BUTTFUCKING DOESN’T MAKE YOU QUEER. IT MAKES YOU A FAGGOT.

an essay by Elijah Benson

What do the letters that make up “LGBTQ” mean? Lesbian - a woman who sleeps with other women. Gay - a man who sleeps with other men. Bisexual - anyone who sleeps with anyone. Transgender - a person who identifies outside of their assigned birth gender. Queer - ??? A blanket term to include anyone who isn’t straight or cisgender? Something else entirely? 

Within our community it is not uncommon for our “LGBT” siblings to blindly adopt the identifier “queer” without doing much, if any, critical thinking or research about the historical implications of the term. It has been used into the ground - so much so that it has lost a lot of its meaning. While it has recently been appropriated, severely obfuscated, and neutralized by the neoliberal cause, “queer” was once a word that had great specificity and power. 

During WWII, gays, lesbians, and transsexuals had, out of logistical circumstances of the gendered nature of war, begun to form community. A generation of men and women were forced to separate, leaving them to their own sexual will to experiment, scratch an itch, or satisfy a serious, otherwise suppressed, desire. Once those who had an especially good time being away from their wives and husbands were forced to return to their ordinary lives and the very means in which their newfound sexual freedom no longer existed, this community began to 1. come out, 2. organize, and 3. get pissed off together. This came at a historical moment in which the state took very direct action against a myriad of antagonistic causes, creating the political necessity of intersectional thinking. The struggles for gay and Black rights, feminism, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism all came to a head as things in the US went back to business as usual following the war. Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals, having been targets of similar methods of legal problematizing and policing, found particular political comradery amongst one another, but with varying opinions on the best means in which to meet the best end, things were not as simple as we often seem to remember. While many LGBTs sought assimilation and state recognition, others had developed more radical mentalities about the way forward not as a “gay people” but simply as a “people.” The birth of the queer movement was in direct opposition of fags who sold out to the state and in whole-hearted support of anti-colonialism and consequently - anti-racism, anti-misogyny, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism. Queerness did not just demand sexual liberation, it demanded liberation period. Queerness was dangerous to the state. It defined the state as a blip, a mere historical convenience, a bump in the road before arriving at something better. Those who aligned themselves with this movement saw anti-LGBT attitudes and actions not as problems in which to be eradicated independent of any other cause, but as symptoms of a larger plot to control human activity.

Sexual deviance was (and is) viewed by the state as something to restrict. Once direct violent suppression of homosexual and transsexual behaviors turned unpopular, it became clear to the state (as it always does) that the people ultimately hold the power. They couldn’t beat the gay out of them and they couldn’t convince them not to be gay, so they simply assimilated as many gays as possible into “respectable” sexual deviants before developing a way to depoliticize and liberalize the revolutionary queer movement. While the state made it more comfortable to live as an LGBT person, their efforts represent a clear bastardization of our initial demands. We asked them to stop killing innocent brown people abroad gratuitously or otherwise - they made it safe for us to hold hands in the mall. We asked to lead dignified lives not stifled by conditions of poverty and financial hardship - they funded gay history departments at our universities. We asked for a cease of the surveillance and subsequent smothering of socialist and communist movements both domestically and internationally - they stopped posting our names in the newspaper. We asked for Black power - they put rainbows on cop cars. We asked for a complete upending of our binary understanding of gender - they made it legal for us to change an M to an F or X on our passports (and then made it illegal again.) We asked for infinite political choice for the rest of eternity - they gave us a month of the year to hear decontextualized retellings of “Marsha’s” brick. We demanded the world, they gave us crumbs and most of us accepted them.

Queerness is not your gay wedding where you wear complimentary-colored pastel suits and perform a lip-sync flashmob to H-O-T-T-O-G-O with your kinda racist high school friends who never left your hometown. It’s not your weird gender reveal threesome with your surrogate mother. It’s not the repetition of gendered or otherwise binary and strict roles in gay relationships via classifications like “top, “bottom,” “bear,” or “twink.” It’s not the ability to proudly serve in the US military as a disclosed homosexual or transsexual. It's not a means in which to develop an arbitrary Regina George “you can’t sit with us” attitude against any and every straight or cisgender person. It’s not marching down Christopher Street at the end of June in a multi-colored tie-dye

Capital One t-shirt with the other Equinox card-holding muscle gays from the office before heading to a circuit party to suck dick in front of strangers. It’s not an undying need to pass. It’s not reading one (1) book by Angela Davis and posting an infographic twice a month about whatever issue is next in the neverending cycle of trending political stories on social media. To be queer is not to be in opposition to the norm, but dedicated to the destruction of the very logic of norms. Queerness is liberatory. Queerness is limitless. Queerness is revolution.

Let’s remember our roots.