I am a 73 year-old cisgender, Gay White male who taught English to Regular and Special Needs students on the Middle School and High School levels for 38 years, the last 25 years, 65% of my career, as an openly Gay teacher which caused some problems especially during my 18 years, 31% of my career, in the Bible Belt where Baptist pastors, politicians and other conservative, anti-Gay groups and individuals were not pleased with that and attempted to kill the advocacy for Gay students by eliminating the advocate which did not stop the Oklahoma City School District from adding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to their students policies on December 14, 2009 as a result of that advocacy which remained in place for 12 years until the recent craziness had the state of Oklahoma’s legislature vote to remove all protections for Trans students, protections they at least had in the capital city for a minute.
The reaction to this was extremely weak if even existent. After 12 years of every stripe on every Pride flag and its variants having been covered and made equal to all other students, with the act of the legislature, the community there does not seem bothered that a two tier system is created and apparently accepted by the community as some get to keep their rights while others have lost theirs and that seems just fine.
The cisgender members of the community have been enacting a version of Animal Farm. They have been recognized and accepted by the greater community, and it seems to be okay that one group among them was not. As a matter of fact, and this is worse, the kids that had that acceptance and recognition saw it erased and were sent back to the barnyard.
In Massachusetts, where I presently reside back in my home state after experiencing the country, the law establishing equality was passed back in 1989, so anyone born just before and since has had full equality, except the Trans people which created another embarrassment for those claiming to be “leaders of the community” and was rectified years later by vote of the people.
In 1992 the state passed its anti-bullying ordinance that required sensitivity training for all school staff, school district policies be put in place along with procedures for handling offenses, and that it be made clear this included Gay kids. Bullying has been outlawed and reduced over the last 30 years, so anyone born around that time had little chance to have to face the unbridled bullying of the past.
Marriage came in 2004, going on 20 years now.
This means anyone under 35 has had their rights since birth, anyone under 30 has been protected from bullying in school, and anyone under 20 can begin planning their wedding the same time their heterosexual peers begin planning theirs, usually the first time playing house takes on a more serious aspect.
Someone, many someones in the past worked to get those rights, they were not bestowed because of reasoned largess, and many in the past lost their homes, families, jobs, lives, and health in the process of getting those rights.
At the bar one recent night there was a nice mix of people from multiple generations. A news story came on the TV behind the bar about a state proposing to eliminate some rights Gay people now had. The reaction of the older men was two fold. First they lamented anyone losing their rights and, then, referencing the struggle to get those rights, expressed how they really hoped the younger generation that has had their rights are prepared for the battle to get them back. After some reminiscing about the old days and the conditions we lived under and the rights we had fought for and won accompanied by references to some long dead warriors, one of the younger people, who would get agreement from his peers for doing so, informed the elders at the bar that if, perhaps, the older generations had only fought harder, they might have gotten the rights the young have now sooner.
He had no idea who some of the people at the bar were, and a few were those who spent their youth fighting for the rights the young now enjoy in theirs.
In 1828, the city of New Bedford began the Lyceum where prominent people came to speak to whoever showed up about some important and often controversial topics like Abolition and war vs peace in certain political times. Lincoln, Dickens, and Melville spoke at the Lyceum. The New Bedford Whaling Museum is attempting to bring the Lyceum back, and chose as its first speaker George Johnson, the author of “All Boys Aren’t Blue”.
While some might concentrate on the obvious, this being a Non-binary Black man restarting the Lyceum during Pride Month and the huge boost for every stripe on the Pride Flag, I was struck by a coincidence that I informed the speaker of before their talk so the speaker would know the full historical impact of being there.
Frederick Douglass, another Black Man, had spoken at the Lyceum of his past and its influence, the wrongness of it, and the assumptions commonly held about the enslaved as a living, breathing, example of what a Black man could be given the opportunity.
