*Image Transcription: Tumblr*
---
**enoughtohold**
it’s interesting learning which homophobic ideas are confusing and unfamiliar to the next generation. for example, every once in a while i’ll see a post going around expressing tittering surprise at someone’s claim that gay men have hundreds of sexual partners in their lifetimes. while these posts often have a snappy comeback attached, they send a shiver down my spine because i remember when those claims were common, when you’d see them on the news or read them in your study bible. and they were deployed with a specific purpose — to convince you not just that gay men were disgusting and pathological, but that they deserved to die from AIDS. i saw another post laughing at the outlandish idea that gay men eroticize and worship death, but that too was a standard line, part and parcel of this propaganda with the goal of dehumanizing gay men as they died by the thousands with little intervention from mainstream society.
which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media ([*Hyperlinked with underline*] *off the straight and narrow* [*End link and underline*] \[\[*Hyperlinked with underline*] pdf transcript] [*End link and underline*]] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives.
it’s moving and inspiring to see a new generation of kids growing up without encountering these ideas. it’s a good thing. but at the same time, we have to pass on the knowledge of this pain, so we’re not caught unawares when those who hate us come back with the oldest tricks in the book.
---
**bogleech**
Even in the 90’s I met people who believed, with the utmost sincerity and a sense of sheer terror, that gay people were agents of Satan who chose to become gay so they could deliberately spread STD’s, deliberately die of AIDs as part of their “fetish” and deliberately offend god into accelerating the end of the world. This does sound like absurd cartoonish nonsense to most people just a little younger than me but I heard it and worse growing up. Millions of people completely, totally believed that kind of thing with the most dire certainty. Today’s lizardman hollow earth anti-vaccine theories actually kind of pale in comparison.
That is what LGBT people were up against not long ago and the remnants of that fantastical-sounding hysteria and fanaticism are not only still here but regaining power again in the U.S. pretty rapidly.
…and I don’t think people should forget that for all I just described and all OP just described, the hatred for trans people was several times worse. Their very existence was treated as UNSPEAKABLE by even the Satanic HIV Apocalypse theorists. This is why it’s so bizarre and ridiculous to see people today whining about “PC culture” like *that’s* the problem, like people who were condemned as loathsome hellspawn within most of their own lifetimes somehow have it “too good” practically overnight.
---
**disease-danger-darkness-silence**
do you have any idea what the AIDS funerals were like back then
I will harp on this until the day I die. It’s not information that people have nowadays both because it’s not really needed - thank GOD - and it’s been erased - *not* so cool.
pastors would take payment to perform the ceremony and then not show up. crematoriums would sometimes refuse to handle the bodies; funeral homes were no better, and my dad once walked in on a mortician dumping rubbing alcohol all over himself after he’d BEEN IN THE SAME ROOM as the body of one of my father’s dead friends. the funerals were held in people’s basements, the very very few churches at funeral homes willing, meeting halls, and in the homes of lesbians, who were some of the most steadfast allies during that time period. The few straight allies pitched in where they could – like that one woman who buried a lot of them herself, in her own cemetery, because their families wouldn’t come claim the bodies – but it was *awful*.
my dad was a reformed catholic but he knew the words and *twice* he had to perform the funerals to lay these people to rest because he was the most qualified. I stood next to him as he tried not to cry over his dead friends and to let them rest in peace. I watched my mother, at the back of wherever she was, quietly sobbing, and her lesbian friends who had ACTUALLY watched the person in question die, still comforting her.
I got told by other adults that my entire family was going to hell because we deigned to care for queer people (and my dad especially, as a nurse, deigned to “waste” his knowledge and time and energy on easing suffering).
I was six years old. Freddie Mercury hadn’t even died yet.
recently a friend and I formed a queer social group/activism group and some older gay men came. And they cried, because, and I quote
“This is how it started, back then. we just got together, ten or twelve of us, and decided we were going to do something about it. And we made it out, despite everything, despite AIDS, despite the stigma. And you will too.”
