“You don’t own me
I’m not just one of your many toys
You don’t own me
Don’t say I can’t go with other boys
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And don’t tell me what to do
Don’t tell me what to say
And please, when I go out with you
Don’t put me on display…” – “You Don’t Own Me” (Madara/White), recorded by Lesley Gore, 1963.
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Picture: Lesley Gore (May 2, 1946 – February 16, 2015), c. 1963.
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At the age of sixteen, Lesley Gore, who died two years ago today, burst onto the pop charts with “It’s My Party,” and quickly followed it up with other hits like “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” the protofeminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me,” and “Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows.”
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Although Gore largely dropped out of the pop scene in her later career, she continued to make music. In 1980, Gore and her brother received an Academy Award nomination for their work on the soundtrack of the 1980 film “Fame.”
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In a 2005 interview, Gore came out publicly when she announced that she had been in a relationship with jewelry designer Lois Sasson since 1982.
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Lesley Gore died of lung cancer on February 16, 2015; she was sixty-eight. She was survived by Sasson, her partner of thirty-three years. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #LesleyGore
LESLEY GORE WAS GAY OMFG I HAD NO FUCKING IDEA
As great as the lyrics to You Don’t Own Me are, they gain so much in the performance:
what a lot of these contemporary queer theorists have done is they’ve collapsed critiques of homonationalism into their critiques of what they term “homonormativity” which is their fancy way of saying that cis gay and lesbian people are Evil and Catered To or some shit. but understanding homonationalism and pinkwashing, which are very much different from “homoassimilation”, is incredibly important, especially because lgbt people of color are impacted by homonationalism.
lgbt inclusion in the military; corporations at pride; “pro-gay” corporate ads; drone operators and soldiers and CEO’s who are lgbt; white nationalists such as milo yiannopolous; patriotic pictures of white lgbt people with the american flag overlaid on their faces; wanting cops to be included in pride parades – this is all what homonationalism is. prioritizing capitalist notions of success over liberation is what this is. israel touting itself as “pro-lgbt!1!!” while blackmailing gay palestinians is what this is.
gay people wanting to get married is not a bad thing and it’s not “assimilationist” of lgbt people to want to lead happy, healthy, safe lives with their loved ones, lol. however, gay and trans people being pro-cop and pro-military and pro-capital and white lgbt people aligning themselves with white nationalist ideology is very bad and you really cannot use your hatred of contemporary queer theory to ignore actual critiques of homonationalism.
This is such a great post omg. I was thinking about this the other day and couldn’t figure out how to put it into words, let alone put it into words that aren’t four letter words!
I don’t know any history surrounding that but kinks and poly are not LGBT+. They deviate from social norms, certainly, but they’re adjectives, not subjects.
okay idk if that made sense im not an english major guys
Okay so I’ve made about a dozen of these posts in the last month or two, so I’m not going to get as exhaustive as I sometimes do, but here’s the history that my mother and aunties taught me about kink and polyamory as queer.
When I was growing up, I was told that the kink community was the physical space in which the queer community existed and that non-monogamy/polyamory as the concepts that exist today were born directly out of queer culture and the environments that shaped it.
Basically, back in the early years when most of queer culture was an arrestable offense and people mostly only got to meet their partners in the backrooms of old speakeasies and nightclubs, kink spaces were doing the same thing and were one of the only non-mob owned options for gatherings. Kink communities themselves were almost entirely made up of queer folks already anyways because surprise surprise a community made mostly of abuse survivors is gonna have pretty high rates of queer folks in it. And because of the semi-public nature of the spaces and the limited safe dating options polyamory and related non-monogamous practices became common place.
They became so common place in fact that queerness and queer culture completely and foundationally shaped the discussions around consent, relationship needs, emotional connections, and ethical behavior that became central to kink and polyamory as practices. They became so common place in part because it made sense, in part because the cultures all needed each other, and in part because, as my mother always said, “if society had already damned you just for being queer, what did you have to lose by trying all the other things society was going to damn you for as well?” This, incidentally, is also why there have historically been such high numbers of queer folk in illegal occupations like sex work and why my mom and aunties also used to consider sex work as a culture pretty fucking queer too.
