JulienMayfair · July 26, 2019, 11:13 a.m. · 1 reply
Had it not been for the AIDS epidemic and the devastation they never would’ve got in.
This is an interesting claim, but I'd like to see it more rigorously argued. My memory is that T was added to LGB in the early/mid 1990s as a top-down move by activists whose positions were informed by the fast-growing field of academic Queer Theory. At the time, Queer Theory seemed like a good thing to the extent that it was legitimizing homosexuality as a topic for academic study. It was only slowly that it competed with and displaced Gay & Lesbian Studies. Academic theorists tend to want to cast the broadest net possible such that they have more to write about (regardless of whether or not they really know what they're talking about), so it does make sense that they wanted to embrace all people who varied from the sex/gender norm in some way.
But that's digressing a bit. What I recall is that the argument came down from higher up that we should add T to LGB, even though at that point we had not the slightest clue of what we would be dealing with 25 years down the road. At that point, for most of us, there weren't any trans people involved anyway, so it seemed a minor concession. Maybe it was different for people living in New York City, but NYC isn't the whole LGB world. LGB politics was drastically more local back then than it is now in a world of three-network 6pm news, landline phones, and print media, before we'd even thought of having internet access or email addresses.
I guess the argument could be that since a lot of gay men active in Gay Liberation of the 1970s died in the 1980s and 1990s, their policy of keeping LGB activism separate from T activism and their reasons for doing that died with them. But that is, to an extent, historical second-guessing, which is always a dangerously speculative enterprise. Would they have been able to resist the radical chic and the shiny intellectual veneer of Queer Theory? We can't say since it's hard to imagine how the whole landscape of LGB life would have been different had there been no AIDS Crisis.
There was always a kind of not-so-subtle contempt for grassroots LGB community from the Queer Theorists, who often positioned themselves as understanding us better than we did ourselves.
lairacunda · July 26, 2019, 2:19 p.m.
This is a reply I posted in a different thread on a different sub to a different but similar topic. It is directed at lesbians but may have some relevance to GBs as well. Edited for clarity.
"My generation was too young to participate actively in the Second Wave but old enough to reap a lot of the benefits. I feel that we were the ones who fell asleep at the wheel and were lulled by the sing-song wording of equality and rights. But we certainly weren't the only ones who got lulled. The women who got sucked into AIDS-crisis-damage-control mode and abandoned the Liberation efforts for other reasons were mostly Second Wavers and those a little younger. Liberal feminism did its damage on my generation. By the time I went to college, a lot of the major non-profits had been or were being set up, sex was a path to empowerment and drugs and alcohol use were rampant in the LGB communities. Bashings were common but there was still a sense that we were moving forward. And for a while we were. But the progress had nothing to do with the overall status of women or lesbian rights. It was mostly a legal redefiinitioning of very punitive laws and of the outlawing of certain practices. It still sucked to be a young LGB kid in a very conservative place, as it still does. I don't know if it sucked more than now b/c the new conversion therapies [as opposed to the traditional ones] were just gaining momentum whereas now they are the norm, the religious kind in fundie-fuck country and the new kind in "progressive" places.
As far as who is "allowing this to happen" now, I can't really say. The younger L generation is actively participating in its own destruction. They just relabel themselves and join the lesbian bashing party along with all the other "queers". But it's not just teens and twenty-something SJWs. If what they are doing were even remotely progressive they would not have the legal and institutional backing they have, which is how you know this is all a social-engineering endeavor. During all this time, from the 70s through the early 20teens, we [lesbians] have for the most part had a women's community to fall back on. The big difference now is that our communities have been mostly destroyed and the few remnants that are left are actively fighting a constant onslaught of encroachment. That is why there is a dedicated number of lesbians who are actively working to rebuild our communities IN EARNEST. We know what will happen if there is no modeling for the next generation and how difficult it will be for younger dykes to come out of the closet. We also know how difficult it will be for us if there are no younger lesbians to pass the baton onto. I really feel that should be our number one endeavor right now, the creation of lesbian-only spaces and the enforcement of the boundaries that will keep those spaces for lesbians. No one is going to do it for us and as we well know or should by now, there is no segment of the alphabet soup that has any interest or desire to see us survive as a viable community. We're on our own now just like we have been for most of our herstory, and we owe it to ourselves and our younger (and older) sisters to fight like hell. Never forget that we have weathered much worse than this."
