Funniest (fantasy) way to find out you're trans I think. Assigned male by ancient prophecy
You cant be in the closet theres a fucking prophecy. You have to kill the dragon.
Or the reverse. Oldest son doesn’t get powers, second son does, and the first “son” goes, “…ohhhh, yeah, no, that makes sense.”
I love me a pseudo-historical arranged marriage au but it always nudges my suspension of disbelief when the author has to dance around the implicit expectation that an arranged marriage should lead to children, which a cis gay couple can't provide.
I know for a lot of people that's irrelevant to what they want from an Arranged Marriage plot, but personally I like playing in the weird and uncomfortable implications.
So, I've been thinking about how you would justify an obviously barren marriage in That Kind of fantasy world, and I thought it'd be interesting if gay marriage in Ye Old Fantasy Land was a form of soft disinheritance/abdication.
Like, "Oh, God, I don't want to be in this position of power please just find me a boy to marry", or, "I know you should inherit after you father passes but as your stepmother/legal guardian I think it'd make more sense if my kids got everything, so maybe consider lesbianism?", or "Look, we both know neither of our families has enough money to support that many grandkids, so let's just pair some spares and save both our treasuries the trouble".
Obviously this brings in some very different dynamics that I know not everyone would be pinged by, but I just think it'd be neat.
This is actually a really cool variant solution to a real historical problem, wherein either primogeniture or other profoundly shitty customs led to wealthy parents having insufficient resources to provide for all of their children in a manner consistent with their station.
Historically, the Church and its widespread monastic structure functioned as a dumping ground for second/third/etc sons and all the daughters one can't afford to marry off adequately, with the military eventually picking up the slack for the former post-Reformation to the point where it's been argued that the need for something to occupy these dispossessed sons played a role in Europe's ongoing conflicts between its nations and the eventual push of imperialism and colonization over the rest of the world.
In a world where homosexuality were more accepted, it would offer a new option: spare a comparatively-small outlay of resources from the main family fortune to equip a house and accoutrements, which would be reabsorbed into the family as a return inheritance in a few decades, and contract a marriage which would be deliberately unable to produce legitimate offspring.
You get the advantages of creating marital ties with another wealthy family, the people married therein have a spouse and the status achievements that go with marriage, and the risk that your child goes off and marries someone unsuitable or inconvenient is removed entirely, as is the risk that they could marry someone and have legitimate, inheritance-claiming children with them. Sure, they can have affairs and thus get children if they're married to a same-sex spouse, but those children cannot be passed off as legitimate issue of the marriage, and so they pose less of a threat to the the main body of the family's wealth.
And, thus: perfectly reasonable reason why your pseudohistorical fictional characters can find themselves in a same-sex arranged marriage!
"Nicholas, we've arranged for you to marry Eric, in the neighboring kingdom."
"But father, I'm not...."
"I'm well aware. I've just decided that you shouldn't reproduce."
So “queer” isn’t just an identity that’s broadly inclusive because, I don’t know, we like big parties. There’s actually an underlying ethic, a queer theory, that has political implications.
Its name reclaims a slur because the point is to say, “I am different, but that’s not a bad thing.” The queer movement is about upholding the right of all people to deviate from an oppressive cisgender, heterosexual, patriarchal norm. Broadening the spectrum of acceptable diversity; questioning and dismantling the social pressures that police and punish deviance. Changing not just our own lives, but how our entire society thinks about sex and gender.
That’s why “queer” embraces so many different groups. It’s not trying to erase their differences, but to try to coherently understand the complex overlapping pressures that affect each of them, and to extend our reach beyond the LGBT+ community. It’s about the right of lesbians to live without men and the right of trans and nonbinary people to be who they are, the right of asexuals to define for themselves what’s significant in their lives, the right of straight men to be vulnerable and emotional and nonviolent. When the great queering project is done, you will see the changes everywhere, not just in small LGBT+ enclaves.
It’s recognizing that something that harms or oppresses one of us is pretty likely to harm all of us, so we all benefit from taking it down together.
Did you just say emotional straight men are qu*er? Did you deadass just say that cishet men are part of the lgbt community? And y’all wonder why so many people hate it?
