I had a friend on Facebook for a while who would make a lot of statuses on the importance the LGBTQ community being welcoming and kind to allies and I generally tried to ignore but respect her statuses because she is a member of that community and I don’t know that much anyway so I figured she knew better than me but today I unfriended her for other reasons and was thinking about how that sort of irked me anyway and now I am just wondering how you feel about LGBTQ who push welcoming allies?

scenicroutes:

lol ok i’m gonna be controversial here

obviously, allies should never be prioritized over lgbtq people. but there is an important difference between the trevor project giving a statue to katy perry and a group of high school students in a rural town holding an ally week. and /nobody/ on this piece of shit website seems to want to acknowledge this difference.

another important reality no one wants to acknowledge: “ally” is very frequently a category used by young kids who are just learning about lgbtq issues and are questioning their sexuality or aren’t ready to come out of the closet yet

i first came to lgbtq rights activism at the age of seventeen under the label “ally.” i knew, even in my first gay-straight alliance meeting, that the label wasn’t completely honest but, god, given my abusive home life? given the fact that my friends at church were shunning me just for attending GSA meetings? “ally” was the easiest and simplest and safest identifier for me to use. 

when my high school GSA held an ally week, it wasn’t about patting straight people on the back for being decent human beings. it was about educating the 99.9% of the student body that didn’t come to GSA meetings and didn’t give a shit. it was about encouraging them to help us create a safer space for the handful of openly gay kids at our school. and it profoundly, deeply helped me to see that so many of my classmates and peers were receptive to this messaging and openly, actively supportive of the GSA’s purpose.

another thing? at my school, the GSA and ally week were both founded by one of the guidance counselors, who has two gay daughters. it did not originate with a straight person disconnected from the movement who wanted to score some feel-good brownie points. it started with a mother who wanted to improve her childrens’ lives by increasing the level of support around them.

like, there’s this weird presumption that “ally week” and the concept of a “straight ally” started with straight people. ally week is an initiative of GLSEN. “straight ally” is a term created and promoted by LGBT rights organized to increase public support and solidarity.

of course no one should get a medal for merely being an ally, and of course queer spaces shouldn’t be dominated by allies, and of course an LGBTQ person’s voice is always going to be more important in queer space than an ally’s, but this weird senseless ganging up on high school gay-straight alliances and ally weeks has g o t to stop.