#queer History

[whereserpentswalk]

If I have learned anything from this comment section it's that the average goy is far closer to holocaust denial then they know.

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

[makingqueerhistory]

Gay Girl Prayers

Emily Austin

A collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

The extreme level of sass in Emily Austin's Gay Girl Prayers does not mean that this collection is irreverent. On the contrary, in rewriting Bible verses to affirm and uplift queer, feminist, and trans realities, Austin invites readers into a giddy celebration of difference and a tender appreciation for the lives and perspectives of "strange women."

Packed with zingy one liners, sexual innuendo, self-respect, U-Hauling, and painfully earnest declarations of love, this is gayness at its best, harnessed to a higher purpose and ready to fight the powers that be.

(Affiliate link above)

[gaywebcorenostalgia]

Fresh Fruit Records, 1996

[justdavina]

SO much FUN!

[ladyblacklavender]

It’s Remembrance Day and well… it’s happening again.

Fragile men on the internet are claiming the rainbow poppies are “disrespectful” to those who died in the Great War etc. Followed by the comparison of a gay man voguing at Pride to soldiers going over the top. Yet this is not just a half-baked attempt to mask homophobia. It also displays a fundamental lack of knowledge about the history of the world wars. Especially that of queerness in the trenches.

Though the Edwardian period is famed for its restrictive attitudes to homosexuality, class and gender, some of our most famous poetry, art and film has been made by or has taken inspiration from real life LGBT+ individuals living and active between 1900 to 1919.

The famous names are visible because of the efforts made by historians to map their personal lives. But other queer people existed alongside them even if they had nothing to their name. We do not know about them because Imperialist might, particularly in a time of active war, insisted on the erasure of gay lives. It was a culture that could brook no vulnerability, in which macho stereotypes and feminine domestic tropes were key to the very emblem of Britain, where the queering of empire was a subversion not to be tolerated. To say it’s “old fashioned to be blending national symbolism with colonialism and traditional hetero-masculinity (to declare that the two were powerful and sacred to Great British Values) is an understatement.

That being said, Britain is still grappling with its Imperial history and military future in a fast changing world. Ideas around what it means to be a man or a woman are changing as well as attitudes towards sexual expression, peace and social hierarchy and rightly so. Many Britons may feel they live in the shadow of the “good old days”, with a sense of bitterness that comes from a sense of not belonging to the now and the fear of losing power.

It is natural to be wary of what we don’t understand. But we must adapt rather than default to hatred and bigotry.

Lest we forget the LGBT+ individuals who were sacrificed in an unjust war and also those who did what they could to prevent losses and aid their fellow person. We can’t let history forget them.

[campgender]

“You can’t tell butch-fem by people’s dress. You couldn’t even really tell in the ’50s. I knew women with long hair, fem clothes, and found out they were butches. Actually I even knew one who wore men’s clothes, haircuts and ties, who was a fem.”

white butch “Reggie” quoted in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy & Madeline D. Davis (1994)

[nerdygaymormon]

[sweatermuppet]

closing statement from an article about being intersex & the possible connection of gender expression and sexuality in intersex individuals, published in The Gay Liberator, 1970s

[allthebooksandcrannies]

Good news in the world!!! Read the article here.

The law also will extend adoption and inheritance rights to same-sex couples!

[aerithpilled]

the butch/femme scene of 1990s san francisco by chloe sherman

[makingqueerhistory]

I'm from the USA and am trying to take hope and inspiration from our queer predecessors who faced dark times in the past. How did they keep going even when it felt like the world was ending?Do you have any recommendations for queer historical essays, poems, books, anything to find comfort and hope for these dark times?

Yes, I have a couple of stories for this.

Claude Cahun

A queer surrealist photographer from 1920's paris, Claude was Jewish and recognized the rise of antisemitism in their home country and watched it become fascism. Here is a quote from their article:

"In 1937 Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore cut off many connections because of the war and ran to Jersey to avoid anti-Semitic violence. Upon arrival, they went back to using their birth names and laid low until the Germans took Jersey. Moore and Cahun set to work. They used their experience with art and disguising their genders to create works that spread misinformation, seeds of rebellion and implied that there was a large-scale resistance happening when in reality, it was just the two of them. Though some of their work was based on confusing the soldiers, they also translated and transcribed BBC transmissions into German, detailing the war crimes that were being committed. They would have these translations on pieces of paper that they would slip into soldier's pockets, matchboxes, and anywhere a soldier may stumble across it and possibly read it. An investigation was started, and Nazi authorities believed there to be a group of people doing this. When the two were discovered to be behind the actions, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore were sentenced to death. Fortunately, the sentence was never carried out because the island of Jersey was liberated from German rule only a year later. Claude took a picture upon their release in front of the camps with a Nazi eagle pin between their teeth."

And Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz

who wrote:

"Poetry readings and concert attendance—and often a chat over vodka—were not only forms

of escapism, but also a search for better, more substantive aspects of human beings, a search

which would end, more often than not, in complete disillusionment. If it could be possible, to

discern, in these notes even if only for a moment a measure of humanity in that time of

inhumanity, the goal of this publication would be fulfilled.”

I think his whole article is worth reading.

Also here are some books to read:

Your Art Will Save Your Life

Beth Pickens

Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

Ben MacIntyre

Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color

Christopher Soto

The New Queer Conscience

Adam Eli

(Some of the links are affiliate links)

[dreamingmappist]

It’s not the first lesbian wedding in the Philippines—but was first in Mindanao around 8 years ago. Still badass I admit. There was a mass same-sex wedding in Baguio in 2003. Not sure if there’s any earlier ones.