(sigh) I’ll repeat myself:
For everyone who’s like “Whoa, I was with you until you threw straight men in there”:
Homophobia is a huge part of how all men are policed. If a man isn’t strong, tough, aggressive, and dominant? He gets called gay. So this isn’t “Soft straight men are totally LGBT+ and belong in your gay support group!” but it is “Part of the work of disassembling homophobia is changing how it affects straight men.”
It’s the same way that men aren’t the primary intended beneficiaries of feminism, but part of the work of feminism is addressing and changing toxic masculinity. If you’re effective enough at changing the system, you change it for everyone.
To reiterate: One way that toxic masculinity is kept as the default pattern of behavior for straight men is that they are punished, quickly and efficiently, for any show of vulnerability. Dismantling the structures that enforce traditional gender roles is one way to ensure that LGBT people are welcomed in society.
The world would be much more accepting if Joe Cishet didn’t feel the need to correct every single deviation from the toxic behaviors he believes are required.
The curb cut effect is good y’all. Not bad.
I’m stuck on “the great queering project”
Queer theory uses “to queer” to mean “to interpret in a way that causes something to depart from cisheteronormative societal standards” or “to interpret as queer”. It originated in literary and cultural criticism, but it can be used to describe the tangible social inroads LGBTQ+ people have made in dismantling cisheteronormativity itself.
Once again:
The purpose of the queer coalition is to end the practice of, “you must have [X list of traits] to participate in these parts of society.”
Can cishet men be queer?
Why does it matter?
Being queer isn’t about what specific identity or traits you have. It’s about saying, “HEY! Average isn’t the pinnacle of human existence! We didn’t build this world so everyone could strive to be just like their neighbors! People can be different and we can celebrate that difference, not shun it!”
Can a cishet man “be queer?” I dunno. I don’t think that’s important.
Can a cishet man “live a queer life?” Hell yes he can.
Can a cishet woman “be queer?” Wrong question.
Can a cishet woman “live a queer life?” Hell yes.
These aren’t “straight people appropriating queer culture.” They’re not taking it away from us, not picking and choosing bits of it to share with their cis het friends. These are people joining queer culture.
They’re not part of the LGBT community. They ARE part of the queer community.
this is a long-ish, text-heavy post but please read it, especially the last addition ^
Queer is a coalition, not a demographic.
^ This is why allies are part of the broader queer community while lesbian TERFs, exclusionists, etc. aren’t.
My mom’s friend who corrects anyone who gets my sibling’s pronouns wrong, who actively supports queer kids in her classroom, who welcomed her daughter’s trans girlfriend into her family? She is part of the queer community regardless of her sexuality, and anyone who says she can’t be needs to think about their definition of community. And by the same definition, TERFs aren’t part of the community because they choose not to be, because trying to control other people and justify their own bitterness and bigotry is more important to them.
“Can cishet people be queer?”
Listen. Listen. In 2007, I went to see a gay performance artist named Tim Miller. At that time he did pieces talking about the two major issues that had affected him as a queer man: surviving the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s as his friends dropped dead around him, and the fact that he wanted to marry his partner, who was Australian, and every time said partner came to the US there was a concern he’d be deported because his relationship made him “a risk for overstaying his visa.” Marriage would have given him a green card, but guess what you couldn’t do in 2007! Even if you got married in Maryland, it didn’t count for immigration purposes because it wasn’t federally recognized.
So one of the stories he told that night was about his high school German teacher, who was a butch lesbian. He ended the story with a line I have never forgotten:
“The queer kids, whether they’re gay or straight, have to stick together.”
This was a performance piece he’d first written IN 1994.
So: a man who survived a queer genocide says yes, you fucking well CAN be cishet and queer. I think he’d know.
(If you’re wondering: yes, he and the partner did finally get to get married. Assuming they’re both alive and well, they’ll celebrate 30 years in 2024.)
Ten years ago this October, I came out as Queer.
At the time, I identified as a cishet man, although I usually added some witty disclaimer like “but I’m not very good at it” or “but I don’t have a fucking complex about it” or something like that. Queer was my way of a) showing support to the community that had been there for me my entire life, and b) ditching the vague qualifiers.
