(((I Will Outlive)))

Maggie Smith as Amanda, and Robert Stephens as Elyot - Private Lives (1972)

Okay so I’ve made about a dozen of these posts in the last month or two, so I’m not going to get as exhaustive as I sometimes do, but here’s the history that my mother and aunties taught me about kink and polyamory as queer.

When I was growing up, I was told that the kink community was the physical space in which the queer community existed and that non-monogamy/polyamory as the concepts that exist today were born directly out of queer culture and the environments that shaped it.

Basically, back in the early years when most of queer culture was an arrestable offense and people mostly only got to meet their partners in the backrooms of old speakeasies and nightclubs, kink spaces were doing the same thing and were one of the only non-mob owned options for gatherings. Kink communities themselves were almost entirely made up of queer folks already anyways because surprise surprise a community made mostly of abuse survivors is gonna have pretty high rates of queer folks in it. And because of the semi-public nature of the spaces and the limited safe dating options polyamory and related non-monogamous practices became common place.

They became so common place in fact that queerness and queer culture completely and foundationally shaped the discussions around consent, relationship needs, emotional connections, and ethical behavior that became central to kink and polyamory as practices. They became so common place in part because it made sense, in part because the cultures all needed each other, and in part because, as my mother always said, “if society had already damned you just for being queer, what did you have to lose by trying all the other things society was going to damn you for as well?” This, incidentally, is also why there have historically been such high numbers of queer folk in illegal occupations like sex work and why my mom and aunties also used to consider sex work as a culture pretty fucking queer too.

But the years went by and your average, “respectable” white gay and lesbian folks with their picket fence day dreams started making progress. They started kicking people to the curb in an effort to make queerness look less “challenging” and different. Bye bye, bisexuals, bye bye drag and trans culture, bye bye non-monogamy what do you mean you actually think the “slippery slope” to gay marriage also leading to polygamy might be a good thing? Bye bye all you sex freaks, sexuality is something your born with and you can’t help who you love, it’s not like all that disgusting talking-about-sex-and-building-the-entire-network-of-sex-ed-information-we-used-to-desperately-try-and-survive-the-AIDS-crisis-ew-you-perverts-our-sex-is-beautiful-and-pure-like-marriage! And so on and so forth.

See, when it was all about survival, the distinction that Straight people drew between gay, kinky, polyamorous, trans, ace, etc was irrelevant. They’d kill us all the same so we might as well band together and make a world in which the next generation might not just live but thrive. But once it became about gaining access to state acceptance and making room within the legal framework that already existed, those of us who were too scary to Straight society, who still needed the hierarchy destroyed, not just expanded, became dead weight. Our labor, our physical space, our intellectual efforts all became irrelevant and all that mattered was when the Straights looked at White Cis Gays they saw Us instead. So the White Cis Gays fixed that by making it clear they thought we were just as disgusting as the Straights thought we were. They abandoned us and took our history and our language and our fucking lives with them and said we weren’t ~allowed~ to have it. And because those of us who were marginalized in many ways or who were doubly or triply damned were more likely to have suffered massive losses during the AIDS crisis and to still be living in poverty, in crime, and in general destitution of social capital, we’ve been fighting an uphill battle not to be erased ever since.

So now you have a whole generation or two or three who grew up being told a sanitized history where a “drag queen” threw the first brick at Stonewall, Pride wasn’t started by one of the bisexual Queens of Kink, and non-monogamy hasn’t been the natural progression of so many of our communities for generations. And they tell us we never existed, we’re just secret straighties thinking our gross sex lives make us queer, we could just choose to be respectable and “normal” like everyone else and then we wouldn’t be “bullied” (because god forbid our actual oppression be recognized) and they completely miss the irony.

