when you write "corporate gay" who does it stand for?
Corporate Gay refers to the marketing of the LGBT movement - though GLAAD, PFLAG and many other advocacy groups actively embrace the entirety of the rainbow, the actual imagery and the actions taken are often disclusive and not inclusive.
It also refers to the well-documented image issue that the LGBT community has of erasing QPOC, disabled queers, bisexuals, pansexuals, trans folks especially those who do not pass/do not want ‘the surgery’/are not ‘the right kind of trans’, non-binary or genderqueer folks, mentally ill queers, fat queers, ace/aro folks, etc.
The usual Image of the queer community is a White, Affluent, Thin, Cis, Lesbian or Gay individual or couple. Even on magazines specifically marketed to us, the covers are overwhelmingly decorated cut white dudes (this was extremely well-documented - even in Brazil, for example, the covers are almost completely white dudes). Of course, variations on this are (either ‘soft unthreatening white affluent cis lesbian’ or ‘cut hard white hot dude’) are also the most palatable image of the queer community for advertisers to use, so that’s what shows up in print media and commercials and everyone coos ‘they’re so inclusive yay’ and the rest of us go ‘yay?’
It’s been a problem since I was a tiny queer, and it’s still a problem now. We have an image issue, which then permeates the community, and pushes marginalized queer folks further to the edges, or out of the community altogether.
It does not refer to individual queer people unless those individual queer people are actively and persistently promoting this particular agenda, and even then, that’s not really what I mean. It’s a shorthand for referring to our community-wide image & mentality issue, and the fact that this package of issues – racism, cissexism, ableism, biphobia, acephobia, and the misguided mentality of the Purity of the Movement or the Queer Litmus Test, and respectability politics, among others – has a tendency to cause us to fight each other over scraps rather than lift each other up.
It does refer to the lifting up of (for one) marriage equality over all other issues – queer youth homelessness, the continued prevalence of STDs in the queer community, especially among MLM of color, the murder of trans women, just off the top of my head – and the way that issues which affect other segments of the community are often ignored or downplayed until they affect the Big LG. (Want a good example? Multiple bathroom bills have been passed, but since those bathroom bills solely targeted trans people, they didn’t get a lot of airtime. When HB2 lifted all the queer people’s protections, lord amighty, suddenly we could talk about this!)
It does refer to the way in which issues of life and death for less privileged segments of the community are often downplayed or dismissed in order to put forward a more marketable agenda item, and how over and over again many of us have been told ‘we’ll get to it, as soon as this other thing is done.’
It definitely refers to the buying and selling of Pride to the point that young queers have now forgotten that it was a disabled bi woman and her bi male husband who got the first permits for the first Pride, and who named it Pride in the first place. & boy does that lead to some really ugly moments when kids half or one third our ages try to be like ‘oh you can’t be here, you’re not queer enough.’ Because it’s been sold as what it didn’t start as, and it has fallen to the same image and mentality exclusion issues that affect the rest of the community. Pride just especially galls me because that was most definitely not started by cis white gay dudes.
It refers to the whitewashing and ciswashing of Stonewall.
We fight for visibility and more importantly respect from a cishetnormative sexual/romantic society and marketing narrative who will never really respect us no matter how much we scrub our image, rather than band together & demand that all of us be seen, cared for, and respected, and not just the segment which is most palatable to small-town America.
It’s an old problem, and it’s not over.
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