Respectably queer

Over three years, the author embedded herself in three prominent queer organizations in Los Angeles. Christopher Street West organizes the city's LGBTQ pride festival. The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center is a multi-site group that has existed for 37 years. Bienestar provides HIV services to gay Latino men. Through these organizations, Ward tracks how they have changed over time, including the class and racial tensions that run through them, with particular attention to how diversity culture gets misused.

The book argues that neoliberal thinking about difference is working its way into the everyday routines of a progressive movement, and that this shift keeps sparking arguments over what "diversity" should mean. Ward shows queer activists borrowing from corporate practice, using their differences to stand out among other nonprofits, build public credibility and moral authority, and present themselves as experts on diversity. In her account, this turn toward difference as a resource has raised the demand for forms of identity that are predictable and easy to measure, which runs against the spirit of queer resistance.

Ward examines the tension between the polished language of diversity awareness and the raunchy, sexual, and historically unbuttoned culture of queer pride festivals. She also focuses on dissenters within one queer organization who came to see diversity as dull, surface-level workplace training. Finally, she looks at how activists push back when the dominant diversity vocabulary, which diverse people must adopt to secure funding, fails to match their lived realities.