Recently in a conversation with an acquaintance, I asked that she not call me queer. By the time she had hit puberty I was in my forties with a good twenty five years dealing with what it was to be a Gay person by that time. She was at the beginning of her journey to self which was helped along by any progress made by those before she had gotten to that point. By the time she entered high school, I had lived with the word queer for 19 years at its post WWII pique of derogatory usage and during its loss of power over the years after Stonewall as we named ourselves while still holding the memories of those who suffered that word to the ultimate usage, the last words screamed by those beating someone to death.

For those of a certain age it is not an empty word. It is filled with history. We may have used the word among ourselves for our reasons or threw it back in defiance, but we did not accept its application to us by others. 

To me its present use is capitulation.

Her response was the one I expected. 

I was inform that this meant that I was slowing progress and was complicit in interference because, being stuck in the past, and with all my activism being based on White, Gay, Male Privilege, my main motivation, and I assume that of others like me, was to insure that progress would only be allowed up to the point it begins to threaten the Patriarchy so that no matter what I did it was never enough as I would always pull back at that point. It was an attempt at control.

No, it is a heavy word with a lot of baggage and I had fought it my whole adult life to eliminate one more thing that kept us down and hurt us both mentally and physically and I was not going to pretend that, by some Harry Potter Latinism, my history with that word never happened or might not have been all that bad.

Unlike the predictable releasing of the Kraken if, after 38 years of teaching middle and high school English to  both regular and Special Ed students, in a room full of people who have all told me their individually preferred pronouns, I sometimes slip on the side of official English pronoun usage, don’t assign a motivation to the error and demand I defend the motivation you assigned to me. Just point out my error so I can do better next time just as politely as I will remind you not to call me queer.

I fully understand that in a gender variant world it is essential to use the proper, not preferred, pronoun as that is affirming and life saving, but I find it patronizing when known Straight people, who wear their Heterosexuality like Liberace wore furs and jewels, enter an event with their list of pronouns on their “hello my name is” sticker which are the ones we learned in school and a little disconcerting if their patronizing is just accepted but my not wanting to be called a loaded term, which is my preference, makes me the enemy.

While this person faulted me for obstruction by not liking a word because it makes me “feel uncomfortable”, the brush-aside that would never be tolerated without an angry lecture in the event of a misused term or pronoun, another dismissed my not liking to hear us referred to as queer on broadcast media the way it was in the days of three networks and a local education station with the admonishment to just grow up because I was butt-hurt by this, a choice of words that made me question if he knew the origin of the phrase making the choice problematic, or using it facetiously but with the humor lost in an emotionless, social media comment reply.

The latter has delivered lectures at the occasional pronoun slip.

I found the assigning to me the motivation of protecting the Patriarchy as the main reason for my activism a little insulting as we modified goals and approaches as times changed and knowledge increased when the fight for rights became serious. 

In advocating for all the stripes on the Rainbow Flag, having gone through the progression of letters with the final addition of the T, we were aware that the understanding of gender variance was growing. In Oklahoma City, rather than deal only with GLBT students we began advocacy by using the term “Sexual Minority Youth” to be proactively inclusive and not have to keep adjusting a simple policy in a very complicated recurring process. Sexual orientation only came into use when discussing the policy because the rest of the committee asked if we could use the term they were familiar with to avoid unnecessary stalls that depended on needing this new term explained each time a new, yet important, person heard it. The school district had just entered a rapid-fire succession of real superintendents and seat warmers and there had been enough stalling by those who needed to be “brought up to speed” before we could progress. So, there was wisdom in this as this was an often attempted tactic.

In the buckle of the Bible Belt, before many other more “progressive” cities had done it, apparently those of us protecting the Patriarchy lost our way, and got Trans students included in school district policies. The red state legislature removed protections for all Trans students state-wide after twelve years, and apparently as nothing has been done to get them back, our work for the Patriarchy  has been judged to be unacceptable.

Defending past Gay Rights advocacy by explaining that in the distant past people did not have the knowledge we have today and their behavior should not be held to information people back then did not have in response to the charge that the Rights Movement was controlled from the beginning by cisgender, Gay, White males of privilege who made sure they stayed king of the hill, I was offered the rebuttal that the proof of this was the conscious erasure of non Gay white males and Transgender people of color. 

I have to assume that most, if not all, people who are not Heterosexual had to go through a process that was based on our realization that we are not quite the same as our peers and this becomes very obvious around the time we hit puberty. You adjusted with new knowledge, did your best to deal with things and find answers. Not being Heterosexual there was much about our own persons we had to learn on our own. There was no intuitive moment when all became clear. Even if we learned something about ourselves it did not mean we also learned of some academic study in a distant place that filled in all the blanks.

Psychologists began studying gender development in young children in the post war era of the 1950s since “Homosexuality” was slowly becoming more visible especially as the men and women needed for the war effort had migrated to cities and found people like themselves when they had thought they were alone and, being different, probably sick. Homosexuality may have existed, but until the war migration it wasn’t clear how prevalent it was, unless you were an academic and had the time and opportunity to read the latest research. There had been a Great Depression followed by a World War and people were realistically figuring out what the world was supposed to be like and where they fit in.

The UCLA Medical Center established the Gender Identity Research Project in 1958 to study Intersex and Transsexual people which resulted in the book “Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity.” Ten years later and the author introduced the term gender identity to the International Psychoanalytic Congress in 1963, Six years before Stonewall. Not every non-Heterosexual was there or even heard about this.

The next big step came three years after Stonewall when, in 1972, psychologist John Money of the Gender Identity Clinic at the John’s Hopkins Medical School suggested in his book, “Man and Woman, Boy and Girl”, that gender identity is relatively fluid until a certain age. His book was widely used in colleges, but many of his ideas have since been questioned.

