#but FEM BISEXUAL MEN SHOULD BE REPRESENTED. like butch bi women

[mithliya]

I just find it so annoying the time, energy and debates the discussions like this usually turn into. Something nasty or then crazy gc discourse or someone calling you a fake lesbian on rf gossip. The nitpicking is ridiculous. As soon as I saw this thread I knew someone was gonna call you bi or get mad because she didn’t get by you saying looks you mean aesthetic. You can like a character or actors personality or acknowledge they have a nice aesthetic or be a fan without being into them. Just from now maybe use aesthetic and not looks because looks to most people means physical attraction.

So many people get so hostile and are just waiting to call some actual lesbian bi. I don’t think white fems even think about how much harder it is for lesbians of color to get where they are and how bad the pressures and socialization is. Radical feminists are massive hypocrites with their own works and beliefs. Cognitive dissonance of their own going on about how women are socialized and sexuality. Their empathy, perspective and analysis seems to disappear when it’s needed the most. Liking men can put your life in danger and women of color are especially not allowed to desire only be desired by men.

We exist as business transactions all over the world, denied so much and barely allowed to be our own person. Sexuality can be deeply suppressed. Women aren’t taught or allowed to have their own desires and to know their own bodies or orgasms, just how to please men. In high school every discussion amongst girls involved blowing men or how cum is good for your skin. No one talked about pleasing a girl ever. I hated having to hear it & girls doing it because that’s what they’re taught. even bi women I’ve met have just blown men for years and never been sexually satisfied or reciprocated by men once. Then they got lucky and realized they liked women and fell for one. So yeah I think no lesbian actually obviously fantasizes about males in anyway fictional or not. Plenty bi women feel like that and don’t want a male irl. Penis repulsion is thing. A fantasy is representative of a desire or scenario of something or someone you find pleasant and makes you feel things. I know lesbians who love anime and cartoons who just love butches and they still never fantasize about a male because it isn’t what a butch is. That anon is fantasizing about male characters and I think that’s not lesbian period. No lesbian is excited by maleness and depictions of it. I think it should end their.

So anyway, no one also does this with gay men. gay men don’t argue about this and call other men fake gay men. Maybe that’s because it’s so different being a woman and experiencing misogyny and homophobia with sexuality and the fact that bisexual men aren’t saying they’re gay or being problematic and annoying in the same way bi women who are always lesphobic do. idk. Gay men don’t go through female socialization and are taught to be submissive so it’s easier for them to be confident and at least know or realize their desires much more easier than lesbians. Some things to think about. bi women are so annoying to us and love to hate lesbians and wanna be one but this shit doesn’t happen much or in the same way or extent with gay and bisexual men. I think people need examine the misogyny and double standards here.

it’s kinda bizarre to me bc i straight up said repeatedly that i don’t really get it and that i personally have always just gotten extremely bored when male characters are involved n don’t care for anything about males.. yet bc i said i don’t think someone’s not a lesbian if she likes anime guys or w/e it means i also like fictional men in any sense 😐

u did lose me in some parts tho and the part where u said no bi men claim to be gay, thats untrue. there’s plenty of bi men that call themselves gay men, it’s just never turned into a discussion of Some Gay Men Can Be Into Women or w/e and it’s not used to prove that gay men can be attracted to women to the same degree. but unfortunately plenty of bi people of both sexes claim to be gay. some will call themselves gay bc they genuinely think they are exclusive same sex attracted while some will say they’re gay bc they’re primarily same sex attracted and think that’s the same thing. it’s terrible bc it rly makes it harder for gay ppl to communicate our sexualities and also to form communities around our shared sexual orientation

anyways i think u may have sent me the longest anon ive ever had,, i wish i could give u an award for that

[gothhabiba]

(femme anon) i very well could be! my assumption was that "femme" came to wider attention because of more writing about a (seemingly) popular kind of queer femme identity (which i figured was popular/used in part bc of its feminist identity), in articles like this> tinyurl(.)com/yxy4a8ac but i don't know when companies started printing things with "femme" on them or if that could have been an influence.

