“Men run faster than women.” “Hence rape.” Or, Reddit in a nutshell.

@BlackBloc: Having lived with a medieval historian who I think may be fairly affiliated with the historical materialist view (her main work is on religious change in England in the late 1300s) since 1995, I have become more and more convinced over the years that this theory has a great deal of merit, and yes, it does not endear one to people operating under other assumptions.

We used to have some marathon and impassioned discussions back then (well, we still do, but I’m no longer arguing the positions I held then). (It doesn’t help that she got her doctorate at a Jesuit university, though it makes for some lovely theatre in committee meetings when the guys think they can outargue her).

Queer is a reclaimed slur and still is. It is still a word that carries massive pain against LGB, etc and trans people and is still used against us. It can’t be divorced from that pain and that history. And it certainly can’t be declared to be by those who are not a part of those histories and experiences.

The queer identity term was popularized by Queer Nation, and ACT UP, only a bare few decades ago by people working in AIDS movements. This is a term that rose in a situation of people watching swaths of their community dying and being murdered by government neglect, as well as government and public hate. This is the opening of Queer Nation’s manifesto:

How can I tell you. How can I convince you, brother; sister that your life is in danger. That everyday you wake up alive, relatively happy, and a functioning human being, you are committing a rebellious act. You as an alive and functioning queer are a revolutionary. There is nothing on this planet that validates, protects or encourages your existence. It is a miracle you are standing here reading these words. You should by all rights be dead.

That’s the feeling and climate from which this identity was built.

Every day one of us is taken by the enemy. Whether it is an AIDS death due to homophobic government inaction or a lesbian bashing in an all-night diner (in a supposedly lesbian neighborhood), we are being systematically picked off and we will continue to be wiped out unless we realize that if they take one of us they must take all of us.

I’m angry. I’m angry for being condemned to death by strangers saying, “You deserve to die” and “AIDS is the cure.” Fury erupts when a Republican woman wearing thousands of dollars of garments and jewelry minces by the police lines shaking her head, chuckling and wagging her finger at us like we are recalcitrant children making absurd demands and throwing a temper tantrum when they aren’t met. Angry while Joseph agonizes over $8,000 a year for AZT which might keep him alive a little longer and which does make him sicker than the disease he is diagnosed with. Angry as I listen to a man tell me that after changing his will five times he’s running out of people to leave things to. All of his best friends are dead. Angry when I stand in a sea of quilt panels, or go to a candlelight march or attend yet another memorial service.

Saying that this pain and this history is gone and saying it on World AIDS day of all fucking days, is a brutal erasure and denial of history and experience. This is a term with a massive ongoinghistory of pain, a term which is built out of that experience as an attempt at resistence.

I have had this word used against me, I have seen it used against my friends. I have seen people within the community say it sometimes hurts to hear it at times even from others within the community because their association of that word with brutality against them is so strong. The question of this word as a slur isn’t fucking academic, it is part of our oppression.

When you claim queer identity, you are claiming that oppression and that history. So this argument that “asexual people face stigma but don’t share queer oppression and history” means they can’t fucking claim queer identity. If you don’t share the history and oppression of an oppressed group Oppressed people don’t have a duty to let people outside of the oppression use their identity simply because those people face other sorts of stigma.

And, yes, joking about queer sexuality when trying to claim something asinine like a universal sexual privilege and to try and claim other’s experiences and histories and that saying queer people have privilege to express our sexualities is massive erasure and dismissal. Telling me I can safely engage in queer sexuality and genders when they involve such heavy risks is a denial of oppression and a denial of the hate done against us. To claim I have freedom or even in many cases fucking basic safety around my sexuality is absolutely and totally erasing my experiences and denying homphobic oppression (with more than a little overlapping cissexism). I consider myself lucky to be alive, lucky to have never been homeless, lucky that the attempts to physically assault me over this have been comparably few and minor, lucky each time the public naming and expression of my sexuality has not been met with slurs and discrimination, and, when it has, lucky when it doesn’t escalate to violence. People expect us to be grateful to be allowed to exist with our sexualities http://www.towleroad.com/2009/06/pa-senator-eichelberger-were-allowing-gay-couples-to-exist.html And that’s being called privilege. Queer people are directly oppressed around being sexual, a denial of that is a denial of histories, experiences, and pain.

