Pride month is coming up fast
and with it comes our fun annual dose of
corporations trying to capitalize on pride while still supporting anti-lgbt causes,
the intensification of twitter discourse, the rampant spread of lgbt historical misinformation,
and me, fighting the urge to shave off half my hair again.
During pride month I always see a lot of people on my timeline who are very well-intentioned,
creating threads about LGBTQ historical figures with an almost…
reverent tone, like we’re speaking more about a deified character than a person.
Actually, I see this year round. The instinct to talk about people of the past this way is obviously not limited to the LGBTQ community.
I literally cannot count on two hands the amount of cishet men I’ve met who have talked about various presidents or war generals like they were their dad or something.
The core answer is, there is absolutely no way /not/ to view history as a story. And history will always feel so far removed from us
that even if we know everything about it, the good the bad and the ugly, we can’t help but read history as some kind of tale, and the players within it as characters. Even if we are personally witness to a historical event,
we can only go on to tell it from our own perspective, informed by others or not. One day in the future, many of us will tell a younger generation who never lived through the COVID-19 pandemic
about what it was like living through it, what people we loved and lost, the things we did to survive and cope. But to the young people we tell that to, they can only imagine our stories as just that. A story.
And that story will be dramatically influenced by the perspective of the person telling it, because when we tell stories, whether historical or our own, we have a bias we’re trying to convey.
For example, if you’ve watched the news recently in America, you might’ve noticed that Republicans have really latched onto the phrase “critical race theory”,
and how we shouldn’t be teaching it in schools. Now if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that that phrase is a load of crap
and is actually a code name for “literally just stating facts about the history of racism in the united states that have been historically obscured from the school curriculum.”
None of these things being taught about the racism and oppression against people of color in America are fake or made up, and are very much rooted not only in hard historical evidence, but in the lived experience of people alive today, old and young.
So why are people who don’t suffer from that legacy so upset about schools telling the truth? Because history is a story, and they really don’t like feeling like they’re associated with the villains of that story.
And if you view history like that, and history is a tool, then it’s very easy for you to view the suffering in that story as nothing but fiction, suffering that you can frame in a way that either makes you not look as bad,
or frame the story in a way that nearly omits the suffering altogether. You can make a war about slavery sound like it was about ‘states rights’ instead, which is exactly what the organization the Daughters of the Confedaracy did when the south lost the Civil War.
They made it their mission to retell the story of the war from a reframed perspective that makes the Confederacy look righteous and glorified, and completely ignores or rewrites any wrongdoing that occurred. The results of their labor are still taught today despite how ahistorical it is. [1] [2]
But a lot of the time, strategic framing of history isn’t done in a harmful way, but instead to bring attention to historically ignored or underrepresented stories or figures. God, please don’t play a drinking game with how many times I say the word history in this video. I can’t be held liable for your demise.
Knowing history better informs our present. It’s vital to understand the past in order to truly understand why we are the way we are now, why certain systems exist. It puts into perspective how far we’ve come.
In the LGBTQ community, people’s attitudes towards our history can vary wildly. Some people with sparse knowledge of LGBTQ history may sometimes view older and long dead queer people with limited compassion or understanding, or write them off as either
less enlightened as we are or too dumb to know their own identities. They frequently reassign historical figures’ self-proclaimed identities or downplay the seriousness of the oppression they faced just because we don’t face it the same way today. And oftentimes,
even some people who do have a basic knowledge of queer history will assume queer people of history were much less visible than they actually were. This is a complicated situation.
For one thing, higher education is woefully inaccessible and k-12 schools sure as hell aren’t teaching queer history in any significant way yet. And if you do decide to research on your own, good luck unless you have institutional access to read scholarly papers and publications, or have been taught how to use public library databases.
Even if you know how to do all that and for that matter, want to, who the hell has the time??? In this economy? It’s absolutely no one’s fault for being less educated in queer history, and it is not a reflection of anyone’s worth as a member of the community.
Which is why the teaching of our history has always fallen to community members teaching each other. In the past through in-person community, word of mouth storytelling, and even zines and LGBT magazines.
Today, it’s through tumblr posts, tiktoks, twitter threads, and youtubers like myself, speaking to you from far far away. The tough part is, though, that the internet makes it easier than ever to learn and spread historical misinformation through good intentions.
I mean, why do you think every pride month thousands of people on Twitter make tweets saying Marsha P Johnson threw the first brick at Stonewall when she said herself to historian Eric Marcus in 1987 that she wasn’t even there when the riot started.
