tumblr xpost bc I'm so done with this shit

[brancher]

"The notion that straight people who approach sex unconventionally are comparable to gay people is predicated on a conception of gayness as sexual deviance. It’s homophobic."


this is it

this is why all those baby gays think “queer” is a slur

it’s because they think sexual deviance is WRONG

and that’s it’s important to stipulate that the way gay people have sex is NORMAL and NOT DEVIANT

and “queer” is a term predicated on deviance

It literally means “at a 90 degree rotation to the norm”

And therefore MUST BE BAD AND A SLUR

JFC

babies, people marched and died for your right to be deviant. The entire idea of the queer movement was to uncouple the idea that NORMATIVE=GOOD and DEVIANT=BAD. Gay sex is, in fact, not the norm, and it will never be the norm and that is FINE. Straight people who approach sex unconventionally are not the norm either and that is ALSO FINE. The entire point is that NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO PERSECUTE YOU because of your non-normative desires or practices. You do not have to redefine your sex practices as “not sexual deviance” to have the right to practice them in peace.

That’s why “queer” is such a necessary term, because “queer” will move as society develops and the Overton window of normative sexual practices changes. Gay sex may end up to be more normative than some kinds of straight sex, and the queer movement and queer theory will still be there for the people having queer straight sex, to defend them against persecution on the basis of deviance.

Honest to god I'm so worried about the next generation sometimes

Comments

[numb3r_5ev3n]

Honest to god I'm so worried about the next generation sometimes

Same here. I saw a similar rant on Tumblr two years or so ago when I was still on it, with the declaration "DAMMIT KIDS, THE WORLD EXISTED BEFORE YOU WERE BORN." People fought too hard for the right to reclaim "Queer" for a bunch of people who came up since then to decide we don't get to use it.

EDIT: And I've gotten into DISCOURSE on Twitter over it, and when I told someone who asked how old I was that I was Gen X, and they sneered "so what, you're in your 40s now? What gives you the right to talk like an elder of the community?" Before someone else chimed in and reminded them about how a lot happened in the 90s and early 2000s and about how not long ago AIDS was killing people left and right, and how much we've all been through, and maybe they'd better sit down for a while.

[brancher]

jesus, we ARE the elders because the generation just a few years older than us freaking DIED

[brancher]

also, this reminds me of how some Black people are uncomfortable with comparisons between the civil rights movement and the queer rights movement.

the comments on that tumblr post are exactly the same: we don't want to share the freedom train with you people.

[eyebrowofdoom]

<3

[jadelennox]

Baby queers are exhausting, but it's also true in this case that old people are to blame, and by old people I mean HRC in particular, with their biphobia, apathetic-to-lesbians, anti-immigrant, anti-trans stance in favor of straight white gay men joining the power structures.

I do understand that some of the forces that underlay that in the first place were about getting same-sex marriage: that whole fight and victory (which was amazing and wonderful) was not about opening up the notion of what is normal and acceptable to queerness, but was about dequeering mainstream gayness. Think about all the articles after Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage about how wonderful it was for capitalism, with all the rich white gay couples having huge fancy weddings in Provincetown.

We came up during the heyday of ACT UP; baby tumblr queers came of age during the heyday of the marriage equality fight and the HRC. So makes sense that they think the fight is about being allowed to be seen as normal, and we see the fight as being about fuck normal,

[brancher]

I read HRC as Hillary Rodham Clinton and was like "can we really blame her PERSONALLY ... yes, I guess we can"

But srsly yeah, I agree on where some of this came from. There's a fascinating book published in 1989 called After The Ball where a couple of gay men laid out, step by step, a massive advertising campaign to normalize gay people in the eyes of mainstream America -- as a survival strategy. Basically everything they wrote was implemented in the following decades, culminating in marriage equality. One thing I didn't add to this rant but thought about adding was "To save our lives we fought hard to convince straights that we were normal and we accidentally convinced ourselves."

(also hihihi!)