Even if asexuality were another indisputably oppressed group (which I don’t think it is, not all stigma equal oppression), it would not give cis non-quuers a right over queer oppressions and histories. Cis non-queer black people don’t get to call themselves queer or claim queer identity and history on the grounds of being black, cis non-queer disabled people don’t get to call themselves queer identity or history on the basis of being disabled (excluding intersexed people if intersexuality is being discussed as a disability, because intersexuality has traditionally related to trans and LGB, etc. histories and experiences in its own unique way that more gives it more that solid grounds to do so in many, many cases), cis non-queer poor people don’t get to call themselves queer or claim queer identity and history on the grounds of being poor, etc. etc. It isn’t even a denial of an oppressed groups oppression to tell them they can’t co-opt the histories and experiences of another oppressed group. For example, when I as a non-black queer person hear black people call out white queer people for co-opting black experiences, I don’t see that as inherantly anti-queer, white queers don’t have rights to appropriate black experience either and royal fuckups around race when they do isn’t uncommon. Not being allowed to appropriate others oppressions does not just apply to people who are not oppressed in any way, it applies to everyone.

Trying to use feminism as a metaphor doesn’t work either. Feminism names an anti-oppression movement or an anti-oppression politics, it does not in and of itself name an oppressed identity. A close analogy would be if cis men felt as if the fact that they face some gendered stigma gives them the right to say they are women because of their feminism. Is queerness a political identity….well, in the sense that all identities are political, but not in the sense that what lets you use that term for yourself is having its politics. Identifying as queer is less analogous to identifying as a feminist or marxist and more analogous to identifying as a person with disability (though, of course, as always when discussing two different axis of oppression, there are important unique experiences and histories for both).

@shora

I’m sorry for trying to dictate to you what you can and cannot define as a queer person.

No you are not, because right after you say this you turn around and do it again. Until you understand what you did wrong and stop doing, I have not the slightest desire to hear your fake apologies.

Jesus Christ. Over the course of this thread I’ve had my identity erased and I have been called a liar and a thief. If it weren’t the fact that it isn’t a majority of the posters doing it I’d probably have decided not to come back here after that.

Please stay, Lauralot. I value your posts.

Argle bargle bargle, DSC is determined to find something that excludes asexual people, and if it’s not the Bible or oppression based on our sexuality then dammit maybe the fact that asexual people do not currently frequently die of AIDS will do it!

Okay, sure, if being queer means you must have been alive during the 70s and/or lost friends to AIDS then I would not count as queer. You totally win that argument. :p

Also, using dead people and their loved ones as a bludgeon seems like a very classy move. What’s next, a Holocaust reference?

@ Bagelsan, your comment to me beginning “Actually, now I’m more confused.” … now back on the previous page of comments — is more or less an inversion of what I thought I had been clear in saying, or nearly opposite. Perhaps as it was well into the a.m. hours when I typed it, so I will assume it is my fault that my communication was so poor. I think I did manage to get my point across to Comrade Svilova, who replied with greater cogency than I could manage.

Thanks Shora, VoiP, ithiliana, and everyone else who’s shown me support over the course of this thread.

Please stay, Lauralot. I value your posts.

I honestly don’t know if I can keep continuing to post here. Even checking to see what’s happened in my absence has made me feel ill.

I’m used to attacks and marginalization from the trolls here. It doesn’t bother me. I couldn’t care less what they think of me, or what they have to say. But the attacks in this thread haven’t come from trolls. Instead, people that I respected, people I’ve learned from and agreed with, have started spewing bile at me just because I disagree with them, or worse: agreed, but the wrong way.

