queer story 8
[EDIT] This letter has been sat in my drafts for a while. I wasn't sure if I wanted to send it since it's mostly a series of questions without conclusions, starts and stops and tangles of thoughts I haven't figured out, so please forgive me, but as it's the start of LGBTQ+ History month I thought I would send it anyway.
Originally, I had planned to write on Eley Williams's brilliant short story Smote, Or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You In Front of a Print by Bridget Riley and about self-conscious queer desire and I hope I still will at some point. But I can't stop thinking about something I read last week in The White Review on the use of Queer Art
There's a paragraph I can't get out of my head about history and queerness (sry it's longish):
The freedom of queerness hits like a revelation: it doesn’t have to be this way because it hasn’t always been this way. Sex, desire, my gender, my body: these were different in the past and therefore can be different in the present. [...] This leaves today’s queers with a strange relationship to the past. The freedom of queerness is the realisation that the self and its desires are cultural, not natural: they change, and they have never been fixed. This means the queer can only know history in order to do without it, at least in any deep and extended sense. If selves and sexualities can be invented, then before a certain point they didn’t exist. Queerness is perhaps the most modern identity of them all, accepting of the most intimate aspects of our lives that all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. Queers are cut off from the past by the revelation that sets them free. Queers need to do without history in order to be queer.
It's the "do without history" bit that I keep getting stuck on. What would this actually look like to live without history? In some ways I feel like I'm already living this way, I have no touchstone for queer history, no queer parent, or role model or way into a queer past that I can access. Such knowledge I have scraped together, piecemeal from books and tv and friends. I do not know what good it has done me? How I might live without what I'm not sure I even have.
But I hesitate to throw away our/my (is it "ours"? is it "mine"?) history. It seems too extreme, too insensitive to those who have paved the way before us. To abandon not my personal history but the wider, public one. I do not think I'm brave/naive/radical/stupid enough for that. But to be queer is to place oneself within the context of the straight world, since queer is a reaction to the status quo, so without straight there is no gay? I do not want to define myself by what I am not. A convex to something concave. To shuck off the heteropatriarchy for something new seems idealogical unstable, but also hopeful, freeing, perhaps.
Does history hold us back? Is jettisoning queer history a way to rid oneself of a burden one inherits by being queer? Or is it a betrayal to what precious history we do have? Is it freedom or callousness? Can I build my own (queer) future from my present, without the past? Western education and thought is built upon the foundations of history, a story of sequential time: cause and effect. History is our teacher, model, and warning. Surely that is needed? Surely we need to know where we have been to know where we are going?
And my heart could weep for all the lost history that I don't even know, the queer people from the past whose lives are a mystery to me because no one thought to save their story: lives was cut miserably too short, or stuffed away into a dark corner to be forgotten. And I think just this week how Dr. James Barry, a man who wished to be remembered as such is being co-opted into telling a story that isn't his. That our reclaiming (or in this case rewriting) of the past is not always welcome or right.
And just this morning, listening to Desert Island Discs with Billie Jean King hearing how she has campaigned for equality all her sporting career. That she was the first female athlete to be awarded the Medal of Freedom and the first time someone had been acknowledged for their work in the LGBT community (In 2009!!! it's not even history yet ffs ). Do I want to forget all that? And I think of the zine I'm making about Tove Jansson and how I want to claim her as a queer heroine when maybe she was happy on her island with her partner and their life together and why do I need to go nosing about it in?
I don't know where this leaves me, I remain half in the shadows, unable to let go of whatever queer history I have found for myself and perhaps that is wise. Does this hold me back or propel me forward? I don't know, but I know I want a queer future and for that, I need a queer present which I intend to grasp with open arms.
queer story is an ongoing narrative on coming out and being part of the queer community
If you have a tiny narrative to share please get in touch at thetinynarrative@gmail.com