Hi, welcome back to Who We Are. My name is Aiden Bassett. I'm the summer 2020 opinion editor. And hi, Kat.
How's it going? Hi, Aiden. I'm good. Do I stress my title?
No. Okay. Yeah. Okay.
My name is Kat talking. I'm the summer 2020 opinion editor. Awesome. And thank you for joining us for another episode of Who We Are, which is an identity-focused pseudo-news podcast centering around queer issues, where sometimes we discuss opinions on the news and sometimes we just discuss opinions.
Today's episode is going to be centered around queer community. We're going to talk about what it means to us to be involved in the queer community, what the idea of queer community means in our own lives. We're going to talk about the visibility and dominance of certain groups within the queer community and how visibility and representation affect your experience of that community and what that community seems to be to people in it and outside of it. And then we're going to talk about queer history and the evolution of that community over the past handful of decades.
So I guess we'll start off with Kat. What does it mean to you to be involved in the queer community and what does queer community look like in your life? Okay. I don't particularly think that I'm super involved in the queer community at large.
I don't have an overwhelming amount of queer friends or a queer friend group, if that makes sense. I think my image of the queer community is kind of what's in the media. I think about like drag shows and gay bars and that more adult environment, if that makes sense. Yeah.
But being involved in the queer community to me means being like politically involved, like culturally socially involved, but just like knowing what's happening, like what's happening with the gays like in the U.S. and abroad. What do you think? I mean, I think when I was younger, my impression of what you needed to do to like get your club card to be a member of the queer community was a lot more concrete in some ways.
Like you had to have lots of queer friends and you had to like know all the queer cultural touchstones. You had to know the classic movies. And as you said, you had to be politically engaged. You had to like know which laws in which parts of the country, like the transgender bathroom bills that were transphobic in the South.
And you had to be paying a lot of attention. You had to do certain things. There was a lot of sense of, if not ritual, then at least rites of passage. I remember going to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time in theaters on Halloween.
And you know, someone dressed as one of the characters had a thing of red lipstick. And she asked me if I had ever been before. And I said no. And she marked a B for a version on my head.
And so it felt very much like there were clear rites of passage where you weren't really in the queer community unless you did X, unless you did Y. And I definitely evolved to, I think maybe closer to your perspective, which is that it's more about an intellectual engagement and maybe a more flexible social engagement. It's not so much about doing specific things that mattered necessarily in the past, maybe more so, as markers, as indicators of belonging. And now it's a little more fluid in many respects.
I don't know if that feels true to you. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that the straights, I shall call them, have like a view of what queer or gay culture is based on like what they see because, you know, they're outside of the community. And when you're first figuring yourself out as a baby gay or like, oh my gosh, is that a community term, baby gay?
I think we can say gayby. Yeah, that's fine. And you don't really know what it means to be part of queer culture. All you have is like this straight representation.
Right, right. Not straight representation, but like what the straights believe is like a queer community. Right. No, I think that's, you know, there are still times, even today, when I feel like I am a queer person in a straight person's body or something like that, which I think is maybe an exaggeration.
It's definitely closer to I'm a queer person in a heteronormative world. But it often, I mean, I think that lens is a good one where it's like when you're coming to accept this is true about you, you are still looking into the queer community from maybe not fully outside of it, but definitely straddling the line. Like you're not sure if it's true yet, or you can tell it might be, but your only lens for it is how straight people see it. And so that may well be more reductive or more simplistic than your experience of it is or than you want to have it be.
So I think that's definitely true that most people's first experience of the queer community is as straight people see it or as cisgender people see it and not as it truly is in all its complexity. Yeah. And I feel like that's where kind of like the fixation on sex that feels really like, like present in the queer community comes from. Um, yeah, like, you know, gay bars and like places where, you know, when, you know, queer, we were not as open about queerness, like a place where people like queer sort of just kind of like hook up and just be with other queer people.
What do you think about that element of sex being like so important in the community? Well, you know, it's, um, it's interesting that you bring that up because I think, I think these days, and we'll get to this a little bit later, but I think, you know, if you look at the statistics for our generation, our generation is just, just has less sex and has it on average later than previous generations, which is maybe not what people would like to think of millennials or Gen Z. They probably think we're, you know, quite promiscuous. Um, but statistically, at least it seems that we're not.
