In late May, the Visit Las Vegas Campaign released “Now and Then,” a glossy vye for queer tourism depicting the marriage of two women. The ad has since reached over 7.8 million YouTube views and the reception is overwhelmingly positive. At first glance, this might seem like a win for a culture unfamiliar with mainstream depictions of women loving women. Yet as I watched, my stomach sank. The ad felt like a cheap, performative grab for my queer attention. Ultimately — and regardless of the many rainbow emojis brightening the comments section — my feminist killjoy alarm went off.

Here’s the down and dirty overview: Beautiful Lesbians A and B are deeply in love and vacationing in Vegas. A wants to get married. B does too, but she’s tormented at the thought of her parents’ disapproval. A cajoles B while they both enjoy Las Vegas’ various amenities, until finally surprising B with a gorgeous ceremony. All the couple’s friends are there, but B is going to shut the whole thing down until she realizes her parents are in attendance. B lets out a high-pitched, “Let’s get married!” then moves towards a beaming mom and dad.

“Now and Then” is shamelessly soap, moving in for every queer person’s soft spot with heat-seeking precision: the homophobic parents, the shame, the emotional release of seeing accepted the little dyke we all root for. It seems like an important step for lesbian visibility in popular culture. So what’s the problem?

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The problem is that tolerance is a trap, and the Visit Las Vegas Campaign wants to sell it to you.

Suzanna Walters’ book The Tolerance Trap exemplifies how media like “Now and Then” — with its liberal attitudes towards gay tolerance, depictions of gay marriage, and rainbow capitalism — actually sabotage gay equality while seeming to advance it. Though the high-sheen production value can mask this, the plot of “Now and Then” is clear: If queer folks conform to heterosexual norms like marriage and wait around for societal approval, we’ll be rewarded, Vegas-style. Walters points to the sinister nature of (eventual) acceptance when she writes:

“The tolerance mindset offers up a liberal, ‘gay-positive’ version of homosexuality that lets the mainstream tolerate gayness. Its chief tactic is the plea for acceptance. Acceptance is the handmaiden of tolerance, and both are inadequate and even dangerous modes for accessing real social inclusion and change… The ‘accept us’ agenda shows up both in everyday forms of popular culture and in the broader national discourse on rights and belonging.

‘Accept us’ themes run the gamut: accept us because we’re just like you; accept us because we’re all God’s children; accept us because we’re born with it;…The ‘accept us’ trope pushes outside the charmed circle of acceptance those gays and other gender and sexual minorities, such as [transgender] folks and gays of color, who don’t fit the poster-boy image of nonstraight people and who can’t be — or don’t want to be — assimilated.”

“Now and Then” exemplifies the performative tolerance politics that the straight and cis majority thrives on. By capitalizing on classic — yet very real — tropes of disownment, rejection, and secrecy, the commercial asserts that queer happiness is achieved by hinging your actions on heterosexual opinions and values. B clearly orients her self worth to her parent’s unwillingness to tolerate her. “My parents aren’t proud of me,” B tells A, who feigns incomprehension:

A: “But you’re so beautiful, successful, funny!”

B: “I don’t think it’s my sense of humor they have an issue with…”

Then later,

B: “We can’t get married today, my parents will never forgive me.”

A: “For getting married without them, or for who you’re getting married to?”

Both scenes cut away, leaving unnamed not only the validity of B’s fears, but also the clipped-wing desire to finally have the legal right to marry and feel unable to because of intolerance. Note that the edited version of the commercial (rather than the full length version discussed here) is purged of this dialogue. Instead, the edits imply the parent’s issue is with elopement, not B marrying a woman. With this, Las Vegas give queer people two, and only two, impossible options: Hinge your life to hetero acceptance, or pretend the trauma of being queer never happened.