And as much as I hate that I have to list my credentials in order for there to be a chance in burning hell for this response to be considered legitimate, I am the nonbinary, bisexual, polyamorous, kinky, intersex child of a bisexual, kinky, polyamorous woman who spent all of my life and most of hers in the heart of Queer culture and politics to the point that she put me on the stand in front of the entire school board and a third of the state at age 10 to fight for our right to participate in the Day of Silence without fear of suspension, expulsion, abuse, or injury/death. I was on my mother’s hip at the state capitol protests with police in riot gear ready to do whatever it took to prevent us from entering the building. I am Queer in so many ways, including ones no one can dare fucking argue and so was my mother before me and my aunties before her, and this is THEIR history I am telling and will keep telling until I’m dead because I will rot before I let people erase their memories, blood, and joy from our history by claiming that kink and polyamory don’t belong.

I apologize for that all sounding angry and upset. It is not aimed at anyone in particular. I am just very very tired and it’s almost Passover which means that my auntie’s are a lot more on my brain than usual and I am just so exhausted by the way I have been mocked and belittled for months now over things that were simply Truth when I was growing up. Please understand how much history is denied and how many ancestors are dishonored by this rhetoric of “who REALLY belongs in the community?”

We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate. We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of seeing people pretend otherwise.

We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate. We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of seeing people pretend otherwise.

When I met my “First queer person ™” back in 1990, one of the things she said to me that I spent about 27 years unpacking was this:

“monogamous heterosexual relationships are patriarchal bullshit.”

I took offense at the time. But when you don’t let people use words like “queer” to describe “everyone who isn’t in this Normative Bubble of heterosexual serial monogamy”, you have to get pretty specific about the fact that STRAIGHT refers to this concept of being “normal” which in this culture has meant for many years “Straight, cis, monogamous (or doing your best to fake all of the above)” 

Quit fucking gatekeeping.

The people who hate us hate all of us. Joining them in their hatred doesn’t solve the problem. 

The way they win is if they get us to fight each other. 

I don’t reblog sensitive topics on this blog, but this is exactly what I had a long conversation about recently. I’m not young, and I remember shit like this as it was happening. polyamory is queer as fuck and learn to respect that

Well, you know what….

David Bowie - Interview - Afternoon plus - 1979  [x]

Not much has changed in the way people treat bisexuality smh

October 14, 1977, Anita Bryant is pied for her antigay bigotry at a press conference in Des Moines, IA.

It was 40 years ago today…

Never gets old.

40 years on and it still is gratifying

Anita’s still alive and kicking and being anti-gay. Thom Higgins, who threw the pie when he was 27 – and was poetically from Beaver Dam – passed away 17 years later at 44. Info on his life is here. The pie throwing was a big deal. In an age before the internet let gays feel connected, and long before ACT UP, the pie showed small pockets of gays that we could fight back.

it showed that gays were human beings, who might be in the room with you, that you had been accepting as being equals and treating as people. you didnt suspect them as bieng gay, why should you treat them different after? do they become less human after finding out? i mean, its almost like you just found out they have an oppinion on your bullshit

She was “pied” on TV.  All across the country, people got to see proof that the LGBT community weren’t going to just sit there and take it.  People who thought they had no choice but to stay silent saw a horrible woman get humiliated on live TV.  

One of the best moments in television history.

pride 2020 02/30 | the rainbow flag

The rainbow flag is the most recognisable symbol of queer pride and community. Commissioned by gay politician Harvey Milk,it was designed and created by artist and activist Gilbert Baker (top left), Lynn Segerblom (top centre), and a team of volunteers. It was first flown at San Francisco Pride in June 1978.  In 2003, Gilbert was commissioned to make a 2km (1.25 miles) long rainbow flag to commemorate the design’s 25th anniversary.

learn more with queer as fact: a queer history podcast 

[image sources: Gilbert, Lynn and two other volunteers with one of the first rainbow flags; early rainbow flag; 25th anniversary flag]

It’s 45 years today since the rainbow flag was first flown - on 25 June 1978 at San Francisco Pride - as a symbol of gay pride and the queer community!

[Image: two rainbow flags flying on flagpoles above a group of people out on the street at San Francisco pride. The flags have eight coloured stripes, and one has a blue-and-white star pattern in the top left corner.]