What is homonormativity and why is still it a HUGE problem in our community?

When information like this is inaccessible to the masses, you’re left with generations of queer people who can’t find the words to express the oppression that they’re facing. As a high school student, I didn’t know what I was being given from other people was wrong. I didn’t know people disliking and shaming me for being feminine was wrong. I thought I should hate myself too, and so I did. Luckily, I was blessed with a gay uncle who had spent a great deal of his life exploring cultural academia. He was able to talk me through this trauma and oppression, arming me with words like homonormativity and microaggression, which helped me not only live my reality, but to make it better. What I learned, at the simplest level, was how to advocate for myself.

If I hadn’t had the uncle that I do, I may still have been enforcing homonormative values on myself (butching it up) and on others (saying I wouldn’t date feminine gay men). As a community, we have to make knowledge about homonormativity available to everyone, so that people can speak up. The thing about societal trends like homonormativity is that they’re made to be insidious. We accept trends and norms as natural, when they are anything but natural. There is no correct way to be gay, or bi, or trans, or queer. Once you name homonormativity and point it out, it loses power.

We need homonormativity to lose power because it wrecks lives, tears communities apart, and even kills. Homonormativity can explain why masculine gay men are often left alone, tolerated at worst and accepted at best, by society, while feminine gay men (particularly POC) are still frequently attacked by aggressive mobs on the daily. Homonormativity is why there is actual legislation against the trans community, based on gross accusations and stereotypes about them, that will force them to use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth (as if this legislation won’t cause unspeakable harm to these individuals). This is not liberal, culture-policing. This is real life.

The change needs to start from the bottom up. We need to be conscious about how we talk and how we conduct ourselves in public, both physically and online. We need to listen when people different from us talk, and recognize our own privileges and adjust accordingly (because no one is totally oppressed, we all have privileges somewhere). We need to organize for issues that are not gay marriage and fight for the rights of people who do not share our identities. We need to let queer people be queer people and stop enforcing molds created by a heterosexual world that wants us to be less like us and more like them.

Homonormativity is all of us this and more, but what it needs to be is history, not the present and future.