Using the state for expansion of social security cushions endemic violence and poverty queer people face.

While the LGBT movement has been on the cutting edge of pushing for more equitably distributed health care in the above areas, however, it has neglected others. For example, since effective treatments made HIV a diagnosis Americans could live with instead of die from, queer activists haven’t challenged drug-company profiteering at home and abroad as much as they once did in the 1980s and ’90s. (Some activists, such as those of Black Lives Matter, on the other hand, have recently opposed antiquated statutes that criminalize HIV transmission.) Second, the movement ought now to turn to our most vulnerable: the young, the elderly, and other groups—especially transgender women of color—who face poverty and endemic violence. The movement has productively drawn attention to the bullying teens face when they come out while still in school and living with their families. It is less clear whether or how we will tackle the problems senior citizens face. As queer baby boomers retire, many lack children to care for them and/or find that moving to a nursing home means they cannot be as out as safely as before. But the LGBT movement could ally with others in calling for expanding Social Security and other safety-net programs, which would benefit both gay and straight senior citizens. The third and final policy area to which U.S. activists must attend is the trickiest: LGBT equality abroad. The suffering of so many queer people around the world cries out for international solidarity: as Hillary Clinton rightly said, LGBT rights are human rights. And there are concrete things U.S. policy can do to help. But Clinton also more recently bragged of her “tough conversations with foreign leaders who did not accept that human rights applied to everyone, gay and straight.” Our policy and rhetoric should be calibrated by the fact that we—like Clinton herself—are ourselves latecomers to this cause. LGBT activists should therefore resist such clash-of-civilizations rhetoric, or what queer theorist Jasbir Puar has called “homonationalism”: the use of gay rights as a symbol of our civilizational modernity and superiority. The examples of far-right Dutch and German politicians, who invoke gay rights as a cudgel to demonize Muslim immigrants, point to the dangers that accompany such an arrogant posture. Let us not be enlisted in militarism and Islamophobia, but rather—as Barack Obama, the gay rights president, said in his second inaugural—in being part of the legacy of “Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”