[about this ask]

it was of course lesbians who repopularised the fem/butch identifiers in the ‘80s, & I can only assume that that was a prerequisite for the situation that we have now. but I think it’s more likely that a general shift towards thinking of feminism in terms of individualist “empowerment,” which corporate capitalism caused or at least markets heavily on, plus capitalist focus on who you are as an “identity” or collection of “identities” based on how you dress, how you act, and what you buy (because these “types” of people form demographics that can easily be marketed to)–it’s more likely that these things represent a general trend in thinking that a lot of lesbians have been impacted by, than that some trends in lesbian self-conception singlehandedly caused a shift in how people think of what “femme” means.

to be fair, when I answered your first ask I thought you meant something more along the lines of e.g. tumblr posts that seem to imply that fem as a specifically lesbian identity is completely free from the contradictions and discomforts that govern femininity in general (the kind of thing that I’m [lovingly] criticising here)–which if anything are a reaction against the “’femme’ means any feminine-presenting woman” / “butch/fem couples are regressive imitators of heterosexuality” waves–than something along the lines of the article you linked. that article is closer to an example of what I would consider to be “femme” being divorced from its context (I gave the example of “companies who make money off of…publishing articles about like. femme power or god knows what” as an example of “mainstream discourse” in which “femme” in its meaning as a sexual role had been “lost”).

at any rate, as with the construction of butch & fem roles and terminology in the first place, or with the change in the conception of lesbianism from something role-oriented (fems aren’t lesbians because they’re still taking on an appropriately ‘feminine’ role in their relationships with butches; butches are lesbians because their roles are inverted from what they ‘should’ be as women) to something object-oriented (the identity of the object of your desire as a woman is what makes you a lesbian–this was also likely part of what led to the creation of “lesbian” and “bisexual” as separate identities)–or with any other situation where you have a minoritised group of people interacting with and creating language and forming vocabularies and frameworks for self-conception–the relationship between cause and effect, between influenced and influencer, regarding the frameworks of the minoritised community & those of the culture at large are going to be very entangled. (on a similar note, there’s of course more going on with the “loss” of butch & fem as sexual roles than just what I mentioned in that very quickly written post, and some of it is just changes in how the dominant culture perceives of sexuality.)

part of why I am so wary about any implication that lesbians’ self-conception has had the power to singlehandedly change the broader culture’s conception of language or sexuality is that this claim has been made in very lesbophobic ways–I see the claim being made very often that (women who today would be defined as) lesbians somehow effected the shift from “a lesbian is any woman currently interested in being with women” to “a lesbian is exclusively interested in women, & any woman who is also interested in men is something else” all on their own just by being mean and exclusionary to (people who would later be considered) bi women & “pushing them out of the community.” but this shift from a role-oriented to an object-oriented view of sexuality was one that was also taking place in medical and psychiatric thinking and in the broader culture… minority culture both reacts to (as when lesbians responded to a dominant view of sexuality in the ~40s as based on rigid sexual role dimorphism by creating the butch/fem system) and influences broader culture. I’m not sure that there’s any way to clearly establish cause and effect here. & it’s a very common bigoted tactic (which tbc I’m not accusing you of, just following a line of thought that’s been occupying me a lot lately) to claim that the targeted group holds far more power to singlehandedly affect events than they, in fact, do.

[xeno-aligned]

copy & pasted under the read more in order to have a local copy.

A Brief His and Herstory of Butch And Femme

BY: JEM ZERO 16 DEC 2017

When America’s LGBTQ+ folk started coming out of the closet in the 1950s, the underground scene was dominated by working class people who had less to lose if they were outed. Butch/femme presentation arose as a way for lesbians to identify each other, also serving as a security measure when undercover cops tried to infiltrate the local scenes. Butch women exhibited dapper and dandy aesthetics, and came to be known for being aggressive because they took protective roles during raids and other examples of homophobic violence. The image of the butch lesbian became a negative stereotypes for lesbians as a whole, leaving out femme lesbians, who are (pretty insultingly) considered undetectable as lesbians due to their feminine presentation.

In modern times there’s less need for strict adherence to these roles; instead, they become heritage. A great deal of political rebellion is wrapped up in each individual aesthetic. Butch obviously involves rejecting classically feminine gender expectations, while femme fights against their derogatory connotations.

But while butch/femme has been a part of lesbian culture, these terms and identities are not exclusive to queer women. Many others in the LGBTQ community utilize these signifiers for themselves, including “butch queen” or “femme daddy.” Butch and femme have different meanings within queer subcultures, and it’s important to understand the reasons they were created and established.

