Bristol Pride Sponsored By PricewaterhouseCooper, or: Pete Buttigieg Isn't Gay, And That Explains Everything

I

Lads. I've got a scoop. This is the big one. This is what catapults me into the major leagues. I'll have NYT articles casting me as the doyen of the new 'roadman left', which is exactly the same as the regular left except sometimes we say 'pussyhole'; it's all very vulgar, in both senses of the word, and VERY subversive. We're really shifting some paradigms out here. I'll supplant Ash Sarkar as the official one (1) Commie of Colour that you're allowed to see on the TV. It's gonna be a madness.

Anyway. Listen. Here's the tea, sweeties: Brands have co-opted Pride in order to sell shit.

I know, I know. "How did you figure out something so incredibly not-obvious? No one's been pointing that out on Twitter???" Well, my dears, it all came to me last year.

I was invited to spend Pride with my friends in Bristol. I'd never been to a Pride event before, and I wasn't really sure what to expect. I was aware that it probably wasn't gonna be like that one Onion article, but - what if it was? My suspicions were heightened when my friend insisted that I wear a nice colourful shirt instead of my traditional all-black-and-maybe-a-football-shirt attire. "Surely there are queer goths, right?" I thought to myself. "Do they have to be colourful too?" Trans rights and everything, yeah, but I was baitly the real victim here.

We arrived at the parade, sufficiently colourful and glittered, and waited around in a park. It was there that I had my breakthrough. As someone on the edge of acceptability (A Straight At Pride), I did the only logical thing and picked on the one thing that seemed more out of place than me - brands. There were way too many, in my defence. First Santander, who had coloured their stylised flame symbol in the traditional rainbow. Fine, whatever. Then PricewaterhouseCooper, doing the same to the three letters in their logo. Was no one else seeing this, I thought to myself? Then my friend pointed out his previous employers, the National Trust were there. "THE NATIONAL TRUST????" I exploded. "That institution that didn't pay you for months, right? I sure do love to see relevant brands at Pride! When I think of the LGBTQIA+ struggle my mind immediately darts towards the fucking National Trust!" I'm paraphrasing, but you see my desperation in trying to prove that these brands did not belong (and by extension, that I did). Anyway, in a twist pulled directly from the most upsetting episode of Peep Show or The Inbetweeners, it turned out the National Trust group were directly behind me. All I could bring myself to see was some poor girl holding a banner on the verge of tears. I turned 360 and speedwalked away as fast I could.

The parade was not the shameless display of debauchery and hedonism I feared, obviously. We kinda just walked in a circle around Bristol slowly dying of heatstroke. My mission, however, was clear - I had to be the one to expose the cruel injustice of capitalism slowly getting its hands on people it had marginalised for decades. Then I forgot about it for a year. Now Pride Month has come and gone again. A friend pointed out that there are still Pride Parades happening, though, so this is super timely fuck you.

II

I hope it's clear that I am aware this take lacks the requisite Scovilles to explode into the heights of the blogosphere. Everyone knows brands are co-opting Pride. My point is something slightly different. You see, as a nominal leftist my default analysis of "Brands at Pride" is that the brands don't belong. I'm predisposed to see capitalism as unending fuckeries, because it is. But what if the real fuckeries was me???

Check this post on Reddit. They're sick of socialists at Pride, not brands. I had not, for one second, considered that a single member of the queer community might resent the encroachment of weird Marxist politics into their lives. Then it all ACTUALLY came to me. Of course there are boring neoliberal trans people! Why did I think any different? This only makes my outburst last year all the worse - not only was I transparently trying to fit in, and incredibly rude, I was needlessly economising something that didn't need economising.

III

This is a common mistake on the left, not just in my Internet-addled brain. It's a sort of essentialism, where you decide that because someone belongs to a certain set, they HAVE to exhibit certain traits. Here I've decided that if you're queer you're automatically socialist, but it comes in other flavours. If you read at some point on the blog that I'm black and assumed I was a poor grime fan instead of a middle-class indie-boy, you've done an essentialism. There's a particularly amazing reddit thread from a few months back that I want to draw attention to because it highlights exactly how batshit essentialism can get if you take it to its logical conclusion.

