not that my input really matters, but i don’t know much of lgbt history other than bits and pieces of stonewall, a little bit of the aids crisis, and the legalization of gay marriage; i’m an actual child and nobody here (kentucky) educates anyone/gets educated on it
how about instead of shaming people—especially young people—for not knowing our history, we provide them with credible resources?
here’s a long list of LGBT+ historical events worth googling and learning about. i’m not sure if all the dates and details are spot on, but, again, this is really just a guide for what to research on your own. to warn you, a lot of this history is ugly, including things like the conflation of pedophilia and LGBT+ people, genital mutilation, homophobia, transphobia, nazis, and wide scale persecution.
Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community (warning: this documentary was made in the 80s and is dated in a lot of respects as a result; it also features quotes from Allen Ginsberg, who we now know was a pedophile, but it’s still very informative in terms of history)
Honestly “queer” is so useful for people like me w/ a “complicated orientation” b/c instead of having to say I’m “asexual panromantic” and explain what that means, I can just say “I’m queer” and it tells you all you need to know (that I’m not straight).
yeah sure good for you but don’t ever ever use that word for someone who doesn’t identify as it themselves, it’s not an umbrella term for everyone. also “pan/ace” would definitely work, even if you don’t want to use it, other people could. i use ace lesbian and definitely not the q slur.
Wow its almost like they were just talking about using it on themselves for individual reasons and you butted in to be an ass and be condescending because you think you’re superior for not using queer, then you called their identity a slur right to them. But that can’t possibly be what you were trying to do, right?
Anyone is allowed to use it for themselves, I never said no one should do that if that’s what they want. Queer is a slur though. I just want people to be aware of that, I have no idea if OP is aware of that or not but some people using that word aren’t. I’m tired of people including me and other people who don’t want to be included in that word, and before anyone asks, I never meant that OP did that, because I literally have no idea if they do.
Queer is a slur as much as any other LGBT+ word, I just want you to be aware of that.
“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella – gay rights, gay marriage, gay community – when discussing the entire community.
Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.
Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.
Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.
So if you’re not going to come onto gay people’s posts for the same behavior, maybe critically analyze why exactly you feel the need to be so condescending to Queer people, specifically on posts that ONLY have to do with personal identity. Why you feel the need to insist to Queer people that their identities are slurs, to directly slap away the power of reclaiming a word from them by demanding it remain in the hands of the Straights as a perpetual slur.
I think an important difference between gay and queer is however, that queer started out as a slur used against members of the community and continues to be used as a slur in many places. Whereas gay began as a word the community chose itself to describe itself and was then later used by homophobes and heterosexuals in general in a negative way, meaning however, that gay doesn’t hold the same negative connotations as queer for many people simply because it was our word that they took, and not a word that they forced on us to make us “strange” or “other” like queer means.
That’s…. Not true. People think so because the history before gay was reclaimed is way older (older than any love community member’s lifetimes, probably,) but gay had the exact same origins.
It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.
The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”
There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.
The more recent history of the mid to late 20th century more prevalently favored queer as a slur, as is represented in our media. However its clearly undeniable that the switch back to gay as the popular community slur (along with the ever present f slur,) happened in the 2000s. Which is trying to be denied and rewritten by the anti queer crowd, who completely ignore the words popularity with community members who actually lived through when it was a popular slur.
Yes to all of this. When it comes to words for “not straight” there are hardly any choices that didn’t originate as ways to stigmatize or pathologize us. We are all using reclaimed slurs to describe ourselves.
Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet.
Somebody else pointed this out earlier to me, and of course I’ve lost the post, but it’s really suspicious that of all the reclaimed slurs, the one that gets the most pushback is the one that is most radically accepting of all identities
“hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it.
Queer is an ideology and an identity, historically and now. It is an umbrella for that ideology and an umbrella for those identities, historically and now. They can’t be conflated (with LGBT) and it’s super fucking disingenuous to pretend one is just the tarnished besmirched dirty slur version of the other. They’re different. In my particular work for example, Queer bioethics is different from LGBT bioethics and conflating the two will muddle any discussion you try to have about them because they lead to literally opposite conclusions in some cases.
Yeah I freaking love pancakes
Wait wrong post
By far the best addition to this post
This is one of those things where I feel like an old.
Like, *the* slogan I associate with pride is, “We’re here, we’re queer – get used to it!”