The dialogue is haunted by B’s apprehension. But with the sound off, “Now and Then” tells a completely different story. Strategic cinematography distracts from the lovers’ conflict, instead panning the best of Las Vegas’ attractions. The women laugh in the gorgeous Nevada dessert, take in the bustling nightlife, kiss in a neon-lit hotel pool. It’s all G-rated and aggressively cliché, but “Now and Then” offers up a rare moment of visibility to lesbian viewers starving for the scraps of representation.

Why ‘Tolerating’ Your Queer Loved Ones Is Dangerous
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When A leads B to the surprise wedding, the venue is candle-lit, elegant, but not ostentatious enough to annoy. This is supposed to be the emotional climax of the story, but instead “Now and Then” proves its own disconnection with queer lives by revealing that B’s perceptions of intolerance are baseless — her parents are there, smiling and happy. Surrounded by supportive friends, family, and — here’s the important part — the city of Las Vegas, the commercial seems to say See, aren’t you silly for thinking homophobia still exists? The irony of “Now and Then” is that it tries to signal the end of intolerance when in fact its star is driven by the fear of it.

Visit Las Vegas’ commercial is dangerous because it “short circuits the march toward full equality and deprives us all of the transformative possibilities of full integration,” by depicting fully-realized queer joy as dependent on heterosexual acceptance. Even more alarming, “Now and Then” offers convenient vindication for any homophobic person ever. B’s parents are not held accountable for their prior actions; when they enter the wedding venue they are absolved of any wrongdoing. Given that B’s parents are brown-ish, and that both women have foreign accents, the commercial reinforces racist perceptions of foreigners as regressive. The ceremony is a racially-coded, apology-free mess.

Whatever the good intentions Visit Las Vegas had, “Now and Then” is a money-driven advertisement, released at a time when Vegas has nothing to lose from marketing to gay people. Note how it’s taken them until 2018, when a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage, to make an ad like this, rather than tout Vegas as a destination for tolerance and fun in the ‘90s. Make no mistake, the motivation behind all “queer-friendly” media is to profit from, not defend, our community. “Now and Then” targeted a market, and now eagerly awaits the pink money and gay tourism that will surely follow. Don’t let the thrill of seeing yourself represented mask this.

Here and now, it’s 2018 and I’m not satisfied with lesbian representations in mainstream media. Even the commercial’s title, “Now and Then,” implies a degree of separation from the bigotry “then” and the tolerance “now.” The commercial is a joke its creators don’t seem to get. Supposedly “post-gay,” “Now and Then” can’t even imagine a present unburdened by the “air kiss of faux familiarity” that defines mainstream understandings of queer people.

Show me the queer love that’s hard to look at, the kind that makes its own rules and does what it wants regardless of approval or pride. Show me the most intolerable among us front and center: trans folks, gender deviants, queers of color, the undocumented, the deeply transgressive. Show me two fat, middle-aged bull-dykes madly in love, deeply amused by the ironies of gay marriage, and getting hitched anyway. Then maybe I’ll visit your damn city.

Around 1:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day this year, I was crying in a blessedly secluded corner of New York’s bustling Port Authority. I’d missed my bus north by about five minutes and was inconsolable. Because I hadn’t gotten up a few minutes earlier, I’d missed my chance to eat with my family. I felt especially terrible because my grandmother was due for intense surgery in a few days, and nobody was sure what the outcome might be.

Sniffling, I called my girlfriend and arranged to meet her out on Long Beach for her family’s festivities. Although she’d had some difficulties over the past year with a few family members because of various aspects of her gender transition, by and large, you couldn’t ask for a more accepting family. Apparently, when you celebrate the holidays at a middle-aged lesbian couple’s house, queerphobia and invasive questions in general are kept to a minimum . . . and nobody talks about politics.

In fact, I’ve only met one family more accepting of transition — and that’s my own.

At last year’s holiday gatherings, even though I’d only been out to them for a month and change, I could count the number of times I was accidentally misgendered on one hand; my aunt, whose first words to me were “This will take some getting used to,” began correcting herself without prompting after just a few hours together. I was sad not to see them again this year, but happy to have found another accepting clan.

