Sorry, that’s just putting the horse before the carriage. The moralizing of foreign policy started more than a decade before gay marriage became legal in the US, in the wake of 9/11, driven by the neocons in the Bush II administration, and it originally focussed on “democracy” as the moral principle to be spread through imperialist violence. The ideologies behind this were Kantianism, especially Kant’s writings on eternal peace, Fukuyama’s “end of history” narrative and Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, none of which had anything to do with queer rights even in the most remote sense.

Expanding this idealist approach to foreign policy to include spreading gay rights through regime change was a much later development in imperialist propaganda that happened after gay marriage became legal and homophobia as a mandatory cultural stance was denormalized. It only became a campaigning strategy after corporations had already latched onto large-scale pinkwashing in the mid 2010s. Yes, there was queer marketing before, Subaru realized a decade before other corporatios rolled out the rainbows in June that their cars were bought by lesbians and that they could expand that market, but advertising to gay people at that time was a lot more targeted and subtle than “just slap a rainbow on everything” because at this time you had to avoid straight people noticing that the brand was popular amongst queers.

Rainbow imperialism as a stance among straight people also never was that important outside of a few employers in the US MIC and Israeli PR. There is a discursive tradition of homonationalism that later developments tied into and that started around 9/11 within reactionary strata of especially communities of cis gay men and TERFy lesbians, but that was mainstreamed islamophobia seeping into queer communities, not queer emancipatory movements shaping imperialist discourse. The simultaneous exclusion and fetishization of Middle Eastern men among cis gays was a thing ever since orientalism had existed, but it wasn’t something people outside of gay spaces were even aware of. These were conversations siloed off from the straights almost entirely.

The idea that gay marriage became legal to then justify imperialism with it is honestly laughable. It was way too much of a contested issue in mainstream policy back then to parade it around like that. The whole line of reasoning doesn’t sit well with me, it reminds me way too much of reactionaries describing queerness as a “western cultural import”.

Also blaming the abandonment of rainbow imperialism on “the pushback from the radical side of the gay community” sounds like the typical hogwash from transphobic gays who blame us for “pushing things too far” and “endangering queer rights by demanding too much”. Abandoning rainbow imperialism was, from the beginning, driven by homophobes in the MIC who had never been happy with these developments in the first place. They didn’t need to listen to radical queer activists for that.