I have tried to calmly, clearly explain my views over the course of this thread. I have tried to stay respectful despite the insults I’ve received. But none of it has made any difference, nothing I’ve said has even slightly lessened the hostility, and my words have been ignored by the people I’m trying to explain myself to.

For my efforts, I’ve been rewarded with being told that I’m stealing my identity from others. I’ve had my identity erased, I’ve been belittled, mocked, and insulted. The posts I tried to communicate with were either dismissed or misconstrued (apparently saying that this thread has shown me asexuals face a hell of a lot more discrimination than I realized means I’m saying asexuals have it worse than anyone else, and apparently believing that a post quoting me may be directed at me makes me illiterate). I’ve done everything in my power to avoid a fight and every time, it’s been thrown back in my face.

And I have no doubts it will continue after this post. I have no doubts I’ll be met with accusations of playing martyr and more “oh god, spare me.”

And again, this isn’t from trolls. This is from people that I considered my allies.

It’s by no means a majority of the posters here, but that doesn’t make it any less toxic. I’ve spent the day alternating between feeling sick at what I’ve read here, and beating myself up for caring what anonymous commenters online think, and that isn’t healthy or productive. In general, I’ve loved being a part of this site. I’ve loved getting to know the posters here, and I’ve loved the discussions. I’ve learned a lot. But the more this thread continues the more the bad apples are spoiling the bunch.

“Queer” is not just used as a reclaimed slur anymore, DSC, its definition and appropriate use have expanded from that in many circles.

“Queer” is not just used as a reclaimed slur anymore, DSC, its definition and appropriate use have expanded from that in many circles.

“Queer” is not JUST used as a reclaimed slur anymore, DSC, its definition and appropriate use have expanded from that in many circles.

I hope you stick around, Lauralot, I like your posts.

It’s still a slur. You can’t use a slur without it being a slur unless you are part of the group the slur is against and have reclaimed it.

If you’re not using it as a reclaimed slur, then then you are just using slurs outright.

@Lauralot: I’m so sorry you’re upset by this. 🙁 I think feeling upset is a perfectly natural and rational response to finding out that people you thought were cool are actually douchebags, even just if they’re internet people. I’d love for you to stay on manboobz, but obviously your well being comes first and it would probably make a lot of sense to take a break or at least avoid this thread.

@VoiP, not that you deserve my time, as you have blatantly misrepresented my claims and actions on other issues as an ad hominem attack

Oh, that’s precious.

Claims like that about sexuality and being sexual erase and deny the current and historical fact that there are in fact oppressions of people based around their sexual expressions and desires, incredibly serious ones.

If you seriously believe that Holly, who has blogged extensively about sexual issues and makes a great deal of good sense, thinks that the only problem with being sexual is that you have to wash your sheets a lot and therefore that she believes that LGBT people are not oppressed, you are monumentally dense. As I’m pretty sure you don’t have reading comprehension problems, I can only assume that you’re deliberately taking her words out of context in order to claim that she believes this:

Telling me I can safely engage in queer sexuality and genders when they involve such heavy risks is a denial of oppression and a denial of the hate done against us. To claim I have freedom or even in many cases fucking basic safety around my sexuality is absolutely and totally erasing my experiences and denying homphobic oppression (with more than a little overlapping cissexism).

She has not said this. She has not ever said this. NOBODY IN THIS THREAD HAS SAID THIS, and if you think that three people joking around in the middle of a very tense thread is the same as being,

dismissive towards people who are killed, beaten, raped, and discriminated against on the basis of their being sexual in certain ways.

then I have really no idea where you’re getting that.

Joking that being sexual carries no costs to people who face massive costs for having their sexualities and being sexual as LGB, etc. or trans people is erasing and dismissing that oppression. Saying that LGB, etc. (with overlapping issues for many trans people) people are not oppressed as sexual people is denying homophobia and homophobic oppression.

WHERE HAS ANYONE HERE SAID THAT LGBT PEOPLE ARE NOT OPPRESSED.