Divided Loyalties
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            In her introduction, Story, an associate professor at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, uses her own life experience as a lens through which to analyze the actual lack of solidarity within the “Rainbow Nation.” She cites the example of Chadwick Moore, a white, conservative gay journalist, who opposed making Juneteenth a federal holiday because it fell during Pride Month. In 2020, Moore tweeted: “I’m sorry blacks, but you already have a month. Juneteenth isn’t a thing. Don’t colonize our month as well. Thanks! Signed, the gays.” This is just one of Story’s descriptions of racist condescension, and worse, perpetrated by people who claim to be oppressed themselves.

            As an educator, Story explains that an exclusively white, cis-male-centered version of “gay” history distorts reality. She teaches a course in lgbtq+ studies that is intended to inform students who are too young to remember the Stonewall Riots that lgbtq communities outside the white, middle-class mainstream already existed at the time. The culture of the Black and Latinx ballroom community is introduced as a source of slang expressions used by some of her students, who apparently believe that RuPaul invented them.

            The author describes her own introduction to the queer Southern ballroom scene in 2009, and she traces this culture back to Harlem in the 1860s. The “pansy craze” of the 1920s produced drag balls that attracted thousands of participants. Then, in the 1930s, a legal crackdown on cross-dressing forced the balls, and the community that organized them, out of the cultural mainstream until the late 1960s. A New York City ordinance against cross-dressing that was enacted decades earlier was the excuse for the police raid on the Stonewall Inn in 1969. As Story explains it, the LGBT liberation movement that followed the riots was made possible by years of multiracial queer and trans organizing, largely in coastal urban spaces.

            She provides numerous examples of misogynoir—the intersection of anti-Black racism and contempt for women—including the stereotyped persona of a welfare mother, “Shirley Q. Liquor,” performed in blackface by a gay, white, male comedian. And she shows that in the current cultural climate, “epidemic levels of dehumanizing violence” continue to be aimed at Black trans women in particular, and even celebrities such as Laverne Cox are not safe.

            In her discussion of the use of racially fetishizing terms on dating apps for gay men, Story quotes Fatima Jamal, a writer, performance artist, and model, who produced a documentary on these dating apps, No Fats, No Femmes, to “consider how white supremacist, colonial gazes severely impact how we see ourselves and also how we see and understand others.”

            This slim book provides much evidence that the “Rainbow Nation” is fractured by intersecting forms of institutional hatred, including Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism. The steady assimilation of Pride Week into a neoliberal culture of extreme economic inequality, in which racist and queer-phobic police violence persists, is sobering. This book is a wakeup call that needs to be widely read.
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Jean Roberta, a frequent G&LR contributor, is a widely published writer based in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.