While she did get there later and was a prominent participant in the uprising, the important thing here is that Marsha and most of the other participants that night remembered it as a collective uprising, not as something instigated by any one person.
But this fruitless search for the One Leading Hero of Stonewall is a perfect example of our desire to view people of history as characters. Who’s the hero, the protagonist?
Real life doesn’t have a main character, and Stonewall wasn’t the only LGBTQ uprising against the police from that era- or for that matter, even the first one! Side note, even though Marsha didn’t dramatically throw the first brick and “start pride”,
she DID make an incredible impact on the community through her on the ground work with Sylvia Rivera, founding the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or STAR, and opening the country’s first house to shelter homeless LGBT youth. And her legacy absolutely deserves to be honored by that.
But on a related note, that brings me to the most common thing that happens across the board: the literal idolification of LGBTQ historical figures. [3] [4] [7] [12] In the National Park Service’s 2016 anthology LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer History, Gerard Koskovich says,
Koskovich goes on to discuss the important work of the ONE institute and their goal in using the exploration of gay history in order to challenge common beliefs about just how ‘straight’ society has always been:
Because the LGBTQ community was denied the basic respect of a well-researched history and representation for so long, the desire to retroactively gain back that history is very powerful. Not only does it provide a sense of collective belonging and shared heritage to the community,
but it also expands the cishet world’s view of what they previously believed history really was. To people who only recently saw the rise of queer visibility, they may feel that some or even all types of queerness are something new, something morally objectionable on the basis of being a trend.
But when they come to understand the queer history that has always been here, it’s harder to really buy into that belief without knowingly lapsing your credibility and judgment. So it’s always been vital to re-evaluate all aspects of history from a queer lens and see what comes up. This is a good thing.
I’m literally one of the people trying to do this. But with this mission comes a lot of complications. As Lelia J. Rupp writes in the National Park Service study,
Teaching LGBTQ history oftentimes means having to spend a lot more time on confusing ground concepts that a lot of people find difficult to reconcile with their previously held beliefs about how the world works. It’s long, hard, dirty work and so a lot of LGBTQ organizations
reconcile this by trying to buy into watered-down, easier to digest takes on how LGBTQ people fit into history, which can tend to make the process of continued historical learning more difficult for people as they struggle to unlearn the things they thought they already correctly learned, and this leads to confusion and mishandling
when people encounter further queer history online, on social media. Above all, people have the strong desire to learn LGBTQ history and help others learn, too. With that desire, though, comes the same slippery slope we discussed earlier, where the desperation for a unified and beautiful history to make us feel like we all came from a powerful common ancestry,
can quickly lead to the tendency to turn real life LGBTQ people of history into the perfect characters for the story we want to tell. Look what happened to David Bowie. I can’t tell you how many people in the community adore and identify with him, and because of that, adamantly pretend he wasn’t very much accused of sleeping with a 15 year old girl and raping a 30 year old woman.
And if numerous reports are to be believed, these weren’t one-off incidents either. [8] [9] Ironically, a lot of these same people who idolize Bowie are also very vocal about supporting and believing victims, and are supporters of the MeToo movement. Don’t get me wrong, I see why some queer people identify with him and I love Labyrinth (though that has less to do with bowie and more to do with the cool puppets,,,,).
But...Where does the line begin and end? Why do white queer icons continually get passes for their bad behavior within the community, while LGBTQ people of color who commit the same infractions are ostracized with far less forgiveness?
And when does admiration for a person of history slide into deliberately ignoring their faults for fear that it will tarnish the end goal of uplifting the community? Do we not deserve heroes of our own after being denied them for so long? Well,
the truth is, we’ve always had our heroes. They came from within. They were people doing the work to make change and protecting their community family. Why do you think gays love the found family trope so much? However, just like real families, both by blood and found,
the people in those families mess up and it’s wrong to pretend they don’t. I’m not immune to this type of slip-up. When I made my JC Leyendecker video, I really thought I was making that video from a place of at least mostly-neutrality.
I included the faults of the people I spoke about because to pretend they didn’t have their issues would be a disservice to them. But I also thought that, because my video was focusing on the biographical story, I didn’t need to talk about any of Leyendecker’s art, good /or/ bad.