None of this was in the popular consciousness as this was all research and academic, with obvious differences of opinion. The person on the street had life to worry about.

But, by today’s understanding of the past, while academics were studying, reporting, and rebutting, every person who was not Heterosexual had the knowledge others sought but stayed silent.

It was in the late 1980s, twenty years after Stonewall, that gender studies scholar Judith Butler claimed that the traditional view of gender is limiting as it viewed gender as strictly binary.

As Drag Queens, Transvestites, and Transgender people began to separate themselves from each other and into their proper gender identity and expression and not long after Non-Binary had entered the academic field, Gender Identity Disorder, was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The 1987 DSM added gender identity disorder of adolescence and adulthood, in 1994 changed that to gender identity disorder, in 2013 renamed it gender dysphoria revising its definition, and in 2019, the World Health Organization removed gender dysphoria from its mental illness section, moved it to the sexual health chapter, and changed the term “Gender Dysphoria” to “Gender Incongruence,” removing gender dysphoria as a mental illness.

All that time, person power, those studies, and the trees lost in all the paperwork such studies produce, when the last action taken was fifty years after Stonewall when they could have simply asked anyone who was there that June night in 1969 for the information.

We, apparently, all had it and just sat on it. It might have been better for all concerned if we had just come clean with all the knowledge we had. We would have prevented the struggles of those thirty years.

In another “discussion” I had explained some of the above, mentioning that in my activism and that of others with whom I had worked in various communities, we went after what was best for everyone. In spite of the new charges that we cisgender, Gay, White males were exclusive, like a union representative actually using a member’s grievance not only to protect that member but all members by defending and solidifying the contract, we went after the rights so they were available to everyone.

We kept adding letter, we did not erase any

My own experience attests to that.

As a school teacher I taught everyone in my class. I was even nationally certified to teach Special Education. I tried various approaches hoping that one would be the best for my variously abled students, but I never decided that something was impossible for any of them to learn. In California, my middle school “learning disabled” students mastered pre-algebra ahead of their grade level peers because it was presented as a game not an academic subject.

However, instead of the assumed response to past attempts since Stonewall to gain equality for everyone, I was informed that my privilege kept me from seeing  that not everybody felt helped and when they hear people like me say we “helped everyone”, it makes some people feel like they are “no one” because they do not feel included in the “everyone”.

With that advice I should have spent my career sitting at my desk reading a newspaper because everyone could easily and successfully see what I was doing, therefore,  that, as opposed to teaching my students knowing some may not learn everything, would leave no one out.

Will and Grace was first broadcast in May 1999, thirty years after Stonewall. A thesis paper on how that program celebrated Gay White Privilege and promoted it was given to me as proof that all the work done after Stonewall was to arrive at that show being what Gay life should be, so that left minorities out and only left room for high paid professionals with a flaming Queen as a Bestie, like it was for all White Gays.The first fifty years of my life, at least half of which was spent dealing with the straight world before, during, and after Stonewall and any trauma all came down to Will and Grace being the summation of my life. 

I was also given an article about how Millennials have ruined the Rights movement by twisting it to fit their wants and needs as further proof that the older Gays, especially the Boomer ones, had messed it all up. So, I checked.

With Millennials not coming on the scene until 1981, they would have wielded very little influence until the late 1990s which, although I appreciate the compliment that even being in my late forties then I was a defacto Millennial, I had already spent a good number of years fighting the fight before the Millennials came of age, but, since I was an adult in the 1990s, I was a kid again.

“Gay men and lesbians over 55 have disappeared at a time they should be assuming the role of tribal elders, providing community stability, tending to our spiritual well-being, and transmitting lived learning and tribal history to our young.”

We have not disappeared. 

History, which, apparently, only began in the mid-nineties, is clung to for comfort, and the facts of an event are changed to more closely produce that comfort even when it means we erase our own and replace them with NFT Trump cards.

Old people have stories to tell and are very willing to tell them. We can offer advice as some things done in the past might have some value still. We might have worked with and still know people who could benefit the younger generations. But, it is the constant misinformed corrections, the rewriting and having to defend facts against it, and, while we ask for a little respect and understanding that even though it might be different we all went through trauma and are dealing with it as for some it lingers just below the surface, and don’t need to be accused of actions against the Community because people ignore real history for cheap feather boas sold out of a rickety shopping cart by a person you can tell is living the dream doing this at a Pride Parade.

And we certainly do not need to be told that something is a Queer event or is a Queer space and as we are old cisgender Gay White men and women that if we are allowed in we must remember being Gay makes us guests in the community our past built for those finding excuses to bar the door.

AIDS hit one generation particularly hard. Boomers learned Gay history from the generation before, the first generation of Gay men and women who realized they had never been alone and learned about what society had denied them, but AIDS weakened that generational link. There were fewer Boomers to pass on the history and many feared this would affect the future Community identity. Those who came after would have fewer connections to the past and the people of the past, so the burden of making the connection fell on the survivors.

But we are pushed away because reality does not match desire and the real heroes are being replaced with creations in stories that have been altered for audience comfort and not audience education.

Like magic, the present just happened. It is the normal, stress fee progression,

If people really want to know real history they will need to listen, not argue. The elders are not discussing possibilities, they are recounting events.

October is Gay History Month (my choice to use the historical name. Gay is my queer).

Take the time to read actually historical books. I favor John Boswel.

Go back beyond 1990 and read what people actually did and said. Not what you heard from a friend. And take the time to fact check what you have heard of by reading beyond the texts from friends.

And,  in the name of all the activists who have gone before, learn the history, don’t argue with it, and listen to those who have histories to tell without feeling every conversation is a debate.

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