But the years went by and your average, “respectable” white gay and lesbian folks with their picket fence day dreams started making progress. They started kicking people to the curb in an effort to make queerness look less “challenging” and different. Bye bye, bisexuals, bye bye drag and trans culture, bye bye non-monogamy what do you mean you actually think the “slippery slope” to gay marriage also leading to polygamy might be a good thing? Bye bye all you sex freaks, sexuality is something your born with and you can’t help who you love, it’s not like all that disgusting talking-about-sex-and-building-the-entire-network-of-sex-ed-information-we-used-to-desperately-try-and-survive-the-AIDS-crisis-ew-you-perverts-our-sex-is-beautiful-and-pure-like-marriage! And so on and so forth.
See, when it was all about survival, the distinction that Straight people drew between gay, kinky, polyamorous, trans, ace, etc was irrelevant. They’d kill us all the same so we might as well band together and make a world in which the next generation might not just live but thrive. But once it became about gaining access to state acceptance and making room within the legal framework that already existed, those of us who were too scary to Straight society, who still needed the hierarchy destroyed, not just expanded, became dead weight. Our labor, our physical space, our intellectual efforts all became irrelevant and all that mattered was when the Straights looked at White Cis Gays they saw Us instead. So the White Cis Gays fixed that by making it clear they thought we were just as disgusting as the Straights thought we were. They abandoned us and took our history and our language and our fucking lives with them and said we weren’t ~allowed~ to have it. And because those of us who were marginalized in many ways or who were doubly or triply damned were more likely to have suffered massive losses during the AIDS crisis and to still be living in poverty, in crime, and in general destitution of social capital, we’ve been fighting an uphill battle not to be erased ever since.
So now you have a whole generation or two or three who grew up being told a sanitized history where a “drag queen” threw the first brick at Stonewall, Pride wasn’t started by one of the bisexual Queens of Kink, and non-monogamy hasn’t been the natural progression of so many of our communities for generations. And they tell us we never existed, we’re just secret straighties thinking our gross sex lives make us queer, we could just choose to be respectable and “normal” like everyone else and then we wouldn’t be “bullied” (because god forbid our actual oppression be recognized) and they completely miss the irony.
And as much as I hate that I have to list my credentials in order for there to be a chance in burning hell for this response to be considered legitimate, I am the nonbinary, bisexual, polyamorous, kinky, intersex child of a bisexual, kinky, polyamorous woman who spent all of my life and most of hers in the heart of Queer culture and politics to the point that she put me on the stand in front of the entire school board and a third of the state at age 10 to fight for our right to participate in the Day of Silence without fear of suspension, expulsion, abuse, or injury/death. I was on my mother’s hip at the state capitol protests with police in riot gear ready to do whatever it took to prevent us from entering the building. I am Queer in so many ways, including ones no one can dare fucking argue and so was my mother before me and my aunties before her, and this is THEIR history I am telling and will keep telling until I’m dead because I will rot before I let people erase their memories, blood, and joy from our history by claiming that kink and polyamory don’t belong.
I apologize for that all sounding angry and upset. It is not aimed at anyone in particular. I am just very very tired and it’s almost Passover which means that my auntie’s are a lot more on my brain than usual and I am just so exhausted by the way I have been mocked and belittled for months now over things that were simply Truth when I was growing up. Please understand how much history is denied and how many ancestors are dishonored by this rhetoric of “who REALLY belongs in the community?”
We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate. We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of seeing people pretend otherwise.
We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate.
We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better
itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of
seeing people pretend otherwise.
When I met my “First queer person ™” back in 1990, one of the things she said to me that I spent about 27 years unpacking was this:
“monogamous heterosexual relationships are patriarchal bullshit.”
I took offense at the time. But when you don’t let people use words like “queer” to describe “everyone who isn’t in this Normative Bubble of heterosexual serial monogamy”, you have to get pretty specific about the fact that STRAIGHT refers to this concept of being “normal” which in this culture has meant for many years “Straight, cis, monogamous (or doing your best to fake all of the above)”
Quit fucking gatekeeping.
