[Image description: Digital art of young Raine and Eda from The Owl House, holding hands and making a yellow spell circle together with their free hands, both pointing at the viewer. A top text bottom text formatted caption says, “These witches. Point at gay people.” End description]
woman in a film: soaked in blood brandishing a knife in grimy hands screaming incoherently veins popping on her forehead red faced and disheveled going absolutely feral with rage
“We had dorm rooms next to each other freshman year. We mainly just played a lot of board games: Risk, Scrabble, Scattergories, a Trivial Pursuit game from the 1980’s, which everyone sucked at. But we became best friends, and the next year decided to get a house together. That’s when things started to get tense. We began sitting closer together. We were touching more. We’d play with each other’s hands. Never holding hands, but playing with hands. And we’d even fall asleep in the same bed together. There was a time that she told me goodnight, and I swear I felt her brush my lips, but by the time I opened my eyes she was out of the room. Neither of us had ever dated a woman. And I was terrified to try anything. We were such good friends. There was always this fear that if I voiced the desire, it would ruin our friendship. But one night we were out for drinks at a hotel where Al Capone used to stay. I was feeling pretty drunk, so I leaned over and said: ‘Sometimes I feel like I want to kiss you.’ And she replied: ‘Sometimes I do too.’ I didn’t say a thing. I wasn’t even sure that I’d heard her correctly. I just kept thinking: ‘Oh my God, it’s happening. It’s happening.’ Then once we finished our drinks, and started walking home, I stopped her in front of a bridge. I said: ‘Shall we do it here?’ It was December 12th, 2002. And even though we got married five years ago, that’s the day we celebrate as our anniversary.”
By the way legislators aren’t making laws specifically targeting the LGBTQ community because of pansexuals or trans people without dysphoria or aces and aros. They’re doing it because they hate queer people, and want to make us existing openly illegal.
No amount of “but but but the new labels are making us look bad and people won’t take us seriously” will ever change the fact that you are putting yourself on the side of people that want us dead. So stand by your community, or put a damn sock in it.
This is your community. There is no circumstance that you should say “well, the oppressor is right on this one” but that’s what SO many of you are doing!
When politicians mock parts of our community that they know you won’t bother to defend, they’re using it as a foot in the door. They are using it as a way to make their next action seem less extreme, and they will continue until they have achieved what’s happening in Texas and Idaho. And you are allowing them to.
Other queer people are not your enemy. And once again if you still can’t see that, you’re on the side of the oppressors.
So, this is going to be a little meandering and all over the place. But I’m trying to express this…web of thoughts I’ve been having lately around this issue of queer, and labels, and the way we talk about our history and the way the community conceptualized itself in this very digital age. And it’s still kind of half formed, so…let’s see.
So. OK.
One thing I see a lot online, especially with people who are just now coming out, is a sort of…overfixation on increasingly niche labels. Im not saying that having a very specific or newer label is bad, to be clear. Labels are rhetorical tools, use what is useful. They help with visibility and discussing specific issues. No issues there.
But watching people quibble over bi vs pan vs omni vs abro or non-binary vs genderqueer vs demigender vs genderfluid vs agender vs xenogender vs bigender vs gnc. Asexual or gray ace or demisexual or queerplatonic. And whether they are a biromantic lesbian demigirl or bisexual greyaromantic genderuid. And it’s always just a little exhausting, ya know? Again, if those labels are meaningful and useful, that’s great, but I see people *agonizing* over which they “really” are. Like if they pick the wrong word to describe themselves, they are coming out the wrong way, like they are wrong about themselves if they can’t find the exact correct word on an FAQ list of lgbt vocabulary.
And how I think that relates to the way people talk about our CURRENT labels as though these labels have always been there and like the people described by these labels now have no common experiences with other labels. Like lesbians and bisexual women have absolutely nothing in common. Like butches and trans men have no shared history. As though trans women and drag queens have always been completely separate and unconnected groups. As though ace folks and nonbinary folks are somehow new to the scene, and not community members who were always here and just didn’t have a separate label until more recently.
I *remember* watching the community make the switch from transvestite and transsexual, to differentiating between transsexuals and transgender, to basically just using transgender/trans. Those labels are not stagnant. None of our labels are some ingrained biological unchanging objective truth. Labels are rhetorical shortcuts to summarize this facet of our identity and lives and experiences- but they are just words.
And maybe this connects to the way people get really…weird about historical figures too. Like whether Sappho was a lesbian or bisexual, as though either of those words would have had any meaning to her. About whether Shakespeare was gay or bi, like he would have conceptualized his own identity that way. About what modern label Dr. James Barry would have used for himself if anyone could travel back in time and ask him.
And then I think about why queer feels so much more affirming, so much more a place of strength, than LGBT+. Not that LGBT as a label is bad, and I honestly probably prefer it for allies and outsiders to use. But as a community label- Queer, to me, says that all our experiences are queer experiences. Queer can be many things, but they are all queer. Regardless of how many genders or which specific genders you like, whether you have a romantic and or sexual attraction to whatever collection of genders, whatever thing your gender is doing today- all of it, ALL of it, once you step outside that cis, straight mainstream sexuality and gender norm- is queer. Equally queer.
Lgbt+ feels like we are still keeping all those labels separate, little boxes all lined up next to each other- different but a coalition. And while that isn’t bad, I also think it isn’t totally true.
[A caveat here, that there are times when more specific labels are very helpful. We don’t want any specific kind of queer experience to be overshadowed or erased, and having more specific labels facilitates those discussions. Again, I’m not saying that we should eliminate or erase our more specific labels.]
But I think imagining our community as a collection of wholly separate groups that are just allied together, instead of one group that we are all equally in, can make it far too easy for exclusionists to sneak up and say “well ___ isn’t REALLY lgbt. THEY aren’t REALLY one of us. ___ dont belong.”
If we take all the labels off all the crayons- red and pink and purple and blue and teal and green are not hard and fast divisions. They are artificial distinctions we have made- all of them are light, all of them the rainbow.
Anyway. I just think that, while everyone should use whatever labels bring them joy and are useful for them, we might be better off if more folks were ok with ALSO accepting the vast ambiguity of being queer.
[Image description: three black and white photographs of marches and protests.
In the first, a group marches down a street with the leaders holding a banner that reads “Queer Nation - Get Used To It!”
The second shows a similar group standing behind a banner that reads “Stop the violence. Queers fight back!”
The third shows protesters around the front steps of a building, where three people hold a banner that reads “We’re queer. Don’t fuck with us. Rights now!” with ACT UP in the corner.