And I think in many ways, you're, you're spot on both statistically speaking and more just kind of amorphously culturally speaking that the older version of queer life, especially of gay life for gay men, cisgender gay men, um, was much more explicitly sexualized. You know, I'm thinking of like, there's still the, the steamworks baths, I think are in Oakland, but also in Berkeley, um, that are like, you know, nominally a gym, but it's mostly a gym where gay men are naked in a steamy setting and, you know, you can find sexual partners as much as you can. Right, right. Literally and also figuratively.
Um, and so it is, it is a setting that is very highly sexualized. And I think that it's, it's maybe not, I don't want to say it's a relic of queer culture because obviously there's still very highly sexualized queer culture, um, and queer experiences and queer settings at the moment. But I think that it's, it's interesting how sex can kind of obscure other parts of it. It makes life often seem not very three-dimensional.
And I think in some ways you're right to point out that that is the very straight perspective on the queer community is that it's because it is an identity that is rooted in sexual orientation or gender identity or things like that. It is very easy to make it seem like it's all just about us having lots of sex, having it right indiscriminately and maybe reducing either the ideas of partnership or just the ideas of platonic community, uh, intellectual and social community as much as one around sexual partnership. Yeah. Um, I feel like in a way though that kind of fixation is exclusionary.
Um, yeah, for sure. Especially for, you know, asexual or aromantic folks, um, and on younger queer people because they don't have access to those kinds of environments and may not be entirely comfortable being in those environments. Yeah. You know, I think, I think as the queer community has, I want to say matured and imply that it wasn't nuanced and well-developed and complicated from its very, from its very nascence as a community that you could have and you didn't have to conceal in the U.S.
But I think, I think in some ways as it has become a more visible community, a increasingly legally and socially accepted and protected one, there has been, um, from many levels, a rising call for its diversity to be acknowledged. It is, it is no longer good enough to have just the largest sects of the queer community be the only ones visible. Like it's not just enough for, um, white cis days to be the ones in all the magazines and all the movies and the ones for whom all the, you know, civil rights laws are named. It's, it's important, I think, for, for how broad a swath of, you know, the population, the queer community is, to have that depth and breadth acknowledged.
And I think, especially for people who are asexual or a romantic, it's, and even for people who are transgender, because they are still devastatingly underrepresented and marginalized, I think it's worth a lot to have more than just drag race and more than just a handful of movies, um, as your frame of reference for what it means to watch other people live your identity and thrive that way. And I think, I think this brings us perfectly into our next topic, which is, um, really the dominance of certain groups in the queer community by way of visibility. That maybe, you know, like, I've heard the statistic, and I think it's probably roughly accurate, um, that about 50% of the LGBTQ plus community is bisexual. Bisexuals are just far and away the most common group.
But even though I think, you know, me, myself, being bisexual, I'm aware of the most stereotypes about bisexuals, I didn't think that they would be such a large plurality, if not majority, of the queer community until I heard that statistic. And, you know, again, like, who's to say these statistics? Um, I don't think they're anecdotal, but also that the data is hard to find in some ways, because, you know, all sorts of queer individuals still can't be out, still probably can't answer questionnaires. Um, but I think all of that ties into certain groups are visible and certain groups are not.
And the visible ones are probably ones it's increasingly easiest to be a part of, to identify with. And if you can't see yourself, then, you know, you are definitely a more marginalized member of the queer community. I also think, um, in some ways, representation kind of gets too much credit as a source of importance, because I also think that legal barriers, uh, contribute or compound visibility barriers. Because, like, for example, you know, it's all good and well if Laverne Cox is starring on Orange is the New Black.
If you, you know, if you see, if you live in North Carolina and you see your state legislature passing, like, aggressively transphobic legislation, then great, you're being represented in the media in some respects. Like, you can have a Netflix account and see transgender people, you know, overcoming adversity and all sorts of good things. But you still get the manifest sense from the culture around you that it's not good for you to be visible. It's not good for you.