The people who hate us hate all of us. Joining them in their hatred doesn’t solve the problem.
The way they win is if they get us to fight each other.
The other thing about the word “queer” is that almost everyone I’ve seen opposed to it have been cis, binary gays and lesbians. Not wanting it applied to yourself is fine, but I think people underestimate the appeal of vague, inclusive terminology when they already have language to easily and non-invasively describe themselves.
Saying “I’m gay/lesbian/bi” is pretty simple. Just about everyone knows what you mean, and you quickly establish yourself as a member of a community. Saying “I’m a trans nonbinary bi woman who’s celibate due to dysphoria and possibly on the ace spectrum”… not so much. You’re lucky to find anyone who understands even half of that, and explaining it requires revealing a ton of personal information. The appeal of “queer” is being able to identify yourself without profiling yourself. It’s welcoming and functional terminology to those who do not have the luxury of simplified language and occupy complicated identities. *That’s* why people use it – there are currently not alternatives to express the same sentiment.
It’s not people “oppressing themselves” or naively and irresponsibly using a word with loaded history. It’s easy to dismiss it as bad or unnecessary if you already have the luxury of language to comfortably describe yourself.
There’s another dimension that always, always gets overlooked in contemporary discussions about the word “queer:” class. The last paragraph here reminds me of a old quote: “rich lesbians are ‘sapphic,’ poor lesbians are ‘dykes’.”
The reclaiming of the slur “queer” was an intensely political process, and people who came up during the 90s, or who came up mostly around people who did so, were divided on class and political lines on questions of assimilation into straight capitalist society.
Bourgeois gays and lesbians already had “the luxury of language” to describe themselves – normalized through struggle, thanks to groups like the Gay Liberation Front.
Everyone else, from poor gays and lesbians to bi and trans people and so on, had no such language. These people were the ones for whom social/economic assimilation was not an option.
The only language left, the only word which united this particular underclass, was “queer.” “Queer” came to mean an opposition to assimilation – to straight culture, capitalism, patriarchy, and to upper class gays and lesbians who wanted to throw the rest of us under the bus for a seat at that table – and a solidarity among those marginalized for their sexuality/gender id/presentation.
(Groups which reclaimed “queer,” like Queer Patrol (armed against homophobic violence), (Queers) Bash Back! (action and theory against fascism, homophobia, and transphobia), and Queerbomb (in response to corporate/state co-optation of mainstream Gay Pride), were “ultraleft,” working-class, anti-capitalist, and functioned around solidarity and direct action.)
The contemporary discourse around “queer” as a reclaimed-or-not slur both ignores and reproduces this history. The most marginalized among us, as OP notes, need this language. The ones who have problems with it are, generally, among those who have language – or “community,” or social/economic/political support – of their own.
High school cliques: the jocks, the theatre kids, the anime fans, the stoners, and the motley crew of weirdos who don’t seem to have any discernible commonality but are all inexplicably drawn to one another and feel a strange sort of kinship, who will all independently experience epiphanies a few years later when they realize they’re LGBTQ.
So my boyfriend came out as trans last night and I realized something… back when we first started dating we identified as lesbians, then I came out as trans and consequently realized I’m bisexual, and now I’m in a gay relationship. So what I’m trying to say is that I have actually been LGBT as a singular person. Every single acronym. I have ascended and reached gay nirvana
I recall being in a conversation with a gatekeeper once (the sort of “monosexual is a homophobic term!” “MOGWAI means kinky people count as queer!” “asexuals don’t belong in the queer community!” type of asshole) and they said of a fictional character: “He’s definitely gay. Totally gay. Maybe bisexual. Queer at the very least.”
That’s when it clicked for me: Gatekeepers honestly think that any sexuality beyond straight and gay is just Gay Lite. Bisexual is half-gay, asexuality is, like, 0.05 percent gay, and just identifying as “queer” is a quarter-gay, maybe.
