Gay Assimilation is “no fats no femmes no asians” in a grindr profile. It’s cops marching in uniform at Pride. It’s a gay man like Milo being a leading figure of the fascist resurgence in the US. It’s banks using us as props for feel good ads while denying loans to trans women. It’s “equal opportunity employers” hiring lgbt+ people to make the drones used to kill queer Arabs. It’s a Starbucks with a rainbow police shield “safe space” sticker on the door while a cop down the street assaults a black trans woman. It’s cramming gay people into the predefined boxes of a cisnormative hetnormative white supremacist capitalist society. It’s abandoning the fringes to the cold so that those of us closest to the mainstream can get a pass as long as we don’t act “too gay” in public. Gay Assimilation is maintaining all the same broken power structures that enabled our oppression to begin with.
Queer Liberation is dismantling oppressive structures. It’s abolishing prisons, opposing war, subverting capitalism, disarming/dismantling the police. It’s building new models of community and resistance, it’s refusing to abandon our siblings on the edges because they are no less deserving than those of us who can “fit in”. It’s refusing to cut out bits of ourselves to accommodate the comfort of straight people. Queer Liberation is striving to create a radically different society where systems of oppression and biases have been challenged and uprooted.