On a sweltering summer’s evening in Greenwich Village in 1969, a fire was sparked that would never be extinguished. The patrons of the Stonewall Inn – a ragtag group of queer outcasts and gender nonconforming misfits – were mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it anymore. Speaking with one furious, defiant voice, they rose against their oppressors and uttered a demand which would alter the course of history forever: “The straight boyfriends of bisexual women are not welcome in queer spaces!”

Over the following months, the inchoate energy of the Stonewall Riots was harnessed towards the construction of an organised political movement. The participants wanted to articulate an expansive vision of queer liberation, one which recognised that no one is free until everyone is free. With that in mind, the Gay Liberation Front drew up its manifesto. Instead of focusing exclusively on the “straight boyfriends of bisexual women” question (as important as it was), they launched a broader assault on the capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist heteropatriarchy which oppresses us all. “When y’all prance around in fetish gear at Pride, y’all are just giving homophobes license to hate us. Like???” reads one particularly stirring passage in the GLF manifesto, while another takes aim at straight people appropriating queer culture by referring to their “partners”. The question of whether Call Me By Your Name should be condemned for its problematic age gap, meanwhile, was the subject of a bitter, fractious debate which would ultimately lead to the splintering of the group in 1973. But the GLF’s legacy lives on. Every year, the LGBTQ+ community pays tribute to the spirit of these early pioneers having the exact same debates over and over again. Every year we take up their rallying cry: out of the closet and into the tweets.

Why are we trapped in this discursive purgatory, and how can we break out? There is nothing new to be said – on either side – about Kink at Pride (the very first article I wrote for Dazed – back in the misty sands of 2019 – was about this topic, which shows you how perennial it is). “No kink at pride” is a bad, stupid and reactionary argument which uses the same underlying logic as groups like the LGB Alliance (we should distance ourselves from stigmatised groups in order to avoid experiencing second-hand stigma ourselves), but this question should have been settled a long time ago. Yet every year someone waits until the clock hits midnight on June 1 before lambasting the leather-clad perverts who are giving us all a bad name and making us feel uncomfy. Then other people hit back in a tone of indignant outrage, fact-checking these statements with detailed histories of the Folsom Street Fair, then other people chime in to wonder why we are still having this conversation and, in doing so, extend the cycle even further.

Over the years, a handful of new variations have been added to the canon of LGBTQ+ debates, and not all of them are equally trivial: while questioning whether fossil fuel companies and arms dealers should be welcome at Pride might be equally cyclical, at least there is something real at stake (although if you have yet to arrive at the opinion that pinkwashing is bad, I don’t know what to tell you). But most of these debates are so inane that we are wasting our lives by devoting even one second to pondering them: obviously, it is fine for bisexual women to take their boyfriends to a Chappell Roan gig. I have been degraded just by typing out that sentence.

It feels like a cop-out today to blame cultural deficits on “the algorithm” – as an omnipotent, almost supernatural force – but the incentives of social media clearly play a role here. We know that outrage generates engagement, and the more played-out a particular topic, the more outrage it inspires. There’s outrage towards the sentiment itself, and outrage towards the people venturing such unoriginal opinions as though they are the first ever to do so, as though they are making a daring, yet necessary intervention: you think seeing a 50-year-old man in assless chaps is a violation of consent? Wow, you are one insightful chica! In the years past, I’ve made a promise not to engage in any way whatsoever, but I find it so annoying that the temptation becomes impossible to resist. I’m the problem; it’s me.

But it’s not just the algorithm: the eternal recurrence of the same five talking points is also, I think, because ‘LGBTQ+’ is a vast, nebulous grouping and we don’t all have a shared set of experiences or cultural references. When that category is broken down further, more interesting and specific conversations do take place on social media, but the discourse around Pride month – which by definition includes us all – tends to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Anyone can weigh in with an opinion on abstract questions of etiquette, less so the political economy of HRT or whether Dennis Cooper was too harsh on the novels of David Leavitt. The conversation is dictated by those with the least to say.

If that has to be the case, we should at least shake things up with some fresh variations: would a ban on fetish-wear at pride include an exemption for couture pieces, such as a fabulous gimp bodysuit designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier? Is being allowed to say the f-slur an alienable right that gay men carry throughout their lives or a privilege which can be revoked for bad behaviour, such as referring to yourself as “same-sex attracted” or being Wes Streeting? Should Pride be a welcoming space for the straight nephews of queer aunts? Only once these debates are settled will the promise of the Stonewall riots finally be fulfilled.