There was a TV show called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” that was total mainstream pap. (Not that the show wasn’t riddles problematic elements from the concept out, but ‘queer’ in the title was clearly meant as a positive.)
I just have a hard time processing queer as anything but reclaimed.
They actually shot “Queer As Folk” in my city!
TERFs and radical gender/sexuality bianarists are flooding social media and blogging sites with propaganda smearing the word queer in the hopes of silencing all of us who don’t identify with their hate politics. I fought hard to reclaim the word queer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it’s the one word that doesn’t worship exclusion. Which is why these people are trying to convince you not to use it. fuck that noise. there is literally no word i could use to identify my sexuality that hasn’t been thrown at me in hatred, fear, and violence. No way am I giving up the one of those that allows me to talk about all of my community without trying to put people in boxes they don’t fit in.
I will never not reblog this post. Queer, queer, queer here.
“Queer” has been claimed by queer people as a self-descriptor since at least 1910. It’s an insult to those historical people (and all the generations of queer historical people who have identified as queer since then) to pretend that the people using it as a slur owned it more than the queer people who used it as a self-descriptor.
Source: George Chauncey, “Gay New York,” page 101
They don’t want us to use queer because they don’t want to be lumped in with anyone who’s not cis gay or cis lesbian. So fine. You don’t like the word queer? You don’t want to be in the “queer” community? Get the fuck out, then. Y’all don’t welcome us in your community anyway, so we’ll just have our own.
And it’ll be queer as fuck.
I fucking love the word queer ❤
Or, to put it another way, using a great old slogan of the community: I’m not gay as in happy, I’m queer as in fuck you.
Yes yes yes yes yes! These younglings today don’t know their queer history but feel so free to comment on it. Trying so desperately to assimilate into straight culture by turning your nose up at queer, and all the people who take refuge under its umbrella. Queer accepted me when nobody else would, not even the LGBT groups.
Queer is full of the types of people who don’t make good poster children for the middle class assimilationist cis gay couple just looking to get married and have some kids. Queer forces us to realize the fight didn’t end with gay marriage, and cis gays are gonna have to step out of the spotlight sometimes, and realize cis gays have privilege, and fight for someone with less. Trans people, nonbinary people, people in nontraditional relationship structures, aromantics, asexuals, sex workers. Heck more and more bisexual people these days are switching over to queer because the amount of biphobia in the so-called lgBt community is so alienating, and also because so many of us feel the term bisexual reinforces a false gender dichotomy and we’re too tired of jokes about kitchenware to use pansexual.
Part of what I love about the term queer is that it does make people uncomfortable. It makes them aware of their privilege, exposes certain biases, even within the LGBT community. What’s so wrong with a movement that strives to fight for everybody, huh? Huh?
Proudly bi, proudly queer, and being part of this movement when I was young was an honor.
Text of a manifesto originally passed out by people marching with the ACT UP contingent in the New York Gay Pride Day parade, 1990. –
An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose
Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred. (We have been carefully taught to hate ourselves.) And now of course it means fighting a virus as well, and all those homo-haters who are using AIDS to wipe us off the face of the earth.
Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It’s not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It’s not about executive directors, privilege and elitism. It’s about being on the margins, defining ourselves; it’s about gender-f— and secrets, what’s beneath the belt and deep inside the heart; it’s about the night. Being queer is “grass roots” because we know that everyone of us, every body, every c—, every heart and a– and d— is a world of pleasure waiting to be explored. Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility.
We are an army because we have to be. We are an army because we are so powerful. (We have so much to fight for; we are the most precious of endangered species.) And we are an army of lovers because it is we who know what love is. Desire and lust, too. We invented them. We come out of the closet, face the rejection of society, face firing squads, just to love each other! Every time we f—, we win.
We must fight for ourselves (no else is going to do it) and if in that process we bring greater freedom to the world at large then great. (We’ve given so much to that world: democracy, all the arts, the concepts of love, philosophy and the soul, to name just a few of the gifts from our ancient Greek Dykes, Fags.) Let’s make every space a Lesbian and Gay space. Every street a part of our sexual geography. A city of yearning and then total satisfaction. A city and a country where we can be safe and free and more. We must look at our lives and see what’s best in them, see what is queer and what is straight and let that straight chaff fall away! Remember there is so, so little time. And I want to be a lover of each and every one of you. Next year, we march naked.
guys. if you go to college and want to study our history and current political climate etc? do you know what that department is called? “Queer Studies”. So could you fucking stop, you little babies.
