With income disparity at play, queer people need help just to make ends meet. A 2016 survey from Prudential Financial finds that LGBTQ respondents experience an income gap “linked to both gender identity and sexual orientation,” with men making more than women but gay men and lesbians receiving, on average, less than their straight counterparts. One of the best ways to ensure an LGBTQ person’s livelihood is through direct financial support. So being a good LGBTQ ally isn’t so much about slapping rainbow branding onto a product as it is amplifying queer life experiences. Queerness rejects heteronormativity, or “the idea that binary gender identity and heterosexual orientation” are “the norm” for humanity.
In its most rebellious form, our community’s celebrations are also protests that challenge the way straight, cisgender allies think about sex and gender. Pride is a celebration rooted in “radical queer liberation” and “fighting back against the various forces that want to erase or exterminate queer lives,” Diavolo says. “Being queer is about joy, but that joy is often tempered by a great deal of pain it is through that bitterness that the sweetness is that much sweeter.” So when I see corporations or big-name artists trying to tap into some sanitized version of my identity that’s only about the fun parts, I feel alienated and that huge parts of my experience are erased,” Diavolo tells Vox. “As a queer trans woman, my life is often misery. Teen Vogue’s politics news editor Lucy Diavolo - also the co-founder of the Trans-Feminine Alliance of Chicago, a discussion group for transgender women and gender-nonconforming people who identify as transfeminine - stresses to Vox that advertisers are obsessed with “rainbows, glitter, and unicorns as marketing props,” which feel like disingenuous depictions of a community that still lives on society’s fringes.
In a world where corporations like Budweiser proudly “fly the flag for bi pride” and Converse sells the trans flag on a pair of $80 Chucks, Swift is just another figure donning rainbow garb to sell queer people something unnecessary so she can turn a profit.Īs a queer trans woman who has covered LGBTQ politics for five years, I would argue that such behavior isn’t empowering to the LGBTQ community it’s objectifying. While some saw the rainbow-colored, cake-fighting, gay tea party as bringing queer visibility to the masses, others saw another pop star playing around with queer imagery without talking much about LGBTQ people’s actual lives.Īs Vox’s Rebecca Jennings points out, while Swift’s song looks like a “powerful example of allyship” on the surface - and does include a call to sign a petition in support of the Equality Act - her queer-signaling outfit, slew of LGBTQ celebrity cameos, and outdated parodies of homophobes are all examples of safe messaging during Pride Month. When Taylor Swift dropped her music video for “ You Need to Calm Down” earlier this week, she set the LGBTQ community ablaze. There are two kinds of “allies”: those who lift up the queer community, and those who seem most concerned with lifting up themselves.