Something we have run into a couple of times is the idea that because a queer person was not also a good person, or made a well-known mistake, that we shouldn’t talk about them because they are “bad representation”.
So, let’s all take a moment to recognize that history does not exist to fulfill our needs. Queer people in history have never been perfect, and should not be expected to be to deserve to be recognized as queer. Queerness is not a synonym with moral purity and the idea that it should be, or that we shouldn’t talk about certain people at all if they don’t fit today’s moral standards is not constructive. Ignoring history because someone doesn’t think it’s nice and clean is the reason queer people are underrepresented in discussions around history in the first place.
I understand wanting a perfect role model. I understand wanting happy stories that go how they “should”. But this is something we need to learn about history, more than just queerness: Human beings are complicated. Everyone has flaws and makes mistakes. Every villain has a good side. You have to be able to judge the sum of someone’s parts, not try to lump them to all one side or the other.
Traditionally, histories have served politics much more than the truth. History books have often been artfully arranged to tell a story that suits the people in power, a tale about only good people who did good and supported the system, with the bad guys carefully positioned as outliers everyone opposed. Churches only talk about their saints. Countries only talk about their heroes.
Queer history is trying to do two things at the same time: It’s trying to uncover our history, and it’s trying to tell the truth about it. We’re very deliberately not airbrushing them out of the picture. This is the same kind of history that reveals that the glorious battle led by a noble leader was actually a brutal slaughter in an unjust war, and that the virtuous charity led by a kindhearted saint was actually an act of genocide.
It sucks to get the non-airbrushed, non-storybook version of history, if you’re used to histories where Christopher Columbus was an amazing discoverer and George Washington never told a lie and the Roman Empire was the height of civilization. Everything is suddenly so complicated and murky and depressing, and you wanted heroes and saints!
(I still want heroes and saints, but might have to get there by reconsidering a lot of hagiographies and changing the plaques on statues)
But if you take that lens and turn it on the rest of histories, you’ll start seeing that they’re not so bright and noble either. Nobility and goodness turn into much more complicated and elusive issues, and you might have to fight the people in power to achieve them.
Also, if we only ever talk about historical queer people who were shining examples of perfection who never did anything that would be considered bad in their time or ours, then it creates a pressure for living queer people to also be flawless, never make mistakes, never have a wrong opinion, etc.
And also, if we don’t talk about the toxic, abusive, and criminal people in our own community in the past, we won’t have the tools necessary to spot and deal with them in the present and future. There’s a strong thread of historical revisionism that says LGBTQ+ people are inherently good, inherently pure, inherently nonabusive. Domestic violence and rape and child abuse and sexual harassment are cis/hetero/patriarchal problems! They won’t occur HERE!
It leaves survivors feeling like they’re the first person to have ever experienced such a thing, like naming these problems is something only our enemies do. It leaves bystanders confused, unable to spot problems of abuse or react appropriately. It hinders the growth of our children and youth, who need to learn about what power they have and how to use it responsibly.
And it lets abusers get away with it.
So, yanno. It’s important.
One of the griefs and joys of history is finding that everyone in the past was human. The same people who are capable of unbelievable grace are capable of being monsters, and almost everyone* falls somewhere between. That’s why I loved this take on Fred Rogers (which I took pains over about fifteen minutes wrestling with Google’s abysmal algorithms “Here’s the top result for our favorite of your search terms; we excluded four of them because we didn’t feel like it”) only to find has now been placed behind a paywall since it’s technically archived). He wasn’t faking it - he really did care that much about people - and nonetheless, he helped put down a labor strike and critiqued factory unions. He was a genuinely good person, from a middle-class background in a mid-twentieth-century context. And he was bisexual, David Emery, by his own testimony; you don’t have to act on attraction for it to count. Did that stop him from asking a gay friend to stay in the closet and marry a woman to avoid controversy? No, it did not.
There’s no such thing as an unproblematic person. We just don’t work that way. A friend of mine loves to point out that he’s actually hopeful that someday, people can comment on his currently rather radical views that they are, by a later standard, conservative and backwards-looking.
*Except pioneers. The settlers of the Far West, in California and Oregon (and Arizona and parts of Washington), almost entirely, without respect to gender or age, allowed themselves to become monsters. There are two that I know of who didn’t, one of whom who clears the bar of “not as bad as you could’ve been” just barely by being a decent person to Natives who assimilated. The entire rest of the lot? Monsters.
I love all of the discussion this post brought up! All of this post is worth reading, and is one of the rare examples of a post from us where almost all the feedback has been constructive and thought-provoking!
This is true, but also… really disheartening? Because it means that things are never going to be okay and some groups of people will always be oppressed and there will always be something to feel bad about? Which makes it hard to see the point in fighting for anything, because why bother if you can’t win or make a difference?
I don’t know, this just feels like one of those things I can’t think too hard about, for my own mental health and general wellbeing
It’s disheartening if your goal is perfection. But there is a huge space between perfect and perfectly awful, and that space fits the whole world and nearly all of human history. We’re not working towards perfection; we’re working towards a kinder one.
Perfection is a sterile, brittle, unstable space. It is tightly circumscribed out of fear, unable to change. Imperfection can grow, can learn to understand, can stumble into joy. Perfection can’t, because for perfection to exist, we must reduce all possibilities to the single best one we can think of at this moment, no room for error, no room for finding even better ways by accident.
People make mistakes. We can grow and learn from those mistakes. We can experiment and improve over and beyond what we’ve dreamed of. We can have different perspectives and different opinions and all be reasonable, all be contributing something to the conversation. Conflict can be a space for growth. It can open up room for people to be more free and true to themselves that we can be under perfection. Any place that hopes to be inclusive must necessarily include people who are different from each other and who disagree.
We can’t make the world perfect, and I don’t think we should try. I think we should try to make it kinder, in whatever way we can. Do the thing in front of you that helps. We’re a big team; you don’t need to carry the ball all the way yourself.
Or to put it another way, we’ve grown enough to have outgrown a few ideas that Fred Rogers had. I think he would be so proud of us for that.