Acceptance isn’t something that often comes naturally from the families of those who are transgender. Scrolling through Facebook the day before, I scanned countless posts from friends who were nervous about (or resigned to) the familial horror show they were about to endure. Others talked about being cut off by their family members the night before Thanksgiving. “Holidays are the time I miss having family the most,” wrote one of my nonbinary friends.

Lest any cisgender readers think I merely have exceptionally depressing Facebook friends — well, maybe. But according to the most recent data available from the National Center for Transgender Equality, about one in five trans-identified people experience rejection from their families because of their gender identity. One in 10 suffer violence at the hands of family members after coming out. A quoted respondent said that after coming out, their parents “told me to leave and not come back. I spent the next six months homeless.”

Transgender people of color experience higher rejection rates than the average; 37% of Middle Eastern trans folks and 38% of Native Americans reported familial rejection. My heart breaks for all the Native protestors at Standing Rock, but especially the trans people who risked their lives in the face of frigid fire hoses and tear gas without even the love of their families to keep them warm.

Things are getting better; these numbers are significantly down from the NCTE’s previous survey, and 60% of trans people polled said they were supported. But when our families do reject us, they do it violently — and if nobody’s around to catch us when we’re pushed out, the fall can be deadly.

As we drove back to Brooklyn on that Thanksgiving, my girlfriend dozing in a food coma beside me in the back seat, my mind drifted to these kinds of numbers and how much luckier I am than so many of my siblings — my “chosen family.” I may be among those whose relationships ended as a result of my gender, but my biological family remains intact, and my ex and I are close friends. I thought back to this summer, when I attended my cousin’s wedding in Manhattan without fear of being cornered by some drunken uncle and berated for wearing a pink dress. How many ways could my life be endlessly worse than it is now?

For this reason, I reflected, I don’t often feel comfortable discussing my family with others in the trans community — especially my sisters, who are most likely to experience familial rejection. I’m touched that some of my closest friends count me as part of their chosen family, but every time that phrase is mentioned, I feel tremendous guilt that I’ve somehow held onto my mother, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and sundry cousins.

Well. I hung onto the ones on my mother’s side, anyway. After my father died almost five years ago, his side of the family fell out of touch with my mother and me, and nobody’s made much of an effort to get in contact with me since I started wearing skirts in public. I think four out of five of them voted for Trump anyway — but as much as I’d like to dismiss them out of hand as a bunch of out-of-touch white cisgender conservatives who don’t know what a cool chick I am these days, I still miss them. I know I won’t be welcome at my aunts’ houses anymore, so I won’t get a chance to play soccer again with my cousin, the athlete. I won’t have dinner at Grandma’s and hear her play lounge-lizard tunes on the piano after dessert. I can’t go back to the house in the country where I grew up.

But still, I kept more of my family than I could have hoped. Nobody hit me, nobody interrogated me every time they saw me, nobody adamantly refused to use my pronouns unless I acted or dressed a certain way. And so I find myself a privileged member of a group defined by its lack of privilege: a girl who cherishes her mother while her sisters long for their parents to talk to them like they’re people.

We have our chosen families — but how do you mend the hole your blood relatives make when they abandon you?

I’ve found myself trying to alleviate this (admittedly irrational) guilt by introducing my mother into my friends’ lives. When we talk on the phone, she goes out of her way to call me her daughter and tells me how angry she is that my friends “lost their mama bears.” She’s been dipping her toes into the waters of voice coaching, and I’m hopeful that she can help my community in a tangible sense, but I also just want the people I love to feel like they have a mother again. The winter holidays are about family and sharing, so why shouldn’t I share my family? As Hanukkah, Christmas, and other gift-giving holidays approach, can I gift-wrap my bloodline to share it with those I love?

Maybe these feelings are misplaced, and perhaps I should be focusing my energy elsewhere. I don’t know. All I’m certain of is that I’m one of the luckiest girls in the world, just because my biological family loves me — and that knowledge is enough to make me cry all over again.