Because so many other people have. People could get that on any other video, I thought. That was a mistake I made fully believing I wasn’t making a mistake. By not talking about the paintings, I failed to include one of Leyendecker’s greatest faults. The Saturday Evening Post, which was easily one of Leyendecker’s most frequent clients,
was a very much conservative publication, and they had an absolutely appalling rule that said that their cover illustrations could only include black people if they were portrayed doing acts of service. The Post covers usually represented either a holiday or something relating to article contents or a short story inside.
Even long after Leyendecker was dropped from the Post, their position on race in their covers was disturbing. One of the editors, Ben Higgs, once told Norman Rockwell, “Don’t put [African Americans] in your paintings. It makes people uneasy.”
A few scholars have said that Leyendecker disliked this rule and “got back at it” by making the black people in his illustrations the focal point of the composition, but this argument falls flat in the end because the paintings were still rife with offensive stereotypes and racist archetypes.
It doesn’t matter, in these cases, how ‘beautiful’ his technique was, or what his intentions were. He made these paintings because it’s what white America wanted to see. And his work suffers for it. It’s sad and disappointing.
I’ve included a pinned note in the comments under that video to help inform people on this issue, but I should have just included it in the first place. Some people have argued that the only way to accurately portray historical figures is through neutral tone and presentation. But the issue is, I don’t think true neutrality exists.
When attempting to speak neutrally on instances of injustice you risk sounding like you’re downplaying the issue which can do more harm than good. You play into the hands of the oppressor.
And no matter how neutral you think you’re being, you may be unknowingly stating your true bias through what parts of the story you omit. This is why I feel the best option is, honestly the simplest one: Treat historical figures with nuance. You can’t go into learning their story if you are going into it searching for a hero. You will inevitably be disappointed and come out of it feeling hurt.
If you’re going to tell their story, tell the good parts along with the bad. Understand why the bad things happened, but more importantly, observe where they went afterwards. Did they change, make amends? What is their legacy? It’s unfair to ask perfection of people of history, because perfection is impossible.
All of us fuck up over the course of our lives as we struggle towards becoming better people who do less harm. Some of us ignore that struggle entirely, but that’s kind of the key difference, isn’t it? On the flip side, to omit the wrongdoings of people of history just because their overall legacy is one of good… that’s doing them a disservice, too.
Because when you spread that squeaky clean story, one of idolized beauty and a fascinating life lived, what happens when someone else internalizes that person as their idol, and then goes to look that person up themselves, only to be crushed by some disappointing detail you left out?
My first personal experience with this was with Virginia Woolf. I fell in love with the story Orlando at a young age. I could identify with it, and so many people online I followed hailed her as a Sapphic hero who fearlessly loved another woman. Imagine how I felt when I found out about her extreme antisemitism.
As a Jewish person, it was incredibly painful. But my pain was directed less at Virginia Woolf, and more at all the people and writers who had made me believe she was worthy of /that/ much reverence,
without even once bringing the antisemitism up. I could understand that a historical figure would harbor such awful beliefs and openly write about them. That, I’m used to.
Also, not a gay, but don’t even get me started on the girlbossification of Queen Victoria… I’ve seen y’alls comments on my Crimson Peak video. I know the education on her wrongdoings is CLEARLY lacking.
All this is not to say you can’t have your LGBTQ heroes, or that you can’t admire historical figures or feel inspired by them if they’ve done bad things. I mean, shit, if we thought that way, there’d be nobody left. But I guess so long as we continue digging up the souls of the dead to make them our common ancestors to look up to,
we should probably follow the same rules that are advised with regards to celebrities and parasocial relationships. Never assume someone is perfect or can do no wrong, don’t try to erase or deny their fuckups, and since they are unfortunately human, viewing them as a deity will never do you any good.
Godly perfection is a standard many of us strive towards but none will ever reach. So asking it of imperfect people alive and long gone, in pursuit of making them a character in the story you want to tell, will nearly always let you down.
We can tell the story of our collective history without perfection anyways. After all, imperfect as it is, it’s the story that got us where we are today, and we can sure as hell learn a lot from the mistakes our ancestors made.
Thanks for watching. I hope this video doesn’t like, scare anyone off from learning or trying to talk about LGBTQ history. Rather, my goal is to encourage people to take a more conscious and nuanced approach to how we both engage with and educate history.
Because the more of us take an interest in and talk about this history, the better off we’ll all be. So I’ll keep saying it until we’re finally out of plague hell, but wash thy hands, wear thy mask, and go get vaccinated!!