Token queers: LGBTQ+ pride, gay greed, and the blockchain

Web3 advocates use the language of community and vague promises of innovation to rainbow wash their affinity scams

Look, you’re either online enough to understand this illustration, or your brain still makes serotonin Illustration: John Voss

As we kick off Pride Month, you’ll see the usual crop of rainbow logos pop up across social media. This year some of them will be hexagons. Some might also include apes or robots.

Those avatars are NFTs, and the people behind them might object to being lumped in with pandering corporations. They say those profile pictures represent technology that’s going to revolutionize the web and queer digital spaces. They themselves may even be queer.

It’s not the same old rainbow washing, it might be shadier.

NFTs are part of a larger movement, web3, which envisions a web built around blockchain technology, economic mechanics, and buzzwords like “decentralization” and “creator ownership.”

These ideas have drawn in a passionate community of technologists and artists who hype each other’s crypto art drops and have .eth in their Twitter display names.

The most tangible expressions of that vision today are financial speculation through cryptocurrency and art speculation through NFTs.

These opportunities have attracted a rabid community of pyramid schemers, scam artists, and paid celebrity spokespeople.

Whether you’re a true believer building a platform or an opportunist running a Ponzi scheme—or both (like gender, it’s not a binary)—growth is essential to your success. So web3 proponents are doing targeted outreach to marginalized communities in the language of inclusion and the spirit of affinity fraud.

Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash

Queer folks and allies in web3 are proudly hyping projects they claim will benefit the LGBTQ+ community in language that speaks to its revolutionary roots.

Their pitches can be convincing. LGBTQ+ people, like other communities who face bias in traditional finance institutions and other financial hurdles, are disproportionately attracted to web3 offerings like cryptocurrency.

Take MariCoin, which is a cheeky little slur-turned-trademark. MariCoin bills itself as the first cryptocurrency for the LGBTQ+ community. It’s offering LGBTQ+ organizations around the world free coins in exchange for encouraging their membership to become “Maricoiners.”

Mutual.love is an “NFT marketplace and web3 ecosystem centering and celebrating trans and queer creators and culture-makers” that purportedly uses an unspecified percentage of its platform fees to fund “direct action mutual aid.”

But if you dig into what is actually being offered, it’s all ticker-tape and no Pride parade. At their heart, these projects are the same financial gambles with a coat of glitter on top.

The best example of why the queer community should be wary of web3 is Serif, “a global members club for LGBTQ+ leaders and creators” with NFT membership cards. Beneath an image of Stonewall patrons in 1969, Serif invites you to join them in assembling digital and physical spaces that represent “the next phase of LGBTQ+ community,” made possible by web3.

A screenshot of Serif’s vision statement

In copy they’ve since revised (see Twitter for screenshots or this Wayback Machine capture), Serif invited visitors to:

Imagine if Alan Turing’s queerness was never erased from his contributions to computer science and the outcome of World War II. Imagine if all of The Houses could reap the benefits of Voguing, Imagine if—instead of corporations—we could own the power of Pride.

We don’t have to imagine, though! “All of this is possible in web3,” according to Serif, although they don’t tell you how.

They don’t tell you how history might have changed if a queer computer scientist, driven to suicide in part by his outing, had his sexuality recorded to an immutable ledger.

They don’t tell you how having a token of ownership would have stopped Madonna from appropriating ball culture.

They don’t tell you how minting the first brick thrown at Stonewall would have prevented the corporatization of pride.

They can’t. Because queer erasure and disenfranchisement aren’t the result of poor receipt keeping. They are the intended outcome of institutional and societal forces that operate beyond the boundaries of the blockchain.

Web3 is a handful of technical innovations that don’t currently solve any problem better than what already exists. Whether it’s currency, databases, or trading cards, web3 is recreating existing paradigms in nascent technology—hoping to lure investors with something new that may, at some point in the future, prove to be better (in an unspecified way).

The same is true of Serif. Their solution to the corporatization of the queer community is to corporatize and commodify ourselves first.

“The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a ‘self-proclaimed artist’ to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses.”
— Keith Haring

In some ways, web3 is uniquely mispositioned to serve the queer community. Sexuality and gender? Notoriously fungible.

Without any tangible proof of web3’s value to queer people, novelty is its only selling point.

Web3’s outreach to the LGBTQ+ community is just another grab for queer cash. These yassified cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and DAOs aren’t any better equipped to serve the queer community; but by being among the first to tap into our wallet through this medium, they hope to make piles of queer cash.