I am officially Old as Fuck ™ compared to most Tumblrites.
I came of age after they discovered HIV and before they discovered how to treat it. THAT is how old I am.
I worked and marched with friends and loved ones and the banner that brought everyone together was “Queer.” The word doesn’t need to be reclaimed. It has been reclaimed. Before a lot of y’all were ever born.
Trying to school your elders about shit of which you know nothing doesn’t build community. It’s part of a rejection of the idea that the LGBTQ community is multigenerational. It’s a rejection of the idea that there is gay, lesbian, QUEER life after 30. Its refusing to consider that those who went before did an awful damn lot to make where you are now possible.
Back in 1984, when the mere mention of aids induced panic, Poltergeist actress Zelda Rubinstein did something truly brave by lending her face to one of the first state-funded safe-sex campaigns directed at gay men.
Posters depicting Rubinstein as a caring mom urging her “sons” to play safe were plastered all over Los Angeles’ buses and buildings before going national and then international. (They were spotted on phone booths as far away as Madrid.)
“I paid a very big price career-wise,” Rubinstein says of the attention, which predated Elizabeth Taylor’s and Madonna’s AIDS involvement by at least a year.
A quarter-century after their debut, Rubinstein’s posters have found a second life — no séances required. Physician Irene Adams, an AIDS specialist in Brazil, is bringing Mother’s lessons to her nation as part of a new youth outreach initiative.
The 76-year-old Rubinstein is ready to help once again: “I would do a fund-raiser for this cause anywhere in the world.“
Can bi tumblr stop spreading that lie that a bisexual trans woman started pride.
If you want to feel so important why not do something for the bisexual community .like um have a proud to be bisexual day.
Instead of trying to erase lesbians and gay men from history.
Seriously is your self worth so low that you must steal things from lesbians and gays to make yourself important?
Have some pride in yourselves
Uh pride started with Stonewall, which was a community effort. Without that there would be no pride.
You’re clearly unable to critique popular LGBTQ history without showing your rampant biphobia.
There were no bisexuals that started pride so guess what we would still have it nice try. Why not do something for your community instead of trying to steal shit how about that.
PRIDE. WAS STARTED. TO. COMMEMORATE. STONEWALL.
PRIDE. WAS STARTED. TO. COMMEMORATE. STONEWALL.
You know, when we talk about bi exclusion from queer spaces, “get your own pride!” is exactly the kind of bullshit we’re talking about. You are literally telling queer people they’re not welcome at Pride events.
Um.
Brenda Howard, who was at the Stonewall riot and who organized the first Pride march to commemorate Stonewall, was bisexual. She is also known as the Mother of Pride.
Please at least research your hatred so you don’t end up with egg on your face like this.
I started thinking about it before Amok Time aired.
In the summer of ‘67, watching the reruns of the first season, I very clearly remember a growing sense of, “They really love each other.” I did not jump to “they are in a romantic/sexual relationship,” but I was increasingly aware that there was love and devotion between them. I wrote a speculative essay about their platonic love in our summer fan club newsletter, which I remember being well-received.
With the start of Season 2, our whole fan club (and often others) watched the show together, at the house of the one person we knew with a color TV. The show was on Friday nights, so we would start the weekends by piling into her living room and watching “in living color” for the first time. Afterwords we would stay and discuss.
When Amok Time aired, we definitely had a lot to talk about. I am pretty sure no one suggested that they were gay – that would have been quite a scandalous suggestion at that time; and I don’t think I thought it myself. But we did have quite a discussion about how much Jim was willing to sacrifice for Spock, Spock’s reaction to seeing Jim alive, and what did Spock mean by “having not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting…?”
Did Spock … want Jim?
Two camps formed: one believing that Spock was in love with Jim and was pining for him, the other believing no way! that’s ridiculous!
Single copies of “Spock pines for Jim” stories started appearing and being circulated hand-to-hand. Two other women and I were doing most of the writing in my circle of fan friends, and because distribution was so difficult, we started having Thursday night gatherings. Anyone could come and we would read the latest installments in our Spock-loves-Jim stories out loud to the group.
Sometime between the second and third season, my primary writing mentor – an established, published sci-fi writer who was much older than me – told me in private conversation that she thought their love was mutual, quite possibly physical, and that she thought their relationship was worth exploring in writing.
