. Now gays
aren’t liberated as long as some kid is getting bullied? That
appears to me to be a definition of liberation that can never
actually come to pass. And what does it have to do with Burger King
or gay marriage? For that matter, what does it have to do with
being “radical”?

It is hardly surprising that we sometimes appreciate being
targeted by big business. Gay men, in particular, tend to have more
disposable income than their heterosexual counterparts, and while
there has been a baby boom in the gay community as a whole, the
majority of lesbians still don’t have children, so potentially have
more money to spend on luxury items such as exotic holidays and
expensive clothing.

…

Even pregnancy and childbirth have become commercialised. In
recent years a huge amount of money has been spent by lesbians and
gay men on embryos, sperm, IVF and surrogacy services. Now that we
are indivisible from straight people – at least those who marry and
have children – banks are targeting us to help increase their
profits. Last year, a cosy lesbian couple featured in one of
NatWest’s adverts, showing just how important our spending
potential is.

Some will hail all this as a great stride forward, an indication
that we are now so mainstream that even banks represent us
respectfully. But this is about equity, not equality.

Lesbians and gay men have accepted a fake, highly limited
liberation which involves spending and sponsorship, and embraces
the notion of inviting church and state back into our relationships
(preferably monogamous, with mortgages and babies). In the radical
days of the Gay Liberation Front, both lesbians and gay men wanted
to abolish marriage, not be invited to join this oppressive,
patriarchal regime. As Jill Tweedie wrote in this newspaper in
1971, Gay Lib does not plead for the right of homosexuals to marry,
“Gay Lib questions marriage”.

I know her questioning of state-controlled marriage will
resonate with many libertarians of all orientations, but her
definition of what is real liberation and fake liberation is not
based on equality or liberty. Her idea of the pursuit of happiness
is “the pursuit of what I tell you is supposed to make you happy.”
Her idea of “liberation” is really about instilling a new
orthodoxy, not eliminating it.

And she’s entirely wrong to say that what “lesbians and gay
wanted” was to abolish marriage. Again, she only sees the community
she was directly a part of and not the larger picture—as in, all
those gays and lesbians who were still in the closet or who didn’t
move out to the big cities and were, in fact, never radical.

Guess what? Those gays and lesbians are no longer in the closet.
And they are not and never were the radical anti-capitalist,
anti-business leftists that certain activists always thought they
would be. Burger King is right. Gay people are just like everybody
else. And most everybody else doesn’t want to abolish marriage or
think that the exchange of goods and services is a massive plot to
keep us all down. She continues:

What would real gay liberation look like? Marriage would be
abolished for all in favour of something based on equality and next
of kin rights rather than ownership and tax avoidance. Gay men and
lesbians alike would challenge a culture and politics based on
consumerism, and would speak out against the misogyny that confines
both groups to stereotypes. And we would look beyond the picket
fence and rejoin the picket lines in protest about the ongoing
oppression and anti-gay bigotry we still face, despite legislative
equality.

This isn’t “gay liberation.” This is the answer to the question,
“What does Julie Bindel think gay people should believe in?”
Because the larger gay population does not (and probably never did)
share Bindel’s larger values, she doesn’t grasp that there has been
no selling out. This is what many wanted all along. The label of
“radical” was forced on everybody included in the LGBT acronym by
the state. It didn’t mean everybody saw himself or herself that
way. Bindel’s failure to grasp that we don’t all share the same
goals or politics and never did pushes her into this space of
denying the agency of gay people everywhere. We’ve been “sold a
dream of marriages and babies” as though it we didn’t actually want
it. We were tricked by evil banks and businesses!

But it’s simply not true. Freedom means gay people can decide
what sort of relationships they want. Those who always dreamed
about getting married can have those dreams. Those who don’t want
to embrace the state’s classification of relationships don’t have
to. That’s liberation. What Bindel cannot grasp that being gay is
not radical, despite the fact that this was the argument coming
from the gay and lesbian community for decades now. She asks, “What
happened to that early radicalism?”

We won. That’s what happened.