The OP is upset because her mother-in-law does all the cooking and washing up when her and her boyfriend come over, so what does she do? If you answered "treat all parties like people instead of abstracts," you lose! She starts off by asking "why don't we all help clean up?" which is perfectly reasonable, then follows up with "I mean, it's pretty sexist to expect the woman to do all the work while the men have a drink." Now, let's be clear: that's actually true. If that's the divison of labour with no other thought put into it than WOMAN CLEAN AND MAN WHISKEE then that's a bit fucked. But, once again, here's the tea: they're specific people that she can talk to. The mum is ostensibly fine with it (the joke she makes might be covering for untold years of sexism but we don't know that), and I'd say the boyfriend is more upset with the fact that after he specifically told her that his family is fine with the division she had to go and bring it up again. It's also important to note that the point of her objection was to redress some abstract gender balance, rather than, you know, actually improve things for the mother. How do we know that there isn't a problem, but now the mum's been called out in front of the patriarch, and now can't be honest? She could've really endangered the mother if things were as bad as she thought, but instead it was imperative that someone (an omnipotent entity that will tell her she's good, perhaps?) saw her Doing The Right Thing.

This obsession with being right (which, I can't stress enough, she might be) over doing good is causing real problems, both on the big stage (c.f. Kamala Harris is objectively terrible but she fits in the sets Black and Woman so she must be on our team), and in our personal lives (poor OP really doesn't understand why failing to trust her boyfriend about his own family is any kind of problem). I've already explained that I'm against the current trend towards identity politics on the left, and this is one of the reasons why: you end up refusing to believe people are specific people, kettling them into performing whatever identity you want, whatever actions you want, because that's what That Kind Of Person does.

IV

OK, so the second part of the title. You seen this hot take that 'Pete Buttigieg isn't actually gay' floating around on Twitter over the past few months? Let's unpack that a little.

We are fundamentally in two different Americas: the one where Pete Buttigieg isn't gay enough because he didn't meet his husband on Grindr, and the one where in 29 states you can still be fired for being gay.

— Dana Schwartz (@DanaSchwartzzz) April 9, 2019

There's a lot of stuff going on in this article, entitled 'Why Pete Buttigieg is bad for gays,' but the problem at its core is a misunderstanding of who's on your team and who isn't. We start off with this whole section devoted to noting the similarities between Buttigieg and the writer, Jacob Bacharach.

"That is to say, I see a lot of my own most embarrassing qualities in Mayor Pete, as he is known. We are almost precisely the same age, 37. We occupy the same broad economic position, that 10 percent of the population who sit just below the fabulously rich. (Alone calls this lot the Aspirational 14%, by the way, and they are fabulous marks for all kinds of nonsense.) We grew up in similar social and economic milieus in the greater Midwest... I can almost guarantee that he would have called his family “upper middle class,” as I called mine for many years before I figured out just how far to the right side of the national income distribution curve we really sat. We are both white. We are both gay."

Why is Jacob doing this? The clue is the first sentence - "my most embarrassing qualities." Jacob isn't bragging, he's apologising. I've decided to call this the 'penitence of the privileged,' and it explains everything.

V

So, 'penitence of the privileged.' What did he mean by this? Well, in part V of Anyone Else Remember Atheism Plus? I try and elucidate this phenomenon, which I see all the time, but that I've only just named. It's probably too obvious to have a name, but philosophers have done much worse for ideas that explain much less. The idea is that when someone is objectively in a position of power, they will do all they can to make it seem like they aren't. Alone is constantly going on about people taking the trappings of power instead of power itself, but this is the inverse; you must rebuke the trappings of power while keeping the power. You see it when white Midwesterners make a huge deal out of the fact that they're 1/googolth Native American (i.e. I'm just as affected by racism as you!); you see it when Anthony Wedgewood Benn, 2nd Viscount Stansgate, insisted upon being called Tony and renounces his peerage - the trappings of power, House of Lords bows to the Commons and has done for about a hundred years - so he could continue being an MP - actual power; you see it when I pretend I use any slang in my common parlance so I can seem less posh. Tony Benn's example is especially wonderful because his son is now 3rd Viscount Stansgate and not an MP, thus allowing some kind of power to remain in the family. I'm not knocking his socialist bona fides (I am), I'm just saying it's interesting.

