queer is a gender, sexuality, romantic orientation, political alignment, and mission statement, babey

queer is literally a slur that means weird and strange

and I most certainly am weird and strange, what else you got?

Some people just don't want to be called a slur. Is that just too much to ask? Whatever happened to respect people's decisions?

that's literally fine! I don't care what you do or don't want to be called! it would just be sooooo cool if people didn't feel the need to come barreling out of nowhere to tell me I'm wrong for what I do want to be called! you know, respecting my decision?

the first slur I was ever called on the playground when I was 8 or 9 was "lesbian/lesbo". It came with getting my ass kicked. I don't tell people they can't call themselves lesbians bc someone kicked the shit out of me while calling me a lesbo.

Jesus

Can you imagine hearing someone go "people told me I'm weird and I used to feel bad about it, but now I've come to accept that I am weird, and that's OK, and maybe even good?" Like, can you imagine hearing that and immediately going "well, actually being weird is bad and you should feel bad about that and certainly never speak to other people about this". Like, can you imagine being that big of a tool for people who hate all of us?

We’re intentionally trying to reclaim Queer for a reason. Because we’re showing that no matter how horrible a slur can be, we can take it and turn it into a positive identifier. You take away their fuel. Don’t wanna ID as it? Fine! Nobody can tell you what you can or can not identify as. But those of us who do want to reclaim the word, deserve to be called what we want to be called.

A lot of people assume any use of queer as a community term automatically either inclzdes them by the term or excludes them from anything related to queerness and it's bc that is how terms work that are supposed to replace queer as a community label. That's hoe lgbt and all it's derivatives operate. You're either in or out. You're either name dropped or you're excluded and barred from conversation.

Queer doesn't work that way.

You can say "I'm not queer, I don't use that term" and you are still welcome in queer spaces. You're still in the conversation. You're still important. And you can say "I am not included when ppl talk about queer ppl (in an identity sense)" and still take part in the community. Bc queer as a label doesn't exclude. It only opens doors and reaches out hands. It's opt in and out whenever you feel like it, and you don't have to actually use the label for yourself to have a voice in discussions on queer topics. Demanding that would make it lgbt-lite.

Time to get towards the queerest insurrection circulating again folks. Teach young ones queer history and the power of the word queer.

“Queer is not merely another identity that can be tacked onto a list of neat social categories, nor the quantitative sum of our identities. Rather, it is the qualitative position of opposition to presentations of stability — an identity that problematizes the manageable limits of identity.

Queer is a territory of tension, defined against the dominant narrative of white hetero monogamous patriarchy, but also by an affinity with all who are marginalized, otherized and oppressed. Queer is the abnormal, the strange, the dangerous. Queer involves our sexuality and our gender, but so much more. It is our desire and fantasies and more still.

Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world. Queer is a total rejection of the regime of the Normal.”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mary-nardini-gang-toward-the-queerest-insurrection

To add on here for some UK flavoured context- in the UK Margaret Thatcher introduced the infamous Section 28- a law that forbade the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ - which basically means schools couldn’t mention LGBTQ+ topics and LGBTQ+ advocacy groups were threatened with prosecution. Thatcher was *famously* very buddy buddy with Reagan and both in the UK and US at least, the pair did their best to ignore the AIDS crisis. 

“ So we end up with a bunch of young queer folks teaching each other queer history based on what random scraps they could find from the Internet.” - also this is really succinct and exactly what we’re all depending on rn because there’s basically no alternative except rebuilding and becoming those elders for queer people in the future. 

And may I recommend onearchives.org as a reputable source for queer history education? Their mission is preserving the stories of queer people so while it’s not the same as talking directly to queer elders, it is the stories.

Also the comment on the trans inclusive branch is explicitly why equating ALL radfems to TERFs is not accurate. Most visible ones are TERFs, but including trans people (aka TIRFs) does not stop it from being radical feminism either. Also just because you are accepting and actively supportive of trans people, or are even trans yourself, Does Not mean you are not a radical feminist and it Does Not mean your brand of (potentially unpacked/unnoticed) radfem rhetoric is suddenly the Good kind. All of radical feminism hurts the queer community enmasse. There is no one who gets by it unscathed. And the trans inclusive radical feminist point of view is still very harmful to trans people enmasse.

You don't have to consider yourself a radfem, letalone a TERF, to still be mimicking and outright scripting from radfem talking points. Please learn what it is, and do your part in unlearning whatever pieces of it you have picked up unknowingly or purposefully. It is never too late.