It's not going to be safe for you. To, like, use the restroom that corresponds with your gender identity, because it's a risk. It remains a legal and social risk, even if there's some kind of cultural indications that it's more accepted. More accepted, dot, dot, dot, by the straight community.
Right, by the straight community. Even, I mean, at the same time, though, like, even within the queer community, like, there are those techniques that exist. Yeah. And that's definitely something I think we'll get into a little bit more next time.
But I also think that, you know, it's good to put all of these things in perspective a little bit. I think, you know, for example, what was it, 2015 was when gay marriage was technically made legal by the Supreme Court. And I think, in some ways, the visibility factor contributes to the legal factor, right? So the fact that there was increasing media representation, maybe, again, of often white cisgender, relatively affluent gay men in media.
But even so, there was increasing representation of what it means to just be a gay person, live or a queer person of any kind, bisexual, lesbian, even some trans characters a little bit, were in media before that was the law of the land, right? And I think, in some ways, for straight people, who still are the majority of the country, to come around with different cultural understanding, especially older straight people, who come from a time when this was just not remotely part of the conversation, like legal rights for queer people. And I think my impression always was that that Supreme Court decision reflected the majority opinion of Americans, in part because, you know, all the articles that came out around that time about the decision said an increasingly huge number of Americans, an increasingly huge proportion of Americans know someone queer, know, have a brother or sister or aunt or uncle or friend or cousin or, you know, co-worker. They have encountered queer people.
And so our visibility is, in many ways, not just a source of community, but also a way we keep expanding the bounds of that community, keep letting people in more by seeing them more. And the way our national community opens its arms a little wider to new rights and new legal protections for queers in the workplace or things like that. And I think being seen is a huge first step in being respected. Yeah, queerness be guess.
Queerness, like, especially, I know we were talking about polling earlier and, like, with 50% of bisexuals apparently making up the LGBTQ plus community. It's like, as people see or meet more queer people, they feel more comfortable with identifying in that way. And, like, you're right, that's how the queer community grows. I think the point you made about age and generational differences is really interesting, too.
Like, older, I don't know, I don't know many older queer people. Like, queer adults were, like, queer seniors. I just, like, have had no access to, like, those stories or what their community was like and how, like, their community has slowly shifted and changed and become the community that we now exist in as young people that came out, like, in the last five years. Yeah, you know, it's, um, I have a lot of lesbians in my life who I would say are, like, 50 years young or 60 years young.
You know, they're very vibrant and engaging people, so I don't want to imply that, you know, the parents of my dear friends or people in my extended chosen family network are so old that they have a frame of reference for completely different eras of history. But also, like, in particular, you know, Eugene Oregon, where I currently live at the moment, has, I think, a pretty rich community of older lesbians, um, who, many of whom have been partnered for a long time, um, and for whom the, the stereotypes of queer community are maybe stronger or more valuable touchstones in some respects. I think, you know, it obviously makes sense. We had to get our cliches and our stereotypes from somewhere, and so we probably got them from the past.
We got them from 30, 40 years ago. Like, do most gay people you know today love Judy Garland? Probably not so much. I mean, they might if they saw Judy Garland's work, but, like, that's, that's an older, a much older stereotype about gay men, um, being a friend of Dorothy and all that.
But I think there, there's, um, there's a lot of richness in the queer experience of even just, like, the early 90s. I had, um, and so much more nuance to the kinds of absolute madness and absolute exclusion they experienced. My girlfriend's mom, once upon a time, was in a relationship with a woman who, you know, by my girlfriend's account, was very transparently butch. Like, it would have been inescapable to anyone and certainly was inescapable to her family that she was quite probably a lesbian.
Um, but as long as she and my girlfriend's mother were always keeping it under wraps, you know, they would live together and make it appear so they were roommates and things like that, as long as they didn't keep it in the, in the open, as long as they didn't allow it to become an obvious thing that they said aloud and made known, even though my, my girlfriend's mother's partner probably wouldn't have been safe in her very conservative rural, you know, family and or, you know, neighborhood, if, if it had been an open fact because she kept it to herself and certainly looked quintessentially butch but didn't say she was, there was, there was some kind of tacit understanding that that would be allowed to continue, that no one was going to... As long as she was hiding, it was okay. And I think that's one of the, like, quiet tragedies of queer life is that lots of people actually have been able to be in long-term queer relationships for decades, as long as they just went out of their way and doubled over backwards to make sure even their families couldn't accuse them of being too overt about it, to, like, you know, transgress. would be the straight perspective to transgressively queer, to obviously so.
