Identities for sale

How the modern LGBT movement marketised identity for profit

The once serious and largely grassroots gay right movement is now a corporate behemoth specialising in selling increasingly esoteric and odd identities to a generation groomed into mistaking difference for expression. Most recently the UK’s manifestation of this global business, Stonewall, produced a smart marketing video featuring an attractive woman celebrating her “asexuality”. In a crushingly sad section, she tells viewers “what not to say to an asexual” commanding that no one ask if she’s lonely or suggest she meets someone they have in mind. Such basic human incidental kindnesses are an anathema to a life lived exclusively through the prism of the self. There can be no debate, because all debate is hate.

So, these hungry consumers of new identities are doomed to wonder a lonely hall of mirrors endlessly limited by only seeing their own reflection. All the time the gay rights industry lies to them that these new “identities” are immutable ways of being special and make them just as marginalised as a gay person. Homosexuality has been chopped up and rearranged into the stripes of a hundred different flags, it has been trivialised and made equivalent to the kink or quirk de jour in the name of profit and imagined relevance. If you look at the staff list for one of these businesses, you’ll see it now recruits account managers and marketing executives to complement the sales force it makes of lost and lonely misfits.

Gay activism at one time was lesbians abseiling into the House of Lords protesting section 28, it was the same group chaining themselves to Sue Lawley’s news desk live on national TV, it was gay men dressed as nuns doing the cancan on stage to disrupt Mary Whitehouse’s homophobic “prayer meetings”. These are black and white faded images of gay history quite out of place in modern discourse because they feature that element of gay culture quite unknown to our new puritan overlords – humour. Humour is subversive and the new identities are such brittle products they cannot be trusted to laugh at themselves. Laughing of course can disturb a “brand” image and the new CEO’s of gay activism mean to see that this revolution not only be televised – it must be sponsored, marketized, financially viable and endorsed by a thousand tweets from PR savvy multinationals. The plucky abseiling outsiders of 30 years ago have no place at the polished corporate tables of the powerful now just as before. No wonder. They are too tatty, raucous and diverse in opinions to be trusted with clients in a business environment.

LGBT people on the ground now lack the feedback mechanism of effective free speech, so the monied overlords are largely unbothered by any real discontent on these issues. Such ripples as do surface are met with the accusation of hate, a bullet of a word deployed on a hair trigger at the least provocation, often to quite devastating effect. This strategy is explicitly passed onto the identity hungry consumers who now police language and though like no other generation. It is quite unremarkable for them to instruct their viewers about “what not to say to a…” person, so inured are they to censorship of basic human interactions.

Where the gay rights movement once made common cause with the oppressed overseas it now has no such real concern. Just as the identity consumers are invited to endlessly retreat into themselves, what was once an international movement is now a national, domestic and personal one. The end horizon of the movement is the self and complex foreign debates with complex foreign people is just, well, too much foreign and too much debate for this luxury brand designer movement.  

These asset strippers who have sold off the moral capital of the gay rights movement, like all asset strippers, will leave the organisation far worse than they found it. Their faddish boutique of endlessly customisable “selves” will not maintain it’s purchase in the market for ever. The messy, nuanced, empathetic lives humans are meant to live will poke through and tear apart their balance sheets. Us ordinary gays will be left with a shell company of a movement when this happens, an unfashionable wreck of a factory in administration with angry creditors to assuage.