Top Tweets for #NotQueer

As a lesbian, I am so tired of this nonsense. I am tired of corporate Pride and activist Pride. This week HelloFresh decided that the best way to celebrate Pride Month was to post jokes about preparing for anal sex and offering high-fibre recipes to help people "prep". They then doubled down with a discount code called BOTTOMSUP. Inclusion! WOO! 🙄 The thing that frustrates me is that people like me have spent years defending gay rights against accusations that we are hypersexual, inappropriate, and incapable of ordinary family life. That was one of the central prejudices gay people faced. For decades, opponents portrayed gay men in particular as sexually obsessed and depraved. They argued that homosexuality was all about sex rather than love, commitment, relationships and family. The fight for equal rights was partly a fight against exactly that caricature. And now here we are. A major multinational company has decided the best way to celebrate Pride is to publicly discuss anal sex. What an achievement. The same-sex marriage movement wasn't about sex. It was about love, commitment, and the ability to build a life with the person you love. It was about family and equality before the law. Most gay people are not what the weirdos in the HelloFresh marketing department think we are. We go to work, pay bills, walk the dog, argue about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher, and try to build a decent life together. You know... Normal things. The overwhelming majority of gay people just want to be accepted and left alone. We want the same freedoms, responsibilities and opportunities as everyone else. We don't need multinational corporations making dirty jokes about us to feel "included". What makes this even more ridiculous is that HelloFresh's core market is clearly not radical "queer" activists with blue hair and septum rings. Their customers are overwhelmingly middle-class couples and families. Busy parents. Professionals. People with disposable income who want convenient meals after work. How hard would it have been to make a genuinely wholesome Pride advertisement? Two mums cooking dinner with their kids or two husbands hosting friends. A same-sex couple just making dinner together or flipping a coin to see who has to cook. A simple message acknowledging families and love. Instead they went with rectum jokes. Somewhere along the way after the TQ+ hijacked our movement, Pride stopped being about acceptance and started being about performance. A small but influential group of activists have convinced themselves that being as shocking, vulgar and sexually explicit as possible is somehow brave and intrinsically "queer". They think boundaries of any kind are oppression including standards and decorum. They think manners are censorship. The result is campaigns like this one and somehow people are shocked when there is backlash against us all. I actually feel really sorry for gay men in particular because one of the oldest stigmas they have faced is the idea that they are dirty, promiscuous and defined entirely by sex. This campaign reinforces that stereotype. If you wanted to design an advertisement that would make ordinary people roll their eyes and think Pride is ridiculous, or shield their children's eyes in horror, you would struggle to do better than this. The irony is that HelloFresh's marketing department thinks this is progressive. It's regressive and distasteful. It takes decades of work by ordinary gay people who want to be seen as neighbours, colleagues, parents, partners and family members and reduces all of it to a crude sexual punchline. The people who fought for our rights wanted dignity, but the people most enthusiastic about Pride today seem determined to turn it into a fetish convention with corporate sponsors.