Simple bits to start with questioning and asking others about are:

- The idea that All Men are Evil (this hurts literally everyone, even cis women who hear this and can end up too afraid to enjoy life for long periods of time, and this is actually a notion that has been used to pull people into cults. Letalone anyone who is not a perisex cis woman that gets targeted for this and the violence is then 'rationalized' with this notion)

- Testosterone is the evil/violent/overly sexual horomone (even when you personally claim that trans women on HRT are exempt from this view, it still hurts them, non-HRT women, cis men, trans men, trans folks on T that aren't men, all intersex people w hormonal imbalances, and yes even cis women bc this is a misogynistic point used as to why Women On Period Are Insane Bc Higher Testosterone. Testosterone is neutral and so is estrogen)

- Women's love for other women is Better or More Special than any other loving dynamic (even when this includes mspec and trans women. Not to be confused with celebrating the special specifics of WLW dynamics. It's the emphasis on inherent Betterness or More Healthy than any other dynamics that is the one to look out for. WLW dynamics are beautiful and special, but there is no one dynamic inherently better than any other one)

- Certain queer orientations have privilege over others (it's all lateral)

- Anyone with a beard is safer in the world (... Please think about anyone who isn't a cis man who has a beard and why that may actually put them in more danger, especially dependant on any of their other features)

- Some trans genders have more privilege than others because of how cis genders work in society (being trans is a different playing field, it is again all lateral)

- Only women can ever really be healers and teachers

- Anything that equates all positive human traits to femininity only and equates all negative human traits to masculinity only

- Only addressing toxic masculinity and never naming nor addressing toxic femininity

- Anything trying harder to seperate men's and women's gay communities rather than help understand and respect each other

- Anything that pits mono orientations (hetero/homo) against mspec orientations (bi/pan/omni/etc)

- Anything that claims monogomy OR polyamory are inherently abusive in dynamic

And there is many other radfem bulletpoints but I am working off the top of my head and after a long day here. So use this to stoke your intrigue and please learn more about how to love your queer community rather than resent or hate it. Learn what radical feminism is, and how to get it out of your life.

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.

this is so important

I’ve been trying to think of a good term for the “weepy movies about tragic queer people aimed at straight audiences” subgenre, and I think I’ve got it:

dead gays for the straight gaze

eh? eh??

queers die for the straight eye

SO YOOOO who wants to learn why this is a thing because the history is actually really fascinating and ties into some of my favorite shit ever?

Okay, so like, back in the mid-twentieth century, when being queer was still totally a crime everywhere in the United States, queer writers started working in pulp fiction–starting with Vin Packer (she is awesome)–and writing pulps to tell our stories.

So one day over lunch, her editor asks her, “Hey, Vin, what’s the story you most want to write?”

And she goes, “Well, I’d like to write a love story about lesbians because I’m, you know, gay.”

He says, “Hey, that’s awesome, I will publish it. One thing, though, the homosexuality has to end badly and the main character has to realize she was never gay in the first place. We can’t seem to support homosexuality. I don’t actually think that’s cool, but the government will literally seize our book shipments and destroy them on the basis of the books being ‘obscene’ if you don’t, so if we want this story actually out there, and not burning in a bonfire somewhere, it’s what you gotta do.”

So Vin goes home and writes Spring Fire, the book that launched the entire lesbian pulp genre. And while one character ends up in an insane asylum and the other ends up realizing she never loved her at all, it’s massively successful, and queer women everywhere snap it up and celebrate quietly in their closets across the nation because HOLY SHIT THERE’S A BOOK ABOUT ME? I’M NOT ALONE and it starts a huge new genre.

But: every publisher is subject to those same government censorship rules, so every story has to end unhappily for the queer characters, or else the book will never see the light of day. So, even though lesbian pulp helps solidify the queer civil rights movement, it’s having to do so subversively or else it’ll end up on the chopping block.

So blah blah blah, this goes on for about twenty years, until finally in the seventies the censorship laws get relaxed, and people can actually start queer publishing houses! Yay! But the lesbian pulps, in the form they’d been known previously, basically start dying out.

MEANWHILE, OVER IN JAPAN! Yuri, or the “girls love” genre in manga, starts to emerge in the 1970s, and even starts dealing with trans characters in the stories. But, because of the same social mores that helped limit American lesbian pulp, the stories in Japan similarly must end in tragedy or else bad shit will go down for the authors and their books. Once more: tragic ends are the only way to see these stories published rather than destroyed.

The very first really successful yuri story has a younger, naive girl falling into a relationship with an older, more sophisticated girl, but the older girl ends up dying in the end, and subsequent artists/writers repeated the formula until it started getting subverted in the 1990s–again, twenty years later.

And to begin with cinema followed basically the same path as both lesbian pulps and yuri: when homosexuality is completely unacceptable in society, characters die or their stories otherwise end in tragedy, just to get the movies made, and a few come along to subvert that as things evolve.