The Etymology

The term “lesbian” derives from the island on which Sappho lived—if you didn’t already guess, she was a poet who wrote extensively about lady-lovin’. Before Lesbos lent its name to lesbians, the 1880s described attraction between women as Sapphism. In 1925, “lesbian” was officially recorded as the word for a female sodomite. (Ick.) Ten years before that, “bisexual” was defined as "attraction to both sexes."

In upcoming decades, Sapphic women would start tearing down the shrouds that obscured the lives of queer women for much of recorded history. Come the ‘40s and ‘50s, butch and femme were coined, putting names to the visual and behavioral expression that could be seen in pictures as early as 1903. So, yeah—Western Sapphic women popularized these terms, but the conversation doesn’t end there, nor did it start there.

Before femme emerged as its own entity, multiple etymological predecessors were used to describe gender nonconforming people. Femminiello was a non-derogatory Italian term that referred to a feminine person who was assigned male—this could be a trans woman, an effeminate gay man, or the general queering of binarist norms. En femme derives from French, and was used to describe cross-dressers.

Butch, first used in 1902 to mean "tough youth," has less recorded history. Considering how “fem” derivatives were popularized for assigned male folks, one might attribute this inequality to the holes in history where gender-defying assigned female folks ought to be.

The first time these concepts were used to specifically indicate women was the emergence of Sapphic visibility in twentieth century. This is the ground upon which Lesbian Exclusivism builds its tower, and the historical and scientific erasure of bisexual women is where it crumbles. Seriously, did we forget that was a thing?

The assumption that any woman who defies gender norms is automatically a lesbian relies on the perpetuation of misogynist, patriarchal stereotypes against bisexual women. A bisexual woman is just as likely to suffer in a marriage with a man, or else be mocked as an unlovable spinster. A woman who might potentially enjoy a man is not precluded from nonconformist gender expression. Many famous gender nonconforming women were bisexual—La Maupin (Julie d'Aubigny), for example.

Most records describing sexual and romantic attraction between women were written by men, and uphold male biases. What happens, then, when a woman is not as openly lascivious as the ones too undeniably bisexual to silence? Historically, if text or art depicts something the dominant culture at the time disagrees with, the evidence is destroyed. Without voices of the Sapphists themselves, it’s impossible to definitively draw a line between lesbians and bisexuals within Sapphic history.

Beyond White Identities

Another massive hole in the Lesbian Exclusivist’s defenses lies in the creeping plague that is the Mainstream White Gay; it lurks insidiously, hauling along the mangled tatters of culture that was stolen from Queer and Trans People of Colour (QTPOC). In many documents, examples provided of Sapphic intimacy are almost always offered from the perspective of white cis women, leaving huge gaps where women of color, whether trans or cis, and nonbinary people were concerned. This is the case despite the fact that some of the themes we still celebrate as integral to queer culture were developed by Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ folk during the Harlem Renaissance, which spanned approximately from 1920 to 1935.

A question I can’t help but ask is: Where do queer Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color fit into the primarily white butch/femme narrative? Does it mean anything that the crackdown on Black queer folk seemed to coincide with the time period when mainstream lesbianism adopted butch and femme as identifiers?

Similar concepts to butch/femme exist throughout the modern Sapphic scene. Black women often identify as WLW (Women-Loving-Women), and use terms like “stud” and “aggressive femme.” Some Asian queer women use “tomboy” instead of butch. Derivatives and subcategories abound, sometimes intersecting with asexual and trans identities. “Stone butch” for dominant lesbians who don’t want to receive sexual stimulation; “hard femme” as a gender-inclusive, fat-positive, QTPOC-dominated political aesthetic; “futch” for the in-betweenies who embody both butch and femme vibes. These all center women and nonbinary Sapphics, but there’s still more.

Paris is Burning, a documentary filmed about New York City ball culture in the 1980s, describes butch queens among the colourful range of identities prevalent in that haven of QTPOC queerness. Despite having a traditionally masculine physique, the gay male butch queen did not stick to gender expectations from straight society or gay culture. Instead, he expertly twisted up his manly features with women’s clothing and accessories, creating a persona that was neither explicitly masculine nor feminine.

Butch Queens Up in Pumps, a book by Marlon M. Bailey, expounds upon their presence within inner city Detroit’s Ballroom scene, its cover featuring a muscular gay man in a business casual shirt paired with high heels. Despite this nuance, butch remains statically defined as a masculine queer woman, leaving men of color out of the conversation.

