Pride Parade in a Pickle after Corporate Daddies go Anti-Woke.
The Gay Meme Parade Part I
Where is Rainbow Capitalism Now?
The inevitability of “Rainbow Capitalism” was becoming a tired cliché as the mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ culture had reached its saturation point. Every mainstream TV show and movie gave a wink and a nod that they were are on board with the gay rights movement. Democrats had a cause they could safely rally for. Corporations made sure you knew about their “commitment to diversity,” from their super bowl ads to their mandatory employee training. Every year in June most corporate logos in America would sport the rainbow and big box stores would have a prominently displayed Pride products section. And there was no better way for a corporation to signal their virtue more than to sponsor marchers in the Pride parade. This was a sad transition for Pride parade enthusiasts – who were born into the way of being a fun creative, daring and rebellious group – to now identity as unfabulous submissives, marching down the street with rainbow banner advertisements for their corporate domination daddy of choice: the Lockheed Martin Lesbians, the Google Gays, the Budweiser Bisexuals, The T. Rowe Price Trans and Quickbooks Queers.
Sporting a Pride flag logo in June drifted from being an edgy political statement to being the generic marking of a corporate automaton. On a weekly basis there would be news of an actor coming out as bisexual, a drag queen coming out as trans, a singer announcing they are nonbinary with they/them pronouns, etc. These announcements were written up the magazines as brave revelations but by this point they were boring, and it was a bit cringe that the celebrity wanted to be celebrated even more for this announcement. And there was a new trend of heterosexual “allies” who also wanted to identify as queer; but it was just a hip fashion statement, not unlike dressing like a punk rocker forty years after punk rock was relevant. In the past rebellious teens had raged against society’s conformity, now the cool kids rebelled against gender conformity.
Then Trump won the election and the cultural winds changed. Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan to disavow every woke initiative Facebook has ever had and to slam the door on the face of the LGBTQ+ community (then he bored listeners to tears by spending an hour talking about how he was now really into martial arts and macho culture). Previously it had been a given that the tech companies of the San Francisco Bay Area all supported the Democrats. After all San Francisco and Silicon Valley is the home of the “liberal elite” and left-wing values. Now suddenly the top tech CEOs – the liberal elite -- all had front row tickets to Trump’s inauguration. San Francisco’s largest building, the Salesforce Tower is owned by tech mogul Mark Benioff – Benioff now embraces Trump. San Francisco’s baseball park is branded Oracle Park, and Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison is now in charge of Trump’s AI initiative. Ellison says omnipresent AI cameras will keep people on their best behavior. That sounds like it may have a chilling effect on San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ public kink event, the Folson Street Fair. And by no coincidence Ellison is now the world’s second richest man.
None of the corporations ever cared about gay rights or liberal values whatsoever. They care about money and power period. They promote the corporate values that serve their interest. This year those interests are not queer interests.
While the gay rights movement became corporatized it forgot about the roots of left-wing activism, which is the labor movement and the New Deal politics that created the middle class. This can’t be blamed on gays entirely, this has been the folly of Democrats generally ever since Jimmy Carter started chipping away at the New Deal in favor of neoliberalist policies – policies that were later doubled and tripled down by Reagan and Clinton. You may have heard the phrase “the cultural war is a distraction from the class war.” The gay rights movement became front and center of the culture war -- and while the movement was having victories in terms of having diverse representation in the media and corporate hiring practices, America’s class inequalities continued to grow and grow. The kind of people who used to put their energies into protesting foreign wars and organizing unions were now protesting right-wing influencers with bad trans takes at college campuses. The University of California, Berkeley had its biggest protests since the Vietnam war in 2017 over Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter being allowed to speak there. The protests went on for weeks and many were injured as they became violent. But did they stop a war? No – for all their effort all they did was keep two right-wingers from speaking publicly. And that’s one example out of thousands of misdirected political activism.
