Democrats Will Never Be Queer Allies

 Election season really does bring the very worst out of everyone and, as if Queer people don't have it hard enough, this election season had to collide with Pride Month, putting us right smack in the middle of the fucking circus. For the Republicans this means lighting their torches and sharpening their pitchforks so they can chase us around for a while in front of the cameras. Florida Governor and professional Ronald Reagen impersonator Ron DeSantis rejuvenated his fag-bashing blue collar street cred by attacking the admittedly odd spectacle of family friendly drag shows as child endangerment and calling on parents who engage in such G-rated Disneyfied camp to be hunted down by Child Protective Services.

Not to be beat by the Texas GOP, who used the month of Stonewall as an excuse to rev up the engines of their pick-up trucks with a new party platform declaring that "homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice" and reiterating their opposition to "all efforts to validate transgender identity" in language so unhinged from reality that it would give early-nineties-era Pat Buchanan a rager. Those self-loathing closet cowboys seem to be just one Austin Pride Parade away from climbing a clocktower and declaring the murder of Matthew Shepard a state holiday to prove their cis hetero manhood to daddy.

This is all part of a multi-year campaign by the Republican Party to chum wayward Trump populists without having to give up on forever wars and outsourcing. These neocons achieve this by posing like hip, politically incorrect, edgelords and kicking trans kids who play soccer in the teeth before grabbing their jock and flexing for the Proud Boys. But this year those mouth-foaming curb stompers weren't to be outdone by a Democratic Party equally desperate to appear relevant in an age when they look increasingly like relics. Maybe I'm just a contrarian asshole but the only thing that feels worse than being used as a prop by bigots like Greg Abbot to prove how edgy he is is being used as a prop by bigots like Joe Biden to prove how woke he's suddenly become.

This year, the Democrats celebrated Pride Month by beefing up the police state that failed to take Stonewall from us but somehow hasn't yet failed at winning over the hearts and minds of the GOP-traumatized children of these faggots who whooped their ass back in '69. Kamala Harris got the festivities cooking by revamping Nina Jankowicz's failed Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board as a brand-new rainbow bedazzled "White House Task Force to Adress Online Harassment and Abuse." 

This new Ministry of Information sets itself apart from the last by specifically condemning "gendered disinformation" which according to Kamala basically amounts to insulting anyone with a vagina or anyone who should have been born with one who is vanilla enough to be picked from my tribe to represent us on the Death Star. Her memo specifically singles out women and LGBTQ Americans in positions of public or political leadership, and yes that includes cis gendered serial killers like Hillary Clinton. To top it all off, this whole new woke posse is being co-chaired by none other than those fine drone-jockeys at the National Security Council. 

Joe Biden followed up this stunt by surrounding himself with a Barney-and-Friends-grade funky bunch of diverse, photogenic, Queer children so he could be filmed with them signing his historic "Executive Order on Advancing Equality for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Individuals" (You forgot non-binary furies, asshole!) This word salad of alphabet soup essentially amounts to the old man instructing various federal bureaucracies to look into GOP legislative hate crimes and wag their fingers at them. Joe ended his little virtue signaling serenade with a special message to freaks like me who suddenly matter enough for him to acknowledge. "Just be you. You are loved. You are heard. You are understood. You belong." Aw, thanks Pop-Pop, but go fuck yourself.  

Do we really even want to belong with these people? Republicans have been horsewhipping us like Cossacks for decades and the Democratic cavalry only showed up to save the day with their empty gestures and gladhanding cash grabs when we started showing up on MTV. Joe Biden voted for both DOMA and Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell. In fact, the only Queer friendly legislation that bastard has ever voted for are the hate crime laws that only empower the Queer-bashing prison system he spent the eighties and nineties juicing up with noted bigots like Bill Clinton and Strom Thurmond. This is the same prison system that gave Kamala Harris her political career with positions like District Attorney of San Francisco and Attorney General of California. Positions that Pride-hag used to hunt down transgender sex workers like dogs and throw them into men's prisons where she openly mocked them for demanding basic human rights. 