For many QTPOC, especially those who transcend binary gender roles, embracing the spirit of butch and femme is inextricable with their racial identity. Many dark-skinned people are negatively portrayed as aggressive and hypermasculine, which makes it critical to celebrate the radical softness that can accompany femme expressions. Similarly, the intrinsic queerness of butch allows some nonbinary people to embrace the values and aesthetics that make them feel empowered without identifying themselves as men.

Butch, Femme, and Gender

It’s pretty clear to me that the voices leading the Lesbian Exclusive argument consistently fail to account for where butch and femme have always, in some form, represented diverse gender expression for all identities.

‘Butch’ and ‘femme’ began to die out in the 1970s when Second Wave Feminism and Lesbian Separatism came together to form a beautiful baby, whom they named “Gender Is Dead.” White, middle class cis women wrestled working class QTWOC out of the limelight, claiming that masculine gender expression was a perversion of lesbian identity. The assassination attempt was largely unsuccessful, however: use of these identifiers surged back to life in the ‘80s and ‘90s, now popularized outside of class and race barriers.

Looking at all this put together, I have to say that it’s a mystery to me why so many lesbians, primarily white, believe that their history should take precedence over… everyone else that makes up the spectrum of LGBTQ+ experiences, even bi/pan Sapphics in same-gender relationships. If someone truly believes that owning butch/femme is more important than uniting and protecting all members of the Sapphic community from the horrors of homophobic and gendered oppression, maybe they’re the one who shouldn’t be invited to the party.

As a nonbinary lesbian, I have experienced my share of time on the flogging-block. I empathize strongly with the queer folks being told that these cherished identities are not theirs to claim. Faced with this brutal, unnecessary battle, I value unity above all else. There’s no reason for poor trans women, nonbinary Black femmes, bisexual Asian toms, gay Latino drag queens, or any other marginalized and hurting person to be left out of the dialogue that is butch and femme, with all its wonderful deconstructions of mainstream heteronormative culture.

It is my Christmas wish that the Lesbian Exclusivist Tower is torn down before we open the new chapter in history that is 2018. Out of everything the LGBTQ+ community has to worry about already, petty infighting shouldn’t be entertained—especially when its historical foundation is so flimsy. Queering gender norms has always been the heart of butch/femme expression, and that belongs to all of us.

[precise-desolation]

Pride Month 4 - Flags (Part 2)

[[Aaaand we’re back.  With more flags.  Still focusing mainly on sexual orientations this time.  I’ll get to gender next weekend.  (With the exception of the transgender flag, as that flag is common enough that it warranted a place in the first flag post.)  Again, this will be long, so it’s under a read-more.  

I’ve also added the color meanings to the section on the ace flag in Part 1.  Additionally, there are some things in this post I don’t know very much about and Google was less than helpful.  So please, if I got something wrong or if you know some of the things I don’t, let me know.  I’d love to make this more complete.

This is a lesbian pride flag, one of several.  It was created in 1999 by Sean Campbell.  The flag features three prominent elements: the purple background, the black triangle, and the labrys.

The purple background is representative of spirit, as with the rainbow pride flag.  The black triangle is representative of the black triangles that marked “asocial” female prisoners in Holocaust concentration camps.  Same-sex attraction was one of the things that could get a woman branded as asocial.  I will include more about the black triangle this coming weekend in a post on symbols.  The final piece of this flag is the labrys.  This is a double headed battle axe associated with Minoan society, was was thought to be matriarchal, and with the legendary Amazons, an all female society.

This is the lipstick lesbian flag.  The flag was created by unnamed blogger in 2010.  It’s intention was to give the lesbian community a flag of their own.  (Granted, this was about 11 years after the first lesbian flag.)

Lipstick lesbians is a term that dates back to the 1980s in - you guessed it - San Francisco, seeming the the origin of most things queer.  This categorization was part of a larger cultural structure.  This is something we have seen break down with the recent trend of normalization of same-sex couples and the acknowledgement of a gender spectrum along with third wave feminism and the push for gender equality.  That influence has created a breakdown in some of the strict heteronormative gender roles that used to impact the LGBTQ community.