The reason is, of course, social standing - coolness. Not only is it morally wrong to oppress people, it's simply not cool to be the oppressor. You'd think power would be cool, right? The ability to affect proceedings in your favour should be valued socially and yet I really don't think it is. Simply perform a social experiment by suggesting that you're a Tory in any group of university students and see what happens. Of course this is a primary left-of-centre concern, because:

1. we're the ones most frequently out of power :(
2. a lot of right-wing thought is predicated upon preserving hierarchy, i.e. the position of the powerful, so why would they care about accidentally looking powerful? 

The interesting thing here is that the modern right, not necessarily alt-right (that shit's basically dead now anyway, right?), but definitely alt- and Fox-influenced right, perform the penitence of the privileged while chastising lefties for "making" them perform the penitence of the privileged. "I can't even be a Tory on campus!" says this one cunt who goes to my uni. You'd be hated even if you weren't a Tory from what I've heard, sweetheart, allow yourself. "The American way of life is under threat from the coastal elites, and why must we constantly apologise for the Atlantic slave trade?" says the kind of person, probably from the Yeoman South (which I rate much higher than the Plantation South, but nonetheless they fit the stereotype), that would doubtless love to regale you with tales of the noble Native heritage in her family. "i AM owned, i AM owned," the Kekistani cries out in pain, as he strikes at you the same way he thinks Jews do. The key is that you know they're oppressed, and therefore deserving of not just respect, but personhood. If you need any more proof that today's right are just upset lefties after last time, here's yet another tactic they've brought over with them.

Not revelant, this is just to break up the wall of text :)

I want to stress that this runs deeper than 'whoever has a majority of the House of Commons/Representatives/Bundestag/whatever your dumb country has isn't rated'. It does not become cool to be a Tory when they aren't in power; the distate is a deep structural understanding of who has true power and who doesn't. The point is, we, as leftists, hate oppressors, so much so that we won't hesitate to joke about killing them (but secretly mean it). It's a tradition that stretches back to at least the French Revolution (a liberal revolution, not leftist, I know, don't start, it's not my fault Yanks use the terms interchangeably), and you can see how that puts you in a weird position that means if you end up in the position of power you must immediately disavow it, lest you be stripped of all empathy. "Where are you going with this?" I'm sorry, I've been cider-drunk for the past month, and contrary to Alone's great writing and his love of rum-drinking, it has not exactly done wonders for my cognitive ability, which is hazy at the best of times. Luckily for you, much like a Thelonious Monk solo piano piece, I seem messy and unfocused, but really I'm incredibly smart and also pretty. We were talking about Pete, weren't we?

VI

I contend that the reason Jacob Bacharach is so quick to disparage Pete Buttigieg is because it makes it harder for him to perform the penitence of the privileged. Here is someone who ticks all the same identity boxes as you, and someone who is therefore the same person as you if you follow the essentialist logic from part III, and he's... boring and centrist? What does that say about you? Are you a boring centrist too? That's not cool!