And I think that's a huge difference. I totally agree with that. I mean, I just wonder how those generations, like, what are their queer access points? Do you know what I mean?
I feel like the young kids today, like, I mean, the TikTok queers are strong, very strong. There's like a gay section of Twitter, of Tumblr. Like, it's much easier to make contact with the queer community and make those, I don't know, have new understandings of what it means to be queer and a part of the community in that digital sense. Yeah, I think, I mean, in some ways, obviously we know of now lots of people who obviously were queer generations ago when it was not something they were per se especially open about, like, you know, Cole Porter was bisexual.
Was he openly bisexual at the time? I don't know. I presume he kept it within, you know, the New York theater scene where it was probably relatively safe to be queer at the time since lots of people were. But I also feel like some of it must have been reaching out to find touchstones for yourself.
So, like, was Judy Garland queer? Not to my knowledge, but, like, lots of gay men cherished her anyways. And I think you still see the queer community do that today where we take, especially women, and frankly, especially white women, to be kind of de facto or, like, honorary members of the queer community. Like, I adore, I cherish Tyler Ray Jepsen.
To my knowledge, Tyler Ray Jepsen is as heterosexual as one gets. I'm sure she's a good ally. I can't actually prove that, but I just get that sense. But I know lots of other days who just absolutely adore Carly Ray Jepsen.
And, like, is Carly Ray queer? Again, no. But I think it's an example of how when you see your aesthetic in the world, it's not necessarily about one-to-one parody of I have to find a queer person who is visible, who does this thing. Sometimes it's just about finding your thing and expressing yourself through that.
Like, Prince, to my knowledge, is a classic pillar of queer culture. Prince himself, against my knowledge, but super queer and unorthodox in his gender expression and in the sexual envelopes he pushed, not to mix my metaphors, but also, again, individuals who weren't queer and were maybe safe because they weren't, but also could afford to kind of be an homage to the queer community. In certain cases, certainly co-opting. I don't imply that it was always banal and fine.
Like, David Bowie, certainly, you know, again, queer icon versus queer co-opter. Debatable, right? But I think that's also where, at least artistically, I see queer history in the making of, like, sometimes it's about our chosen idols as much as our real ones, our substantive ones. I don't know.
I really do not gravitate towards Judy Carlin or Carlin Jeffs or I really, I think part of the privilege of growing up, like, being a young queer person today is that, like, other tabloids are obsessed with finding out, like, which celebrities are queer. Like, I recently read that Tyler Crater's bisexual, which is freaking awesome. Which, weirdly, that kind of makes me love him even more. I don't know.
But, yeah, I think especially on these online communities, like, recently there was this uproar that, oh my gosh, Dakota Johnson is a bisexual and now, like, we're all obsessed with her because, like, we like to find other queer people that are doing great things that are, like, making it out there in the world. I wonder if that's, like, an inherent part of queer culture. Like, it feels really supportive. Like, we see somebody pushing an envelope and we're like, yes, like, go, like, go girl, go you.
Like, what do you think about that? Well, I think in some ways it ties back to the issue of visibility we were discussing earlier and also that, you know, again, as we're going to discuss next episode, there are intersecting kinds of privilege and oppression in the queer community and in ways that race, for example, I mean, as much as you can be white-passing or, you know, multiracial and it can be, you know, people can infer racial traits about you that are per se accurate. It's on the whole more visible than queerness. I mean, people interact with me and they have inferred on my life that I'm gay, but, I mean, despite being ever so slightly off the mark on that one, they've been able to tell but it's not always true that it's the case that you can tell.
