Baldwin was right. In fact in his lifetime and even during that interview white gay people were fighting for their rights to have the same entitlements as hetero white people.
They weren’t fighting for liberation or for an end to the way queerness was pathologized. They weren’t fighting pathologization at all. Instead they fought for their right to be assimilated into the empire. They didn’t want to end oppression, they wanted equal rights to oppress. They fought to become the boot.
But, ultimately, the Gay/Lesbian movement had an investment in the binary-marital-familial nexus. Much like the feminists. For example, the push to get homosexuality depathologized, and no longer considered a mental illness, often revolved around appealing to the idea that Gay men were capable of working and marrying and raising children just as anyone else. The Ableism that went into construction of homosexuality as a “pathology” (pioneered by Western sexologists in the 19th century, transforming an earlier religious bias against “abomination” into a secular-scientific bias): this was shifted to those populations who were outside the productive economy and outside the household configuration. It just so happened that these populations were Black and Third World folks who were gender expansive: disproportionately at risk of being forced out of work, out of the home, and discriminated against in other ways due to racial capitalism and the coloniality of gender as a ‘good ole boy network.
The Gay movement would eventually come to represent its “identity” in media and legislative campaigns that skewed bourgeois. And their focus was on assimilation into the nation through a fight for same-sex marriage. This became known as Homonationalism. Homonationalism would come to include including Gay people in the US army, as well as other technologies of empire, such as the police force. Dominant material and power relations would eventually expand their imbrication because of a now gay-inclusive Patriarchal nexus, anchored on assimilation into the binary-marital-household configuration.
Body-reasoning was ever present, because even if not made explicit, any discussion of the Gay movement came to assume white and cis, the main populations with access to the institutions that Homonationalism focused on. Thus, “Man” as the subject of liberal “human rights” was no longer just heterosexual but could be homosexual. But, intersexism, cissexism, exorsexism would remain, for Homonationalism was simply an expansion of the Grand Patriarchy.
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