But even some progressive gay white men say they feel alienated from a movement they see becoming more radical, particularly online, where the tenor of conversation is often uncivil.
Hot take: I'm honestly, vocally sick of settler-gay men who demand that you handle them with kid gloves when their entire existence within the community is an existence blanketed in microaggression at best, when they're not being outright full-on macroaggressive about someone that 'doesn't fit their "preference"'; and I'm genuinely glad people are starting to talk about it.
There's a reason we call them reactionaries.
It's an interesting issue and talking people round from that reaction is difficult. Ultimately nobody wants to take away the fact that you definitely do experience expression for being gay but that the white men are overly represented and have overly dominant voices within the lgbt community to the point of harming other causes because they don't think to shut the fuck up from time to time, in fact they're happy to talk about what they think of other causes, even directly harming them with shit.
This happens in smaller subsets too. For example the same fragile reaction occasionally occurs among trans women, who are overly dominant within trans circles and some (not all) have a fragile reaction to this being pointed out rather than working to reduce that dominance and elevate trans male voices.
But the white male reaction is a very similar one to the same fragile white male reaction that occurs among cis people when you raise women's issues. Which is why the whiteness is specifically highlighted. There's different issues with black men, but their experiences and issues are quite unique to their intersection and their skin colour doesn't usually enter into their issues patriarchally unlike white men for example when you get into white men and racial fetishisation.
It's very difficult to have these conversations because people often have these reactions when their power is questioned, especially when it's power they don't want to acknowledge.
They are called reactionary because they think the past is better than the present or future.
Not because they are reactive
This is not the marxist usage. The marxist usage of the word is as a descriptor of the monarchist opposition to revolution, referring to the opposition as the reaction to the revolutionaries of 18th century france purely in a materialist way as a literal reaction to the existence of revolutionaries being a change in the material conditions provoking a reaction.
This in turn informs all other marxist usage of the phrase, referring to various forms of reaction to conditions that the left creates.
Not going to lie. What you wrote does not read easily
Sorry.
The point I am making is that the marxist usage actually IS about people having a reaction to something. Reactionaries are a reaction to certain material conditions, these conditions are produced by the left (marxists) in most cases. For example critique of white male dominance in society produces a viscerally angry political opposition in some people who recognise consciously or unconsciously that it means they lose power. These people are what we call reactionaries in this context.
Whether or not they believe in RETVRN is actually irrelevant. They don't have to believe that returning to the past is better. They just have to be reacting negatively to something clearly progressive. There are a tonne of people in our society who aren't regressive but are also definitely reactionaries that angrily oppose everything we want.
The liberal definition removes materialism and just tries to say "they're people that want to return to the past". Mostly because liberals do not want to do materialist analysis as they recognise it's not beneficial to them.
This is probably still difficult to parse. The point here is that the marxist definition is not really the same as the liberal definition. They do this to a lot of our language, much like "working class" means something different to liberals compared to marxists, "imperialism" too.
Your first paragraph in this response is much more clear and makes sense
Monarchist reaction to revolutionaries of 18th century France who represent a change in material conditions.
The primary point of the response, I think, was to refocus reactionary away from "the past" and towards material conditions.
In the case of this thread it has to do with white people reacting to their place being questioned. White queers benefit from increased representation, increased safety, even if it doesn't feel that way to us, and generally being the biggest ethnic group in queer spaces. And other stuff too.
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Yea it is because they are reactive. The origin of the word is the reaction against revolution.
Past isn’t magically bad and future isn’t magically good. Time isn’t linear progress