Two Black men with something special about them stood before a crowd that had preconceived notions and dispelled them by word and presence. George Johnson was doing the same thing as Douglass had done, and the parallels hit me.
When I got home, I wrote a Facebook post about this and the next day a more detailed blog.
I naively waited for the responses of people to what I considered an important event and connection, but, as I stated before, after 38 years teaching Grammar, in my enthusiasm in writing the Facebook post, I had used standard pronouns, and the comments I got were basically lectures on how my refusal to use preferred pronouns was part of the problem while none mentioned the substance of the post and the significance of that Lyceum presentation.
A Black, young, Non-binary person, the author of the second most banned book in America today stood before a crowd of people with varying ideas and perceptions, dispelling them for himself and all like him in a public forum just as Douglass had done for his people, but what was important was to lecture me because I slipped up and used the standard male pronouns. I referred to they as “He”, and that is all that mattered. The rest, the substance, was secondary, if of any importance at all, to pronoun use.
I was even given an explanation of the use of “They” in the history of the English language because, I assume, the lecturer was not aware of my past profession.
Sadly, although to me this is an acute example of the problem, as a political wonk and Gay Rights Activist for close to 50 years, I have attended meetings where discussions on goals, objectives, and procedures have devolved into discussions of pronouns and the explanation and defense of preferred pronouns while that which should be addressed had to be subsequently dealt with in emails and over coffee at a coffee shop where substance, not Grammar, could be discussed.
I endeavor to use the preferred pronouns of everyone who offers them, but there are so many that are handed out at events and meetings and so varietal as to be inconsistent even with the same person (“My pronouns are they, their, and Xim”) that after having taught the language for decades, I occasionally slip.
Sadly, these slips are seldom met with a gentle reminder, but are usually addressed through a Grammar lecture, angrily delivered, and an attempted guilt trip to have me feel guilty that I am one who has promoted the oppression of minorities based, apparently, mostly on me being an old White guy once accused by straight people in the Bible Belt of deceit by not presenting myself “Gay enough”.
On the other hand, going back and looking at history, especially local history, those who have decided to refer to all of us as “Queer” insisting that is the correct term and claiming they are taking the word back, have never had to face what that word was actually used for to accomplish.
“Queer” killed us conveniently through AIDS.
“Queer” was the last word a loved one heard before the final bashing blow killed him.
“Queer” is what kept many of us isolated in the school yard and later at work if we wanted to keep the job, or our house, or our own kids.
“Queer” was a weapon that killed, maimed, and cost people the lives they could have led having, instead, forcing them to settle for the crumbs society would allow through the largess that never gave us our rights.
“Queer” is not just a word, a term, a simple label.
Yet, in spite of what “Queer” has meant, I have frequently been referred to as “Queer” by someone insisting they are reclaiming a word never used against them with no regard for any circumstances where that weapon had been used in the past or consideration of what it actually meant to be called “Queer” because to them it is just a word easily said without any emotional baggage or historical memory or experience.
I have been chastised because my celebration of Pride is politically based and I should understand Pride is a party. Apparent being beaten by a group of Southern Baptists with their leather bound Bibles during a Pride Parade was a party game and Stonewall was just a Beer Bust gone awry.
I recently read a summation of my political, artistic, educational, and activist career being presented at a university. So many “trigger” words were replaced with so many neutral ones while terms relative to past actions, not being pleasant, were replaced with words more acceptable and comfortable for the students who would see this summation printed on huge posters placed in the Student Center lobby. The need to address their comfort had me represented as someone who, in my estimation, really hadn’t done anything that would call for a retrospective.
A little negotiations, and the help of older professors, had the softened edges removed, the triggers, which were merely terms used in the past, restored so that that the final product was me and not whoever the Milquetoast had been in the originals. Had this been posthumous, anyone not around at the time I was would be reading about someone created but not me.
For the sake of vocabulary, substance had been watered down for reader comfort, not reader education.