This is why they lose their shit so badly whenever someone thinks a character is bisexual and not gay, why they accuse others of erasing their representation. A bisexual is just half a lesbian, so how dare you try and water down our portrayal in the media! Asexuals are such Lite Gays that they might as well be straight, so don’t you dare take away my representation with your ace headcanons!
Never mind if the source material itself is ambiguous. If it’s not gay or lesbian, it’s not real representation. If you don’t want real representation, you’re siding with the straights.
It’s such a pathetic and limited way of looking at the world. I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t such jerks.
Some do this in relation to trans headcanons as well. They’ll go into one hell of a performative outrage against TERFs and other assorted bigoted shits… and then have a fucking meltdown when a young trans man on this site says ‘I headcanon this character as a demisexual trans boy’. This person got dogpiled by dozens of the usual suspects involved in the most virulent anti a-spec discourse, all of them shouting ‘she’s a lesbian!’, ‘lesbian-only!!!!’ The fact that all of this was over headcanons about the goddamn moon in the sky just made me cross myself and go ‘these people are the future of the community? I fucking weep for it, then.’ Honestly, someone can post all they want about how ‘TERFs are Bad’. it becomes mere performative drivel when one engages in pretty damned TERFy bullshit in turn.
Also, he’re as example of this particular dogpiling in action re: a bisexual headcanon. Notice, again, the usual suspects involved and the rejection of any headcanon other than gay. But sure, sure, m-spec people and a-spec people and trans and nonbinary and agender people are ~*~totally valid~*~ and other meaningless buzz-words tossed round like candy for placation. Valid until any of the aforementioned groups want to work at seeing themselves represented by identifying with a character and having personal headcanons for a character whose sexuality and gender are never black-on-white stated in a give canon.
So I’m going to be bitter and old here for a minute.
The absolute refusal to allow anyone to use queer as an umbrella is both novel and regressive (I know, I know). For decades, queer was an accepted and neutral way to concisely refer to a coalition of loosely connected communities and identities. Queer theory, queer film, queer spaces, queer history.
This use came after another few decades of committed work in reclaiming the word from oppressors who flat out stole it from us.
It took a lot of effort to wrestle it back out of their hands, and now I’m expected to just give it over to them because decades of unity and collective action and shared experience don’t matter because a handful of (usually white, almost exclusively american) kids on this godawful website have deicded it’s illegal for me to “force it on others” and that I should instead just let them for LGBT or gay or whatever else on me.
Like, fuck off?
Fuck off.
I am going to refer to my community in the way that I have been doing for an entire lifetime. Not just my specific identity, which is queer as fuck, but the whole fucking shebang.
And I will not hand the word back over to straight people with a nice little ribbon and a coat of polish and say “here, some kids decided it was cool if I let you stab them with this word so here you go” like
Fucking, why would I ever.
Frankly, and I know how people are going to react to this but, frankly?
I damned well will use queer to refer to my community as well as myself, and anyone who wants to take it away from me can take it over my COLD DEAD QUEER LITTLE FINGERS.
I will not sit by and let antsy, nervous kids who don’t know a damn thing about our history talk down to me about how “well, actually” when they can’t even recognize the fact that trans people were still being policed out of here literally three fucking years ago.
The presumption and the ignorance are staggering.
So yeah.
Queer as in fuck you people in particular.
And, to my followers who are made uncomfortable by this, well. I will regret losing you on some level, but not enough to stop.
I fully intend to use queer as the umbrella term it has been for my entire life. LGBT never did my intersex, pansexual ass any favours anyway.
My point is, I’m not going to be referring to the “LGBT” community at all, anymore. It’s going to be 100% queer here, in a more conscious and consistent way than it has been before. Because, you see, even people who do use queer as an identity unashamedly have gotten into this pattern of being apologetic or conditional about it, with a constant, overbearing tone that even when we do use queer as a community term with have to hedge it and gentle it because it’s so dangerous.
but it’s fuckign not.
We spent decades pulling the danger out of it.
And ‘m not going to let it sneak back in.