"Oh, but that's all over now," I can hear some suburban lesbian soccer mom cry out from the back of the room, "they've changed, they've seen the error of their ways!" Bullshit they have. In between Pride parades in 2018, then Senator Kamala Harris sponsored FOSTA/SESTA, the opening salvo in the ongoing bipartisan war on sex workers. The bill essentially labeled the entire industry as a sex-trafficking cartel and violated the shit out of the First Amendment by making platforms like Reddit and Craigslist legally liable for content that aids sex workers by providing them the means to screen dangerous clients and share this information with a network of fellow working girls, keeping them safe and off the streets, away from serial killers and predatory pimps. 

The National Center for Transgender Equality has found that 1 in 5 trans adults have participated in sex work. I have friends on the stroll, and they are not friends of Joe Biden's police state. That's because 9 in 10 transgender sex workers report being harassed, attacked or just straight up fucking beaten by the cops. But these women and femmes don't live in the suburbs and shop at the GAP. Most of them are Black or Latinx. Many suffer from years of trauma that the medical establishment conveniently labels as mental illness. 

In other words, they aren't conventionally pretty enough for a photo-op with a woke white supremacist. They don't pass for the kind of diversity Kamala Harris suddenly gives a fuck about. This is why nearly every presidential candidate in the packed 2020 Democratic Primaries backed FOSTA/SESTA, not just Joe and Kamala, but Warren, Gillibrand, Booker, even Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. The only motherfucker with the stones to stand up for my sisters when it counted was a grizzled old breeder named Mike Gravel who died a true ally last year, but he wasn't even invited to the debates. I guess he too was too Queer for inclusion.

The Democratic Party's real allies are the police state and the prison industrial complex, and these allies will always be the mortal enemies of all Queer people because they represent the very worst of the same traditional power structures that the Queer Liberation Movement was built to smash, and this movement was built on shoulders of sex workers of color like Miss Major, Sylvia Rivera, and Marsha P. Johnson. 

This movement was also built in solidarity with the revolutionaries who showed us the way in the ghettos and jungles of the Third World, from George Jackson and the Vietcong to Mumia Abu Jamal and the Houthi rebels. The kind of people who thugs like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris rape and pillage while they kiss the rings of rampant fag-bashers like the Saudis and the Azov Battalion. The sick truth is that those colonialist con-artists only want to be seen passively giving a fuck about certain Queer people because we help cover up the stink of their crimes, just like the GOP camouflages their devotion to corporate welfare with casual fits of well-publicized bigotry.

It's all a big fucking game, dearest motherfuckers, and this is one genderfuck revolutionary who is tired of being played by it. If Queer means anything anymore, it means rejecting the shackles of mainstream society and the patronage of the Democrats amounts to little more than shackles with rainbows on them. As a community, we should take a stand and throw their thirty pieces of silver back in their fucking face and add a thick loogie to the barrage. As a tribe, Queer people should shout it from the rooftop of every fleabag motel and message parlor, the Democrats will never be our allies because our allies are the people they step on in the streets on their way to the White House. We don't fucking belong to you, Joe Biden. We belong to no man.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

This post is written with venom and vitriol in loving memory of Mike Gravel, one pop-pop who will always have a place at my tribe's table as the grouchy cis hetero grandpa that every Queer outlaw deserves. Godspeed and goddess bless.

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Mississauga Goddamn by the Hidden Cameras

*  Looking for a Kiss by New York Dolls

*  Pretty On the Inside by Hole

*  Scott Street by Phoebe Bridgers

*  List of Demands by Saul Williams

*  Some Might Say by Oasis

*  All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem

*  Birth In Reverse by St. Vincent

*  I've Been Tired by the Pixies

*  Suedehead by Morrissey