Until the last decade or so, there was an unspoken rule that somebody in the relationship had to “wear the pants,” so to speak.  Even in same-sex couples, there was an expectation that one partner would take on a more traditionally feminine role while the other would take on a more traditionally masculine role.  In Steve and Bucky’s day, this was expressed in the gay/bisexual male community with the term ‘punk’, among others.  A punk would have been the effeminate, passive partner.  (I’ll do a post on New York queer slang from Bucky and Steve’s youth.)

In lesbian culture, there were bulldykes** or butches and fems, or lipstick lesbians.  Butches were the more masculine lesbian/bi women, as the name suggests.  A woman who was a fem or lipstick lesbian took on a more traditionally feminine roll.  They did - and still do, as there are many women in the queer community who consider themselves lipstick lesbians and fems - most of the things that society would have deemed properly feminine.  They wore dresses and makeup, styled their hair, and were generally unidentifiable as lesbians/bi.  (This was in contrast to butches, who dressed in a more masculine manner and generally performed social roles associated with men.)  In today’s queer community, the terms fem or lipstick lesbian refer to a woman who is very feminine in their gender expression.

And to round out sexual orientations, this is the aromantic flag.  My google-fu did not get me a date of origin or a creator, so I’m not entirely sure where/when this originated.  People who are aromantic, or aro, do not experience romantic attraction.  This does not mean that they cannot form emotional bonds, it simply means that they are not attracted to people in a romantic sense.  It also does not mean that they are asexual, although a large number of aromantic people do fall on the asexual spectrum.

The colors of this flag represent different part of the aromantic spectrum just as the colors of the asexual flag represent the asexual spectrum.  Green was chosen because it is opposite red on the color wheel, red being the color traditionally used to represent romance.  Yellow was chosen to symbolize friendship, as in the language of flowers this is the meaning of a yellow rose.  Orange falls between yellow and red and represents grey-romantics and demiromantics - respectively, people who only occasionally experience romantic attraction and people who only experience romantic attraction when they already have a strong emotional bond with the person.  Black represents total lack of romantic attraction.

This is also the aromantic flag.  Again, I do not know who created it or when, only that it is newer than the previous flag.  From what I have found, it was changed from the previous flag because the original looked too much like a Rastafarian flag.

In this new version, green is still used for aromantics, as green is the opposite of red.  From what I’ve found, the yellow is for lithoromantics, which the internet defined as someone who can experience romantic attraction and may enjoy the idea of a romantic relationship, but does not actually wish to be part of one.  The grey stripe is for grey-romantics.  And the black stripe is for demiromantics.

And this is, yet again, the aromantic flag.  Like the two previous flags, I don’t know who created this or when, only that this is the most recent.  The yellow stripe was changed to white to accommodate autistic members of the community who are sensitive to yellow.  There is a large overlap between the aromantic spectrum community and the autistic spectrum community.  This is not to say that all aro people are autistic, as there are aro people who are neurotypical or at least not on the autistic spectrum.  This is also not to say that all people on the autistic spectrum are aro.

The colors in this flag are very much like the last.  Green is for aromantics, white for lithoromantics, grey for grey-romantics, and black for demiromantics.

From here we move on to flags that are a bit more fringe, as these groups are sometimes not identified (by themselves or by others) as part of the LGBTQ community.

This is the intersex flag.  It was created in 2013 by an Australian international intersex organization.  Their aim was to create a flag that did not use pink and blue symbolism.  The organization declared that yellow and purple were the intersex colors.  The circle represents strength.  From the organization’s description:

“The colour yellow has long been regarded as the hermaphrodite[**] colour, neither blue nor pink. Purple, too, has been used for the same purpose – including on this site. The circle is unbroken and unornamented, symbolising wholeness and completeness, and our potentialities. We are still fighting for bodily autonomy and genital integrity, and this symbolises the right to be who and how we want to be.”

This goes back to something mentioned in the section on the trans* flag, which was that many intersex infants are assigned a binary gender at birth and begin treatment to make them appear “normal” well before they are old enough to make an informed decision about their own bodies.  Sometimes this is even done without the parents’ knowledge, and some intersex people do not find out that they are intersex until puberty or into adulthood and may have great difficulty obtaining accurate medical records.  There are a number of intersex advocacy groups fighting to abolish this practice.

This is another intersex flag.  This one was created by Natalie Phox in 2009.  Like the other, newer flag, it seeks to give intersex people a symbol of their own.  This one combines the traditional baby colors, pink and blue, to represent people who are both or neither.