Every time someone says “queer is a slur, you shouldn’t use it” I feel like they’re trying to fucking gaslight me. Like, I was there when it got reclaimed. I read “Queer Science”, I saw the “Queer Studies Departments” in college and the majors in Queer Theory. Kids do not get to invalidate my life out of ignorance. And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with, because how would the kids who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about know to invalidate that word?
You go. Reclaim that reclamation. I’ll probably use LGBT+ and queer interchangeably, like I always have, and if some kid tries to lecture my 47-year-old ass on the matter I’m just going to have to look at them over my imaginary librarian glasses and tell them “no. you’re wrong. Go back to school, kid, you need to remember you’re sharing the world with adults and there is a consensual reality you have entered into. You don’t get to make it up from scratch any more than I did.”
And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with
Because it’s absolutely surreal to see someone who is fifteen years old speak as if queer’s been used to constantly attack and smear and belittle and insult them, when they’re about twenty years too late, at the very least, to have gone through that as a teenager. I’ve seen it happen so many times, with so many teenagers on here, that it reads honestly like a script – like a Discourse Point someone’s taught them that they need to trot out as an argument, always and forever, amen. I made this connection over a year ago, when the screaming against ‘queer’ started in earnest on here and thought about it more in-depth when a number of very young activists both here and on Twitter told me unironically and with a straight face that they took all of their discourse points from the likes of leftbians and other exclusionists, starting with your garden-variety aphobes and biphobes and ending with outright radfems / TWERFs / SWERFs.
That was the lightbulb moment for me. Question:
what group has managed to spread their posts and their ideas far and wide on Tumblr, because people reblog without checking the source or reading between the lines?
and what group has had a vicious ideological axe to grind against ‘queer’ as both a self-descriptor and an umbrella-term for decades now?
The answer to both is radfems. I was there ten years ago when they were absolutely driving themselves into a frothing lather over the fact that a very large number of LGBTQIAP+ youth were describing ourselves and our communities as queer uncontroversially – seriously, this was so common on the English-speaking queer youth forums I used to frequent back then that no one batted an eyelash, specifically because the work of reclamation had already been done for decades and if, asked, the vast majority of people answered that they preferred queer because it was INCLUSIVE (which is and has always been the kryptonite for groups of people whose ideas revolved around gatekeeping the community and their precious selves being the arbiters of who gets in and who stays out), Radfems quickly realized that they weren’t going to be able to demonize the word in the eyes of Gen Xers or people at the older end of the Gen Y generation in the community, because we’d either contributed to the work of reclamation or spent our whole fucking lives in communities where queer was a badge of pride.
So, in what is honestly an absolutely brilliant move and which I’d be almost tempted to admire, if I didn’t want to spit everyone involved right between the eyes, radfems and other exclusionists targeted much younger LGBTQIAP+ people, leapfrogging a generation. Tumblr, in this sense, has been absolutely vital, both in giving them access to very young people who were just discovering themselves and whose knowledge of community history was nonexistent and in being built in such a way that radfems could make their posts go viral and attract tens of thousands of reblogs, if not more, if they knew to word them in just the right way (I’ve lost count of the number of what, at a shallow glance, seem like very decent PSAs on consent, but that at a closer reading were actually anti-BDSM screeds, easy to see for anyone who knows the dogwhistles).
If radfems have managed to mire this place in their ideas intensely enough that they’ve turned their anti-kink crusade into an omnipresent thing in certain progressive communities on Tumblr, it’s not impossible to make the logical leap that they’ve managed to do so with their decades-long anti-queer crusade as well.
I’d laugh and clap at the ingeniousness of it all, if it didn’t involve obliterating decades of community history, solidarity and reclamation efforts.
Please note this. Regardless of how you personally feel about the word, this backlash against it happened much more recently than many people seem to think. And it’s worth pointing out who benefits from the backlash, and it sure as hell isn’t the people who gave decades of their lives to make the word a sign of inclusivity and acceptance.
tl;dr: TERFS started a backlash against queer on tumblr c. 2015 and that’s why a cult of ignorant corrupted teens are frothing against the entire queer world today.
just moving along like everyone else 