[9] Duggan writes, "homonormativity is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormativity assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.
"[10][11] Queer theorist David M. Halperin sees the values of heteronormativity replicated and privileged as LGBT visibility and civil rights become normalized, writing "the keynote of gay politics ceases to be resistance to heterosexual oppression and becomes, instead, assimilation...the drive to social acceptance and integration into society as a whole.
"[4] Rubin writes that these poles of acceptability and deviancy see a homonormative privileging of long-term gay couples over the bodies of transgender, non-binary, and promiscuous members of these groups,[14] and that "Individuals whose behaviour stands high in this hierarchy are regarded with certified mental health, respectability, legality, social and physical mobility, institutional support and material benefits.
[15] However, Rubin writes that homonormativity functions to displace the exclusive hold heterosexuality has over normative behavior, instead selectively privileging cisgendered homosexuality (that is coupled and monogamous) as worthy of social acceptance.
[17] During the AIDS epidemic in the United States, transgender people were often excluded from the gay and lesbian demonstrations held in the capitol and denied access to the healthcare initiatives and programs established to combat the crisis.
We were nothing!Holly Lewis states that continued pressure for non-normative individuals "to conform to traditional, oppositional sexist understandings of gender" has resulted in homonormativity permeating the behaviors and identities of the LGBT community,[19] while replacing the radical past politics of the Gay Liberation Movement with goals of marriage equality and adoption.
[27][10][28] Andre Cavalcante says that as homosexuality becomes socially tolerated, representations of LGBT characters in film and television have come to reinforce strictures of cisgender, white, and binary authority.
[29] Gay writer and director Ryan Murphy's sitcom The New Normal has been critiqued for its homonormative portrayal of queer culture and deemed "more damaging than entertaining.
"[30] Homonormative media representations are seen only as mimetic of heterosexual normality, reinforcing gay caricatures and "palatable adherents to cherished societal norms and dominant ideologies.
"[31][32] Such representations, it is argued, omit the queer realities of non-white, non-binary LGBT people, papering over the lived experiences of variant identities and enforcing a "hierarchy by which individuals are expected to conform and are punished if they do not.