There is a laughter that does not belong to you. You borrow it, wear it like something ill-fitting, and return it slightly damaged. My friend was wearing it the night someone made a joke about gay people and the whole table erupted. I watched them choose, in real time, which side of the rainbow to stand on.

I did not laugh. But I did not speak, either. And silence, I have learned, is just applause with better deniability.

There is a performance some of us learn early: the art of being the acceptable queer. The one who does not make it a personality. The one who is gay but, you know, normal. You know the lines because you may have rehearsed them yourself: I support everyone, I just don't think Pride needs to be so loud. I'm not like the political ones. I just want to live my life. It is respectability politics dressed in rainbow colors, which is perhaps the most painful irony of all:using the flag as a blindfold.

Yet, I don't see this as villainy. I see this as survival wearing the wrong costume. Internalized homophobia and transphobia arrive slowly, in the form of every joke you laughed at, every flamboyant classmate you quietly distanced yourself from, every time you said, I'm not like that as though that were something shameful. The community did not invent this wound. Straight supremacy handed us the knife and watched us turn it inward.

When you distance yourself from the loudest, most visible members of our community, you are not simply protecting yourself. You are handing ammunition to the very system that will never fully accept you regardless. The drag queens thrown under the bus to seem reasonable did not make the bus stop. The trans women sacrificed at the altar of digestibility did not make the altar holy. You can sand yourself down to the smoothest, most straight-coded version of yourself ,and the door will still not open all the way. Because what they want is not a quieter you. What they want is your absence.

We are all on the same rainbow: Structurally, politically, and historically. The Stonewall riots were not led by the palatable ones. Marsha P. Johnson did not survive on subtlety. Every right you exercise quietly, someone loud died loudly for. You do not get to inherit the revolution and then evict the revolutionaries.

I think about my friend at that table sometimes. I do not think they were a bad person. I think they were a frightened one. I think they had been taught, the way so many of us are taught, that the rainbow has a hierarchy — that some colors are more acceptable, more livable, more worthy of being kept. And they were simply trying to be the right color.

But the rainbow does not work that way. Refract it however you want. Every color is still light. Every one of us is still here.

Whether you like it or not.

The Frontman