How to Be An Ally

Happy Pride, everyone!!! Celebrate yourself and each other. I’m so glad to be in this family with you.

My name is Tanya, and I’ve been involved with Black and Pink for six years. I started in the Chicago chapter and am now in the NYC chapter. I’ve also been on the National Board for the last few years. Thank you for contributing to our organization that is my political home. I’ve learned so much from everyone and from our abolitionist work.

I’m honored to write a piece for our newspaper. The topic is allyship. What is its importance? What does it mean to be an ally to LGBTQ+ people?

For me, LGBTQ+ allyship refers to the idea that people who do not themselves identify as LGBTQ+ (that is, they are cis and/or straight) still support us as a group. This allied support is helpful because we as LGBTQ+ people have fewer numbers (there are more cis/straight people than there are us) and less recognized power and resources due to histories of queerphobia and transphobia.

art by Shaun Slifer, courtesy of justseeds.org

Allies may not have personally vested interests in our struggles, but when they realize that their liberation is bound up with ours (to paraphrase a 1970s Queensland Aboriginal activists group), we have a stronger path toward collective victory on multiple, interconnected issues.

We are coming from many different places and backgrounds, some sheltered, some traumatic, some affirming, some disjointed. All formative. It’s not pragmatic to expect everyone to perfectly think of each other as part of the same group right away, yet it gives into neoliberal fallacies to think we must struggle in isolation. So, as I learned from reading abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s account of an antiprison campaign in California, mutual alliances are strategically useful to build broader and deeper networks of people with alreadyexisting causes that can accomplish more when pulled together. From this starting point, we avoid the false promise of everlasting unity and one-mindedness; we can be realistic in what kinds of organizing and negotiation and conflict resolution we have to do to concretely win.

However, extending allyship based solely on identity can be dangerous. Becoming an ally to someone just because of one aspect of their identity is potentially tokenizing, fetishizing, or ignorant. It would be misguided to think you’re helping LGBTQ+ people by being an ally to Milo Yiannopoulous, who is gay but also a far-right, proTrump racist. Political analysis matters in addition to identity and lived experience. There are also people who as allies give exclusionary support only to those who seem the most like them. For example, think of rich, white, straight people who support only rich, white, married gay men while leaving poor, weirdo queers of color to die. That’s

bad respectability politics: the idea that you get contingent acceptance and your one “deviance” is “excused” only if you fit into all these other oppressive norms.

Furthermore, the worst “allies” promote themselves instead of the actually marginalized people. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you have encountered people who self-congratulatorily proclaim themselves as an ally to LGBTQ people but don’t put any sacrifice behind their words to make an impact on our conditions. They’re more interested in co-opting our issues to show off how “good” of an activist they are, or they demand you to do all the labor in educating them, or expect you to reward them for minimum decency, or want you to assuage their feelings of guilt and shame. Even more harmfully, some so-called allies step over actual LGBTQ+ people to try to speak for us and give what they think we need as charity, rather than amplifying our own voices and centering our self-determined needs. Ally shouldn’t be an identity someone can give themselves. It shouldn’t be something they say they are; it should be something they do. the idea of accomplices instead of allies. Some people also prefer the terms comrades, collaborators, or coalition partners.

In thinking about this distinction, I refer to “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing The Ally Industrial Complex”, a 2014 zine from Indigenous Action Media. The zine rejects “the commodification and exploitation of allyship [that] is a growing trend in the activism industry”, especially in anti-colonial struggles. “When we fight back or forward, together, becoming complicit in a struggle towards liberation, we are accomplices.” When our very existence as LGBTQ+ has been violently criminalized, it starts to make sense how cis/ straight people who are truly committed to our well-being can become accomplices. We don’t need allies to save us. We need people to fight at our sides in solidarity for the long term.

I strive to be in solidarity with all fellow LGBTQ+ people, no matter how far outside the mainstream you are, if you are committed to the same values of transformative justice and anti-oppression. As someone who has never been incarcerated, I don’t presume to know what it’s like to be in your position, but I’m here to listen to your demands, make common enemy of the prisonindustrial complex, learn from my mistakes, and put my time and resources toward abolition and queer liberation.

Whether you frame it as being an ally or an accomplice, I think the most important things are to: Listen to and follow leadership of the people you’re supporting. Use your own privilege (material resources, safety) to defend against opponents. Do your own reading and self-education. Apologize and do better when you mess up. Don’t make it all about yourself by seeking constant validation. Be an ally/accomplice in community with others, not as an individual. Think of your work (because it should be work) as in our mutual benefit toward a more just world for all.

Now, what do you think about allyship? We value your thoughts; I by no means hold the authoritative point of view. So please share your opinions! Please be well, be fab, be YOU.

In solidarity, Tanya