I Am Really Not A Fan Of "love Is Love" As A Slogan For The Queer Community. It Centers Queerness As

I am really not a fan of "love is love" as a slogan for the queer community. It centers queerness as romantic/sexual interest in other people, and to me feels like it’s inherently ignoring or even excluding intersex people, gender variant people, aspec people, and people with intersecting queer identities. It sanitises queerness into a form that’s easily consumed by a perisexist/endosexist, allonornative, amatonormative, cisnormative culture, instead of critiquing the harm those structures cause.

“Love is love” takes the focus away from important pieces of queer history and culture, such as drag queens, butches, trans folk, and other gender variant or fluid identities. With a slogan like “love is love”, it becomes easier to imagine every queer person as looking straight or at the very most slightly camp, and just happening to be attracted to and wanting to marry someone of the same gender, with a little wiggle room for polyamorous people too.

I think it just becomes a form of respectability politics. Queerness ought to be about accepting and embracing other ways of Being, not making a little extra wedge of space for certain people in an oppressive framework that still demands gender conformity and adherence to certain relationship rules, and still pathologises intersex and aspec people. It ought to be about tearing down that framework so it’s safe for people to be however they want or need to be — regardless of whether or not that falls within what was acceptable in the original framework.

Queer culture and queer liberation are intersectional, they always have been, saying “love is love” just feels like whitewashing it away.