It would be another eight months before the implications of this really kicked in. I had gone to see my mother on her deathbed, and taken all of the needful stuff out of my purse and put it into my pockets. When I got back to the car, I started putting everything back in my purse, and I was grouchy about it, because I hate having lots of stuff in my pockets. And I said to myself I should have said screw it and just taken the purse in with me, because the only surprise would have been that I had the audacity to bring it with me, not that I had one.
And that’s when it hit me that I was, in fact, Queer.
Since then it’s been… a journey. I now identify as trans/non-binary, and there are times I suspect I may just be a woman, but I have such a poor grasp on gender that I really don’t know. I’d never really thought about it before. I’ve come to realize that I’ve always had some level of body dysphoria, but I honestly don’t know if it’s connected to gender. (It… doesn’t feel like it, but again, still not clear on the concept.) I did one of those face-app gender swap things and there was a weird ache looking at it.
And I wouldn’t have gotten this far if I hadn’t started with Queer. I wouldn’t have gotten this far if the Queer community hadn’t bumped into the little sissy nerd and gone “Oh, hey, you can hang with us.” I wouldn’t have gotten this far if a huge chunk of the It Gets Better Project videos didn’t explicitly go out of their way to say “And all of this is for the nerds, too, and the weirdos, and the folks who are always told they don’t belong.”
You can have my Queer when you reincarnate as a quicker shot.
So I was talking about Victorian sexuality with a friend of mine last week and she brought up the fact that in the 19th century and earlier, sexual experimentation between young female friends was considered perfectly normal and okay, and not any reflection on their sexual orientation. Like, two young girls/women would take off some or all of their clothes and snuggle up in bed together and talk and giggle and touch each others’ bodies and not only was this not really a big thing as far as anyone was concerned, it was considered a normal part of being close friends in many cases. It was understood that girls had sexual desires and curiosity, and experimentation between female friends was considered a socially acceptable way to explore that which didn’t lessen a girl’s purity before marriage.
It wasn’t talked about a whole lot but at the same time it wasn’t considered improper either. In mainstream period literature, you see references to female friends kissing passionately on the lips, caressing each other, clutching each other to their bosom. This was thought of as normal. Sometimes these sensual or sexual friendships were lifelong, even. Still normal. As long as they presented as feminine and acted in a socially mandated way, they were not considered to be actual lesbians (i.e., scary unwomanly man-haters who wanted to dismantle the patriarchy.)
This made me think, and I realized something. We still have a remnant of that in our cultural mindset today, and it’s coming out as a sort of erasure of queer women. Have you guessed what I’m talking about?
Yep. The “just gals being pals” thing. What that used to mean was that the gals in question were sharing normal, healthy sexual experimentation, but that was just part of friendship between young women, and basically, don’t worry, they’re still going to marry men and become wives and mothers and fulfill their proper social role. Don’t worry, this is a socially acceptable behavior and they’re good girls. So nowadays, with a lot of the older generation struggling to normalize open queer relationships, what have they fallen back on?
Deep down, they still find actual queer romantic relationships threatening. It’s not the actual sexuality that bothers them so much as the change in the social order of things (women no longer just marry men and become wives and mothers.) So they say what their grandparents did: “Okay, maybe they seem remarkably close and are touching and kissing an awful lot, but that’s just what young women who are close friends do. They seem like nice, feminine girls, so of course they’re still going to grow up to marry men. This is just friendship, closeness, maybe a little private experimentation but ultimately just a part of Gals Being Pals.”
(Mind you, this was different than the euphemistic use of “friend” to mean same-sex partner, which was also very much a thing. You could tell friend from “friend” because it was said with a certain emphasis. I know this because it is still very much in use in the American South, where I’ve lived for the past three years, mostly among the older generation. The fact that you can’t properly put the emphasis in writing has led to this sort of hilarity (warning: nsfw. Link leads to a post showing a painting of Sappho being given oral sex by a woman while other girls frolic naked in the background, with the official caption: “Sappho and her friends”))
So yeah. I thought I’d share these musings with you guys, I don’t really know what to do with them, but yay for promoting understanding of historical sexual culture and how it effects LGBTQ erasure today, right?
If anyone has actual historical sources or additional comments/thoughts, feel free to add to this.
