Blinded by Acceptance: Straight Fragility, Shame, and the Dangers of Postqueer Politics

At the time I was invited to speak on the Western States Communication Association panel from which this forum emerged, I had been writing about solidarities in social movement,¹ and reading the book Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight Against AIDS by Deborah Gould.² The confrontational activism of ACT UP, or the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, has been credited with changing the landscape of lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender (LGBT) rights, forcing the Federal Drug Administration to address the AIDS crisis, and contributing to the emergence of queer theory and its challenges to cisheteropatriarchy.³ But one question Gould's book asks is: why didn't the confrontational stance of queer politics emerge sooner? That is, why didn't more people publicly speak out preceding ACT UP, given the high death toll from AIDS? Her response is that internalized homophobia in gay communities fostered gay ambivalence and shame over queer sexual practices, contributing to respectability politics, in which the recognition of LGBT people as solid, upstanding citizens who were no different than heterosexuals was the goal.⁴ ACT UP challenged central pillars of respectability politics, including the assumption that sex was a private matter and the emphasis on gay and lesbian assimilation. By making queer difference public, ACT UP shifted emotional landscapes of gay and lesbian activism, transforming gay shame into queer anger.⁵

And yet, in our contemporary political environment, the radical potential of queerness is tamed into assimilatory, postqueer practices appeasing straights and conservatives alike.⁶ Queerness has been defined as a "horizon of possibility" in which we might be freed from normative violences and strangleholds of cisheteropatriarchy.⁷ In a postqueer imaginary, however, "the socio-sexual freedoms of neoliberal citizenship—such as the freedom to be an individual [and] the freedom to choose your sexual partner—are extended to (some) queer subjects, but largely within the circumscribed terms of existing [cis]heteropatriarchal gender roles."⁸ Taking queer challenges to normativity as its starting point, this article identifies postqueer politics as (re)centering anxieties about difference produced by straight fragility.

Borrowing DiAngelo's conceptualization of white fragility,⁹ what I am calling "straight fragility" refers to fears, discomfort, and shame produced when those who align with straightness¹⁰ encounter queerness. Unlike LGBT assimilation, queerness demands attention to past and continued violences and erasures produced by cisheteropatriarchy. Postqueer attitudes and politics, however, offer protection from straight fragility, because—much like postrace denials of structural racism¹¹—postqueer positions suggest homophobia exists only in individual acts of recognizable bigotry rather than in racialized cisheteropatriarchy's persistent structuring of institutions and practices. And, like postfeminist discourses that imagine feminisms' work as already accomplished,¹² postqueer representations imagine LGBT struggles as a thing of the past, enabling absolution from the shameful recognition that one might be complicit in cisheteropatriarchal violence. Claims of "postness" therefore bury "uncomfortable" calls for recognizing and dismantling structural injustices beneath depoliticized interpersonal practices of "acceptance" where—as long as you politely nod to diversity while avoiding naming difference—surely everyone is equal.

To challenge silences promulgated by claims of equality's arrival, the remainder of this essay intertwines a personal story of (queer) family secrets with a reflection on a recent institutional interaction in which colorblindness was advocated. My purpose in weaving together these disparate events is not to render them equivalent, or even similar, but rather to trace in/visible connections among silence, shame, and respectability politics as they extend through various times and places to uphold normativities. By incorporating just enough apolitical "diversity" to suggest inclusive acceptance, racialized cisheteropatriarchal systems recast what is different about LGBT and other historically marginalized identities as shameful and unspeakable. I conclude by calling for a deeper consideration of straight fragility as it relates to, and is upheld by, postqueer political claims that sexuality is no longer a difference that makes a difference.

Unspeakable Differences, Past and Present

Describing the feeling of shame surrounding gayness for a lot of men in the late 1980s, ACT UP activist Dudley Saunders spoke of the self-hatred of knowing...