Now gays and leftists need to come back to class activism that truly matters. You may say “oh yeah well I know a lot of queers who already identify as socialists.” And you may have noticed that Republicans paint Democrats and leftists with a broad brush of being a bunch of commies with a “radical socialist agenda.” And “cultural Marxism” is another term used to describe wokism. This is all a bunch of bullshit. People who “identify” as socialists are still capitalists in practice. And its well known Democrats are just bought by different corporations (and sometimes the same corporations) than Republicans.
The left and the LGBTQ+ movement now need to take to the streets and union bargaining committees and push a real radical socialist agenda. Time to bring back edgy floats void of corporate branding.
Gays Love Sex Puns
Dick jokes, butt jokes and dirty jokes in general are the staple of the funny gay guy. Your average homosexual is not as clever as Oscar Wilde but if a White gay man can make a sexual double entendre in the accent of a sassy Black woman than he can be the funniest guy at the bar. The gaymemes subreddit is all about these naughty jokes that relate to gay hook up life. So I thought I might throw a few of these in here because life can’t be all politics.
More of that woke, anti-woke shit that we are bored of now
Here’s a hilarious meme I downloaded a couple years ago but never reposted because well . . . it’s a little homophobic. Liberals for eight years have been posting some very lame “orange man bad” memes that rarely criticized Trump for the right reasons and were often reactionary takes to whatever offensive statement the media was over-conflating in the latest news cycle. But I thought it was more pertinent to criticize Biden for presiding over a genocide than to get excited about Trump paying hush money to a porn star. Now that Trump is back in office -- and he’s the new genocide guy -- I’ve jumped on the anti-Trump meme bandwagon. Still my anti-Trump memes are more sophisticated than that of your average shitlib. This meme accurately lampoons how self-fellating the libs can be in their vague anti-Trumpness. Funny part is that if the maker of this meme is indeed homophobic then he would have to had to watch numerous gay porn videos before finding the right screen shots to make this meme.
The meme below is anti-woke. And I have to admit I have been playing both sides of this issue, making fun of wokeness’s odious capture of popular culture and also poking fun at the lowbrow takes of anti-woke YouTubers. I mean a guy like Critical Drinker doesn’t know a thing about movies other than that action blockbusters from the 1980s are better than the ones being made now. I’m sure he would give you a blank stare if you asked him what his favorite pre-code Hollywood film or favorite contemporary French actress is. As the “cultural winds” have shifted we are going to see less films with a diversity agenda (although to a lesser degree movie casts being more generally diverse could be a permanent thing) but there are still woke projects that were in production before the election just now getting released in 2025 — these feel like relics of a preachy past era on their opening day.
The short-lived trend of lesbian witch shows is just a laughable foot note. Unlike Star Wars, Dune has space witches as part of its cannon, but their function was selective breeding and match making with the universes power elite, not scissoring in the barracks at witch school. The overall vibe of the Dune: Prophecy is a medieval soap opera mash-up of Game of Thrones and Outlander. It didn’t feel like a science fiction show at all. And if the HBO executives knew the source material, they would know that in the fourth book, The God Emperor of Dune, the emperor has a muscle-bound lesbian army which would fit in nicely with female action hero tropes.
Bisexuality awareness
I may be the only one who noticed this but the Diddy scandal broke on bisexual+ awareness week. The leaked picture of Lebron James in a maid’s outfit at the freak-off was a bit disturbing. And the idea of Diddy topping Justin Bieber must have been dismaying for young girls who idolize Bieber, but gay men might find this to be appealing porn content. However, the gay aspect of the story got a muted response because we’ve come a long way, baby. People said, “hey come on, why focus on him being bisexual?” And really, I guess it’s a good thing that the world is less uptight and will give people a pass on this (they were laughing though).
It reminded me of a Richard Pryor bit from 1972 before he was very famous, where he talks about his down-low hook-ups in very politically incorrect terms. This was right around the time of Stonewall, so it took a lot of guts for him to talk about this on stage.
