The desire for perfection and clarity in every aspect is one of the biggest hurdles in the discussion of queer history.
It comes in many forms, one of the ones I have encountered the most personally is the desire people seem to have for queer people of the past to line up with some moral baseline before being understood as queer. As if the queer community is some monolithic paragon of virtue that must be gatekept.
There were queer Nazis, slave owners, abusers, colonizers, and murderers, beyond that there were scores of queer people complicit in those kinds of actions. They are just as much a part of the queer community as the best among us.
There is also this ever-present want for clear concise evidence that is unimpeachable, which is a little silly when you think about it. Queer people from three hundred years ago are not going to define themselves in ways that are easily understood and labelled by us now. How could they be expected to? When some historians say that modern labels can’t be applied to people in the past, they aren’t entirely wrong, but they aren’t entirely right either.
Calling a woman who had never heard the word lesbian used to mean anything but “someone from lesbos” a lesbian, is not perfect, because the best way to find a label for someone is to follow their self-identification and we don’t always have that. But lesbians can look at her poetry as an echo of their own experiences, and using the word lesbian to discuss her can be a useful (if imperfect) tool to connect our present to our past. Queer people from the past have experiences in common with modern members of the community, and that is worth discussing. That being said, that doesn’t mean they can be expected to be perfect representation. In fact, expecting “good representation” from anything but fiction is a recipe for disaster.
Also since queer history is a relatively new field of research, we can’t expect every conclusion we come to, to be the right one. We are products of our time just as much as the people we study, and that’s okay. Mistakes can and will happen, and those mistakes will make room for correction and growth for the people who come after us. Yes, we should be putting our best foot forward, but we just have to accept that we will slip sometimes.
The expectation for perfection is a form of discrimination. Plain and simple. Queer history is a study of complex, messy, horrible, brave, and incredible people from the past, and the ties that connect them to us here in the present. As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking and researching that subject, I have to say: the messiness of it all is what makes it worthwhile.
