This is a really important point.
Related: some countries in the Global South which have strong anti-LGBT-laws, have them since colonial times. For example the Ugandese law which specifies a sentence of life in prison for homosexual acts was introduced by the British.
And the media movement vilifying the LGBT community is heavily sponsored by Western plutocrats.
Homophobia is just another weapon of the imperialists, used to dissolve local cultures and to divide and conquer native peoples.
Speaking from experience. I realized I was gay in high school in China and nobody around me from my teachers and classmates to my parents and extended family gave me any trouble — except the grand narrative on everyone’s mind was that, because I am gay, my future lay completely with the west, mostly cuz of this “western value” idea Chen seems to subscribe to. It was a big factor why I so eagerly moved the US and became an absolutely cringe Eurocentric lib till recently.
There’s perhaps something to be said about how queer people in non-western worlds might be assumed/pushed to identify with the western capitalist world that has middle-class-washed and hijacked the lgbt liberation movements. But this line of thought is always too close to home for me to rationally think about
except the grand narrative on everyone’s mind was that, because I am gay, my future lay completely with the west, mostly cuz of this “western value” idea Chen seems to subscribe to. It was a big factor why I so eagerly moved the US and became an absolutely cringe Eurocentric lib till recently.
A self fullfilling prophecy... This is just absolutely frustrating.
On one hand i can give some slack to these former feudal countries and colonies being backwards in regards to LGBT. Theyre not going to get everything right. But on the other hand ffs why cant people just be cool about gay people.
Ngl I don’t. It’s not like the colonizers we’re promoting LGBT dominance. Anticolonial movements should be inherently pro-LGBT rights, are you against oppression or are you not?
Homophobes get the wall. Period.
Then there's likely not a single AES country you could support because theyre bound to get something wrong.
I still support their movements generally. And I’m not saying to be a communist you must be actively fighting for LGBT rights.
But if you, an individual, have homophobic beliefs and spread them, rope. No matter who or where you are.
Thats fair but youre gonna probably kill alot of people who are much better at promoting and spreading socialism than some westerner who watches breadtube all day
Yes yes you’re right I’m sorry I was in a mood earlier
Long frustration mixed with the fact that when I wrote those comments I had been awake from general anesthesia for about 30 minutes lmao
dying or being reformed, they both solve the issue :shrug-outta-hecks:
Every indigenous culture has LGBT+ people and many are way more accepting and inclusive than fucking Western culture where a gay nightclub was just once again shot up….
Chen needs to learn some fucking anthropology.
I expect that from Qatar with it being an officially Islamic state that specifically draws legislation from religion, but I don't expect it from an atheist, communist country like China. Anti-LGBT rhetoric is steeped in reactionary thought. The only justification against it is religion and when that doesn't work, they come up with conspiracy theories like the whole grooming thing or trans panic. I've seen more breathless coverage about puberty blockers than fucking safe drinking water, but that's reaction for you; take an edge case and make it seem like it's everywhere.
It's like that clip of that Walsh guy on Rogan getting fact checked. Walsh asserted without evidence that there were "millions" of kids on puberty blockers, but Rogan's producer fact-checked him and told him it's less than 5,000 over years. But hey, if we're doing wall-to-wall coverage of issues that effect 5,000 people, I've got some potholes on my work commute that need a fucking act of Congress to be filled, I guess.
I’ve seen more breathless coverage about puberty blockers than fucking safe drinking water
This is a really great comparison.
Being officially an Islamic state does not mean one has to take this stance. Just a hundred years ago, gay men fled from the UK to Morocco because they could live in peace there. It's a classic orientalist cliché to paint the middle eastern man as effeminate and suspicious of being queer, one that carries over until the present day when western commenters joke about how soft Saddam Hussein's handshake was. The ostentatious homophobia we can now sadly see in many societies in the Islamic world is historically a backlash against such racial stereotypes, a compensatory act that cannot be explained without the deep shame about the brutal subjugation of the rich, ancient cultures of the greater middle east at the hands of western colonizers.
To an even greater extend, this goes for transphobia in the global south. It is a result of gender norms violently imposed on indigenous cultures that very frequently, on all continents, recognized more than the western gender binary. Indonesia used to have cultures with 5 different genders, now it is one of the few places worldwide were being trans is illegal.
When we look at who is most ardently supporting and spreading queerphobia in the global south, it is evangelicals and catholics. Colonizer religions that tell the colonized they must hate the gays lest they continue to accept western supremacy.
