As someone who came out just as the first reports of a 'mystery disease' had, in a sudden outbreak, killed over 100 gay men in New York; and as someone who then went on to learn to navigate the gay world and community through the early-to-mid 1980s as the horror of what came to be called HIV/AIDS ravaged its population; I saw what damage division (shunning those who were ill; saying nothing as officials advocated isolating people with AIDS - or even putting them in 'camps') could do - as well as what miracles could happen when the lesbians, gays, and transfolk, rather than forming the occasional coalition for a brief, specific political effort, at last united together as one, and the LGBT (other letters added as people began to express their own sexual/gender identities, and find/create their own subcultures-within-the-subculture) community was born. No one else was helping us in this hour of dire need? OK, we'll do it ourselves. And we did - *together*.
From within that new and necessary unity, the word 'queer' came to be used more and more - especially among the (then-)young turks in the more activist wings - as an umbrella term for everyone who wasn't (or couldn't 'pass' for) heterosexual white folk who accepted 'traditional' gender roles - one word for *all* of us, all in the same storm-pummelled boat - and boy, did the assimilationists and old guard get pist off.
Me, I was among the first to happily adopt the term for myself. As an AuDHDer myself (not yet then diagnosed, but in retrospect it was textbook behaviour), the zeptosecond I came out, I was OUT - and obsessively, voraciously read everything I could on LGBTQI+ culture - its history, its art, music, literature. So having already read respected and admired authors such as Christopher Isherwood and Jean Genet, and knowing they too preferred the term 'queer', I figured heck, that was good enough for me.
I especially always got a larf out of the 'b-b-but "queer" is a slur!' argument. Yeah, bud, like fellow students sneeringly calling you 'gay' in the hallways of high school before shoving you into a locker was meant as a bloody compliment.
And now we're watching the assimilationists do *exactly* what I predicted when marriage equality became prevalent (in the West at least): declare victory; walk away from the fight; and lunge happily into mainstream society, thinking they're totally accepted and 'normalised' - forgetting the lessons of the Weimar republic, and what happened with whiplash-celerity to the 'acceptance' and great legal strides forward that Germany's homophile movement had made when a certain failed Austrian artist with a silly moustache rose to power upon waves of hatred thought left in the past, but were only lurking and waiting for their moment to rise again.
Transfolk? Varied gender identities? Others too different in appearance and behaviour (either by unconscious expression or by direct decision) to fit in - the 'queer' ones? Under the bus with 'em. At gay men's hour of need, in the worst of the AIDS crisis, they may have rusht to our side and been of incalculable help - but now, when transfolk, especially, are under brutal socio-political attack, what do the 'normal-acting' gays do? Run in the other direction and claim that's a totally different thing; not their problem ('the "T" doesn't belong in "LGB"!'). Their behaviour is disgusting and nauseating - and by 'their', I mean the assimilationists like Vines, not my trans friends and allies.
As the hard right lurches from success to success in seizing power and dismantling society (let alone democracy) and uses those of us too different - too 'queer' - as distraction and lightning rod for resurgent hate, we need a community united as determinedly as during the worst of the AIDS pandemic if we are to (quite literally) survive. Instead, we're seeing vipers like Vines pull up the ladder they climbed behind them and throwing the unassimilated (voluntarily or not) to the wolves - those subcultural quislings have no idea how eagerly they themselves will be shoved from the heights and rights they've reached the moment they're no longer useful to those now consolidating power, and hunted down with the rest of their kind.
If, this time, we're driven to defeat and destruction, the blame will be directly upon the Vines of the world, twining desperately around the pillars of 'respectability', so eager for to feel acceptable that they split away, sowed division among their own tribe and simply watcht each splintered portion was pickt off one by one - til their own doom arrived.
I was a teenager in the mid-80s, deep in the closet, watching all of this from a distance I didn't understand at the time. It's part of why it took me another fifteen years to come out, at almost thirty. That kind of fear gets into a kid and doesn't let go easy.
The line about Weimar stopped me. So did the part about who ran the moment it stopped being convenient to stand together. I keep sitting with how many times that pattern has to repeat before people believe it's a warning and not just history.
Thank you for this. I'm not letting go of it either.
Love the social commentary with the embedded moral within the donut/story. Great piece and mutual sentiment
Thank you Miles.