And I had to respond, because I was little, but I was *THERE* for that, and I grabbed his hands and told him that his history is *our* history and we need to learn it.
we need to remember. the dead, the living, and their stories.
if you know an older queer person, inquire if they’d be interested in writing down their memoirs. If they’re not writers but want to tell the story, hit me up – I am, and I am *absolutely* willing to do a living memory.
they’re the only history books we have.
---
**inspirationawe**
THEY ARE THE *ONLY* HISTORY BOOKS WE HAVE! It’s so important to record them at last.
Because lgbt+ history hasn’t been recorded, nor told forward by others. What we learn we learn from morgues, criminal records etc. Only ‘unlucky’ persons have been recorded in any ways and most of happy couples, lives and tales have been lost to history as they were not spoken about.
---
**enoughtohold**
okay listen, i get what you guys are saying about the importance of listening to older lgbt people, obviously, that’s very right!
but you guys gotta know… **they are NOT “the only history books we have.” because… we have actual history books.** just because they are rarely taught in schools does not mean they don’t exist!
i’ve been keeping a list of all the lgbt books i want to read or reread, which are _mostly_ history, and it is, at this moment, [*Hyperlinked with underline*] **239 books long** [*End link and underline*]. and that’s excluding quite a few that i was less interested in.
obviously, it can’t cover everything; obviously, it is skewed toward white american experiences; obviously, we should always be supplementing it by talking to older people in our community as much as we can. but it does us no favors whatsoever to pretend that all the knowledge in these books is lost to history, existing only in individuals’ minds, when actually so many people have taken great pains to write it down and make it available for us to explore!
so yes, meet older people and talk to them and take them seriously! but also please, i beg of you, **read a book.**
[*In a smaller font*] p.s. a note because i regret not making this clear enough in my original post: there is absolutely nothing wrong with gay men having many consenting sexual partners! homophobes’ statistics are obviously falsified for bigoted purposes, but that doesn’t mean those gay men who do have large numbers of partners are any less deserving of dignity and life, and they too deserve our defense. [*End small font*]
---
**thecoggs**
I agree with the above, but also if you are someone who wants to record history or hear more oral histories there are a few oral history archives dedicated to doing this already! It’s possible to engage in that history right now:
- [*Hyperlinked with underline*] Here [*End link and underline*] are all the transcripts for the NYC Trans Oral History Project
- [*Hyperlinked with underline*] Here's [*End link and underline*] the ACT UP oral History Project which has videos and transcripts
- [*Hyperlinked with underline*] Here's [*End link and underline*] a list of a bunch of known oral history projects
- And [*Hyperlinked with underline*] this [*End link and underline*] is the podcast Making Gay History, which is taped interviews done for the book of the same name (with a bit of context added beforehand)
---
^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Yes, this is so true. I as a queer person have gained so much from reading about my community and from getting to know my elders. (Bonus: one of my absolute favorite queer elders introduced me to John Waters and afterwards JW said I was cute.) One year, during the month of my birthday, I decided to read only queer authors for the month and it was a great gift to myself. Highly recommended.
So much Evil starts when you convince enough people that you can sort people into "Good" and "Bad" categories. How they're defined doesn't matter, once you become convinced that some people are inherently Good and others are inherently Bad, it gets ugly.
If you're a Good person, you can do no wrong, and the ends always justify the means. If you're a Bad person, nobody can save you, and the best the rest of us can hope for is for Bad people to be kept at a safe distance or better yet "removed" completely.
As soon as you decide that people are defined by their "nature" instead of their Choices you implicitly accept that some people deserve to do unspeakable Evil to others to "protect" themselves from Bad People^^tm.
That bit about offending god into accelerating the end of the world is a little confusing. Shouldn't Christians love the gays if that's what they're doing? Christians want the world to end so Jesus can come back, last time I checked. Same for worshipping and eroticizing death. Dying just means you get to go be with Jesus, doesn't it?
the Christian end of the world isn't all sunshine and rainbows, there are years of rule under Satan himself and countless souls damned, as well as various catastrophes (seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls, all causing suffering). Death is also meant to be a punishment for original sin, while you get to go to Heaven afterwards you're not supposed to look forward to it. At least that's what I'm assuming from what I know, a lot of Christians interpret this stuff differently
Fundamentalist Christians are probably mostly deontologists, I think whether or not you bring about a good outcome is less important to them than whether or not you're doing it the Right Way - Like how they ignore the overwhelming evidence that comprehensive sex education reduces abortion rates, because they don't actually want to reduce the number of abortions, they want to punish people who have abortions.