This is an interesting claim, but I'd like to see it more rigorously argued. My memory is that T was added to LGB in the early/mid 1990s as a top-down move by activists whose positions were informed by the fast-growing field of academic Queer Theory. At the time, Queer Theory seemed like a good thing to the extent that it was legitimizing homosexuality as a topic for academic study. It was only slowly that it competed with and displaced Gay & Lesbian Studies. Academic theorists tend to want to cast the broadest net possible such that they have more to write about (regardless of whether or not they really know what they're talking about), so it does make sense that they wanted to embrace all people who varied from the sex/gender norm in some way.
But that's digressing a bit. What I recall is that the argument came down from higher up that we should add T to LGB, even though at that point we had not the slightest clue of what we would be dealing with 25 years down the road. At that point, for most of us, there weren't any trans people involved anyway, so it seemed a minor concession. Maybe it was different for people living in New York City, but NYC isn't the whole LGB world. LGB politics was drastically more local back then than it is now in a world of three-network 6pm news, landline phones, and print media, before we'd even thought of having internet access or email addresses.
I guess the argument could be that since a lot of gay men active in Gay Liberation of the 1970s died in the 1980s and 1990s, their policy of keeping LGB activism separate from T activism and their reasons for doing that died with them. But that is, to an extent, historical second-guessing, which is always a dangerously speculative enterprise. Would they have been able to resist the radical chic and the shiny intellectual veneer of Queer Theory? We can't say since it's hard to imagine how the whole landscape of LGB life would have been different had there been no AIDS Crisis.
There was always a kind of not-so-subtle contempt for grassroots LGB community from the Queer Theorists, who often positioned themselves as understanding us better than we did ourselves.
This is a reply I posted in a different thread on a different sub to a different but similar topic. It is directed at lesbians but may have some relevance to GBs as well. Edited for clarity.
"My generation was too young to participate actively in the Second Wave but old enough to reap a lot of the benefits. I feel that we were the ones who fell asleep at the wheel and were lulled by the sing-song wording of equality and rights. But we certainly weren't the only ones who got lulled. The women who got sucked into AIDS-crisis-damage-control mode and abandoned the Liberation efforts for other reasons were mostly Second Wavers and those a little younger. Liberal feminism did its damage on my generation. By the time I went to college, a lot of the major non-profits had been or were being set up, sex was a path to empowerment and drugs and alcohol use were rampant in the LGB communities. Bashings were common but there was still a sense that we were moving forward. And for a while we were. But the progress had nothing to do with the overall status of women or lesbian rights. It was mostly a legal redefiinitioning of very punitive laws and of the outlawing of certain practices. It still sucked to be a young LGB kid in a very conservative place, as it still does. I don't know if it sucked more than now b/c the new conversion therapies [as opposed to the traditional ones] were just gaining momentum whereas now they are the norm, the religious kind in fundie-fuck country and the new kind in "progressive" places.
As far as who is "allowing this to happen" now, I can't really say. The younger L generation is actively participating in its own destruction. They just relabel themselves and join the lesbian bashing party along with all the other "queers". But it's not just teens and twenty-something SJWs. If what they are doing were even remotely progressive they would not have the legal and institutional backing they have, which is how you know this is all a social-engineering endeavor. During all this time, from the 70s through the early 20teens, we [lesbians] have for the most part had a women's community to fall back on. The big difference now is that our communities have been mostly destroyed and the few remnants that are left are actively fighting a constant onslaught of encroachment. That is why there is a dedicated number of lesbians who are actively working to rebuild our communities IN EARNEST. We know what will happen if there is no modeling for the next generation and how difficult it will be for younger dykes to come out of the closet. We also know how difficult it will be for us if there are no younger lesbians to pass the baton onto. I really feel that should be our number one endeavor right now, the creation of lesbian-only spaces and the enforcement of the boundaries that will keep those spaces for lesbians. No one is going to do it for us and as we well know or should by now, there is no segment of the alphabet soup that has any interest or desire to see us survive as a viable community. We're on our own now just like we have been for most of our herstory, and we owe it to ourselves and our younger (and older) sisters to fight like hell. Never forget that we have weathered much worse than this."