Last week, a number of publications including the Advocate, the Huffington Post and the Daily Mail called out rapper Azealia Banks for a tweet that she had deleted from her twitter page. Nearly all of the articles’ titles employ a similar pattern, alleging that Azealia Banks compared the LGBT community to the ‘gay white KKK.’ Although the publications reproduce the tweet in the form of a screenshot, all of the articles’ titles gloss over an important detail: a parenthetical acronym (“GGGG”) placed after LGBT that is integral to understanding the meaning of Banks’ message. In the process of omitting this seemingly minute detail, the media risk depoliticizing Banks’ timely intervention into a growing culture of homonormativity by writing her off as a homophobe.
Homonormativity is the process by which oppressions including ableism, classism, racism, sexism and transphobia become reinscribed by the minoritizing paradigm of gay rights. As has been the case with other social justice movements such as feminism, the foremost beneficiaries and decision-makers of LGBT advocacy have been the most privileged of the oppressed. In this case, that means white cisgender gay men. Banks’ substitution of “GGGG” for LGBT can be read as a challenge to the homonormativity that has infused bids for LGBT rights and community.
More than just a lofty theory, homonormativity is a reality that conditions the possibility of violence against the most marginalized of American society. Azealia Banks is not the first woman of color to be ostracized by the LGBT community this year for drawing attention to the violence of homonormativity. On June 24, immigrant rights activist Jennicet Gutiérrez was evicted from a speech given by President Barack Obama in celebration of the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage. Gutiérrez was booed and removed from the audience for demanding that the President release all LGBTQ immigrants from detention. The media have since characterized Gutiérrez as a ‘heckler,’ effectively tone policing her and distracting from the content of her important message.
As American gays and lesbians continue to celebrate the legality of same-sex marriage and vilify figures such as Kim Davis, transgender women and non-binary people of color continue to be murdered and commit suicide in an escalating epidemic. By consolidating homosexuality and gender variance into one umbrella acronym, major LGBT organizations receive funding that could go to addressing the root causes of transphobic murder and discrimination. Instead, they focus on assimilation into structures such as marriage and the military and anti-discrimination legislation. These objectives fail to address structural oppression and in the end serve to bolster the systems that marginalize transgender, non-binary, and queer people of color.
If we consider the violent implications of homonormativity in the context of Banks’ tweet, it becomes much harder to reduce the situation to one of simple homophobia. Banks was not calling all LGBT people members of a ‘gay white KKK’; to do so would be to implicate herself, as she has publicly identified as bisexual. Rather, Banks was bringing attention to the everyday racism and misogyny that are propagated by certain members of the community and made ordinary by homonormativity. The way in which the media and LGBT community have demonized Banks makes evident yet again the necessity of developing an intersectional framework that does not isolate the issue of homophobia but addresses its relation to other forms of oppression.
To be clear, I am not necessarily defending Banks’ use of a word that has traditionally been used to demean gay men. I am, however, insisting on the right of a bisexual woman of color to criticize the community that is attempting to silence her.