#i really wish i'd gotten this done sooner for y'all and i apologize

[captain-kit-adventuress]

hi there! i apologize if this is weird or strange of me, but i saw you reblogging my post about lesbian men (im a mod on that blog, it wasnt a post from this blog), and thought your blog looked interesting so i clicked on it- and i'm really interested in hearing your perspective as an older queer person, what it used to be like in queer communities and if lesbian men used to be commonly accepted in queer spaces? of course i do not expect you to be an expert, i just always look to the voices and testimonies of older queer people about this stuff because listening to exclusionists can be so frustrating, and y'all are much more educated and understanding of the queer community, and i figured i'd ask for your perspective on inclusionism and exclusionism from a more experienced queer perspective? of course if you do not want to answer you don't have to, i just figured i'd reach out as i'm interested to know!

I am so sorry I haven't gotten back to you on this sooner. Life intervened in a pretty huge way, and I swear Tumblr ate this ask for awhile. This is going to be a long one, because I want to answer your question as completely as I possbly can, but I am not a succinct writer by any means.

I don't mind answering questions at all, and I don't think it's weird or strange to ask a question if you're unsure of something or want clarification or additional knowledge. However. I always put out the disclaimer that I came to queerness, at least out queerness, pretty recently, so even though I'm older, and old enough to remember at least some prominent US queer history as it happened, I was not as directly connected to it as others. That, in addition to it absolutely not being safe to come out in the area where I lived, and as the result there effectively being no queer community where I lived, I'm not as up-to-date as I would like to be. I also did the classic "overinvested ally doesn't realise" thing for a really, really long time.

That said, I'm still happy to answer as much as I can.

Exclusionism, in one way or another, has always existed, as I'm sure you're aware. Queer whites, on the whole, often were and are outrightly hostile and openly racist to all kinds of queer people of colour, fat queers, and plenty of intersections between those and other identities and circumstances. There's definitely been sexist behaviour towards others from both cis-binary genders. What I will say is that queer spaces, in general, have always been more welcoming in terms of actual identities than exclusionists want anyone to believe, and for far longer.

The word queer, since the time I first learnt it (from queer sources), has never, ever meant a specific set of identities. I do not remember the exact terms of how it was explained, but it was a word for people who did not have a word, or didn't want to use specifics. Didn't matter why they didn't have a word, just that they didn't. Everybody was welcome under the definition of queer if they thought they were queer, and while not everyone would have agreed with that as a concept at the time, it was absolutely crucial to my understanding of this community.

For people who defined queer that way, it is very possible that being a male lesbian wouldn't have been seen as a problem, and I have the feeling those who would have taken issue would have been exclusionists anyway, but that may not always have been true. It is sometimes hard to separate the damage lesbian separatism has done to the lesbian and sapphic communities, from what they looked like in general before that, especially to our understanding of feminism and womanhood. Plenty of it predates me, so I don't have as much first-hand context specifically related to male lesbianism as I would need to answer this question more fully. I wish I had more complete experiences, or at least knowledge, to give you.

Among those who truly supported the idea of queerness as I described it, being a male lesbian would have been just as valid as any other identity. How commonly accepted that was, I can't say without stepping outside the scope of my own experience. What I know is that there were a not-insignificant number of people who did embrace that degree of oppenness and acceptance of all queer identities as valid. Hell, I have memories of reading articles defining queerness in mainstream, widely-read teen magazines in the mid-'90s which matched my definition almost exactly.

I do feel like there was a much clearer idea that queerness does not rest on the language someone uses to identify themselves. Queerness, as I learnt it, was always about radical inclusivity. It was always about the community as a whole, no matter what the actual identity was. Everyone was welcome, and we did not have to personally understand to accept, and there was definitely--as I lived it, at least--a feeling that you were expected to accept others as they were, because our community was all we had.

What the queer community of the time understood in a very visceral way was that our lives were at stake; most of us alive in that period knew someone who'd died of AIDS, or had cared for someone, or had some connection to it. Those who had the ability to afford exclusionism had some measure of insulation from that reality. That insulation has extended to more groups in the present, but there is a concerted effort now to strip it away, and it isn't just cishets who are leading the charge.

It is not an accident that the people least accepting of the word queer are the people who tend to hold the most exclusionary beliefs, no matter where they identify in the acronym. They're also the ones most likely to have survived the reactionary-led purge of the '70s, '80s, and early '90s. Their voices were always overrepresented, and that is now leaking into more mainstream acronym and queer spaces in a way that is dangerous to the queer community as a whole.

Take heart, though: it wasn't always like that, and we can make it that way again.