Queer history thread! Queer history is something I perseverate on big time and over on that thread some of y'all expressed interest in talking queer history/theory/psychology. Most of what I know and so will babble on is US-focused but anything from anywhere is 100% welcome and encouraged. So to start things off: I did a pretty major research paper on the impact of McCarthyism on queer rights, so hmu if you need 50s-60s era sources for queer america, I've got TONS to point you towards. But my favorite thing on Earth is that from WWII through McCarthyism the government had a ton of measures enacted to attempt to "weed out homosexuals" that basically formed the impetus for the modern queer community and civil rights movement to form. It's like greek-tragedy levels of ironic, with an added punch of "up yours, assholes" Anyway. That's an entire 15-page essay. Tidbit: The draft that took place during WWII was the first time the question "have you ever engaged in homosexual relations" was added to the incoming health questionnaire for military recruits/draftees. Which, according to Gay America, had an interesting side effect: It presented, way before gayness was literally anywhere in any form of mainstream media, an alternative to heterosexuality to a whole bunch of young adults from rural areas who had very little, if any, other exposure to the concept of queerness. And then, just having introduced this idea, they shipped all these people off to an extremely emotionally and physically intense experience (war) where they pretty much only had regular access to people of the same gender. So there were a whole lot of queers in the military (both women's and men's branches, to be clear), essentially, and that caused all sorts of amusing hijinks: the sex ed offered on bases was actually surprisingly inclusive bc the policy in the height of the war was more-or-less "turn a blind eye". There's a lot of interesting occurrences from this time, especially when post-war the military started to radically tighten restrictions (and put spies on women's softball teams, but that's another story). Anyway, after the war ended the ships brought soldiers back home to New York City (from the European theater) and San Francisco (Pacific theater). Being large, liberal(er) costal cities with a history of bohemianism in the case of NYC, they kind of already had gay communities to a degree. But post-war was when those communities were really solidified, because soldiers who didn't want to deal with going back to the middle of the country and pretending to be straight just sort of...stayed there. And that's how you get a) Brooklyn and b) The Castro.
@Coriander wait hold on, you can't just mention spies and then not explain. Why were they on softball teams?
It's always been very noticeable that in the US, nobody cares about gays in the military in wartime, in actual practice at least. Spies on softball teams was possibly because that had been identified as a hotbed of lesbianism.
Yep @Morven is exactly right! After the war ended, when they were really getting antsy about having queer folks in any position within the government (the stated rationale was that they posed a security risk bc they were blackmailable and of 'weak moral fiber' which is obviously just, we don't understand and we're uncomfortable not understanding) women's units within the military apparatus were suspected to be a hotbed of lesbianism (which was kind of accurate, tbh) and they had a whole lot of trouble convincing women within the unit to turn on each other. In fact, that pretty much only happened when they'd gathered sufficient evidence on someone to dishonorably discharge them through a court-martial they had no way whatsoever of winning, bc then they'd be given the option of naming their friends and getting an honorable discharge (which allows for VA benefits) or even just a dishonorable discharge that states some other reason as why. So anyway, to solve this problem they positioned women from initially from different units in the units and specifically on the women's softball teams with the goal of acting all chummy-chummy so they could confirm folks as lesbian. Which Lillian Faderman points out in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers was also something that solidified the queer community in a way: it became incredibly hard to get into, obvs, bc they were worried about the spies, but once there incredible networks of support and trust were formed with the organizational skills (ie, phone trees--when someone in administration heard that someone was coming under scrutiny they'd call their buddy on one base who would then call their friends until the news reached the unit in question and the woman could be protected and forewarned to the best of their ability) necessary to keep them all as safe as possible. These skills then transfer amazingly well into activism in the coming decades. So even the softball spies backfired, pretty much.
probably my fav queer history thing (that ive heard, i actually have zero confirmation that this is true, feel free to correct me) is when the navy was like "we need to WEED OUT THE GAYS, lets put in fake gays to seduce men and reveal them as gays so we can kick them out" this..........backfired because the few moles that they tried were ALL SUPER QUEER and so managed to get laid and then were like "nope, no gays here" and eventually the higher-ups got suspicious but they didnt really have any proof so they just stopped sending in moles even if it turns out that that isnt true i still think its such a wonderful thing
I mean that quite probably is true, but unfortunately the mole strategy (less with regard to the military, more with regard to police forces) was all kinds of horribly successful. Since homosexual sex was illegal under sodomy laws in some states until Lawrence v. Texas in 2001, and there were lots of other charges they could arrest folks on (mostly variations on lewd conduct) police officers would (mostly during the height of McCarthyism) pose as gay, literally proposition people and then arrest them when they said yes. Which, at the time, even if you weren't charged with anything arrest itself was often incredibly damaging: You may have heard of police escorting people from bar raids into paddy wagons past a line of reporters. And the police offices were all to happy to leak names and pics of people arrested in other circumstances. In an environment where you could never work anywhere in the public sector, even in positions that didn't require a security clearance (which, this is the cold war we're talking about so basically everything did anyway) and the private sector not infrequently ran totally unnecessary background checks could very drastically limit someone's economic options. If time traveling I would 100% definitely avoid the 50s, to be clear. This whole public paranoia and bizarrely oppressive legal climate lasted throughout the 60s as well and into the 70s in some places--remember that Stonewall wasn't until 1969, so if you were struggling under McCarthyism you'd be struggling for give or take the next 15 years.
