Honestly, yes, and that's part of the reason I'm so fucking pissed off at James Somerton - he's thirty-four fucking years old. He's too young to remember the AIDS crisis with clarity - he was six during the worst year of the crisis - but too old and too involved in the community to get a pass for Just Not Knowing.
And also, like, we're taking the words of Fran Lebowitz as meaningful?
This Fran Lebowitz, talking in 2010?
"Candy [Darling, a trans woman] was a man who wanted to be a female movie star," says Fran in the opening of the under-three-minute teaser. "And you know, fell into the clutches of Andy [Warhol] who told her she was."
"A 25-year-old man who becomes a 25-year-old woman is not a woman at all, because a woman first has to be a little girl. Candy was never a girl."
Or maybe this from 2021's Pretend It's A City?
"I said to this little girl, 'you are not a woman.' Now you can't say that to anyone. [derisively] If someone says, 'I'm a woman,' you're a woman, okay? You can be a three-year-old girl, a 70-year-old man, you could be a giraffe. You're a woman? You're a woman."
Or how she repeatedly compared being trans to having a headache?
Who you choose to cite and who you choose to view as an authority tells people a lot about how and where you've formed your opinions. James leaning into this garbage tells me a lot about him, unfortunately.
A lot of people in the notes of this post keep saying that those of us pissed off by this garbage "don't get it" or that those of us pissed off by the post don't understand bla bla bla creating systems of support of our own outside the system bla bla bla now people are just trying to fit in to the system bla bla.
And first of all, it's fucking exhausting to see comments like that from people half my fucking age who didn't live through this and don't know fuck all about fuck all. But second of all--
-- how do you create meaningful and durable systems of support in a capitalist society if you have no form of steady income or cannot be certain that if something happens to you that the resources you've built up will be passed to the people that you want it to go to rather than being stolen by people who hate you? How do you create stability for the next generation, how do you raise kids or provide shelter and stability for young people fleeing homophobic and transphobic bio-families, if you don't have a stable home yourself or if taking in someone you're not genetically related to can cause you to lose your home?
It pisses me off to have to grab people by the neck and say "fucking stop it, we were forced into this fight to protect ourselves," because there is a lot that we lost when we had our backs put to the wall by the AIDS crisis and by the endlessly aggressive Republican attacks of the 80s and 90s, and there are a lot of things we had to give up on as priorities because we were trying to protect our right to employment and a steady place to live, and still are! It fucking sucks that we have to do this. It fucking sucks that as a community we are going to look back in 20 years and see what we could have done if we hadn't had to spend so much time and energy protecting the basic right to bodily autonomy and continually re-fighting the same fucking fights. I know that it will because I feel that way about how shit was when I was 20, and I see history not repeating but rhyming the way that it does.
But this bullshit "we lost the artists because they were the Bad Boys who fucked and that's why it's sad" shit that also contains a lot of absolute fucking lies about what "the community" did 30, 40 years ago is just not the fucking way.
The human cost of the AIDS crisis is incalculable, but not because we lost the "radical artists" and everyone else who remained was the losers who suck (a pretty ironic thing to say when you're one of the ones who lived, Franny). It is horrible because people fucking died due to active attempts to use this disease to exterminate us, because of the malignant neglect of the people in power, because people fucking died.
Not artists, not radicals, not ... whatever. We didn't lose martyrs. We lost people.
And like... this bullshit about how addressing general employment discrimination wasn't on the table? Shut uuuuuuuup. I mean, look at that list. Look at Oregon alone. In 87, sexual orientation protected in state employment (you'll see this as a first step in many states as it is easier to argue and sets the stage for general discrimination to be outlawed). In 88, that goes away bc of opposition. It doesn't return until 1992, 5 years later. Go back further, and you see that Oregon went back and forth five fucking times on the question of whether it was legal to castrate or sterilize queers during the first half of the 20th century, during which time almost three thousand Oregonians, many of them women, were either castrated or had oophorectomies performed against their will for being "moral degenerates or sexual perverts."
Tell me exactly how one establishes alternate systems of care in a society that will forcibly remove parts of your body for being queer. Tell me exactly how one establishes alternate systems of care when you can have anything you establish ripped away from your hands because your job is gone, because you're a pervert who doesn't deserve a job or the ability to rent or buy a home with both names on the deed or the ability to get a mortgage (because they COULD discriminate against your ability to sign a mortgage together, and if you don't have both incomes, you might not qualify and even if you do, if lightning strikes the property owner, well, now it belongs to their shitty homophobic family).
All of these advances in our basic rights that James fucking lies about so blatantly are the necessary ingredients for existing in this society as it is established. You cannot create these alternate family forms or alternate systems of care in a way that is stable, livable, and able to be protected without those basic rights, and the fact that so many young people take that shit so much for granted is both wonderful - because all of them have never really experienced the world that I and other older queers grew up in - and so so frustrating, because they really don't understand that all of those basic rights are written in blood.
I am deeply frustrated by the way in which a lot of the big rights organizations can be really really short-sighted and focused on the rights of cis queers, and I'm extremely frustrated by respectability politics. The solution, however, is not shifting the goalposts so that the "acceptable" queers are the ones who are sufficiently radical in visible, tangible ways. Like, what the fuck. The solution has to be actual solidarity between the radical gays and the "boring" ones, and you don't get there by lying about hard-fought history or quoting TERFy McTERFerson Fran Fucking Lebowitz.
