Just started re-watching Queer as folk and realized how young they all were supposed to be. I’m older than Ted in the first season now. And he still seems old……
Today I told a friend (cis, straight, white guy) about SPNgate
Me: the fandom is melting down because of the latinamerican dub of 15x18 (also explaning the queerbaiting and shit)
Him: I think the idea of overcoming super homosexual clichés and stereotypes, that even a *real tough, killer guy* can fall in love with another man would be great, but that would have seemed badly forced?
Me:……
Him: It would be unusual if Dean were really bisexual (because he definitely likes girls too) has he never looked at another man like that?So he likes women and exactly one man? All these “Destiel scenes”? That’s just plot holes….
Me (queer woman): What???? We live in different worlds and watched two different shows for 15 years……wow!
Fifty people were murdered, 53 more wounded at an LGBTQ Latinx party in Orlando last night. A man attempted to bomb the Pride parade in Los Angeles this morning. I know many of us have expressed frustrations with Pride and its increasingly corporate manifestations… But these horrors are a sobering reminder that we have Pride because people try so, so hard to keep us in the
shadows. We have Pride because people straight up don’t want us to exist. I am scared and shaken and fucked up inside but still I am proud.
From my latest recap of The Fosters, but also just a response about … everything. I’m pretty tired.
I hate this story, I really do. Because there’s an untrue stigma in the world, still to this day, that queer people — and particularly bisexual women — are sexual deviants, and it often makes it very hard for queer women to adopt children or to come out when they’re teachers and school administrators, especially in places that aren’t bastions of progressive values. I have a dear friend who is a teacher at a private school here in Manhattan that fosters inclusivity and encourages staff members to talk about their identities, and she still struggles with it because she grew up in a rural community that would never have accepted her as an exceptional teacher if they’d known she was gay. When I lived in Georgia, my friends who were teachers begged me not to publicly talk about my sexuality because they feared having to cut me out of their lives, or risk alienating the parents of their students.
And on the other side of that coin, women are often punished and socially ostracized for coming forward to speak out against their abusers. The football players who gang raped a women in Stubenville, for example. CNN, NBC, ABC and Yahoo News all mourned the loss of the promising careers of these young men, these respected teammates, these good guys, and cast aspersions on the woman they victimized. Just two weeks ago, SB Nation (a limb of Vox Media) posted a longform article sympathizing with and humanizing Daniel Holtzclaw, instead of honoring the 18 black women he was convicted of raping. Fox Sports’ Erin Andrews won a $55 million lawsuit against her stalker who videoed her undressing through a hotel wall, and posted it online, and just look at these tweets that landed right after the verdict was announced yesterday.
There’s a reason almost 70 percent of sexual assaults are never reported to the police. Authorities, the general public, the media: our society doesn’t believe women when they report being victimized; and even if it’s proven beyond doubt that they were victims, their lives are often still torn apart.
The experience of moving through the world as a woman is fraught; and moving through the world as a queer woman, specifically, is a constant battle that daily includes fighting against the stigmas that have been sewn into the fabric of society by pop culture. I am so exhausted from explaining over and over again the enormous responsibility of putting queer stories into the world. And I remain almost constantly bamboozled by the fact that writers: a) continue to use the same hackneyed tropes when there are infinite other story possibilities available to them, and/or b) are convinced the way they’ll use the trope will be different and singular and acceptable.
It won’t be. And it won’t be. And it won’t be.
Queer women are not just pushing back against one single story on the one single show. I’m not even reacting to just The Fosters right now. Stories do not exist inside a vacuum. Stories build upon the perceptions we’ve consumed from other stories, from advertising, from our religious upbringings, from our anecdotal experiences, and on and on. When you add one more brick to that wall of damaging cliches, it makes it that much harder for us to try to knock it down. That one brick might be the difference between a tough but manageable obstacle and an insurmountable one.
Someone said the most profound thing on Twitter yesterday: “Y’know, there aren’t really lesbian “fandoms.” There’s *the lesbian fandom*, migrating from show to show like a herd crossing the desert.” And what’s more, there’s not even really a generational divide in lesbian fandom. The quality TV shows and movies that are available to us, and especially the ones that really resonate with us emotionally, have been so sparse that we’ve watched them all, no matter when they were made. We’ve watched them in pieces on YouTube, with fan-made transcriptions for non-English shows, and we’ve talked about them and written about them until they’ve become part of our collective queer consciousness. We’re reacting to the totality of the canon because it’s not a very big canon and the fullness of it informs the way other people think about us, and the way we think about ourselves.
You know what got me the most last week about gay TV? The overwhelming majority of queer women who were blaming themselves for believing that [whatever show] wasn’t going to let them down. Using these tropes to write about queer women doesn’t only make the world harder for us, systemically, and more painful for us, personally; it also causes us to hate ourselves for hoping in story. How fucked up is that?
I love this thing Graham Swift wrote: “Man — let me offer you a definition — is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall — or when he’s about to drown — he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.”
Stories make us human, and it’s not hard to tell good ones about women.
Watch how easy this is: There’s a rumor about Sally that she’s gay and she comes to Lena to talk about it, because even though it’s cool that the vice-principal is a lesbian, that doesn’t make it easy to come out as a teenager, and then the rumor gets back to Sally’s parents and they accuse Lena of recruiting Sally into lesbianism and Monty has to investigate. You’re on the side of the established queer woman from the start. Your sympathy is with Sally. Her parents are still controlling. And it’s highly watchable drama. No ducking and dodging at bisexual predator tropes, or leaning onto the lie that women in real life lie about sexual assault. It would cost the same amount of money to make and use the same actors and take up the same amount of screen time and fit in exactly the same place in the season-long narrative. IT’S NOT HARD.
My dad recently said to me that it must be exhausting to view the world like this and I was like, “You mean as a queer woman with my eyes open? Yeah, it is.” I just want to love TV and I want TV to love me back. So simple. It’s so simple. I don’t want to be outraged. I just want to be happy, and for the world to be safe for me and my queer sisters.
my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.
it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.
and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”
so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.
Younger than 40.
I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.
The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.
Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.
They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.
HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.
The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.
There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.
Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.
OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.
I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.
2011
A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall
I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:
And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemicby Randy Shiltsis a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.
Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaustcollects his writings on AIDS.
I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list:
Read or watchThe Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Streetor watchMilk. Dallas Buyers Clubhas its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played Onbut JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.
Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.
Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.
*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.
This is a long (but very informative) post and it reminded me that I hadn’t heard of the Quilt in years. I remember hearing about it fairly often as a kid.
14 years old: I’m young but I know what I want. This isn’t that hard, I’m all grown up already and have everything figured out. 17 years old: Well, this is a little harder than I thought. School is almost ending. What am I going to do with my life? 21 years old: What the fuck is going on? Where are my socks?
27 years old: My body is already collapsing and I’m broke and nothing makes sense but at least I care less about what people think
