Pride and the New Puritans
I was wasting time the other day, scrolling through Twitter when I came upon a flag I assumed to be a new Pride flag. It had different shades ranging from a bluish green to a greenish blue. Cool, I thought, that’s a fun color combination. I opened the image to see what was written on it. “Congratulations!” Thank you. “If you like this flag, you hate lesbians!” Well, that’s news to me. The author of the original tweet went on to show a very similar flag and informed their followers that the new bluish-green-to-greenish-blue flag was a way to show how proud they were of their sexual orientation while preemptively avoiding the “lesbian hater” label that another, better-informed queer might levy at them.
Subcultures define themselves with an ever-shifting group of signs — all but invisible to people who are not looking for them — that a member of the subculture can acknowledge or demonstrate fluency in. There are subtle and not-so-subtle ways that we signify to one another that we are queer. This is also the reason that corporate attempts to mimic graffiti, for example, inevitably fall flat. Graffiti is necessarily, definitionally, countercultural. It is a rejection of systems and structures and thus cannot ever be wielded appropriately by something as powerful as a corporation.
Lockheed Martin wuz here
The queer community is not necessarily a countercultural community, or set of countercultures, but it is still a collection of subcultural communities. The language we use among ourselves is different from the language we let other people use towards us. The only people in whose mouths I trust the word tranny is other trannies.
It is an act of power to reclaim a slur like faggot. It’s like saying “Go ahead. Burn me. I’ll spit in your face from the pyre.” But what does it mean when we, broadly speaking, deny one another the opportunity to reclaim? The boundaries of queer subcultures are enforced where my fluency in the contemporary linguistic discourse is not the only badge of admittance; my ability to determine whether you are adequately fluent in the discourse is necessary as well. Part of this discursive power transforms into something more like kinetic power. The way to exercise my ability to determine whether you are fluent enough to belong is by attempting to exclude you. You hate lesbians, I assert with the confidence of a thousand mediocre men.
I called this discourse before, but it is an anti-discourse in which structures are both deified and eroded; power is subtractive rather than augmentive.
Embracing meta-narratives is why we have signs like “PRIDE WAS A RIOT!” in 2019, marching 100 feet ahead of the SFDA’s Pride float. To the unencumbered, the operative word appears to be riot, an attempt to recall our gods, Marsha and Sylvia. Jules Gill-Peterson asks exactly the right question: “the trans woman of color whose life is invoked is always putative. She’s no fact. Who is she? How do you know her? I know why Chase Bank, or Sephora pretends to know her. But you? What’s your excuse?”[1] Riot is not the most important word there. The most important word on the sign “PRIDE WAS A RIOT” is was.
Sure, the queens and transvestites at Compton’s Cafeteria threw down against the police. Sure, someone told the cops to fuck off at Stonewall. “Fuck the police,” said the anger of a thousand years of having to meet up in secret in the sewers of a city to profess our love to one another. “Fuck the police” said the generations of subaltern and diasporic queers. “Cis lesbians are TERFs until proven otherwise,” says some faggot on the internet.
To invoke the uprisings of 50 years ago as the beginning and to draw a straight line to today is to embrace a fictional meta-narrative of progress that is simply not based on any kind of empirical observation. What progress is there, for the transgender people who watch while states hammer away at our ability to participate in social and civic life. To claim that we have made net progress is an assimilationist narrative. There are so many people out there who hate us, and who are directing the entirety of one of the largest bureaucratic legislatures in the world directly at us. And no one is more poised to suffer than the unnamed, unknown Black transgender woman at the masthead of the movement. An internally-enforced, rigid, queer taxonomy is untenable because we are unnameable. Discourse turns against us the moment we apply a rigidity to it.
The so-called “Protestant work ethic” came in part from a theological explanation by John Calvin. He said that the Christian God is omniscient, and thus knows already whether you are going to get into heaven. Thus, you suffer from a predetermination. However, Calvin wrote, by performing good works and Christlike behavior, that was evidence that you would be granted entry to heaven. So, rather than actions having consequences, instead the consequences are evidenced by actions.
The way Very Online Queers address one another’s linguistic missteps is through punishment. The discourse creates a tenuous, yet rigid, relationship to one another, which ends up mimicking the violence of compulsory heterosexuality even within spaces intended to reject it.
The longer I live, the more I have come to understand that queerness is primarily about whom you fuck. Or want to fuck. Or don’t want to fuck. It is not about language, or labels, or taxonomies. Am I a transgender woman? Fuck you. Is there such a thing as a he/him bisexual lesbian? Fuck you. Are there heterosexual homosexuals? Fuck you. Queerness is not about language; it’s about sex. And if there is one thing that conservative, Protestant queers have in common with conservative, Protestant republicans, it’s hating sex.
What is the point of all of this? It’s that queer discourse and queer presence in public are at odds. But is it gay is as meaningless a question as but is it art. There are enough obstacles in our path towards liberation without imposing anti-discourses and grand narratives on ourselves, or trying to live up to a history we refuse to learn.
[1] https://sadbrowngirl.substack.com/p/trans-pessimism-part-i
