Tag: lgbtqia history

nihil-descent:

[Image: A Reddit comment by corathus59.

This is almost fifty years ago: I added psych as a major so I could access the books on homosexuality in our university library. They were locked in the back and you had to go through the librarian to get them. If you were not a psych major the Dean of Students would interrogate you as to why you wanted to read such deleterious material.

Seeing the newspaper that one of my professors and his friends had been arrested at his own house, having a barbecue in the backyard, for “associating with a known homosexual”. Believe me, these things twist you, and make you think twice when invited to a party at someone’s house.

Having a handsome young stranger make eyes at you at the all night diner as you study for finals, and wondering if he is one of the detectives assigned to entrapping gays. Going through the teeter totter emotions of wondering if he might be the love you are looking for, or is he the trap that will flush your whole life down the toilet.

Coming to barracks at the end of the day in the Air Force, and watching the swarm of OSI and Security Police escorting a friend out under arrest for having gone to a gay bar. Wondering if he would name you, because that was the only way you could stay out of jail – by naming at least five other gays.

All of the above were common experiences for many gays in America, not that long ago. Those of us who went through this are still among you. Don’t take for granted the new freedoms you have. Get out and vote this election no matter what. The Republicans mean to send us back to all this.]

mediaeval-muse:

cedrwydden:

unstilness:

cedrwydden:

unstilness:

cedrwydden:

What annoys the FUCK out of me about the ‘all historians are out there to erase queerness from history’ thing on Tumblr is that it’s just one of those many attitudes that flagrantly mischaracterises an entire academic field and has a complete amateur thinking they know more than people who’ve spent fucking years studying said field.

Like someone will offer a very obvious example of – say – two men writing each other passionate love letters, and then quip about how Historians will just try to say that affection was just different ‘back then’. Um…no. If one man writes to another about how he wants to give him 10 000 kisses and suck his cock, most historians – surprise surprise! – say it’s definitely romantic, sexual love. We aren’t Victorians anymore.

It also completely dismisses the fact of how many cases of possible queerness are much more ambiguous that two men writing to each other about banging merrily in a field. The boundaries of platonic affection are hugely variable depending on the time and place you’re looking at. What people mock us for saying is true. Nuance fucking exists in the world, unlike on this hellscape of a site.

It is a great discredit to the difficult work that historians do in interpreting the past to just assume we’re out there trying to straightwash the past. Queer historians exist. Open-minded allies exist.

I’m off to down a bottle of whisky and set something on fire.

It’s also vaguely problematic to ascribe our modern language
and ideas of sexuality to people living hundreds or even thousands of years
ago. Of course queer people existed then—don’t be fucking daft, literally any
researcher/historian/whatever worth their salt with acknowledge this. But as
noted above, there’s a lot of ambiguity as well—ESPECIALLY when dealing with a
translation of a translation of a copy of a damaged copy in some language that
isn’t spoken anymore. That being said, yes, queer erasure happens, and it
fucking sucks and hurts. I say that as a queer woman and a baby!researcher. But
this us (savvy internet historian) vs. them (dusty old actual historian)
mentality has got to stop.

You’re absolutely right.

I see the effect of applying modern labels to time periods when they didn’t have them come out in a bad way when people argue about whether some historical figure was transmasculine or a butch lesbian. There were some, of course, who were very obviously men and insisted on being treated as such, but with a lot of people…we just don’t know and we never will. The divide wasn’t so strong back in the late 19th century, for example. Heck, the word ‘transmasculine’ didn’t exist yet. There was a big ambiguous grey area about what AFAB people being masculine meant, identity-wise.

Some people today still have a foot in each camp. Identity is complicated, and that’s probably been the case since humans began to conceptualise sexuality and gender.

That’s why the word ‘queer’ is such a usefully broad and inclusive umbrella term for historians.

Also, one more thing and I will stop (sorry it’s just been so long since I’ve gotten to rant). Towards the beginning of last semester, I was translating “Wulf and Eadwacer” from Old English. This is a notoriously ambiguous poem, a p p a r e n t l y, and most of the other students and I were having a lot of trouble translating it because the nouns and their genders were all over the place (though this could be because my memory is slipping here) which made it hella difficult to figure out word order and syntax and (key) the fucking gender of everything. In class, though, my professor told us that the gender and identity of the speaker were actually the object of some debate in the Anglo-Saxonist community. For the most part, it was assumed that the principal speaker of the poem is a woman (there is one very clear female translation amongst all that ambiguity) mourning the exile of her lover/something along those lines. But there’s also some who say that she’s speaking of her child. And some people think the speaker of the poem is male and talking abut his lover. And finally, there’s some people who think that the speaker of the poem is a fucking BADGER, which is fucking wild and possibly my favorite interpretation in the history of interpretations.