But unlike the books and manga before them, even though queer people have become sightly more openly accepted, movies are stuck in a loop. See, pulps and yuri are considered pretty disposable, so they were allowed to evolve basically unfettered by concerns of being artistic or important enough to justify their existence, but film is considered art, and especially in snooty film critic circles, tragedy=art.

Since we, in the Western world, put films given Oscar nods on a pedestal, and Oscar nods go to critical darlings rather than boisterous blockbusters (the film equivalent of pulps, basically), and critics loooove their tragedy porn, filmmakers create queer stories that are tragic and ~beautiful~ that win awards that then inspire more queer stories that are tragic and ~beautiful~ until the market is oversaturated with this bullshit.

The Crying Game? Critical darling, tragic trans character.

Philadelphia? Critical darling, tragic gay character.

Brokeback Mountain? Critical darling, tragic queer (? not totally sure if they’d consider themselves gay or bi, tbh?) characters.

And so on and so on VOILA, we now have a whole genre of tragedy porn for straight people, that started out as validation for us and sometimes even manages to slip some more through the cracks occasionally, but got co-opted by pretentious ~literary~ types. While tragic ends made these stories more acceptable to begin with, and in the mid-to-late nineties that started getting subverted a little bit (Chasing Amy, But I’m a Cheerleader), eventually that became the point, as more straight audiences started consuming these narratives and got all attached to the feels they got from the ~beauty of our pain~.

Queer history is crucial

The life of William Dorsey Swann

Taken from James Standhope on Facebook:

William Dorsey Swann was a gay liberation activist. Born into slavery in 1858, he was the first person in the United States to lead a queer resistance group and the first known person to self-identify as a “queen of drag”. Imagine the queenery of this icon. He was a slave in Hancock, Maryland and was freed by Union soldiers after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. During the 1880s and 1890s, he organized a series of balls in Washington, D.C. He called himself the “queen of drag”. Most of the attendees his gatherings were men who were former slaves, and were gathering to dance in their satin and silk dresses. William was arrested in police raids numerous times, including in the first documented case of arrests for female impersonation in the United States, on April 12, 1888. In 1896, he was falsely convicted and sentenced to 10 months in jail for “keeping a disorderly house” (running a brothel). After his sentencing, he requested a pardon from President Grover Cleveland. This request was denied, but he was the first American on record who pursued legal and political action to defend the LGBTQ community’s right to gather. He was known to have been close with Pierce Lafayette and Felix Hall, two men who had also both been slaves and who formed the first known male same-sex relationship between enslaved Americans.When William stopped organizing and participating in drag events, his brother continued to make costumes for the drag community. Two of his brothers had also been active participants in his drag balls.Imagine how intelligent and ambitious this man had to be to come up with drag balls in the 1800s! Imagine how many terrible concepts he had to unlearn by himself to be a confident gay black man who does drag in the 1800s! Imagine how courageous he had to be to fight for lgbt people as a former slave in America in the 1800s! William Dorsey Swann is the original queen, the original drag mother, the original activist. Tell his story!

Images of the transgender women of 1950s and 1960s Paris

Far Out presents the photos of  Christer Strömholm, who documented the transgender underground culture of Paris in the 1950s and 1960s.

Far Out writes:

Many of these women were sex workers. The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin (who was a strong supporter of transgender rights) once pointed out that many trans women conjured up for her “the deepest reaches of female experience”, precisely because they were outcast, and suffered because of it.

Yet, as these photos shows, many of them manage to celebrate life and their gender in the most amazing ways.

no one ever wants to mention that marsha p johnson was also a sex worker no one ever wants to acknowledge that sex workers have always been on the frontline of most radical historical movements

miss major and sylvia rivera were also sex workers and all of them used money from their sex work to keep lgbt kids from homelessness

Still relevant

black lives matter and pride are intrinsically linked. the black trans community have done so much for us, we owe it to them to not forget their movement this month. without black lives, there would be no pride. black lives matter, today and always

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MARSHA P. JOHNSON (2017)

History isn’t something you look back at and say it was inevitable. It happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities. — Marsha P. Johnson

Queens started being filed out and being put into police cars, and guns had been drawn. Molotov cocktails were flying. And I’m like, “Oh my God, the revolution is here. Thank God. You’ve been treating us like shit all these years? Uh uh. Now it’s our turn.” — Sylvia Rivera

THE FIRST PRIDE WAS A RIOT HAPPY PRIDE | BLACK LIVES MATTER

okay no one single more thing before i have an edible and go watch funny youtube videos: marsha p johnson HERSELF said that by the time she got to the stonewall inn, the uprising was already in full swing

however, MISS MAJOR was there at the start, was an early leader in the uprising (until the pigs arrested her), and has almost completely been erased from the narrative even though SHE’S STILL ALIVE

anyone who makes or reblogs posts this month about the stonewall uprising that do not name miss major as a key figure have to go donate $50 to miss major’s retirement fund. not even slightly joking about this.