Queer liberation can and must be a decolonization project.
we're in this new horrible era of imperialism where the justification for imperialism has become the ghosts and consequences of previous generations of imperialism. every desperate imitation of the west to avoid colonization (genocide, anti-lgbt, poor labor rights, pollution) becomes a new casus belli from the children of the people who showed the global south 'that's how you get strong'.
we so desperately need to reclaim the language of liberation from the cynical evil people in power :yes-honey-left:
Jesus Chen you posted a take so bad bmf is normally legible. :agony-shivering:
The kind Joseph Vissarionovich (who would probably agree with him here unfortunately)
Oh yeah, I think it's just a matter of the man being born in 1878 and being raised in seminary school, so it was just part of who he was, not something he had theoretical justification for or anything. He also wasn't great with the women in his personal life from what I've read. When comparing him to his contemporaries, especially outside of the communist movement, he was definitely much more progressive in many areas than was typical for the time, but I don't think we should, per se, only judge people based on the prevailing viewpoint of their time, so I'm not going to excuse it. It's just one of "the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges" that Marx talks about. I'd like to think that Stalin would have come around on it like Castro did, if given the chance to, but given that he didn't, it is a major point we need to be critical of him on. I still very much "uphold" Stalin, but I think it's important to point out and criticize the shortcomings of people like him, even if he was very good in most other regards. (Sorry if I repeat myself or don't make sense in some parts, I'm typing this at work, so I have to keep going back and forth)
On the anti-semitism point, Proles of the Round Table did a good episode on the topic called "Stalin is a Mensch"
Proles of the Round Table
I'm going to check this out. I've been trying to figure out how much of the "Doctor's Plot", or specifically what people claim about where the Dr's Plot was intended to go, is cap. People make some pretty bold claims about a planned Soviet genocide of Jewish people without much evidence.
L take, especially when in many many places homophobia is a product of western colonization. For example, fucking China. Homophobia was one more tool in the white supremacy tool belt, and should be opposed always, full stop, no exceptions.
As communists we should support compassion and equal rights for all. I’m not saying “communism is when no homophobia” but if you’re a homophobe I don’t understand how you can reconcile that with communist ideals.
Homophobes get the rope. End of discussion.
I love logging onto hexbear dot net to see leftists debate whether my existence is literally imperialism
Hang in there comrade, we will see a better tomorrow, together. Missing a dose of escitalopram is rough. I don't take it but my partner does, and missing a single dose can be enough to make them depressed. But they're usually fine after a few days of being back on it.
The withdrawal on that stuff is something else. I had to quit taking it cold turkey due to a lapse in insurance and it was the most hellish month of my life. Hang in there!
"LGBT is a western psy op because I saw a NATO official holding a rainbow flag once" is a brain-poisoned take I see increasingly coming out of hegemonic officials in the imperial periphery because it erases the possibility that there was ever a domestic LGBT movement demanding fair treatment. Also how the fuck is Chen Weihua gonna say this shit? By his same logic Marxism in China is a German psy-op because Marx was German. It's stupid.
It's also incredibly frustrating because LGBT are still treated like shit in the West. It is far from some hegemonic Western principle. Turn the clock back 50 years and you have nearly LGBT movement in the imperial core getting dismissed as some kind of commie plot imported to drain America of its masculinity and so on. It's an excuse that can always be used. I was arguing with some Russians (who I ironically agreed with on their Ukraine takes) who were insisting that all LGBT movements in their domestic sphere are Western NGOs and what have you. I said "Why ban LGBT demonstrations and not just blanket ban Western NGOs if that's what you're worried about?" And then they used this tortured logic where "actually we're super nice to gays over here
as long as they keep it in the bedroomit's just that LGBT is a western acronym and that's how you know it's a Western imported movement meant to destabilize us."if :inshallah-script: USA/NATO/EU collapsed and was scattered to the four winds these motherfuckers would still blame LGBT as being a western psy op the same way American officials pretend every communist is some kind of fly that burst forth from the corpse of the USSR.
You also have to remember that neoliberal regimes in the developing world that plundered billions of their own country’s wealth and parked them overseas while instituting harsh labor laws to crush wages and living standards in their own country
i never forget this.
are also the same affluent upper middle class people who are most aligned with Western values (like you know, Western neoclassical economics and their IMF austerity)
waiting for it...
and enjoyed Western liberal culture, including support for progressive LGBT rights.