Yet, when I ask someone to call me “Gay” and not “Queer”, as that is the label I fought under to remove the concept and results of the word “Queer” and get Equal Rights, I receive lectures about the word that lack historical substance beyond the excuse phrase “We are reclaiming it because they used to put us down with that word”, with no real understanding of what that putting us down actually consisted in and am then accused of being one of those holding the community back by rejecting the word being applied to me.
Do not condemn me for a pronoun mistake while lecturing me on why I should be comfortable at my age being referred to with a term that has killed us and continues to do so in the less enlightened parts of the country where “Queer” still kills.
Because of my age and relation to that word, my not wanting to be called it is seen as holding the community back and rejecting it as well. I, apparently knowing whom the word killed and how it was used to oppress us, am just being a roadblock to progress, a progress that apparently came about because of the largess of the greater society rather than the blood, sweat, tears, and deaths of those in the past who actually worked for it.
If the youth require me to relearn pronouns and use their preferred ones or be considered the enemy, in exchange, they need to learn the real history, not what their friends re-post to them as if everything on the internet is true and their friends never post erroneous information.
And if I decline to be called “Queer” respect my historically based reasons, and if you do not know the real history upon which my rejection is based, learn it before lecturing me about the world from a tunnel.
Although it may be an attempt to show recognition and acceptance by using the “proper” vocabulary, being called “Queer” by the general population in conversations, ads, television programs, does bring back memories and reactions to many older Gays of the days when we were called that by these very same entities to allow for our second class and subhuman treatment.
In the grand scheme of things it was action against the word “Queer” that brought about Equality, not the acceptance of it, and you cannot reclaim a word that was hardly used against you while in the process insulting and dismissing those for whom the word had real meaning and controlled their lives.
Action brought change. Pronouns didn’t.
When it comes to Transgender people I have used the correct pronouns since my next door neighbor in Boston back in the early 80s, herself a Transgender woman, explained it all to the best of my understanding. Correct pronouns in this case are necessary, and the purposeful or insistent misuse inexcusable, because they are that person’s reality as they are the correct pronouns not preferred ones.
I just cannot muster the same care when preferred pronouns become the issue instead of substance and are worn like the latest fashion especially when a cis-gender, Straight white male goes for pronoun variants, window dressing as meaningful in reality as the Pride flags being flown at places that are only hoping to increase business with no actual concern for the people the flag represents.
If you are inclined to lecture people on the proper use of preferred pronouns while ignoring the substance of an issue, it is not the older people preferring not to be called “Queer” who are holding back progress, it is the obsession with random squirrels.
Oh, and after the uncalled for Grammar lecture, give equal time to the older person to explain reality, and do not dismiss with the phrase too often uttered by the young to the older Gays, “You just do not know how difficult it is.”
We know the difficulties of which the younger Gays have no idea we had to live with. We do not compare our difficulties with those of the young ones because we have been around long enough to see the flow of change, but want to continue to eliminate what remains without being forced back.
There is no way to fully understand the issues of the past if it was a time before you were born, but there should be no assumption that the older Gays have no idea what the present generation is dealing with. They know. They lived with and many worked against the conditions that brought the present about, and they live in the present. It is part of the continuum not a topic in an isolated room.
Rather than dismissing because things are not exactly the same, accept and deal with what exists.
One of the convenient excuses for denying Gays’ their rights was that as a “sexual preference” it was a choice and we had chosen incorrectly and, so, must change, when it actually is an orientation, an immutable characteristic of who and what we are.
Preference can change and be merely a matter of taste, and if we are the result of one choice, we can rectify the error by making the right choice or be punished for incalcatrance. Orientation cannot be changed.
So, aware of it or not, “Preferred” has its problem. The term “preferred pronouns” allows for a choice to honor or ignore.
Even that word has a history and it too is being used freely by the very people who in the past dismissed our humanity as a poor preference.
History should not be ignored by those in the present while demanding those who lived it do the same.
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