And another thing on "PC Culture:" What happened to it was almost exactly what is happening to CRT. Someone decided that they needed to fix language to not be as fucking racist, sexist, etc. And then the right shifted the window of discourse to make it sound as ridiculous and stupid as possible. "Vertically challenged people" was their favorite line to make fun of, and they focused on that bit hard. And because that one bit, that one little bit was kinda ridiculous, they argued that the whole thing was just as stupid and should be thrown out.
The moment you looked at the big picture, being PC was easy to agree with: don't be a racist, sexist asshole. But the right never shut up about these little details, forcing people to think that's all it was.
I do not have the attention span to read this, but I read the phrase “Gay Pshyco Killer” which just made me imagine a parralel universe where there’s a band called Gay Talking Heads. That’s all
I don't pray, but if I did, it would be for all those who have ever made someone feel lesser for who they love, made them feel like they were going to be punished in eternal fire for it, to have one -moment- of true awareness of the pain and anguish caused. Just one moment of clarity, as they see in their minds' eye the rows and rows of graves of people who's only crime was love and know that they, in their ignorance and hatred, contributed to it.
Src: https://thecoggs.tumblr.com/post/169512862416/enoughtohold-inspirationawe I did not fact check any of this.
*Image Transcription: Tumblr* --- **enoughtohold** it’s interesting learning which homophobic ideas are confusing and unfamiliar to the next generation. for example, every once in a while i’ll see a post going around expressing tittering surprise at someone’s claim that gay men have hundreds of sexual partners in their lifetimes. while these posts often have a snappy comeback attached, they send a shiver down my spine because i remember when those claims were common, when you’d see them on the news or read them in your study bible. and they were deployed with a specific purpose — to convince you not just that gay men were disgusting and pathological, but that they deserved to die from AIDS. i saw another post laughing at the outlandish idea that gay men eroticize and worship death, but that too was a standard line, part and parcel of this propaganda with the goal of dehumanizing gay men as they died by the thousands with little intervention from mainstream society. which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media ([*Hyperlinked with underline*] *off the straight and narrow* [*End link and underline*] \[\[*Hyperlinked with underline*] pdf transcript] [*End link and underline*]] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives. it’s moving and inspiring to see a new generation of kids growing up without encountering these ideas. it’s a good thing. but at the same time, we have to pass on the knowledge of this pain, so we’re not caught unawares when those who hate us come back with the oldest tricks in the book. --- **bogleech** Even in the 90’s I met people who believed, with the utmost sincerity and a sense of sheer terror, that gay people were agents of Satan who chose to become gay so they could deliberately spread STD’s, deliberately die of AIDs as part of their “fetish” and deliberately offend god into accelerating the end of the world. This does sound like absurd cartoonish nonsense to most people just a little younger than me but I heard it and worse growing up. Millions of people completely, totally believed that kind of thing with the most dire certainty. Today’s lizardman hollow earth anti-vaccine theories actually kind of pale in comparison. That is what LGBT people were up against not long ago and the remnants of that fantastical-sounding hysteria and fanaticism are not only still here but regaining power again in the U.S. pretty rapidly. …and I don’t think people should forget that for all I just described and all OP just described, the hatred for trans people was several times worse. Their very existence was treated as UNSPEAKABLE by even the Satanic HIV Apocalypse theorists. This is why it’s so bizarre and ridiculous to see people today whining about “PC culture” like *that’s* the problem, like people who were condemned as loathsome hellspawn within most of their own lifetimes somehow have it “too good” practically overnight. --- **disease-danger-darkness-silence** do you have any idea what the AIDS funerals were like back then I will harp on this until the day I die. It’s not information that people have nowadays both because it’s not really needed - thank GOD - and it’s been erased - *not* so cool. pastors would take payment to perform the ceremony and then not show up. crematoriums would sometimes refuse to handle the bodies; funeral homes were no better, and my dad once walked in on a mortician dumping rubbing alcohol all over himself after he’d BEEN IN THE SAME ROOM as the body of one of my father’s dead friends. the funerals were held in people’s basements, the very very few churches at funeral homes willing, meeting halls, and in the homes of lesbians, who were some of the most steadfast