#idk if spg was my gateway drug

[intergalacticgoose]

I am very glad a post I made about social contagion and Steam Powered Giraffe is finding its audience.

BUT.

Even though this was intended as a joke, I have thought about it since and did see some things in tags that made me want to clarify what I mean by “social contagion” versus what I called “the station” in my tags. Someone used “gateway drug,” which is also apropos. Because there is a very crucial difference between the two, I think, and I want to make sure nothing I said gets misconstrued by the wrong people.

When cishet people say being queer is due to social contagion, what they’re saying is that were it not for exposure to queerness, or deviance, in media or in public life, people would default to Straight. That’s why they’re working so hard to scrub queerness, or any hint of queerness, from the public sphere.

But the thing is, they wouldn’t be so afraid of queer exposure if cishetness was that ingrained, right? It’s not that people are being exposed to lgbtq+ people or content and suddenly becoming queer, they already were or it was through that exposure that they realized they were. Those are completely different things.

It’s like going through your life being told you only have to be options A or B. There’s no other options, you’re A or B. But then one day you see option C and you’re like “woah, nobody told me about C, that looks way more comfortable/authentic” or “woah, I’m totally C, why did nobody tell me about that? If I don’t have to try so hard to be A or B anymore, I won’t.”

The humor for me is just how, to me, blatantly obvious, like it is a verifiable, Googleable fact that gender, sex, and sexuality are complex and largely social constructs and that binary gender is a pretty recent Western phenomenon, and yet conservatives (and centrists, even some Dems I hate to say!) are acting like social media is creating queerness, and it’s like no, more people are just more likely to see option C, D, and Etc. these days.

And it’s the type of things they’re trying to ban. Like, if the cisheterosexual institution can’t hold its own against a short haircut, certain colors, people kissing, or, in the case of my post, 2-4 singing robot mimes, perhaps the institution was not that strong to begin with!!! That’s just how people found their option C, and that’s a good thing!! More of that!! That they can’t see how obvious this is, that’s what’s absurd to me.

The thing is, before social media, people found ways before. They found their stations in other people, people whose genders they felt more aligned with their own, in spiritual centering, in nature, in everything. They wrote secret notes, experimented in private, tried new clothes on, and gave each other secret names. Queer people, trans people, nonbinary people, everyone else, have always been here.

Even if they ban queer lit from every public school (I hope they don’t, and they most definitely shouldn’t, but this is a catastrophic example), we will continue to find our ways out of this sour little cage of cisheteronormativity. Whether they like it or not.