This past June, I attended New York City Pride for the first time. Excited to finally partake in the celebration of queer people in the very city where the gay liberation movement was born, my friends and I made our way down to 25th Street and Fifth Avenue, where the event was set to take place. Upon our arrival, however, we were greeted by barricades and police officers who asked us which group we were part of. “None,” we answered, only to be informed that the street had been reserved for floats, and that we would therefore have to stand on the sidewalk—in other words, to be spectators rather than participants.

This came as a surprise to me. As a gay man from Greece—a country that has not yet legalized gay marriage, where there remains significant stigma around identifying as LGBTQ, primarily because of the Greek Orthodox Church—I have always associated pride with protest. In 2022, organizers of Athens Pride forbade the European LGBT Police Association from sending an official delegation to the march, citing a long and ongoing history of harassment, violence, and aggression exacted on Greek queer people by police, and urged officers identifying as LGBTQ to attend as private citizens rather than representatives. Individuals, groups, and organizations marched side by side down the streets of the Greek capital, chants and protest posters in full view, criticizing the government, the far right, and the police while “demand[ing] the life that is owed to us.”

Given my frame of reference, it’s no wonder that NYC Pride seemed so bizarre to me. Instead of protestors flooding the streets, the floats of BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase & Co, United Airlines, and other bulwarks of American neoliberalism were on display; rather than chant in support of queer liberation, attendees sang along to catchy pop songs. This state of affairs is a far cry from the Stonewall riots of 1969, when, harassed and dehumanized by the New York Police Department, queer people took to the streets on June 28 to protest. This uprising was intently focused on police violence and the marginalization of queer people. The LGBTQ community had finally had enough and was ready to emancipate itself, and its activism, which aligned with the tradition of the New Left, was staunchly anti-establishment.

From the ACT UP demonstrations on Wall Street and churches during the AIDS crisis to the direct action of Queer Nation in the 1990s, the LGBTQ community in the United States, especially in New York City, is no stranger to demanding queer rights and opposing the institutions that wish to suppress them. Yet today, this type of activism has largely died down, and queer activists seem instead more intent on promoting inclusion and representation rather than advocating for fundamental change. Dubbed “rainbow capitalism” or “respectability politics,” this kind of approach seeks to assimilate queer individuals into our existing, hierarchical system without making fundamental, systemic change. Indeed, the U.S. has become much more tolerant of its LGBTQ community primarily because of the advocacy of the queer liberation movement, whose greatest achievement is arguably the 2015 landmark Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

In recent years, however, the mainstream community’s demands have apparently dwindled down to the inclusion of explicitly LGBTQ characters in Disney movies, the hiring of queer people by corporate offices, and the sale of rainbow-colored merchandise by large companies. This representation largely serves to illustrate that members of the LGBTQ community are just like their straight counterparts, curating a narrative that praises the cis, white, gay “finance bro,” whose six-figure salary earns him glamorous vacations in Mykonos and a luxurious apartment in Chelsea.

As a result, the legal persecution of our trans brothers and sisters in more than 19 U.S. states, the disproportionate number of queer homeless youth, and the assault on our queer culture primarily through the banning of drag performances have taken a back seat. In the words of Sylvia Rivera, one of Stonewall’s foremost queer organizers, modern pride is beholden to the “almighty dollar” and acts like “a big smokescreen” for corporate profits.

But what can we, as college students and as individual members of the LGBTQ community, do to change the course of the movement? For one, it’s time for us to advocate for the abandonment of rainbow capitalism, and of the establishment itself, in favor of true queer liberation. Instead of urging assimilation and respectability, we must speak up about police brutality, which primarily afflicts the trans and Black LGBTQ community. We must also reverse the movement’s adjacency to pinkwashing corporations like Goldman Sachs, which not only rest on a foundation of heteronormativity, patriarchy, and capitalism but also directly fund the far-right lawmakers leading the assault on queer rights.

To this end, we must promote a progressive agenda on legislative and grassroots fronts as a means of uplifting the LGBTQ groups who have reaped the fewest benefits and been subjected to the most harm. Implementing “Medicare for All,” for instance, would render gender-affirming care and HIV medication accessible and affordable.

Furthermore, we should stress the importance of reforming police departments, including the NYPD, to combat police brutality. According to the Williams Institute, a subdivision of the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, about half of trans people who face violent abuse did not report these crimes to the police. This is especially problematic given that, as was documented from 2017 to 2018, transgender households were also almost twice as likely to face property victimization as compared to their cisgender peers. No doubt, these numbers are caused by and reinforce the trans community’s reluctance to contact the police departments that so often cause them harm. Equally essential is the promotion of unions, such as the AFL-CIO, which have a long history of combating workplace discrimination, ensuring benefits for LGBTQ workers, and lobbying for pro-LGBTQ legislation in Congress.

Finally, we should ensure that Pride returns to its origins as a horizontally-structured protest rather than an establishment parade. In New York City, the Reclaim Pride Coalition, consisting of a group of advocates opposed to the co-optation of pride, organizes an annual pride march with the slogan “No corps, no cops, no B.S.!” Like the Stonewall protests before it, this march aims to expose the oppression that members of the LGBTQ community, especially trans people, face today without catering to the politically and economically powerful. By opting to participate in this kind of initiative rather than NYC Pride, we can shine a spotlight on the issues that matter to our most vulnerable members.

Queer people matter, and only by pursuing true liberation and abandoning rainbow capitalism can we achieve the equality we desire and deserve.