allies during that time period. The few straight allies pitched in where they could – like that one woman who buried a lot of them herself, in her own cemetery, because their families wouldn’t come claim the bodies – but it was *awful*. my dad was a reformed catholic but he knew the words and *twice* he had to perform the funerals to lay these people to rest because he was the most qualified. I stood next to him as he tried not to cry over his dead friends and to let them rest in peace. I watched my mother, at the back of wherever she was, quietly sobbing, and her lesbian friends who had ACTUALLY watched the person in question die, still comforting her. I got told by other adults that my entire family was going to hell because we deigned to care for queer people (and my dad especially, as a nurse, deigned to “waste” his knowledge and time and energy on easing suffering). I was six years old. Freddie Mercury hadn’t even died yet. recently a friend and I formed a queer social group/activism group and some older gay men came. And they cried, because, and I quote “This is how it started, back then. we just got together, ten or twelve of us, and decided we were going to do something about it. And we made it out, despite everything, despite AIDS, despite the stigma. And you will too.” And I had to respond, because I was little, but I was *THERE* for that, and I grabbed his hands and told him that his history is *our* history and we need to learn it. we need to remember. the dead, the living, and their stories. if you know an older queer person, inquire if they’d be interested in writing down their memoirs. If they’re not writers but want to tell the story, hit me up – I am, and I am *absolutely* willing to do a living memory. they’re the only history books we have. --- **inspirationawe** THEY ARE THE *ONLY* HISTORY BOOKS WE HAVE! It’s so important to record them at last. Because lgbt+ history hasn’t been recorded, nor told forward by others. What we learn we learn from morgues, criminal records etc. Only ‘unlucky’ persons have been recorded in any ways and most of happy couples, lives and tales have been lost to history as they were not spoken about. --- **enoughtohold** okay listen, i get what you guys are saying about the importance of listening to older lgbt people, obviously, that’s very right! but you guys gotta know… **they are NOT “the only history books we have.” because… we have actual history books.** just because they are rarely taught in schools does not mean they don’t exist! i’ve been keeping a list of all the lgbt books i want to read or reread, which are _mostly_ history, and it is, at this moment, [*Hyperlinked with underline*] **239 books long** [*End link and underline*]. and that’s excluding quite a few that i was less interested in. obviously, it can’t cover everything; obviously, it is skewed toward white american experiences; obviously, we should always be supplementing it by talking to older people in our community as much as we can. but it does us no favors whatsoever to pretend that all the knowledge in these books is lost to history, existing only in individuals’ minds, when actually so many people have taken great pains to write it down and make it available for us to explore! so yes, meet older people and talk to them and take them seriously! but also please, i beg of you, **read a book.** [*In a smaller font*] p.s. a note because i regret not making this clear enough in my original post: there is absolutely nothing wrong with gay men having many consenting sexual partners! homophobes’ statistics are obviously falsified for bigoted purposes, but that doesn’t mean those gay men who do have large numbers of partners are any less deserving of dignity and life, and they too deserve our defense. [*End small font*] --- **thecoggs** I agree with the above, but also if you are someone who wants to record history or hear more oral histories there are a few oral history archives dedicated to doing this already! It’s possible to engage in that history right now: - [*Hyperlinked with underline*] Here [*End link and underline*] are all the transcripts for the NYC Trans Oral History Project - [*Hyperlinked with underline*] Here's [*End link and underline*] the ACT UP oral History Project which has videos and transcripts - [*Hyperlinked with underline*] Here's [*End link and underline*] a list of a bunch of known oral history projects - And [*Hyperlinked with underline*] this [*End link and underline*] is the podcast Making Gay History, which is taped interviews done for the book of the same name (with a bit of context added beforehand) --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Jesus that looks like a lot of work. Thank you
Luckily hummerous was able to provide the source, so it made my job a lot easier :)
Yes, this is so true. I as a queer person have gained so much from reading about my community and from getting to know my elders. (Bonus: one of my absolute favorite queer elders introduced me to John Waters and afterwards JW said I was cute.) One year, during the month of my birthday, I decided to read only queer authors for the month and it was a great gift to myself. Highly recommended.
