What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

prokopetz:

Buddy, you wanna talk to me about ace inclusion, bear in mind that I’m old enough to remember when there were Very Serious Discussions being had about whether lesbians truly belong in the “gay community”. That’s my point of reference with respect to anti-inclusion rhetoric. So I know for a goddamn fact that your whole “the LGBT community is and always has been defined by the shared experience of homophobia” spiel is a lie, and I’m betting you do, too.

One of the ongoing consequences of the mainstream elision of queer history is that, once we finally find our own spaces and identities, there’s a much higher chance of our younger/newer communities rehashing old arguments without knowing that’s what they’re doing precisely because we have no knowledge of those earlier debates. It’s like each queer generation is recording their experiences in document that gets lost and burned and only rediscovered once their successors have already reinvented half of what it contained, so then they write their own updated version, only for it, too, to be lost and burned, and on and on and on again - 

But the thing is, that loss, that burning? It’s not an accident. It’s generations being forced to live in fear, in secret, dying of AIDS or killed by cops or bullied into suicide, with each new wave of queer kids having to hunt around for the survivors because queer adults reaching out to queer youth in any capacity is invariably cast as predatory and wrong by a heteronormative establishment, like trying to find Gay Hogwarts without the help of a fabulous, letter-bearing owl.

The point being, the loss of queer history doesn’t just cut us off from our origins and our identities. It helps keep us fighting and gatekeeping each other, because those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, and that’s just as true of the queer community as any other group.

(via oceanskysailor)

  1. asinglelilacbush reblogged this from ariasune
  2. allexiaah reblogged this from prokopetz
  3. thisisrachll reblogged this from aroace-people-are-lgtbq
  4. theoneandonlytittyqueen reblogged this from prokopetz
  5. thefirstpaleontologist reblogged this from divinegiftofarticulatespeech
  6. the-night-puncher reblogged this from onesmoothassendoplasmicreticulum
  7. onesmoothassendoplasmicreticulum reblogged this from helliskylux
  8. rigidly-controlled-dragon reblogged this from hopingforsunlight
  9. hopingforsunlight reblogged this from im-birdboy
  10. lebanon-hangover reblogged this from ko-is-an-insomniac
  11. ko-is-an-insomniac reblogged this from eruvadhril
  12. im-birdboy reblogged this from eruvadhril
  13. iisaeii reblogged this from eruvadhril
  14. eruvadhril reblogged this from prokopetz
  15. prokopetz posted this