From Selma to Story Hour
- Monique Duson
- Jun 23
- 7 min read
Updated: Jun 25
How the Civil Rights Movement Was Used To Justify Drag Queen Events
If we want to understand today’s cultural chaos, we must recognize a critical truth: the contemporary “antiracism" movement and the LGBTQ+ movement are not separate battles. They have been deeply intertwined for decades, intentionally woven together by activists and scholars who use the same language of oppression, injustice, power, and liberation to push a broader societal revolution.
In this blog, I argue that the queer liberation movement (beginning with the gay rights movement) has strategically—and illegitimately—attached itself to the civil rights movement. These movements don’t merely flow in the same stream; they are consciously linked, like a tugboat pulling a barge. LGBTQ+ scholars, advocates, and allies, past and present, have hitched their cause to race, and I doubt the LGBTQ+ movement would have the same influence today without this calculated connection.
We are now in a cultural moment where standing for black life demands that you stand for the gender queer. Our nation has shifted profoundly, from Selma to Drag Queen Story Hour, all under the same calls for “justice.”
Pulling the Queer Barge
Since the civil rights movement, we’ve seen a familiar pattern occur in society: a major racial justice movement takes America by storm (usually precipitated by a racially charged event), and then it’s quickly followed by a push to advance LGBTQ+ agendas in politics, education, and the media. Here are a few examples:
Initial Race Movement | Subsequent Queer Movement |
Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968) | Stonewall riots (1969) & Gay Liberation Front (1970–1973) |
Los Angeles/Rodney King Riots (1992) | Queer Nation Movement & March on Washington for LGBTQ equal rights (1993) |
Trayvon Martin (2012); Ferguson riots (2014) | NAACP affirms gay marriage (2012) Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) Fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples. |
George Floyd & national social upheaval (2020) | Brooklyn (trans) Liberation March (2020) Title IX updates (2023) clarify that discrimination based on gender identity is prohibited, extending protections to transgender students, including athletes. |
These concurrences are not mere coincidences; they are part of an orchestrated strategy to conflate the LGBTQ+ individuals and their movement with blacks and the racial justice movement. LGBTQ+ liberation is framed as inseparable from racial justice, with victims of both sharing inequities within systems of oppression. This strategy works for two reasons:
An inner sense of connectedness develops between “marginalized” groups.
The overall “marginalized” group grows, creating a stronger, more united voice for changing culture.
Linking Gay Rights with Civil Rights: Some Key Examples
Given the constraints of time and space, I’ll highlight just a couple of examples illustrating how LGBTQ+ activism has historically tethered itself to the racial justice movement.
One of the foremost activists central to the gay rights movement, prior to the Stonewall riots and the civil rights movement, was Ernestine Eckstein. Through her advocacy for direct action and intersectional approaches, she forged a critical link between the discrimination faced by blacks and that faced by homosexuals. Her efforts laid the groundwork for more inclusive and activist-oriented strategies within the LGBTQ+ movement.
Several decades later, in their 1989 book, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s, Kirk and Madsen laid out a detailed plan for advancing the gay rights agenda (1). It is clear that they also saw a connection between the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement. The following excerpts from the book exemplify their understanding of this connection.
“Just as blacks allowed whites to render them 'invisible' until the 1960s, so have gays made of themselves 'invisible men' (and women)” (page xviii).
“In 1896, Justice John Harlan issued a thundering dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson that eventually overshadowed and shamed the majority’s 'separate but equal' rationale for the segregation of Blacks. ‘The Constitution is color-blind,’ said Harlan, ‘and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens . . . The thin disguise [in the majority’s rationale]...will not mislead anyone, nor atone for the wrong this day done.’ In Bowers v. Hardwick, the gay community has been handed down its own Plessy decision; now the community must await real justice through a gay Brown v. Board of Education” (page 72).
A little more than twenty years later, in 2012, the two movements solidified their union as the NAACP officially came out in support of same-sex marriage. In 2021, the NAACP released a resolution titled “Inclusion of LGBTQ+ Diversity and Sensitivity Training NAACP Programs,” stating, “the NAACP shall encourage the promotion of diversity and sensitivity trainings into all NAACP trainings and programs to encourage the inclusion of members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transitioning, and Queer (LGBTQ+) community as active Civil Rights activists and fighters within the NAACP.” In the resolution, NAACP president Derrick Johnson affirmed, "We pledge today to stand with our transgender brothers and sisters as we continue to fight any efforts to codify discrimination into law.”
But not everyone has jumped onto the barge. Within academia, the idea of hitching LGBTQ+ rights to civil rights has been met with mixed opinions. Some, strongly arguing that LGBTQ+ discrimination is similar to racial discrimination, maintain that connecting the two can yield collective societal benefits when it comes to winning court cases. That’s because, since the Civil Rights Act, courts have been very strict about laws that discriminate based on race. So if LGBTQ+ people are being unfairly treated in a way that's similar to racial discrimination, the hope is that courts would apply the same tough standards to LGBTQ+ issues and offer the same freedoms. However, these are not universally held ideas within academia.
