Queer Conservatism
I don't know if this is been talked about here and I know most LGBT individuals don't have this view point but I've never gotten to ask people about it, though I'll attempt to phrase it delicately as to avoid caricaturing: What are your thoughts on queer conservatism? Usually I see it defined as sort of assimilationist or conformist; that we should conform to the same sort of entrenched, systemized gender norms as everyone else and reduce our visibility/saturation in the media to in a sense, placate and mollify the traditionalist establishment and avoid being othered.
Personally, I don't agree with it: I see any attempt to be the "model minority" as a recipe for disaster because, fundamentally, we're still a minority. And the rhetoric around that term has usually been employed as a sort of divide and conquer tactic to make artificial boundaries around minorities in order to promote aggressiveness between the two and make the alienated group easier to suppress. I don't think certain right-wing people will see gay, bisexual, pansexual, transsexual, asexual, intersex or nonbinary individuals any differently just because we "conform" because the status of being a minority is still unchanged. I also just generally disagree with the idea of conformity and rigid adherence to social norms. I think a quote from John Stuart Mill puts it best (though unfortunately even he was an elitist and racist </3):
"Human beings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not undistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet? If it were only that people have diversities of taste that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can in the same physical atmosphere and climate."
To me, human individuality and eccentricity is our greatest virtue; it is the cornerstone of our Adamic exceptionalism after all, the thing that separates us from a lowly invertebrate or simplemindedly gregarious herbivore. And I think any attempt to undermine or discredit individuality usually appeals to dogma or traditionalism and lacks an objective argument as to why we shouldn't embrace our self-actualization. Anyway sorry for the tangent. I'm still curious how everyone else feels about this ideology (if you can call it that) and if you've met any people who've espoused it.