Queer students
A recent video of a young teacher…shows her awkwardly speaking into a camera: “There is a way to be sneaky about supporting, say, queer students in your classroom, and I want to show you it.”
The camera pans to a homemade-looking pink triangle on her dry-erase board. The teacher continues, “The pink triangle was used in concentration camps to identify gay women and also people who were asexual and now has been co-opted by the queer community to be a symbol of a safe space. Dropping a pink triangle somewhere in your room makes a huge difference, because kids look for that.”
No it wasn’t. The pink triangle was the equivalent of the yellow star, and it was for gay men.
The Nazis didn’t, in fact, systematically persecute lesbians. Nor did they target “asexuals,” who didn’t claim their status as a distinct sexual identity until well after World War II. Homosexual men were persecuted, and the pink triangle was used to designate them as such within the camps. Before the symbol was apparently co-opted by the generalized “queer community,” it was used by AIDS activists at the height of the crisis to symbolize the US government’s perceived silence and indifference, which they believed was tantamount to a state-imposed “death sentence” against patients.
The video’s one true statement—that some ambiguous “queer community” has co-opted the pink triangle—reinforces the general trend of writing gay people, usually men, out of their own history and expanding it to include all “queer people.” The modern use of the term queer itself represents this flattening phenomenon well. It is a “reclaimed slur,” used increasingly by people who would have never had it hurled at them as an insult, and who never claimed it back when it would have resulted in social condemnation, rather than celebration. The term’s vagueness allows it to be used by virtually anyone—including, apparently, the journalist Terrell Jermaine Starr, who recently “came out,” stating he was “attracted to a wide range of women, but not men at all.”
In other words like most men, so what’s “queer” about him? Not one thing.
The problem precedes the march of apparent heterosexuals into the “queer community.” Overstating or outright fabricating the place of minorities within the community happens often. And these “histories” are often written like mad libs: Insert the name of a group, add an adjective, a verb, and a place, until somebody’s son comes home from school asking about the asexuals at Treblinka.
In short, the Nazis were not queerphobic. Next?
I finished with the Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato Queens a long time ago. It was an alphabet soup I wanted no part of.
Each of those letters is its own entity, and they do not necessarily have anything to do with each other.
B is usually on the outs with G, (ask gay men who use online dating apps), and L comes with issues separate from G, because L has the extra layer of misogyny over the homophobia.
And I learned what seems centuries ago that I don’t know or care much T, but somehow T is all the rage now.
And who the fuck knows what I + means?
Q is especially annoying to me. In New England, “queer” has a very special, historical usage, and the fact that it has been ruined pisses me off. It’s pronounced “quee-ya” in these parts. “Woods queer,” “queer for,” “a bit queer.” It’s queer to use “queer” to mean “homosexual,” and just silly, goddamnit. I’m 62. Don’t fucking call me “queer.”
And what would Susan Glaspell’s wonderful play “Trifles” be without the word?
HALE. She was rockin’ back and forth. She had her apron in her hand and was kind of—pleating it.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. And how did she—look?
HALE. Well, she looked queer.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. How do you mean—queer?
HALE. Well, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next. And kind of done up.
It is so annoyingly trendy to refer to oneself as “queer”, even though there is nothing unusual about oneself at all. I’m starting to lose track of the young heterosexual married couples with 2.5 kids, a single-family home, a dog, and slightly bluish accents in their hair who insist that they are uniquely special and “queer”, not like those boring old Gen X’ers and Boomers, no sirree. If anything is “queer” in US culture, it’s anyone like me, over the age of 50 who has never been married, lives alone, and has no desire to be coupled-up or have kids, but I’ll give up looking at cat pictures online before I ever call myself “queer”.
Hell, even as recently as the 70s and 80s, in American Suburbia, ‘Queer’ was a slur, and one solely and exclusively meant for homosexual males. When I was growing up, a common playground game was “Smear the Queer”–one boy would take the ball, then flee around the playground, as the rest of the mob would chase after him. The goal for the ‘Queer’ was to hold onto the ball until the last second, then toss it away to some other boy, who would then become the new target. The goal for the rest of the mob was to catch him before the ball could be tossed, and then dogpile him into the dirt.
This game was passively tolerated by the teaching staff.
Queer was a slur into the 80s/early 90s, too, and sometimes intended to mean worse than gay. In the movie *Warlock*, the heroine says of her murdered gay friend, “He was gay, but he wasn’t queer.” The cops were delicately asking about her friend’s possible BDSM tendencies.
I believe that it just goes to show that a lot of straight people still don’t regard homosexuality as a natural orientation, but as a fetish. As such, given that homosexuality is no longer frowned upon legally, and even celebrated in same-sex weddings, they now want their own fetishes to be mainstreamed and celebrated. They aren’t same-sex attracted, so they have adopted the label ‘queer’ as a label which they used to apply to gays and lesbians, and which they seem to believe gives them the right to societal approval. It’s long been that way – pædophiles tried before, and are still trying, to persuade society that they are just like homosexuals, and since gays managed to have the age of consent lowered (ignoring that it was just to parity with heterosexuals), then they should be able to lobby successfully for a lowering of the age of consent, and then there wouldn’t be a problem with child rape once it wasn’t illegal.
Whether it’s pædophilia, BDSM, bestiality, or porn, they’re all despicable narcissistic abusers; constitutionally incapable of considering that other people’s points of view might not only be legitimate, but actually take reasonable precedence over theirs. And before anyone complains that their fetish is consensual and harmless, which would you rather do? Risk your fetish becoming illegal (which is unlikely, if it really is consensual and harmless), or be used as cover for horrific abuse? I feel the same way about fetish apologists who are against legal enforcement as I do about self-proclaimed ‘responsible’ gun owners who are against regulation; if you are afraid of legislation, you are admitting that you aren’t as clean as you are claiming.
In twentieth-century Britain until the early seventies ‘queer’ was both an insult AND a word used by homosexual people, male and female, to describe ourselves. It was used adjectivally and also as a substantive. There was an element of code in its use and a high degree of defiant self-mockery. It is well documented in Mary Renault’s novel The Charioteer (1953); the usage, though, goes back earlier. (Renault, a lesbian, was very familiar with the homosexual milieu about which she writes in that novel.)
Then in about 1972 Gay Liberation came to us from the USA and we were encouraged to drop queer, with its negative associations, and call ourselves gay. Of course, gay soon became another stigmatised term.
Queer was also used against boys who didn’t meet manly standards, straight or gay, and often preceded a punch to the face, gut, or balls. I’m not diminishing the effect on gay men, but I want to point out that a slur cannot be “reclaimed” by people it was never used against. I couldn’t try to reclaim the word “redskin” or “kike” or “spic,” because I am not a member of those groups it was used against as a slur.
Queer can’t be reclaimed by straight people who call themselves non-binary. It demeans the memory of the men who were beat, treated cruelly, shunned by their families, killed, not rented to, etc. They decide what they reclaim. No one else.
They want to feel that they are “part of the struggle,” however vicariously. They must get some frisson from placing their very own specialness within the context of a noble human rights movement, even if the only thing they struggle with is their day’s choice of hair colour. They want special status without effort, let alone sacrifice. Anything to make themselves less boring than everyone else. Ironic that a bunch of solipsistic narcissists have glommed onto a movement that depended on liberatory solidarity to help everyone, in order to bolster their brittle, entitled sense of individual uniqueness and superiority, demanding constant validation by way of tailor-made pronouns.