Let's address centrist first. It's just part II but again. Just because you're gay and also a socialist of whatever shade of red, doesn't mean ALL gays are. It's not essential to the characterisation. When Bacharach says "Pete Buttigieg will be bad for gays," - or when his editor, thirstily fishing for clicks, titles his piece that - what he means is "Pete Buttigieg will be bad for the type of gay leftist I am." Attacking Pete for not being far left enough is ridiculous. As he states, he just wants normal conservative things like a house and a partner, and he did/does normal conservative things like go to college, join the army, and get married. He's a milquetoast centrist Democrat, and has never claimed to be anything else. You can't get angry at him for being a bad member of your team because he's not on your team. You SHOULD be mad at Liz Warren, who has positioned herself as a Bernie-esque critic of big banks and champion of the poor, but is actually a milquetoast centrist Democrat. People who vote for Pete know what they're getting - a conservative gay who brands himself as smart and who will change nothing but is less outwardly fucking gross than Drumpf. People who vote for Warren WANT what Bernie's selling but are going to end up with a Pete-esque policy platform, a sour taste in the mouth, and a distrust of future socialist candidates.

This is also why, I think, intersectionality does so poorly in the real world - you, learned sociology student person who goes on Twitter from time to time, understand that various minority groups are all oppressed in ways that, yknow, intersect, but people don't necessarily see the world like that. If you probe my father on issues facing the black community, for example, he will speak passionately and empathetically, but ask him about women and watch him turn into a regressive conservative (small c, he refuses to vote Tory after the whole ghastly Rivers of Blood affair, but he did tell me last time I went home that he rates Michael Gove so I'm not optimistic for the future). I mean, fuck, ask him about any other minority ethnic group than Caribbean and watch him turn into a regressive conservative. Some of the things that man has said about the Tamil population in my hometown (Other Asian = Sri Lankan, really) are unrepeatable, and I've said nigger on this blog before. He doesn't even rate Africans, really. And yet, it's foolish for me to get angry about him being a 'bad minority' because he's not on my team. Minorities aren't on my team because they're minorities; leftists are on my team because they're leftists and actually think the same as me. "So you're saying you hate minorities?" I was gonna say, no, of course not, but honestly, if they're Tory scum, yeah? You better believe I'll spark Kwasi Kwarteng if I see him in ends (note: neither of us live in ends). I despise Chuka Ummuna and he's only a Lib Dem (this week, anyway). The sooner you realise you're beefing the wrong people in the most inefficient, ineffectual ways, the sooner we can get down to actually getting rid of the Conservatives/the Republicans/etc.

*looks at alt-right board for 1st time*

getting white kids to think about their whiteness & not their class position has backfired horribly

— Connor Kilpatrick (@ckilpatrick) June 16, 2017

Now, the more interesting problem, in my opinion: Pete's BORING. Why does that matter?

VII

LGBTetc people are countercultural. That tends to happen when the culture you're countering would kill you if they knew who you were. However, if you're black you're always very obviously black. That's the thought behind that Malcolm X quote "What does a white man call a black man with a Ph.D.? A nigger with a Ph.D."

Quick tangent - the article I stole that from continues "I wanted to hold a disagreeable mirror up to white readers [of philosophy] and ask that they take a long, hard look without fleeing." You fucking moron, we're all narcissists, that's literally our favourite thing to do as a culture. "Oh no, PLEASE don't make me take a good hard look at myself (and change nothing lol). Anything but the brier patch mirror, my woke kween!" This is just your daily reminder that pretty much all the rhetoric you see around race, gender, etc, is a grift from the professional journalist class. A normal black person does not want you to look in a mirror, they would like to not fear death when they get pulled over. They would like there to be job opportunities other than gangbanging, selling dope, or betting on the 4pm. There's a difference.

ANYWAY, unlike being a black, being gay is something you could theoretically hide 90% of the time, and therefore culture sprung up around the secrecy - certain symbols (earring on a side, a carnation) were used to say 'I'm gay' without saying 'I'm gay,' because that would get you killed, institutions like gay bars provided a much needed community space, and so on. Unfortunately, secrets, and symbols you have to be part of a special club to understand, and magical buildings where crazy stuff happens and you are finally free, are cool. Counterculture is cool, partly for those reasons, and partly because if being the oppressor isn't cool, being oppressed is.