this isn't "western culture" considering "western culture" is still frothing at the mouth with LGBTphobia. We just had a mass shooting this week. Don't Ask Don't Tell existed until very recently. Gay marriage didn't happen until this century. Anti-sodomy laws are still on the books in the USA. Deliberate conflation of LGBT people with pedophiles is a constant problem. Just because :porky-happy: uses LGBT rights as a fake justification for imperialism doesn't mean LGBT rights has ever been the tip of the spear of western imperialism. I'm tired of imperialists using human rights as a thin justification for what they do because it causes this brain poisoned thinking. If America is falsely claiming to bomb brown people on behalf of LGBT it doesn't justify mistreating LGBT as a response to western imperialism. European Colonialism during the age of exploration saw vast purges of indigenous LGBT in the very same regions where domestic conservative forces now claim that LGBT is some kind of western import. LGBT rights isn't erasure of indigenous culture, and it isn't western imperialism. It is merely an excuse used by Western imperialists to justify their behavior. I used Marx in China as an example for a reason. Why is that not seen as Western influence but LGBT is? It seems like a selective justification of bigotry rather than a real argument.
lol i always think that one is extra rich because nearly everyone over 50 on my mom's side of the family is :gator-bi:
I'm glad you have a cool family, a lot of us dont. Where I live, trusting someone over the age of30 to not bea homophobe can actually be a death sentence.
Apologies. I had thought you were partly joking since "old people are homophobic" while often true, was a bit of a non-sequitur that had little to do with me talking about LGBTphobes in the imperial periphery using fake anti-imperialism as a justification for LGBTphobia. The "idk what you want" at the end also made me think you were joking.
I also don't think it's simply a generational divide. There are plenty of older LGBT people and plenty of younger LGBTphobes and the perceived causes and effects of LGBTphobia are different from country to country which was mainly what I was talking about: The relation between western think tanks using LGBT rights as a fake justification for imperialism and reactionaries outside the imperial core using the perception of these think tanks as a fake justification for LGBTphobia.
As far as I know a lot of anti-LGBT sentiment actually came from European colonialism, which makes this whole thing doubly ridiculous.
Your comment got me thinking about dissing in the 90s about shooting bricks, which reminded me of the Tshirts that said things like "Keep shooting bricks and we'll be playing in an indoor court," which reminded me of the shirts with an entire paragraph about being good at basketball on the back. Now I'm nostalgic for making boys stop in the hall at school so I could read the treatise about basketball on their shirts and laugh. Good times. Anyone remember the shirts I'm talking about? I'm thinking they might have been by And 1, but I could be wrong about that.
This is pretty par the course for leftists in the current or former global south. I hear this all the time from former left-wing guerrilla fighters. They call lgbt people an abomination that NATO uses to removed their culture. The more educated regions tend to be better about it. You'll find the same thing in poorer regions of the US.
You’ll find the same thing in poorer regions of the US.
This is correct, but I also believe you see this in more middle class areas as well. This sort of thing is almost impossible to prove, but I think a lot of middle class suburbanites do sort of carry a lot of homophobic attitudes but they just keep it to themselves. Because over the last decade it's become socially unacceptable in a lot of the social sphere to be outwardly homophobic. Personally I think a lot of Americans are just bottling up their homophobia and god help us if fascism takes hold, because all that bottled up homophobia will definitely break out.
It wasn't that long ago (like mid-2000s) that polls showed a majority of Americans felt homosexuality was immoral. In the 15-20 years since, I highly doubt that hardly anyone say age 35+ at the time who was already homophobic has changed much, they've just been keeping their mouths shut.
On your last point, I'm slightly more optimistic on the theory that personally knowing an LGBT person can reduce bigotry in at least some folks, and the gains made since maybe ~2000 mean there are more out people than ever.
I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s and i had a ton of homophobic and transphobic brainworms i had to work through in spite of being bi and trans myself. Are there people who just don't say anything out loud anymore because they don't want to be shamed for it? Yeah, absolutely. Lots of cishet people aren't fully honest with me and just play nice because they don't want to cause a scene. But there's also lots and lots of people who have genuinely become better, more accepting people and that's honestly not all that surprising. All queerphobias are learned responses. There's nothing genuine about them. People have been trained to reflexively feel the hate and disgust because that was the socially expected thing to do. If they fully realize that, it's easy to discard these fears once they lose their purpose of being a mandatory part of somebody's gender performance. Without that, there is simply no reason to be queerphobic anymore.
I feel that too. Lived in both the inner city and suburbs when I was in the US. People in the inner city used the f-slur a lot more openly while the suburbanites would say that shit behind your back and you'd get it especially bad if you acted flamboyant at all. But this was also the mid 2000's when homophobia was still largely accepted even in liberal circles. To me it looks a lot like racial acceptance. The inner city was a lot more vocal about its racism with little race wars taking place as young as first grade. The suburbs would tolerate you as long as you behaved like them. Anything deviating from that would get you labelled as "ghetto."
It's like that with lgbt. They like you as long as you don't act outwardly flamboyant or cut your hair a certain way. I hear it whenever I visit my American family in the suburbs. They'll have a few gay friends and trans family members, but shit on gay guys that talk a certain way and trans women that don't pass.