TL;DR—If we can’t figure out beyond the shadow of a doubt whether the speaker is a human or a fucking badger, then we certainly can’t solidly say whether a speaker is queer or not. This isn’t narrowmindedness, this is fucking what-the-hell-is-this-language-and-culture (and also maybe most of the manuscripts are pretty fucked which further lessens knowledge and ergo certainty).

Also, if there’s nothing to debate, what’s even the fun in being an historian?

All of this.

I had a student once try to tell me that I was erasing queer history by claiming that a poem was ambiguous. I was trying to make the point that a poem was ambiguous and that for the time period we were working with, the identities of “queer” and “straight” weren’t so distinctive. Thus, it was possible that the poem was either about lovers or about friends because the language itself was in that grey area where the sentiment could be romantic or just an expression of affection that is different from how we display affection towards friends today.

And hoo boy. The student didn’t want to hear that.

It’s ok to admit ambiguity and nuance. Past sexualities aren’t the same as our modern ones, and our understanding of culture today can’t be transferred onto past cultures. It just doesn’t work. The past is essentially a foreign culture that doesn’t match up perfectly with current ones – even if we’re looking at familiar ones, like ancient or medieval Europe. That means our understanding of queerness also has to account for the passage of time. I think we need to ask “What did queerness look like in the past?” as opposed to “How did queerness as we understand it today exist in the past?” As long as we examine the past with an understanding that not all cultures thought same-sex romance/affection/sexual practice was sinful, we’re not being homophobic by admitting there can be nuance in a particular historical product.

I know a lot of very smart people who are working on queerness in medieval literature and history. And yes, there are traditions of scholars erasing queer history because they themselves are guided by their own ideologies. We all are. It’s impossible to be 100% objective about history and its interpretation. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good work being done by current scholars, including work that corrects the bad methodologies of the past.

cricketcat9:

npr:

Matthew Shepard, the young gay man brutally killed on a chilly night in Wyoming 20 years ago this month, was finally laid to rest at Washington National Cathedral on Friday. A reflective, music-filled service offered stark contrast to the anti-gay protests that marred his funeral two decades ago.

The public remembrance at the filled 4,000-seat cathedral was led by the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, and the Right Rev. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay man elected a bishop in the Episcopal Church. After, his ashes were interred at the cathedral’s crypt in a private family ceremony.

Robinson was emotional throughout the public ceremony, tearfully addressing the large crowd. “For Matthew to come back to church,” he said, “is a remarkable step forward.”

He extended a particular welcome to attendees who are LGBT, saying, “Many of you have been hurt by your own religious communities, and I want to welcome you back.”

Shepard’s parents’ requested that their sons ashes be interred at the cathedral after 20 years of reluctance. They feared his gravesite would be desecrated.

‘You Are Safe Now’: Matthew Shepard Laid To Rest At National Cathedral

Photo credits in captions

Matthew’s murder broke my heart to pieces when it happened, and breaks my heart on every anniversary. 

For all LGBT people who were and still are hurt by their religious communities I’m glad this step forward happened. 

thoodleoo:

recently i taught one of my eighth grade classes about sappho. the main focus was on the structure and fragmentation of her poetry, but of course it’s hard to talk about sappho without talking about her love of women (though straight people manage to pull this off all the time, somehow)

i was very upfront with them about it. i didn’t dance around the topic. i told them that sappho was known for loving women romantically, and i showed them one of her poems about a woman. hearing the word lesbian did not blow their minds. they did not freak out at the idea of a woman loving other women. they were respectful and mature. they asked some questions- and they were smart questions, too, like whether sappho’s sexuality was part of the reason her poetry doesn’t survive. we even got into some of the dicier parts of ancient greek sexuality, like pederasty. when class was over, none of them were freaking out about having to learn about an ancient lesbian. they were arguing about taylor swift on their way out, because they’re in 8th grade and that’s what 8th graders do

if anyone ever tries to tell you that we shouldn’t tell students about queer people because they “can’t handle it,” that’s absolutely not true. students are absolutely capable of discussing lgbt issues, and they can even want to talk about it, because it’s something they might not feel comfortable bringing up on their own if they have questions. there’s no reason why students can’t be introduced to queer rights and queer people, even in middle school. even in elementary school. queer does not mean “not child friendly”

and if you don’t think middle schoolers should learn about queer folk…well, then i know a bunch of 8th graders who are far more mature than you

doctornerdington:

naamahdarling:

yall-frickin-inconsiderate:

postcardsfromspace:

vaspider:

skeletrender:

glumshoe:

The other thing about the word “queer” is that almost everyone I’ve seen opposed to it have been cis, binary gays and lesbians. Not wanting it applied to yourself is fine, but I think people underestimate the appeal of vague, inclusive terminology when they already have language to easily and non-invasively describe themselves.

Saying “I’m gay/lesbian/bi” is pretty simple. Just about everyone knows what you mean, and you quickly establish yourself as a member of a community. Saying “I’m a trans nonbinary bi woman who’s celibate due to dysphoria and possibly on the ace spectrum”… not so much. You’re lucky to find anyone who understands even half of that, and explaining it requires revealing a ton of personal information. The appeal of “queer” is being able to identify yourself without profiling yourself. It’s welcoming and functional terminology to those who do not have the luxury of simplified language and occupy complicated identities. *That’s* why people use it – there are currently not alternatives to express the same sentiment.

It’s not people “oppressing themselves” or naively and irresponsibly using a word with loaded history. It’s easy to dismiss it as bad or unnecessary if you already have the luxury of language to comfortably describe yourself.

There’s another dimension that always, always gets overlooked in contemporary discussions about the word “queer:” class. The last paragraph here reminds me of a old quote: “rich lesbians are ‘sapphic,’ poor lesbians are ‘dykes’.” 

The reclaiming of the slur “queer” was an intensely political process, and people who came up during the 90s, or who came up mostly around people who did so, were divided on class and political lines on questions of assimilation into straight capitalist society. 

Bourgeois gays and lesbians already had “the luxury of language” to describe themselves – normalized through struggle, thanks to groups like the Gay Liberation Front.

Everyone else, from poor gays and lesbians to bi and trans people and so on, had no such language. These people were the ones for whom social/economic assimilation was not an option.

The only language left, the only word which united this particular underclass, was “queer.” “Queer” came to mean an opposition to assimilation – to straight culture, capitalism, patriarchy, and to upper class gays and lesbians who wanted to throw the rest of us under the bus for a seat at that table – and a solidarity among those marginalized for their sexuality/gender id/presentation. 

(Groups which reclaimed “queer,” like Queer Patrol (armed against homophobic violence), (Queers) Bash Back! (action and theory against fascism, homophobia, and transphobia), and Queerbomb (in response to corporate/state co-optation of mainstream Gay Pride), were “ultraleft,” working-class, anti-capitalist, and functioned around solidarity and direct action.)

The contemporary discourse around “queer” as a reclaimed-or-not slur both ignores and reproduces this history. The most marginalized among us, as OP notes, need this language. The ones who have problems with it are, generally, among those who have language – or “community,” or social/economic/political support – of their own.

Oh hey look it’s the story of my growing up.

All of this is true.

Yes.

also, “qpoc” is a thing, like how about we not take away a term that a lot of people of color id with? thanks :))))

It’s the only word I have for what I am, that encompasses both identity and sexuality. It’s literally the only word.  I’m not calling myself a “slur”, I’m using literally the only term that works to define me.

I’m not LGBTQ+. I’m not a catchall.  I am a very specific thing.

I know there are people who don’t want it applied to them and I try to be considerate of that because I’m not a total asshole, but we CANNOT throw the term away.

YEP.

adayinthelesbianlife:

Donna Gottschalk’s “Brave, Beautiful Outlaws” is opening at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art on Aug. 29. While Ms. Gottschalk doesn’t identify as a documentary photographer or a photojournalist, she has been making pictures since she was 17. Photos selected from her 50-year personal archive will be made public for the first time.

Her work documents her closeness with her working class family and her involvement with the radical lesbian, sometimes separatist, communities in the late ’60s and ’70s.

The photos are tinged with mourning and mystery. She’s been holding their memory for decades, “fiercely protective” and unwilling to “subject them to scrutiny, judgment and abuse” from the outside world.

”Understand, people didn’t care about them or my pictures of them back in the day,” she said. “These people were all very dear to me, and they were beautiful. These pictures are the only memorial some of these people will ever have.”