Queers for Palestine
There’s a right-wing meme “Queers for Palestine is like Chickens for KFC.” If you look at right wing commentary on Palestine, you will hear this phrase over and over. The point is that because Muslim culture is very conservative and does not respect feminism and LGBTQ+ rights to a degree on par with American liberal culture, then queers should not support Palestine because they are supporting a culture that would never support them back (or kill them).
There are major fallacies with this argument. First of all the conservatives who push this idea have been consistently against gay rights every step of the way. They know they lost the battle on gay marriage, so they moved on to opposing equal rights for transgenders. They also support “traditional family values,” meaning a Christian patriarchal hierarchy. Culturally they have been relentlessly opposed to feminist messages in TV and movies. Therefore, it’s ridiculous for them to come from this liberal viewpoint in the first place. Second, what “Queers for Palestine” want is an end to an apartheid system where the native population are being colonized by Europeans and being murdered for their land. The social traditions of the native population are not relevant. They are also against the mass murder of families and children. Anyone who believes in “traditional family values” should be against this as well. This is literally the destruction of the family.
If conservatives think western standards of the LGBTQ+ movement and the feminist movement are superior to current Muslim values, than they should want Palestinians to have freedom of movement. Meaning if Palestinians could go to college in America or Europe their social views could become liberalized, and they would bring their new values back home with them. But because Gaza is behind a blockade and is effectively an “open-air prison” they cannot leave their country and liberal values have no chance of entering.
But it comes down to a simple question. Do you support genocide or are you against it? Queers who are against genocide have made the correct moral choice. Conservatives who seek to cover for genocide with ad hominin attacks against the people who speak out against it, are flat-out immoral and on the side of evil. There’s no ambiguity. It’s not complicated.
This brings us to Bill Maher, an anti-Trump Democrat who markets himself as a commonsense moderate who isn’t afraid to criticize both sides. This image he has of himself if nonsense. He’s really a Never-Trump Republican and has a conservative institutional bias in most of his viewpoints. He describes himself as a “free speech absolutist,” but this is just not true. In his first episode after the October 7th attacks, he got a big applause from his audience after he said it was a great thing that college students who wrote a letter that gave context to the Palestinian struggle leading up to the attack had their job offers rescinded by major corporations. So basically, they were cancelled for exercising their freedom of speech. How many times has Maher railed against cancel culture? This is because, like most conservatives, his belief in freedom of speech has an Israeli exception. Ever since Maher has gone on to smear college protestors as antisemitic and violent, spreading lies about the “rise of antisemitism” which is really the rise of criticism of Israel. And after a year and a half of genocide he has not amended his position on this issue. The meme is just as true today as when I made it in October 2023. The best any of his “liberal” guests can offer is to make milquetoast statements about how Palestinians and Israeli’s need to learn to live together. He has never had any guests on his show that give an intelligent critique of the Israeli theocratic apartheid state or speak truth about the genocide. He doesn’t want a real debate because the shallowness of his political analysis would be exposed.
And it’s not surprising that Trump invited him to dinner because they both have the exact same view that Israel should be supported no matter what and anyone who speaks out against Israel should be crushed and deported.
Even before the October 7th attack, he has long been the torch bearer for the idea that liberals should hate Muslims because they don’t uphold western ideals. Most people have forgotten that this was originally an idea of political commentator Christopher Hitchens. In 2003, leading to the Iraq war, Hitchens argued that Americans should be on guard against the extreme violence of radical Islam and their hatred of liberal values like women’s rights and scientific inquiry. After Hitchen’s death Maher forgot about his better work (like the book he wrote criticizing the Clintons) but carried the torch for his worst idea: liberals should hate Muslims because Muslims hate liberals. The makers of the “Queers for Palestine is like Chickens for KFC” meme didn’t realize they were manufacturing a dumbed down version of the Hitchens argument. And on this issue that is the only idea Maher has to offer.
‘Nuff Said
Please stay tuned as part II of the “the Gay Meme Parade” will be posted soon.
