Sometimes asking people to tag certain things on their own blogs is uh… not… considerate. Sometimes it’s best to just unfollow. Asking someone with, hypothetically, a visible disability to tag their selfies with “body horror” or “injury” or something? Don’t do that. Just unfollow.
Same with asking a person who identifies as queer to tag “q slur” or w/e. If you think of my identity as a slur, you probably won’t have a good time on my blog and I won’t have a good time interacting with you.
“Boo hoo I’m so sad that this slur didn’t suddenly stop being a slur after I started identifying with it”
I’ve got some big news for you about “gay” and “lesbian”, then.
You’re a 17-year-old, so I’m going to cut you some slack and assume you’ve been taught none of the history of our community outside of what you’ve learned on the Internet, primarily through this website. We’ve been reclaiming slurs as identity words for a long, long time, but don’t take my word for it. Please read at least one of these books about our history, which you can find at many local libraries or, hell, even as a pdf online:
–Queer, There, and Everywhere by Sara Prager (a relatively new text in simple, non-academic language, which serves as a primer on LGBTQ+ history, especially for young adults. Don’t let the conversational tone of the profiles fool you: each mini-biography has been heavily researched, and the bibliography at the back is a good jumping-off point for further academic reading)
–Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th-Century America by Lillian Faderman (this is a tougher text to get through because it was written for academia, but if you can check it out from a local library like I did, you may be able to renew it a couple of times. I’ve included 2 of Faderman’s works on this list, but she’s written many other important books as well.)
–Queers in History by Keith Stern (this is an encyclopedia, so you’re not meant to read all of it, but you can look up more in-depth individual profiles of LGBTQ+ individuals in history in it)
–Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past edited by Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (this is a collection of essays written by prominent gay historians of the 1980s, and so sometimes may include terms for our community–used as identity words reclaimed by individuals and groups–that may make us feel uncomfortable, but it’s important to read anyway)
–Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women by Leila Rupp (for a history of wlw beyond the United States)
–The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle by Lillian Faderman (a history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer political efforts in the United States, called “gay” because that’s how straight people lumped us all together for many years, as Faderman explains in this interview)
–Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman by Leslie Feinberg (Feinberg is a Very Damn Important queer historian, so read as many of hir works as you can get your hands on)
–Queer Brown Voices, edited by Uriel Quesada, Letitia Gomez, and Salvador Vidal Ortiz (about Latinx queer history and issues)
–Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco To 1965 by Nan Alamilla Boyd
–Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution by Susan Stryker
–Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein (less a history and more a memoir/musing on gender, but still important reading)
–Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America by Miriam Frank (a history of LGBTQ+ involvement in US workers’ rights)
–Restoried Selves: Autobiographies of Queer Asian / Pacific American Activists edited by Kevin K. Kumashiro
–Queer: A Graphic History by Dr. Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele (a history of the word, the people, and the school of thought taught using pictures)
Educating yourself is never a bad idea. I’d encourage you to spend some time investigating one or more of these sources.
Published
vanhalenofficial 