Uniting The Marginalized for a Common Cause
Consciousness-raising, a term from 1960s radical feminism, is crucial for liberation movements, as it awakens marginalized groups to systemic oppression, shifting the blame from individuals to unjust structures. It involves three key steps: (1) awakening people to the presence of oppression (their own or others’); (2) uniting with others who are marginalized; and (3) demanding systemic change. This shared awareness empowers people to organize, resist, and demand social change as a collective.
This is what we see happening in our current culture. For example, as blacks have shared their experiences with racism (e.g., not being able to marry outside of their race, being turned away from jobs, or being turned down for promotions) the LGBTQ+ community is effectively saying, “These things are happening to us too.” The two groups unite into a larger, louder group to demand that systems and structures be changed.
And it isn’t stopping with blacks and the LGBTQ+ community. Recently, this ideology has been used to normalize the “struggles” of pedophiles (“minor attracted persons”) and felons (notice how the linked article is moving away from the term “felon”). These other groups are fighting for their seat at the “marginalized” table to join the collective community and demand systemic change in their favor.
What is to come of all this? For some, the end goal is a society freed from traditional structures like the family, religion, biological sex, and capitalism. Many academics and activists alike want to replace what we value as normal with the abnormal or “queer”; they envision a queer, post-capitalist, post-normative society where identity is fluid, institutions are deconstructed, patriarchy is dismantled, and all hierarchies are abolished. The goal isn’t tolerance. It’s a radical societal transformation in which the abnormal is normalized. That is truly what it means to “queer” something.
Is LGBTQ+ Justice Really Like Racial Justice?
In his book It's Not Like Being Black: How Sexual Activists Hijacked the Civil Rights Movement, Voddie Baucham highlights an important point: “Whether you identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, trigender, multigender, two-spirit, furry, queer, demiflux, otherkin, or as a mermaid, a British Columbian wolf, or an avian-human hybrid: Not one of those things is like being Black.” (2)
My black skin, hair texture, and ethnic heritage are not a lifestyle or a behavior. They are ordained through God’s providence from the womb, visible and permanent (Ps. 139:14, 16). I never had the option to not “come out” as black. On February 14, when I came out (of my mother’s womb), everyone saw I was black. Adopting a marginalized identity predicated on internal feelings or sexual behavior isn’t the same as being born into a marginalized ethnic group. In Voddie’s words, “it’s not like being black.”
Sadly, as the gay rights movement (3) emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, advocates like Ernestine Eckstein championed the union and solidarity of gay rights and civil rights activism. This merging was left unchecked, and within little more than a decade (the early 1970s), gay rights had become civil rights.
Thinking About This Biblically
Christians must understand that race and sexuality are not biblically equivalent categories. Race is assigned on the basis of physical characteristics—an aspect of God's good providence and diverse creation—while human sexuality is a moral and theological issue, rooted in God's good design for male and female (Genesis 1:27). Scripture condemns partiality based on race (James 2:1–9), but it also clearly defines sexual morality and boundaries (Romans 1:26–27; 1 Corinthians 6:9–11). To equate the immutable trait of skin color with behaviors that Scripture labels as sinful confuses categories and undermines biblical ethics.
Critical theory frameworks often collapse diverse human experiences into a single category of "marginalization," treating black people and LGBTQ+ individuals as interchangeable victims of oppression. But race and sexuality are not the same. Faithful Christians must reject this error. Conflating these identities leads to confusion and allows for all manner of “marginalized” groups (think pedophiles and felons) to hitch themselves to groups that are distinct because of God’s good design.
Despite these truths, the race and queer movements are connected in our culture. Does that mean we should just ignore racism in order to limit an infiltration of the queer movement? Absolutely not! We can do both—investigate claims of racism before reacting (from supporting riots to advocating policy changes), addressing true racial injustice issues when needed, and guard against the queer movement’s push into our schools, churches, and libraries.
It’s a delicate balancing act. But I firmly believe that the people of God can do hard things. Our children, churches, and society need us to do hard things. If we don’t do hard things, we will definitely lose our children, churches, and society. It’s happening now, right in front of us.
Family, the gospel offers a far better vision for humans and society than any contemporary critical theory ever could—one where every person is made in the image of God and redeemed not by victimhood or power, but by grace. Christians must speak boldly, resisting cultural lies with theological truth. We must teach our children a biblical view of God and his ways. The church needs intentional discipleship of believers who proclaim the moral character of God and the good order he has established for his creation on the earth. We fight back not by adopting worldly ideologies, but by proclaiming a better story, one rooted in the truth and goodness of Christ.
Kirk, Marshall, and Hunter Madsen. 1989. After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the '90’s. New York: Doubleday.
Baucham, Voddie. 2024. It's Not Like Being Black: How Sexual Activists Hijacked the Civil Rights Movement. Washington, DC: Regnery Faith, page 15 (Kindle edition).