Ohhh, yes - that Vines article was vile.
As someone who came out just as the first reports of a 'mystery disease' had, in a sudden outbreak, killed over 100 gay men in New York; and as someone who then went on to learn to navigate the gay world and community through the early-to-mid 1980s as the horror of what came to be called HIV/AIDS ravaged its population; I saw what damage division (shunning those who were ill; saying nothing as officials advocated isolating people with AIDS - or even putting them in 'camps') could do - as well as what miracles could happen when the lesbians, gays, and transfolk, rather than forming the occasional coalition for a brief, specific political effort, at last united together as one, and the LGBT (other letters added as people began to express their own sexual/gender identities, and find/create their own subcultures-within-the-subculture) community was born. No one else was helping us in this hour of dire need? OK, we'll do it ourselves. And we did - *together*.
From within that new and necessary unity, the word 'queer' came to be used more and more - especially among the (then-)young turks in the more activist wings - as an umbrella term for everyone who wasn't (or couldn't 'pass' for) heterosexual white folk who accepted 'traditional' gender roles - one word for *all* of us, all in the same storm-pummelled boat - and boy, did the assimilationists and old guard get pist off.
Me, I was among the first to happily adopt the term for myself. As an AuDHDer myself (not yet then diagnosed, but in retrospect it was textbook behaviour), the zeptosecond I came out, I was OUT - and obsessively, voraciously read everything I could on LGBTQI+ culture - its history, its art, music, literature. So having already read respected and admired authors such as Christopher Isherwood and Jean Genet, and knowing they too preferred the term 'queer', I figured heck, that was good enough for me.
I especially always got a larf out of the 'b-b-but "queer" is a slur!' argument. Yeah, bud, like fellow students sneeringly calling you 'gay' in the hallways of high school before shoving you into a locker was meant as a bloody compliment.
And now we're watching the assimilationists do *exactly* what I predicted when marriage equality became prevalent (in the West at least): declare victory; walk away from the fight; and lunge happily into mainstream society, thinking they're totally accepted and 'normalised' - forgetting the lessons of the Weimar republic, and what happened with whiplash-celerity to the 'acceptance' and great legal strides forward that Germany's homophile movement had made when a certain failed Austrian artist with a silly moustache rose to power upon waves of hatred thought left in the past, but were only lurking and waiting for their moment to rise again.
Transfolk? Varied gender identities? Others too different in appearance and behaviour (either by unconscious expression or by direct decision) to fit in - the 'queer' ones? Under the bus with 'em. At gay men's hour of need, in the worst of the AIDS crisis, they may have rusht to our side and been of incalculable help - but now, when transfolk, especially, are under brutal socio-political attack, what do the 'normal-acting' gays do? Run in the other direction and claim that's a totally different thing; not their problem ('the "T" doesn't belong in "LGB"!'). Their behaviour is disgusting and nauseating - and by 'their', I mean the assimilationists like Vines, not my trans friends and allies.
As the hard right lurches from success to success in seizing power and dismantling society (let alone democracy) and uses those of us too different - too 'queer' - as distraction and lightning rod for resurgent hate, we need a community united as determinedly as during the worst of the AIDS pandemic if we are to (quite literally) survive. Instead, we're seeing vipers like Vines pull up the ladder they climbed behind them and throwing the unassimilated (voluntarily or not) to the wolves - those subcultural quislings have no idea how eagerly they themselves will be shoved from the heights and rights they've reached the moment they're no longer useful to those now consolidating power, and hunted down with the rest of their kind.
If, this time, we're driven to defeat and destruction, the blame will be directly upon the Vines of the world, twining desperately around the pillars of 'respectability', so eager for to feel acceptable that they split away, sowed division among their own tribe and simply watcht each splintered portion was pickt off one by one - til their own doom arrived.
I was a teenager in the mid-80s, deep in the closet, watching all of this from a distance I didn't understand at the time. It's part of why it took me another fifteen years to come out, at almost thirty. That kind of fear gets into a kid and doesn't let go easy.
The line about Weimar stopped me. So did the part about who ran the moment it stopped being convenient to stand together. I keep sitting with how many times that pattern has to repeat before people believe it's a warning and not just history.
Thank you for this. I'm not letting go of it either.
❤️
Preach, sister! Similar history