THE CONSENSUS VIEW on the San Francisco left is that progressives are progressing. It started with Sup. Tom Ammiano and moved forward through the 2000 supervisor victories and Matt Gonzalez's mayoral campaign. That's not all wrong, but here's another similarly true simplification.

First, there was a tragic split between the progressives and the black left, such that it became difficult for white progressives to even recognize their counterparts on the black left. Then the queer left was split off. There was always an underlying rift, but it was exacerbated by a mayoral candidate with a cavalier attitude toward building coalitions and who made speeches suggesting good progressives don't think about gender and by countless street arguments among people needing to argue why it wasn't important to elect a queer.

If you don't believe that version of history, maybe you'll agree that the progressives don't spend much time these days trying to move queer, feminist, or sexuality issues. If you do want to move that kind of agenda, you find yourself looking more and more for allies other than many of the people calling themselves progressives.

When we talk about the need for moving gender issues, the progressive social moderates always think we mean "identity politics" – meaning, supporting someone because they are something. On our side, it's true, we do believe in representation, but we're really after moving an agenda, not being anything. Many people have trouble imagining a queer agenda, especially past the Milk-era agenda of basic tolerance for cocksuckers. But even consensus punk-era queer issues aren't yet on the table.

Progressive politics hasn't incorporated a genderqueer, S-M, sex worker, fat liberation, feminist dyke, badly dressed queer man's agenda, or even a plain old feminist one. This agenda has plenty of issues: trans people have a 70% unemployment rate, fat people are denied health insurance, the owner of Badlands got charged by the Human Rights Commission for allegedly kicking black people out of the club, S-M sex is illegal, sex workers go to jail. And California will soon have a ballot initiative to eliminate not just queer marriages but domestic partnerships as well.

Some of the things we hear from people calling themselves progressives worry us. We hear a lot of pooh-poohing of marriage equality, but we don't hear an alternate agenda. In fact, progressives mostly just tell us there's no reason for any queer agenda.

Now the real queer left isn't represented anywhere – its multiracial, gender-flexible dyke artists doing drag king shows and play parties aren't at the table. The "liberals" are represented by clubs like Milk and Alice and the queer elected officials, all of whom move queer and gender issues locally. Mayor Gavin Newsom is in this category – face it, he moved a queer issue faster than anyone could have imagined, on a worldwide scale. So the progressives are trying to position themselves where? To Newsom's right?

Progressives tend to answer this with "Yes, but ... maybe we just need more outreach." But from over here it feels like intensifying opposition. Last time there was a slate of straight candidates against LGBT candidates. Now the spin's intensifying. When we critique the progressives we get called dividers (not uniters), because shouldn't we all just get behind the progressives?

What's important to understand is that, from our side, the rift is not "Yes, but." We aren't thinking about how to unify the progressives, we're thinking about when it's tactically useful to be allied with progressive social moderates and social-left economic moderates.

The progressives exact a cost by demanding loyalty without supporting our issues. If they further weaken on economic issues – if, say, we're getting bike lanes and not lower rents – that cost is less palatable. And when one of these people the progressives don't like are moving our agenda, we have to work with them, because they're often the only allies we have.

The mayor has taken concrete steps to back the issues of the groups cast off by the progressives. What are the progressives going to do to match?

Greg Shaw is president of the Harvey Milk Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club.