More people know about it these days, but Polari, the cant slang commonly used by the underground gay subculture in England before about 1970 and also by people in gay-friendly or otherwise underground occupations & cultures, is a fascinating thing to learn about. And a ton of words and phrases that later entered the common lexicon came out of it.
On that subject (not, to my knowledge, Polari specifically but queer linguistics) there's a relatively new documentary called Do I Sound Gay? which I have not seen but have heard some really good things about. Also, 'crush' was originally a term specific to queer women used mostly at women's colleges in the 1900s/1910s: They had all sorts of fascinating terminology, a lot of which entered the wider lexicon via the flapper movement of the 20s, some of which survives to this day and much of which does not.
*Brazilian queer appears* Let me tell you all about travestis! And by extension a bit about being trans in Brazil! As I was telling Morven the other day, travestis are transfeminine people who often get misrepresented by foreigners as a "third gender" or something of the sort when reality is a lot more complex than that. To quote Wikipedia's article in English: Travesti is a reclaimed slur widely used by transfeminine people in Brazil, including trans women. Some people will say they're women and travestis, some fluctuate and some may even say "I'm not a woman, I'm a travesti". In a way, travesti is an identity group that resists against the medicaization of discourse regarding trans people and against the expectations that trans women pass as cis. They want to be recognized and respected as trans. It's also a term that validates trans women and transfeminine people who have medical access to transition denied to them due to not meeting the all too familiar traditional criteria of trans womanhood - being feminine in appearance and behavior, being straight and ladylike (with all the racist and classist undertones the word carries). Brazil has a brutal culture of hypermasculinity, yet paradoxically has a very strong, united queer community that's been achieving a ton of rights. We legalized gay civil unions nationwide before the U.S. did, and we have public health trans programs that allow one to transition for free (although they're still gatekept by medical teams, and Brazil still has a policy where legally changing one's name or gender requires GCS - though there's already precedent of name change without GCS). Travestis have the lowest life expectancy of any urban population, and Brazil has the highest rate of murders of transfeminine people in the world. Travestis are a marginalized group, often poor and brown, frequently working in the sex or porn industries. Because of that, there's also many trans women in Brazil (esp. those coming from a middle or upper class environment) who seek to distance themselves from the label of travesti - "I'm a woman, I'm not a travesti". The term began being reclaimed as an identity in the 70s, before mainstream gay activism was a thing in Brazil, and long before the concept of "trans women" or "trans man" became widely known even among queer people. And even when the concept of "transgender" became more well-known, it came tied in with respectability politics and severe requirements related to strictly obeying binary gender roles. To quote my father, who's an anesthesiologist and often does GCS - "Some patients are very sweet and delicate and ladylike even before medical transition, but some are obviously mannish and campy, they're not women, they're just travestis". So IDing as travesti became a way of resisting gender colonization - a way these people had of saying that even though they were being denied the status of "trans women" that they were supposed to aspire to (and that many of them did aspire to) they could at least be travestis and thus not men. Travestis are widely responsible for the trans rights we have in Brazil. So much so, in fact, that in Brazil it's widely accepted that the "T" in "LGBT stands for transexuais* e travestis. And in fact, largely due to their massive presence and contributions to LGBT activism, "being transgender" in Brazil is often conflated with "being a trans woman". So very much so that when I started questioning my gender identity, I found pretty much zero resources on the internet dealing with transmasculinization, and several that assumed "trans" meant "transfeminine" (my favorite: "Transexuals and travestis can now change their gender to female on their documents"). #AFABprivilege. Partly because of the widespread presence of travestis in the movement here, certain complaints that U.S. Tumblr makes about pride parades and/or about the role of drag queens in the movement sound particularly strange to me. Pride here is still widely about political struggle, and it's overwhelmingly run by AMAB femme people including trans women, travestis and drag queens (and, of course, there's a lot of overlap between those categories). A very notable example this year in São Paulo was travesti Viviany Beleboni, who strikingly portrayed herself as Christ on the cross being crucified by homophobia. Spoiler: HERE PICTURES tw: fake blood, fake gore In her words: “I used the markings of Jesus, who was humiliated, beaten and killed. Exactly what has been happening to many people in the LGBT community." Keep in mind I am neither a travesti nor an expert in their history, I just think they're awesome people and am very mindful of their role in giving me the few trans rights I can take for granted nowadays. I can point out two prominent Brazilian travesti activists on facebook: Maria Clara Araújo and Sofia aka Travesti Reflexiva * younger trans activists tend to prefer "transgênero" rather than "transexual" but the former is still more commonly used even within the trans community - a bit like the "transgender" vs. "transgendered" debate, except a lot less screechy and tumblr-y