There’s no keeping this naked cash grab in the closet, so all they can do is dress it up in the drag of queer liberation.

Mutual.Love’s vision is “to build generational wealth, access, and intellectual ownership and equity on-chain for trans and queer folks, in partnership with our trusted allies.”

The founder of Maricoin is quoted as asking an interviewer, “Since we move this economy, why shouldn’t our community profit from it, instead of banks, insurance companies or big corporations that often don’t help LGBTQ+ people?”

Serif touts the size of the LGBTQ+ and crypto economies alongside a photo of Black demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, marching in front of a bank billboard that reads, “We want you to be rich.”

A screen shot of Serif’s vision statement as of 5.30.22.

This is a new prosperity gospel directed at people who aren’t used to hearing gospels promise us anything other than trauma. It’s tempting, but the only people guaranteed reward are the ones collecting tithes.

While talk of building wealth among queer creators sounds empowering, it’s actually a threat to the real queer community that is already thriving off the blockchain.

It defines the LGBTQ+ community’s value by the dollars we add to the economy. It trades on our collective wealth and creative resources while dancing around the inequity of how those resources and that wealth are distributed across lines of race, gender, and ability within the community.

It accepts at face value that queer people’s right to dignity is tied to our spending power and ability to create cultural artifacts that can be resold.

You can see actual disdain for the parts of the queer experience that aren’t mass marketable in the way Serif envisions “a world of queer spaces designed for exchanging knowledge and capital, not just suggestive looks.” As if queer flirting and sex are beneath them. As if no one has ever exchanged knowledge over a cocktail, or capital after a one-night stand. All under a photo of one of the world’s most famous gay bars.

You can see in their willingness to prop up parts of the queer community and shut out others, that it’s not queer identity that drives these projects, it’s cash. The LGBTQ+ community is just an easily identifiable target market in which their identity buys them some credibility.

We can’t let web3 enthusiasts define the future of the queer community by the economic incentives the blockchain runs on.

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
— Audre Lorde

The greatest trick web3 will try to play on you is convincing you of its own inevitability.

Web3 is a product without market fit, and its evangelists need you to believe that its success is guaranteed in order to buy themselves time to find it.

This sleight of hand leads to two types of thinking. One is, “why shouldn’t we get in on this? Why should straight finance bros be the only ones who benefit from these systems?” The other is, “If people are going to build this no matter what, shouldn’t we try to help them make a better, more inclusive version of it?”

In both cases, we’ve lost sight of how inherently dangerous the whole thing is. And through our participation and our labor, we lend validity to an inherently risky system in the eyes of the next person.

The pyramid’s bottom gets a little bit bigger, and a little bit more diverse, but no more stable. Crypto markets rise and crash, tokens are exploited, and when the rug’s finally pulled out, it’s always the most vulnerable people who take the fall.

This is what makes web3’s vision of the queer community so harmful. It puts the people with the most privilege at the hearts of its spaces, and puts everyone else even further on the margins.

It says the people with the greatest stake in the future of the queer community are not those whose lives depend on it but those who can buy the most shares.

Photo © Mike Clegg

This is also what makes these projects inherently un-queer, in spite of the sexualities and genders of their founders.

Brian Tran, co-founder of Serif, previously tried to launch Yass, an LGBTQ+ members club in San Francisco’s Mission, with the backing of a VC firm co-founded by Peter Thiel. That project also received pushback for using slang popularized by Black and Latinx queer people to market a co-working space in a community from which they have been displaced.

In recreating these systems anew with the same incentives as before, projects like Yass and Serif and Maricoin are leaving the dynamics that have helped drive the inequity currently facing the queer community unchallenged.

“No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.”
— Marsha P. Johnson

Serif asks what “would be possible if web3 was even just a little bit more queer?” But the answer is demographics can’t make systems rooted in inequity any more queer.

At best, they are playing a shell game with that inequity. In the end, the people who win biggest will be the ones who have a head start, who can afford to bet and lose, and will be on to the next big thing before the game is over.

Some of those people are queer. Hooray for them. And if you’re one of them, get your MariCoin, but don’t confuse your enrichment with our community’s empowerment.

Stop trying to mine the community for moments and materials to repackage and sell back to us.

Let Alan Turing, Marsha P. Johnson, and all the queer predecessors who have already shaped our community’s present and future rest.

Make something they would actually be proud of.