She and I each started working on long pieces exploring the Kirk/Spock relationship, and it was the first time I had seriously entertained the idea that their love was also physical. That was a very secret project. We only ever shared our work with each other for comment / revision, and never mentioned it to anyone else at the time.
The first time I realized that the K/S relationship – which was called “The Premise” in those days – was being explored by other writers and even artists was in the summer of ‘69. Star Trek had been cancelled and I went to another state to meet with a handful of people who were forming a fan network to try to get Star Trek back on air. While there, a fellow fan showed me a set of drawings, all very tame by today’s standards, that depicted a physical relationship between Jim and Spock. I remember how shocked I was — not by the subject matter, but by the fact that someone had dared depict it.
Slash stayed very much underground until late 1974, when the first published K/S story used very coded language to suggest a love relationship between them.
Additional history note, for people who aren’t aware of it: In 1973, homosexuality was removed from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder) as a mental illness. Before that time, it was officially listed as, and treated as, a psychiatric disorder, like schizophrenia: a condition that requires treatment, with the goal of removing it, or minimizing its effects if that wasn’t possible.
How happy someone was with it wasn’t important – it was considered a disease. Anyone who was happy being gay was considered to ill to realize how damaged they were.
Claiming that Kirk and Spock might have those feelings for each other was a hard clash against mainstream psychology. It was a very controversial opinion, because it meant not only looking at the series and saying, “I’m seeing a relationship that I’m pretty sure the writers didn’t consciously intend,” but also, “oh, and the entire AMA and the combined wisdom of its doctors are clueless about how human relationships work.”
Believing that two people of the same sex could have a healthy, loving relationship was an act of defiance all on its own.
I see that this post is trending today, so I’m going to take this moment to reblog it myself with the important addition of the comments from @elfwreck (Thank you for these, @elfwreck !)
I’d like to add a bit more historical context myself. Until the 1970s, years after TOS had finished its run, sodomy was a felony in 49 out of 50 states of the US – a felony which was punishable by prison or death. Throughout the 60s and into the 70s, I can remember reading carefully-worded news stories about gay men being arrested and given decades-long prison sentences.
For being gay.
Think about this for a moment. When TOS was on the air, not only was a white man kissing a Black woman a crime in a third of the country – but one man in a consensual, loving sexual relationship with other was committing a crime so serious he could be imprisoned or killed in everystate but one.
I’ve seen tags from people and received questions about why Spock and Kirk were not allowed to be out on TV, since they were so clearly in love. This was not remotely possible at that time. The average American understood a man who loved another man to be mentally ill and his behavior to be criminal.
@elfwreck put it beautifully above: “Believing that two people of the same sex could have a healthy, loving relationship was an act of defiance all on its own.”
In the early years of writing slash, one had to be very, very careful about who knew you read or wrote such material. Women and men both went to jail for violating obscenity laws. Just letting people know you entertained the idea of “The Premise” of K/S love could (and did) have people openly questioning your mental health, your morality, your character, your ability to do your job, and the safety of children in your presence. I know a woman who lost all rights to visit her own children in a divorce, when the court found out she had K/S slash material in her home.
Happy Pride Month Eleanor Roosevelt was queer, the Little Mermaid is a gay love story, James Dean liked men, Emily Dickinson was a lesbian, Nikola Tesla was asexual, Freddie Mercury was bisexual & British Indian, and black trans women pioneered the gay rights movement.
Florence Nightingale was a lesbian, Leonardo da Vinci was gay, Michelangelo too, Jane Austen liked women, Hatshepsut was not cisgender, and Alexander the Great was a power bottom
Freddie Mercury is well known for his attraction to men but was also linked to several women, including Barbara Valentin whom he lived with shortly before he died. Friends have talked about being invited into their bed and walking in on them having sex (documentary Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender)
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are two of the best-known activists who fought in the Stonewall riots
So apparently last year the National Park Service in the US dropped an over 1200 page study of LGBTQ American History as part of their Who We Are program which includes studies on African-American history, Latino history, and Indigenous history.
Like. This is awesome. But also it feels very surreal that maybe one of the most comprehensive examinations of LGBTQ history in America (it covers sports! art! race! historical sites! health! cities!) was just casually done by the parks service.
rip tumblr 