THE FIRST PRIDE WAS A RIOT. ✊🏿🏳️‍🌈 #BLACKTRANSLIVESMATTER

Reminder that Stonewall wasn’t about marriage equality. Stonewall was about police brutality. It was about systemic abuse and subordination. Stonewall was spearheaded by black trans women. As we celebrate Pride 2020, within the context of the Black Lives Matter riots, it’s imperative that we remember that.

Riots in protest of police brutality are the reason that we have more rights today. Do not forget your roots.

You can’t celebrate Pride while simultaneously condemning the Black Lives Matter riots and protests that are happening right now. Know your history.

This Pride Month we remember to support ANYONE who has to fight for their humanity.

Happy Pride.

BLM.

No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.

Remember why we celebrate pride, and the people who helped get us where we are today. Stand in solidarity.

i'm reading ONE magazine which was a 1950s magazine made by and for gay ppl in the U.S and i'm obsessed with the letters section but this one has to be the one that made me cry the most like....i cant stop thinking about it...

Until 50 years ago the word for a bisexual woman was “lesbian”

I’m not denying that female homosexuality is a natural part of human nature and has always sexisted. There absolutely are and always have been women who are exclusively attracted to only women. The distinction that is relatively recent is the distinction between people who are different levels of attracted to women.

Which is to say, if a woman had sex with other women, the word for her was “lesbian”, regardless of her relationship to men. Until the 1970s.

So for example, in lesbian bars of the 1930s-50s, where butch/femme culture emerged (check out Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis), femmes usually tended to be married to men who financially supported them. While married to their husbands, they went to lesbian bars and had affairs with other women. Bisexual women were part of the lesbian community. When the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian advocacy group in the USA, formed in 1955, a great deal of their work was helping women leave their husbands. Some of them were completely gay and locked in loveless heterosexual marriages with men they were incapable of desiring–some of them were bisexuals who were capable of love and attachment to men, but were actively pursuing relationships with women. To tell which were which would involve delving deeply into their personal thoughts and feelings, which we can only do for a few of them through this much distance and time, because they at the time didn’t think the difference between gay and bisexual women was terribly important.

Or, very rarely, we’d know they were bisexual because it actually entered the historical record. As Genny Beemyn recounts in A Queer Capital: A History of Gay Life in Washington, Part 3, the Mattachine Society’s 1965 protest against homophobic discrimination in federal employment included lesbian Lilli Vincenz walking in the picket line next to self-identified bisexual woman Judith “JD” Kuch.

The split between lesbians and bisexual women as distinct groups dates back to the 1970s, with groups like The Furies Collective, who advocated that women withdraw from male society completely–that women end all working, personal, or casual relationships with men, and with any woman who would not do so also. The Furies are often cited as a landmark in the formation of lesbian feminism and lesbian separatism, but their first newspaper proclaimed, “Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.“

That’s where the major division between bisexual and lesbian women came from. It wasn’t a deep interrogation of the nature of lesbian women’s desires; it was appropriation of the word “lesbian” to mean a political choice instead of a sexual orientation. It comes from the sense that the choice to work with, be friends with, or sleep with men is a choice to be complicit in women’s oppression. From this comes the idea that bisexual women are less trustworthy, less capable of truly loving other women, and less deserving of a place in lesbian society.

This attitude about bisexual women shows in personal stories of the 1970s. For example, lesbian feminist Robin Tyler recalls an argument at the 1973  West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference, where some members wanted to remove invited musician Beth Elliot from the stage because she was a trans woman: “When Robin Morgan came out against Beth, I said to her, look, you’re bisexual and you’re up here determining who should belong to this movement and who shouldn’t?“

Then in 1979, the lesbian sex manual Sapphistry by Pat Califia was being prepared for publication when its author came out as bisexual an article for The Advocate. Its publisher immediately threatened to cancel publication of the book–a book about how women could have sex with women–because “we do not publish books by bisexual women!” (She later relented, and the book was published in 1980.)

History makes it very clear that it took active work to push bisexual women out of the lesbian community, and it hasn’t entirely stuck over the years–after all, most towns or cities don’t have a large enough LGBTQ+ population to have both a lesbian separatist potluck and a queer-friendly WLW sapphic potluck. A woman looking to date other women goes to lesbian events because that’s all there are in most places. We didn’t fight for “gay and sapphic marriage”, despite the number of bisexual women who wanted to marry other women; politically, bi women in relationships with women have always been grouped under “lesbian”, and there has been almost no push, especially not from lesbians, to popularize “sapphic” as the default descriptor for women attracted to women but with unknown sexual histories and/or personal desires.