[endusviolence]

Rowling isn't denying holocaust. She just pointed out that burning of transgender health books is a lie as that form of cosmetic surgery didn't exist. But of course you knew that already, didn't you?

I was thinking I'd probably see one of you! You're wrong :) Let's review the history a bit, shall we?

In this case, what we're talking about is the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or in English, The Institute of Sexology. This Institute was founded and headed by a gay Jewish sexologist named Magnus Hirschfeld. It was founded in July of 1919 as the first sexology research clinic in the world, and was run as a private, non-profit clinic. Hirschfeld and the researchers who worked there would give out consultations, medical advice, and even treatments for free to their poorer clientele, as well as give thousands of lectures and build a unique library full of books on gender, sexuality, and eroticism. Of course, being a gay man, Hirschfeld focused a lot on the gay community and proving that homosexuality was natural and could not be "cured".

Hirschfeld was unique in his time because he believed that nobody's gender was either one or the other. Rather, he contended that everyone is a mixture of both male and female, with every individual having their own unique mix of traits.

This leads into the Institute's work with transgender patients. Hirschfeld was actually the one to coin the term "transsexual" in 1923, though this word didn't become popular phrasing until 30 years later when Harry Benjamin began expanding his research (I'll just be shortening it to trans for this brief overview.) For the Institute, their revolutionary work with gay men eventually began to attract other members of the LGBTA+, including of course trans people.

Contrary to what Anon says, sex reassignment surgery was first tested in 1912. It'd already being used on humans throughout Europe during the 1920's by the time a doctor at the Institute named Ludwig Levy-Lenz began performing it on patients in 1931. Hirschfeld was at first opposed, but he came around quickly because it lowered the rate of suicide among their trans patients. Not only was reassignment performed at the Institute, but both facial feminization and facial masculization surgery were also done.

The Institute employed some of these patients, gave them therapy to help with other issues, even gave some of the mentioned surgeries for free to this who could not afford it! They spoke out on their behalf to the public, even getting Berlin police to help them create "transvestite passes" to allow people to dress however they wanted without the threat of being arrested. They worked together to fight the law, including trying to strike down Paragraph 175, which made it illegal to be homosexual. The picture below is from their holiday party, Magnus Hirschfeld being the gentleman on the right with the fabulous mustache. Many of the other people in this photo are transgender.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of a group of people. Some are smiling at the camera, others have serious expressions. Either way, they all seem to be happy. On the right side, an older gentleman in glasses- Magnus Hirschfeld- is sitting. He has short hair and a bushy mustache. He is resting one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of him. His other hand is being held by a person to his left. Another person to his right is holding his shoulder.]

There was always push back against the Institute, especially from conservatives who saw all of this as a bad thing. But conservatism can't stop progress without destroying it. They weren't willing to go that far for a good while. It all ended in March of 1933, when a new Chancellor was elected. The Nazis did not like homosexuals for several reasons. Chief among them, we break the boundaries of "normal" society. Shortly after the election, on May 6th, the book burnings began. The Jewish, gay, and obviously liberal Magnus Hirschfeld and his library of boundary-breaking literature was one of the very first targets. Thankfully, Hirschfeld was spared by virtue of being in Paris at the time (he would die in 1935, before the Nazis were able to invade France). His library wasn't so lucky.

This famous picture of the book burnings was taken after the Institute of Sexology had been raided. That's their books. Literature on so much about sexuality, eroticism, and gender, yes including their new work on trans people. This is the trans community's Alexandria. We're incredibly lucky that enough of it survived for Harry Benjamin and everyone who came after him was able to build on the Institute's work.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of the May Nazi book burning of the Institute of Sexology's library. A soldier, back facing the camera, is throwing a stack of books into the fire. In the background of the right side, a crowd is watching.]

As the Holocaust went on, the homosexuals of Germany became a targeted group. This did include transgender people, no matter what you say. To deny this reality is Holocaust denial. JK Rowling and everyone else who tries to pretend like this isn't reality is participating in that evil. You're agreeing with the Nazis.

But of course, you knew that already, didn't you?

Edit: Added image IDs. I apologize to those using screen readers for forgetting them. Please reblog this version instead.

[post-futurism]

As a queer person online who is not from the dominant cultural powerhouse in the world, the most common phrase I see is "know your queer history". I was always annoyed by this mantra not because I didn't want to take the time to understand the evolution of queerness through time but because that statement was always silently referring to North American queer history.

Australians. We now have an incredible new LGBTIQA+ documentary about queerness in Australia's colonial and Aboriginal history and it's written by gay comedians. Wins all around. If you want to learn about YOUR queer history, the three part documentary Queerstralia is now showing on ABC iView. Go go go!

[justdavina]

Stunning Gurl!

[genderqueerdykes]

that's so sick that we've got a reccomendation! here's Khane's socials and the address and name of her barbershop:

https://www.instagram.com/khanekutzwell/

Camera Ready Kutz, Inc. 73 Utica Ave Brooklyn, NY 11213

excerpt from Original Plumbing, a publication for and by transmasculine people.

Khane - The Brooklyn Barber

"Even though I identify with the trans community, I also identify with the butch community. When I barber I use 'she' because it's important to me to use that pronoun in this male dominated profession. The are 'female' barbers, but I don't see them getting notoriety. That's why I take every opportunity to do interviews, barber in public, and post photos to show that female-bodied barbers do exist and are just as good if not better than persons identified male at birth."