2019 Hot Takes: Miscellaneous Points About Queer Identity
by Emily Blair
As 2019 comes to a close and we look out into 2020, I wanted to bring you random pieces of information that, honestly, I couldn’t wrangled into a full-length blog post, but which you may or may not find useful. These are also my hottest takes, so I can go into 2020 either entirely cancelled or with a clear conscience that I have said my piece.
In any case, see you in the new year, dear Boshemia readers, and here’s hoping it is beautiful and bright for us all.
Point 1: A shared, pre-teen, queer consciousness exists for most of the queer women I know between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five in the United States, but none of us can figure out how exactly it worked.
I once wrote a poem called “Keira Knightley Made Me Gay,” and I’m only half-joking that the one-two punch of Knightley starring in Bend It Like Beckham in 2002 and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl in 2003 made me gay. When other girls in my middle school were fighting about whether Orlando Bloom or Johnny Depp was hotter, I wondered if no one else had noticed Elizabeth Swan doing Elizabeth Swan things the entire time. In talking with other queer women, I realized almost all of us had similar feelings about Keira Knightley. Close runners up to millennial queer awakening:
Leonardo Di Caprio in Titanic as a butch icon
Peter Pan, usually when a short-haired woman plays Peter, per tradition, but I’ll throw my hat in the ring for the 2003 live-actor version, with the gender-ambiguous Peter
Susan in the 2005 adaption of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
Motocrossed, a 2001 Disney Channel original movie about a teenage girl who dresses up as her brother to, you guessed it, motocross race, with sexual tension abounding between girl-dressed-as-guy and another guy
She’s the Man, which has the same plot as the above Disney movie but with Amanda Bynes and soccer
Comparing some of these films to “real” queer representation of the time, like The L Word and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, I can start to see some patterns; namely, homoerotic subtext becoming text in scenes that involve women impersonating men felt like a safe way for young women to imagine, well, queerness. Capable, smart, interesting young women our own age on the screen not being ridiculously sexualized also helped us have innocent crushes on women who weren’t on screen merely to have sex with men.
But how did we all just know that these movies were somehow gay? I had never heard of drag or drag culture, but Motocrossed certainly felt queer to me. Perhaps we’re all born with some tiny homing device toward gay culture, whether we know it or not.
Point 2: A lot of queer people don’t participate in hypersexualized queer spaces, but activists pushing the mold of sexual freedom and liberation help create space where we can live openly as queer people, so it feels like internalized queerphobia to explain to a cishetero person that you’re not involved in kink spaces and don’t participate in hypersexualized cultures when they assume all queer people talk about sex all the time.
I don’t have perfectly formed political or moral opinions on this one, so I’ll try to keep it short: yes, in fact, some queer people, like some of any group of people, are not comfortable with seeing genitals in public or on social media.
I personally never want to see anyone’s genitals when I wasn’t expecting to, including on Instagram. I find sex jokes uncomfortable to the point of having to excuse myself or turn off the television, no matter who is involved in the jokes, even when they’re “feminist” or “queer” or “empowering.” An Amy Schumer stand-up special is my own personal form of Hell. No, I didn’t watch Flea Bag, although I’m sure it’s excellent.
So, when vocal and prominent queer activism groups hinge their social media presence or visuals on sex acts, sexual positions, and sex toys / equipment, I just have to shrug and look the other way. I have no desire to tell other people how to express their sexuality or how to talk about their queerness, but I personally can’t go into a space or follow a page that focuses on sex. I’m decidedly not radical in that way, although I’m glad these spaces exist for other queer people.
Most other queer people I know support and enjoy the existence of queer spaces that deviate from our own desires, identities, and experiences, which I love. I just wish I could explain to everyone else that not every queer person expresses their sexuality, body, or identity the same way without feeling like I’m distancing myself from those other queer people in a way that feels like moralistic bullshit. Obviously, this is an issue with cishetero culture lumping all queer people together and choosing to see only what they want to see in queer culture, but it does make for some awkward interactions that I see no way out of without feeling like I’ve let someone down.
Point 3: Instead of asking someone’s pronouns, you can use their name or “they” if you’re in a new space. You should never put a person you think is queer on the spot to answer their pronouns in front of people they don’t know. Stop doing pronoun circles at trainings and the first day of class.
I am personally speaking as a white cis woman to other white cis women right now: if you don’t stop demanding everyone’s pronouns to prove that you know trans people exist and demonstrate your wokeness, I am officially revoking your Good Ally TM card and confiscating your pink pussy hat and ironic tote bag.
At some point in the last few years, white cis women started realizing that we elected Donald Trump and have benefitted in all of recent history from our proximity to white men. In all the resulting white guilt, we latched on to one thing we could do differently that was very low effort, actively harmful, but made us feel warm and fuzzy: asking pronouns!
White cis queer women like me (a pansexual white cis woman, to be exact) began to realize too that sometimes we don’t “look” queer, and sometimes our partners are straight white men, so we had to do something to show that we were with it. Asking someone’s pronouns, in general, is a good thing: the act allows someone to take ownership of how they are addressed and spoken about, much like asking someone’s name, and we can’t tell someone’s pronouns by looking at how they look, how they dress, or their name. So, in theory, asking what pronouns someone uses is wonderful.
In reality, the performative pronoun sharing circle, usually prompted by cis white women, is a tool for cis white women to show that they are connected with queer and political discourse; usually, shows they are “in charge” (because they have the power to demand the sharing); and places people who use pronouns that, say, the barista at Starbucks wouldn’t guess immediately in the horrible spot of either outing themselves to a bunch of strangers (sometimes in a professional or school setting!) or closeting themselves from that point forward (“So and So SAID her pronouns were she/her in August though?!”). Optional pronoun spaces on nametags alleviates these pressures, but no one should ever be pressured to share their pronouns.
Just stop it. Ask privately and have an entire conversation about it if necessary (Ex. “When should I use these pronouns?” “Are there situations where you want me to correct other people’s pronoun use for you?” “Would you rather let slide incorrect pronoun usage in certain situations?”). And stop equating asking someone’s pronouns with trans activism or even acceptance of trans people in a space.
Thank you for reading! I am so grateful for this space and excited to keep writing on queerness + everything else in 2020.