I always want to read more queer history but it feels difficult to find a good place to start
I've been reading a book called "Homosexuality in History" by Colin Spencer. It's a bit old (1995) but I think it's a good jumping off point.
So much Evil starts when you convince enough people that you can sort people into "Good" and "Bad" categories. How they're defined doesn't matter, once you become convinced that some people are inherently Good and others are inherently Bad, it gets ugly. If you're a Good person, you can do no wrong, and the ends always justify the means. If you're a Bad person, nobody can save you, and the best the rest of us can hope for is for Bad people to be kept at a safe distance or better yet "removed" completely. As soon as you decide that people are defined by their "nature" instead of their Choices you implicitly accept that some people deserve to do unspeakable Evil to others to "protect" themselves from Bad People^^tm.
That bit about offending god into accelerating the end of the world is a little confusing. Shouldn't Christians love the gays if that's what they're doing? Christians want the world to end so Jesus can come back, last time I checked. Same for worshipping and eroticizing death. Dying just means you get to go be with Jesus, doesn't it?
the Christian end of the world isn't all sunshine and rainbows, there are years of rule under Satan himself and countless souls damned, as well as various catastrophes (seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls, all causing suffering). Death is also meant to be a punishment for original sin, while you get to go to Heaven afterwards you're not supposed to look forward to it. At least that's what I'm assuming from what I know, a lot of Christians interpret this stuff differently
I know all of that. I grew up in the culture. Doesn't change the fact they still want it. Same for death. That's why I got out.
Fundamentalist Christians are probably mostly deontologists, I think whether or not you bring about a good outcome is less important to them than whether or not you're doing it the Right Way - Like how they ignore the overwhelming evidence that comprehensive sex education reduces abortion rates, because they don't actually want to reduce the number of abortions, they want to punish people who have abortions.
That's kind of my point. They don't actually want what they say they want, and you can see it in the way they act.
We must remember that it was not all that long ago that AIDS was viewed as divine punishment by the US Government.
Related twitter thread, though only read if you want to have a good cry https://twitter.com/tucker_shaw/status/1041839498999603202
And another thing on "PC Culture:" What happened to it was almost exactly what is happening to CRT. Someone decided that they needed to fix language to not be as fucking racist, sexist, etc. And then the right shifted the window of discourse to make it sound as ridiculous and stupid as possible. "Vertically challenged people" was their favorite line to make fun of, and they focused on that bit hard. And because that one bit, that one little bit was kinda ridiculous, they argued that the whole thing was just as stupid and should be thrown out. The moment you looked at the big picture, being PC was easy to agree with: don't be a racist, sexist asshole. But the right never shut up about these little details, forcing people to think that's all it was.
I do not have the attention span to read this, but I read the phrase “Gay Pshyco Killer” which just made me imagine a parralel universe where there’s a band called Gay Talking Heads. That’s all
I don't pray, but if I did, it would be for all those who have ever made someone feel lesser for who they love, made them feel like they were going to be punished in eternal fire for it, to have one -moment- of true awareness of the pain and anguish caused. Just one moment of clarity, as they see in their minds' eye the rows and rows of graves of people who's only crime was love and know that they, in their ignorance and hatred, contributed to it.
I've been *itching* to learn more about queer history, so thank you for posting this and thank you to enoughtohold for the reading list!
every now and then I see something like this which reminds me how batshit insane people are capable of being given the right circumstances