The reason intersex people are questionably a part of the LGBTQ community is due to their own definitions of who they are.  Some members of the intersex community do not wish to be associated with the LGBTQ community, as they do not feel that their identity falls within the bounds of this group.  Others do categorize themselves as part of the LGBTQ community.

This is the straight ally flag.  (I could not find a larger image, which should tell you something about this flag and how it’s viewed...)  This originated in the late 2000s, but there is not a known origin or creator for it.

This flag combines the umbrella LGBTQ flag, the six striped rainbow flag, with the straight pride flag, which I do not plan to give its own section.  The upward pointing V is supposed to look like an A, representing allies and activism.  The straight pride flag consists of black and white stripes.  Black and white are not part of the rainbow and also express a binary.  The straight pride flag originated with a number of anti-LGBTQ groups.  This ties into both the reason I do not plan to include a section on the straight pride flag and why the ally flag is sometimes seen as a mark of bad allies.  

The idea of straight pride is similar in nature to the idea of white pride.  Certainly people who are straight should be proud of their sexual orientation, as a part of a more sex-positive society.  This is just as white people should take pride in their ancestry, because it tells them about their origins.  However, just as there is a very good reason we do not have “white history month” to counter black history month, there is a reason we do not have a “straight pride month” to counter LGBTQ pride month.

Historically in Western society, the dominant group has been straight, white, cisgender, Christian men.  You may be familiar with the saying “history is written by the victor.”  Similarly, history is written by those with privilege.  As such, the histories of oppressed groups tend not to be taught or to be written out of history entirely.  This is why we have ‘history’ as a mandatory subject, but once one reaches higher education one may take ‘women’s history’ or ‘LGBTQ history’ or ‘black history’ as electives.  These are separate classes because the histories of these groups and their contributions to the world at large are not taught as part of mainstream history curriculums.  

Let me repeat that for the people in the back: The histories and contributions of oppressed groups are not part of our mandatory education on Western civilization.  As a person who is queer, female bodied, and part Latin@, I have had to go out on my own to try to find out about people like me.  Black history month exists to highlight the contributions of Black people.  Women’s history month exists to highlight the contributions of women.  LGBTQ pride month exists to allow LGBTQ visibility and teach about the contributions of LGBTQ people.  Many LGBTQ people grow up believing there is something wrong with them because they do not fit into the heteronormative, cissexist mold of mainstream Western society.  They may, in fact, be told exactly that and worse by parents, teachers, religious leaders, and their government.  (As an aside, shame on our current vice president for his contributions to that.)  That’s why visibility is so important.  It lets people know they aren’t alone.  That’s why LGBTQ pride is so important.  It lets people know there is nothing wrong with them and that people like them have made great contributions to the world.

So back to the idea of straight pride and a straight pride flag.  We do not need a white history month, because every month is white history month.  We do not need a men’s history month, because every month is men’s history month.  And we do not need a straight pride month, because every month is straight pride month.  The same need for visibility does not exist for these groups because they are the dominant groups.  They are the ones who control the narrative.  The only people who think we need a white pride month are racists who refuse to acknowledge their own privilege.  The only people who think we need men’s history month are sexists who refuse to acknowledge their own privilege.  The only people who think we need a straight pride month are straight, cisgender people who refuse to acknowledge their own privilege.  (I do realize that most straight allies do not feel there is a need for a straight pride month.)

The purpose of a pride flag is to emphasize unity, community, and bravery.  The courage to be oneself in spite of sometimes violent opposition.  Straight allies, by using this flag, attempt to insert themselves as a part of the LGBTQ community and attempt to send a message that they are brave for standing up for LGBTQ people.  And while some members of the queer community do count straight allies as a part of the community, just as many feel that they are not.  Likewise, many people within the LGBTQ community feel that it is not particularly brave or special to simply do the right thing.  An argument can be made for the difficulty of standing up for what is right when one knows there may be severe negative consequences for doing so, and historically this has been the case for straight allies, so this perhaps does earn them their flag.

In the end, it comes down to privilege.  Those who exclude allies from the LGBTQ community are not attempting to devalue the work of allies, because there have been significant contributions made to the fight for LGBTQ equality by people who are not themselves queer.  What they are saying is that straight allies do not - cannot - fully understand what it’s like to navigate the world as a queer person.  And this is a perfectly legitimate view.  

**It should be noted that these terms may now be considered offensive.