The history in this post is so important. And so is the fact that in a post about how the queer community faced homophobia that literally cost generations of our elders their lives, there are TERFs in the damn reblogs bitching about the word queer being used.
So I’m going to add something here, because this is one of the few issues on which I refuse to remain silent.
I was born in 1988. I knew a very small number of queer people growing up, and I only knew those because they were either a) related to me ((my cousin and his life partner)) or b) because my mother happened to be friends with them. I remember in middle school, realizing I was queer and feeling like I was so alone. I had been raised to believe that it was okay to be the away I am, whatever that entailed, but I still felt alone. I didn’t know who to talk to. I had no “elders” to turn to for advice; for history lessons; for support. There was no one to help me navigate the complexities of sorting out my own personal identity or labels. My first brush with the history of the AIDs epidemic was listening to RENT on CD when my older sister borrowed it from a friend.
I had to do my own research. I had to teach myself. I had to explore and stretch and twist and bend and do everything I could not to break under the pressure of it all. But by the time I was in high school, I was realizing that I wasn’t actually alone. That a startlingly significant number of my peers were also queer. Perhaps not the same exact flavor of queer as me, but that was okay because we were all huddling under this one umbrella. And it was a really big umbrella. It had to be, to cover all of us. As we got older and found each other, our voices got louder and we realized that the sheer number of us was so much bigger that we’d been led to believe.
It would be another few years past graduation before I really started to understand that the reason we’d been led to believe there was so few of us in relation to the overall population was because our elders were dead. Killed by hatred and bigotry and violence and cruelty and neglect. We were not some small subsection of humanity, beneath the world’s notice. We were a large enough group to make change happen. We could march, and protest, and lobby. We could exist, and there were enough of us under that big umbrella of queerness to afford us a measure of support and protection.
I resisted labels for a long time. I changed the ones I used as frequently as some people change their shoes, struggling to find one that fit. I hated how nothing seemed to stick; how nothing worked for me. Except QUEER. Because queer just meant not straight. It meant different. It meant questioning and figuring it out and evolving. It meant I belonged under that umbrella with everyone else.
The loss of the generations of queer persons above me - my mother’s generation, and the generation that nestled between hers and mine, and the generation nestled between her’s and her mother’s - was a devastating blow to the queer community. Not merely because of the loss of life, the loss of loved ones, the loss of history…but because of the loss of mentorship. I grew up believing I was a small, statistical anomaly. I had no concept of the fact that I was, in actuality, part of a rather large community. It is a loss that simply cannot be overstated.
Do your research. Learn your history. Listen to the elders who survived. The march for their lives was built on battle cries like “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” and “Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you!” They fought for queer rights. There were queer studies and queer history classes. QUEER was the umbrella they built, from the sticks and stones hurled at them by their oppressors, broad enough it turned into a canopy that covered all of them. It was all the shelter they had.
And you can pry that umbrella from my cold, dead hands. I will not surrender it any other way. And by telling me that’s a slur you are announcing your own willful ignorance of the history of our community; of the sacrifices and losses of our elders. Stop listening to the hissing lies and sneered condescension of TERFs and gatekeepers. They do not have your best interests at heart, and they certainly don’t have my best interests at heart.
For the love of everything, don’t drink the Kool-aid. It’s been poisoned by bigotry and rhetoric. The goal of stripping away the umbrella of queerness from the community is to leave a very specific subset of the community exposed, because we don’t fit under the umbrellas the TERFs are holding up as acceptable. If you learn nothing else from the history of bigotry and homophobia and hatred that resulted in the AIDs epidemic killing off so many of our elders, learn this. Exclusion does not benefit or protect us.
If you are not prepared to shelter the most vulnerable among us - if you are not prepared to support and protect the members of our community who are attacked and belittled as beneath notice or less than human - than you are a part of the problem.
Which side of history do you want to be on? As for me, I’m siding with queer and everyone it shelters.
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