**Abstract**

The claim of the recognition of individual and collective identities is in charge of the social and political debate. What have traditionally been struggles for material reasons, class interests now move to the cultural. In this way, a displacement of the material to the symbolic is produced. With this emphasis on the recognition of identities, regardless of many times, faced with each other, that is, gays, lesbians, transsexual people, and transgender suffer very different discrimination in the field of cultural in this work we intend to reflect on whether identities are really as malleable and so dependent on the will of individuals as it is intended, and if social equality can be achieved exclusively through cultural policies, as well as analyze whether the emphasis on the identity helps to achieve the objectives of the collective or if, on the contrary, it ends up being harmful to it.

**Keywords:** gay, lesbian, LGBT, identities, queer
