About Wedges (Not the Shoes) and Why They Freak Me Out a Little

I read something today that asked me to choose between safety and solidarity. I’m choosing to slow down instead.

Let’s talk about wedges. And I don’t mean the kind you’d wear to a garden party (though we could certainly have a conversation about those, too). I’m talking about the kind designed to split a community right down the middle.

I started reading a post on Substack a few days ago and I felt it almost immediately.

That internal eye-roll that says, “Oh, honey, absolutely not!”

I can handle disagreement. I can even handle someone being wrong.

What I have a harder time with is when something is written like it’s a report, but it’s really a pitch.

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Some people might have read the article and shrugged it off as nonsense. I’m going to blame the ADHD here, because I can’t skim something unsettling and set it down like nothing happened.

My brain takes it as a puzzle and a threat at the same time. I’ll still be worked up about it tomorrow morning when I’m trying to focus on my skincare regimen.

This one was pushing the idea that we should separate the letters. That “LGB” should peel away from “TQI.” Like it’s a clean, logical update. Like it’s just people “realizing” they don’t belong together.

And since I think aloud, I said to no one, “Where are you even getting this?”

Because that’s a huge claim. The kind that needs numbers and context. Something more than just a confident tone.

There was something familiar about it. A pattern I had seen before.

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The Shape of the Pitch

It goes something like this.

First they tell you the coalition is falling apart.

Then they suggest it’s not the people in power doing the damage. It’s the people next to you.

Then they offer you “safety” if you’ll just agree to stand further away from someone else.

That’s the wedge.

There are disagreements within queer communities. Of course there are. We’re people, not an acronym. We’re messy and human, and we have different needs and experiences.

But this wasn’t written like “here’s something complicated I’m struggling with.”

It was written like “Here’s the problem. Here’s the culprit. Here’s the solution. Now choose a side.”

I’ve seen this move outside of LGBTQ+ spaces too.

Women pitted against women. Immigrants pitted against immigrants. “The good ones” versus “the ones making it worse.”

Working class people blaming the working class person next door instead of the systems that keep everyone scrambling.

Disabled people treated like they’re asking for special treatment instead of basic access.

“Stop making it political,” said to the people whose bodies and lives are already political whether they want them to be or not.

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They Don’t Care About Our Labels

The outside world isn’t buying the neat distinctions this article invented.

People who hate queer people do not pause to ask whether you are the “acceptable letter.” They don’t go “Oh wait, you’re LGB, sorry! Our bad. Carry on.”

They don’t see separate groups, they see one big target. And they know that by getting us to chip away at our own solidarity, we become smaller, weaker and far easier to control.

So when I read something that says, in effect, “we should separate ourselves,” I don’t read it as a harmless identity debate. I read it as the first cut in a pattern that keeps cutting until everyone is standing alone.

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The “Third Place” Fantasy

The article goes on to claim that trans people are the reason gay and lesbian bars have been disappearing.

Once “T” and “Q” and “I” got added to the letters, gay men and lesbians lost their “third place.”

If you haven’t heard that term, a third place is just the spot that isn’t home and isn’t work. The bar. The diner. A place where your people all come together. Every subculture used to have one.

Also, and I need to say this plainly, blaming trans people for shifts in gay and lesbian public life feels like utter bullshit (sorry mom).

Gay bars didn’t start changing because trans people exist. The world changed.

Apps changed how people meet. COVID changed how people gather. The cost of living changed where people spend their nights. Social life moved into group chats, living rooms, and private spaces.

Lots of people, gay or straight, stopped doing “third places” the way we used to. I don’t need a villain to explain that. I just need to look outside.

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This is personal for me because I watched the “third place” fade long before anyone started blaming trans people for everything.

I came out in Minneapolis around 1998. I was nearly thirty, and going out two or three nights a week. I guess I was making up for lost time.

My two best friends and I were essentially running a marathon of bad decisions, and if you asked the bartenders, we were just three middle-aged gay men refusing to accept that the sun was coming up.

It was all very professional, I assure you.

Back then, one of my favorite clubs downtown had blacked-out windows. They didn’t want people driving by to see a room full of gay men. And they had a reason. We were targeted.

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Cade and I got married in November 2019, before COVID. We had a small ceremony in Minneapolis for a handful of family and friends.

After our reception, we went back to one of my old stomping grounds. It was a Saturday night. Ten or eleven.

This place used to be wall-to-wall. Shirts off, music up, everybody celebrating each other in the way gay bars do. But, it was dead. Where there used to be hundreds of people, there were maybe a couple dozen.

So when someone points at trans people and says, “That’s why your community is different now,” it feels less like truth and more like misdirected blame.

I know how easy that kind of framing is to fall for, though. I’ve fallen for a version of it myself.

I used to post a lot of heavy, constant commentary on social media. It kept me informed, but it also wore down my own mental health, and I could see it affecting the people around me in ways that didn’t feel helpful.

Somewhere in there, I learned the difference between being informed and being activated. So I stopped. I got off the platforms that were feeding it.

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Activated vs. Brave

I learned the hard way that being activated all the time doesn’t make you brave. It makes you tired, reactive, and easier to steer.

The world can turn and progress can reverse. The people in power love it when scapegoats get chosen, and we start arguing over who deserves protection more.

We can talk about hard things without inventing solutions that require a smaller group to be sacrificed.

Standing in judgment of another marginalized group because they’re different from me, then acting surprised when that same logic circles back around? I’m not interested.

If you want acceptance from the world, you don’t get there by practicing exclusion at home. We don’t all have to agree on everything. We do have to be careful about who benefits when we split.

So I’m filing this under a very simple personal rule…

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My Simple Personal Rule

When someone tries to sell me safety by asking me to step away from somebody else, I slow down to think for myself.

For me, the answer is simple. If it hurts someone else, it’s wrong. I ask whether this is really about truth, or just about control.

Most days, once I ask, I already know the answer. It comes down to standing alone, or standing together, and I already know which one I’m picking.

Trans people. Immigrants. Whoever’s next, because there’s always a next, and next time it could be LGB.

If I want anyone standing with me when it’s my turn, I have to stand with them first.

–R. Michael

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