And I think, especially for the queer community who, generally, we should know better than to presume from stereotypes that someone has a given sexual orientation or gender identity, it's fun when you finally can see people because, for example, if you're, you know, a young black American looking for icons, they're not necessarily hidden. Like, they may have been brutalized by police or assassinated too young, but you can look at John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, you know, and say, these people are our heroes. These people, you know, symbolized and embodied black power and they did this their whole lives. Whereas it's much more frequently the case that queer people in history, I mean, I don't want to minimize the commitment of activists, but there were far more queer people who succeeded in media, whose sexual orientations or, you know, gender identities came to light only after they had died.
So in some cases, only decades after they had died. Like, you know, Freddie Mercury may have been known as openly bisexual during his lifetime, but it doesn't mean he was, like, necessarily, you know, the foremost AIDS activist in the world. Like, I think in some ways queer people have benefited from being able to pass as straight or pass as cis and have gotten the privilege of being able to hide their identity. But I think in one of the ways that all sorts of oppressions differ slightly from each other, maybe one of the values of great racial activists of the past is that, you know, they couldn't hide their race.
And so it is at least, as much as I don't want to be making a poor parallel, but like black children can look at Obama and say, we had a black president. I could be there too. And not to, you know, again, not to draw parallels between racial oppression and sexual orientation oppression, but I think even if one of our presidents was queer I think in some ways the differences between the past and the present is like I can't tell you any queer activists from the 19th century, but I can tell you a little bit about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman who were pioneering abolitionists. So I think one of the tragedies of queer history is that we don't know our history all the time.
It's something that we kind of have to piece together and infer or guess even when it's not as obvious. Yeah, it really only becomes like obvious, obvious when you have these activists that are, you know, out loud and out and proud and like, you know, really like trying to make a difference like make a change like Harvey Milk or Marsha P. Johnson or yeah, I don't know. I just sometimes I think about how that culture of activism translates to like the modern day.
Like do all queer people have to be queer activists to be a full part of the community? Or I don't know, like is there a happy medium between like the hiding, like living your life and being proud and queer but like quietly and hiding it versus being like out and proud? Is there like a happy middle where we can just be queer people? Like does that make sense like and not have to be queer?
Yeah, I think I mean the happy medium of can it be normalized enough that we don't have to perform it in order to accept it as an affirmed identity but also find a side that's not performative but it's still active it's still socially conscious is still being a good ally to other members of the queer community other you know marginalized groups as a whole and I guess I'll just end on this which is this year because of the pandemic Pride was canceled obviously in pretty much every city that ordinarily would have had it and maybe there were you know other kinds of Pride events or things and things went digital but it was not the same and I'm curious I've gone to Pride for a few years in a row now and I'm curious what effect it had on your sense of community this year if you've ever gone or if you wanted to go and couldn't get to I'm curious how that affected you. Honestly, I've only been to Pride once I went last year in San Francisco and it was like the most reaffirming like experience that I've ever had like I've never just been surrounded by queer people and I was just giddy the entire day I was just like I cannot believe this is happening like every person basically every person I'm talking to like can relate to me and understand my identity and they will accept me with open arms I mean we know that that's not always true but it was just so empowering and the most beautiful gorgeous experience I've ever had like that's when that was the first time I think I really felt a part of the quote unquote queer community like you are automatically part of the community if you are queer of course but it's different I think to live it in this like prideful way Yeah I think as one of our columnists about recently and should be joining us soon about how you know queer culture is not necessarily perfectly captured by pride it has become very co-opted by corporations you know there are police and cops at pride and lots of people I think rightly really hate that given pride's history but I think even if we have real legitimate criticisms about pride these days I think there's no standing for it there's no second best I mean I agree with you like even though I have lots of queer friends and you know have again lived in queer communities of one sort or another all throughout college it really is the case that pride has something nothing else has pride makes you feel a sense of belonging and connection and again community and I kind of hate the word community because I feel like it implies a sense of bondedness from the straight perspective of queers that isn't true like it's hard to find your community it's hard to find you know those to whom you can be connected but I think that's really the beauty of pride and why despite its criticisms it should be fixed and not abolished per se or maybe abolished in this form but reborn in another because it really is in some ways the beating heart of queer culture and I think we'll leave it at that for this week thank you all for joining us and we will see you next time to discuss how much it is you and you you and you Thank you.