Queer Liberation Is Class Warfare rejects the idea that the struggle of LGBTQ people can be won through corporate sponsorship, rainbow branding, or acceptance into the institutions of the powerful. The modern queer movement was born in rebellion by working-class and poor people. At Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco in 1966 and the Stonewall Inn in 1969, trans women, street youth, sex workers, and queer people of color fought back against police raids that targeted those with the least protection. In 1969, radicals formed the Gay Liberation Front, naming it in solidarity with the National Liberation Front of Vietnam, and declared that queer liberation could not be separated from the fight against capitalism, racism, and imperialism.

That revolutionary vision has deep roots. In 1970, Huey P. Newton urged the Black Panther Party to treat the gay liberation and women's liberation movements as allies in the struggle, and STAR, founded by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, organized for the poorest members of the community. In Britain during the miners' strike of 1984 and 1985, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners raised money for striking mining communities, and the miners in turn marched at the front of London Pride. When AIDS devastated queer communities, ACT UP confronted not only the government's neglect but the pharmaceutical companies that profited from people's suffering.

Capitalism has always depended on controlling sexuality, gender, and the family to reproduce its workforce and its order, and it profits today from both the oppression and the commodification of queer people. LGBTQ people, especially trans people and queer people of color, face disproportionate poverty, homelessness, workplace discrimination, and police violence, while corporations sell rainbow merchandise each June. True queer liberation means housing, health care, and dignity for all, and it can only be won alongside the struggle of the entire working class against the system that exploits it.