The result of all this is that "being gay" and "being cool and countercultural" are inextricably linked, one is essential for the other, and I honestly kind of mean that in both directions, c.f. the state of me at pride, feeling even more uncool than usual. You can probably see where this is going. Poor Pete, with his long term partner to whom he is betrothed, normal white picket house, and such, is incredibly uncool, and since being cool is a requirement for being gay, Pete cannot be gay. This is the logic that allows you to write brain-diseased things like "Heterosexuality Without Women." Note how if you replace whiteness, heterosexuality, or any other majority identity trait with 'lameness,' the article still scans. It's also why some lady on twitter said she was "culturally gay" a couple months back. She got completely cancelled for it, but what she meant was she was cool. That also forms the logic behind this joke:

Rachel Dolezal just announced she's bisexual despite never having dated a woman, and I think it's so cool she's finally accepted that she's white

— Rachel McCartney (@RachelMComedy) June 23, 2019

"Explain the joke?" says Beth McColl in the replies, instead of calling it out with her chest like a big girl - I really do hate the fact that everything has to be 'not a good look' or 'rethought' rather than fucking trash like how you mean, by the way. "just a *slight* tap on the shoulder!" you lot say, like the pussyholes (look, my catchphrase!) you are. Well, here's your explanation: if being gay is a cool subculture, that thankfully no longer puts you in danger of getting killed, then as Hotel Concierge explains here, the "most casual people that the culture’s definition allows" will be the newest recruits. "If the culture is defined as “people who go to punk rock shows”, then most newcomers will be, “people who went to Warped Tour once and moshed to Asking Alexandria.” Why? Because there are more of them." If the culture is "LGBT" then most newcomers will be "people who made out with someone of the same sex a couple times." Why? Because there are more of them. The joke is simply that a lot of white women aren't 'hardcore gay' enough. That they're just poseurs. As with the Reddit example from what probably feels like aeons ago but was actually part III of this very post, I want to make clear that as combative as I am, I'm woke, and that this joke isn't true. People can have valid sexualities that don't map perfectly. You can be bi and with only a guy, you can be bi and be with only a girl, indeed if you're monogamous that's the ONLY way you can be bi and with someone. Things are fluid and can change, yadda yadda, as we've established I'm not the person to be making these arguments. What I will say is that the same applies to Pete. He's attracted to men, he's fucking married to one, you don't get to kick him out of the club because he's not hardcore enough.

VIII

Pete knows them man think this way, by the way, which makes him smarter than I thought. He knows that being gay and being counterculture are conjoined in America, as they are across the globe to different extents. Look:

"Back then I would have believed that you could either be gay or you could be married. Not both. That if you were gay, you could either be out, or you could run for office. Not both. That in our country you could live with a same-sex partner or you could serve in the military. Not both."

Translation: "I didn't know you could be BORING and gay. Fuck, man, that was close, I thought I'd have to wear bright pink and suck dildos along South Bend Main Street or something."

Bacharach closes his article by saying this: "But it is hard to escape the way that American capitalism and American democracy have worked in tandem both to dissipate and to assimilate the radical democratic energies of queer liberation by giving a very circumscribed sort of gay a conditional membership to the club."

He's nearly there - the enemy is capital and not 'bad gays'. There are loads of perfectly reasonable non-"he's not gay enough" reasons to avoid Buttigieg (look, here are some now), and those will have to be what you use to fight him, because, unfortunately, this is exactly what all the radical queer liberationists fought for. You don't have to hide being gay anymore, you don't have to wall yourself off from mainstream society, but what that now means is you can't be cool simply by being gay. Don't tear your hair out wondering why gay people aren't Marxist enough, aren't cool enough; they don't have to be your political allies, your mates, just 'cause you both like dick. You get to choose who you hang with, who you organise with, by the content of their character, rather than the colour of their skin or the way that they swing. If you want your politics to function more like an exclusionary social club, then, by all means, continue to refer to Pete as not really gay. If you want to affect change, then, for the love of God, fucking fix up.