The erasure of LGB: just Q and T in the future?

[Shedbuilder]

I've noticed an increasing number of young academics 'queering' lesbians and gay men. The most glaring example I can lay my hands on was on Radio 4 recently, when an interesting Front Row feature on the Scottish artist Joan Eardley was dominated by a young female academic who mentioned Earley's female 'life partner' without using the word lesbian and then went on to tell us, and her fellow expert, that we should look at her through a 'queer lens'.

I've no idea what a 'queer lens' is. Does it just mean acknowledging that being an out lesbian in the 40s and 50s was a brave and unusual thing and influenced her art? If so, why not talk about her as a lesbian?
By making queer and not lesbian her female response to children and landscape (she painted mainly children and landscapes). This is a real suppression of male and female homosexual experience.

I've since heard other academics queering other LGB people on Radio 4 without correction. As I'm usually driving when it's on I'm not always aware of what programme it is or able to locate it, but here's the Front Row with Eardley:

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000y7tr

I think the Eardley discussion starts at around 20 minutes in. The Scottish voices are a clue.

I'm in my sixties and came out in my late thirties and coming out to myself and then wider society as a lesbian was a frightening brave and joyful thing to do. I constantly use the word lesbian, just to go against the current erasure of it as a word to describe what I am. An adult human female sexually attracted to other adult human females. Not an identity, a lived reality.

Just dare let anyone take my name and call me queer!!!!

@irresistibleoverwhelm

Oh and I’m on several Discords with largely young women (often exclusively so if you count the trans men). Interestingly the young trans men, non-binary and straight women all call themselves “queer”, and can be constantly found policing that term and enforcing it on some of the actually gay young women who have been told off for calling themselves lesbian!

In one group the loudest “queer” person is a young woman, engaged to a man in the military, who bakes cakes for her fiancé and calls herself “queer” because she dresses “alternative” and likes tattoos - but she is entirely straight and will happily admit she isn’t sexually interested in women. Yet she and a young trans man police any appearance of what they perceive as “terf rhetoric” in the group, which includes any statement about men or saying you aren’t sexually interested in men. The young trans man is also only sexually interested in men. Yet they are the self-appointed “queer” ambassadors of the group, and will happily police the sexuality of lesbian women twice their age. I mean you couldn’t make this stuff up really, it’s so daft.

This has been really illuminating. I'm going to respond swiftly and sharply to anyone who uses it now.

[quote PurgatoryOfPotholes]This is the second time I've come across Joan Eardley being retrospectively reassigned.

Previous thread about the last incident.
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4171054-Glasgow-Museums[/quote]
This reminds me of Ann Listers blue plaque which "erased" her lesbian identity.

The plaque honouring Anne Lister was unveiled at Holy Trinity Church in York, where she took the sacrament in 1834 with her lover, Ann Walker.

It originally described her as "gender non-conforming", prompting an online petition to change the wording, which had "nothing to do with sexuality".

York Civic Trust agreed and apologised, and re-did the plaque

all call themselves “queer”, and can be constantly found policing that term and enforcing it on some of the actually gay young women who have been told off for calling themselves lesbian!

I just don't get how, in 2021, we have lesbian erasure by heterosexuals

@FloralBunting

I reported them.

I am not doing the hokey cokey with anti-gay bullshit again.

the anti-gay and anti-lesbian flybys have been gobsmacking the last couple of days

Radio 4 might as well have said "Michel Foucault lens" as"Queer theory" was coined by scholars influenced by him in the late 80's/early 90's.

A "Michel Foucault lens" is chilling

I think it would be a good idea to start sending emails.

My university's LGBT society had 'queer' in the title until I protested in an anonymous post, caused a debate and eventually had it renamed. A lot of these people are probably just going off guidance from Stonewall et. al and have absolutely no literacy surrounding gay history or 'queer theory'. It would be very effective imo to just email any (non-LGBT-specific) organisation you see using 'queer' as an umbrella term and request on 'this is problematic' grounds that they drop the word, without using GC terminology and appealing as much as possible to unity and inclusivity - eg say:

1. not every LGBT person has access to queer theory at university, and not every LGBT person agrees with or understands its general tenets, so it's exclusionary to use the term
2. it's going to be most offputting to older LGBT people, who are the most likely to have heard the word used as a slur and to have faced the most difficulties growing up
3. it's a term that will sound vague, ambiguous and possibly also offputting to ESL speakers, who are likely some of the most marginalised in the UK LGBT community
4. it's just generally someone's personal choice to 'reclaim' the term for themselves, not for others, and it's inappropriate to use for a whole group of people - this is how slur reclamation works

'Queer' is just a way to engineer phony acceptance from the LG/B towards the T, because it turns someone's natural sexual orientation into a deliberate political philosophy (and, conveniently, a consumer identity). 'Queer' activists love using slurs to describe whole groups of people, because they're like edgy children who still yearn for approval: think also of 'whorephobia' and 'slut-shaming' (imagine saying either of those things to an actual woman forced into prostitution!).

There's also a related branch of disability theory called 'crip theory', but I don't see able-bodied theorists calling anyone in extraordinary bodily condition a 'crip', identifying with this term themselves, or using it for all disabled people as a group, even if some object. Maybe it's just a matter of time.

Sorry for long post. Anyway the only way forward from here is letter-writing!

*1. not every LGBT person has access to queer theory at university, and not every LGBT person agrees with or understands its general tenets, so it's exclusionary to use the term

1. it's going to be most offputting to older LGBT people, who are the most likely to have heard the word used as a slur and to have faced the most difficulties growing up
2. it's a term that will sound vague, ambiguous and possibly also offputting to ESL speakers, who are likely some of the most marginalised in the UK LGBT community
3. it's just generally someone's personal choice to 'reclaim' the term for themselves, not for others, and it's inappropriate to use for a whole group of people - this is how slur reclamation works*

Really good points, all of them.

@NoWireHangersEver, excellent post. Have cut and pasted into my 'useful responses' file.

It's just riding on the back of others' struggles, isn't it? I sometimes have to remind youngish (under 35-ish) LGB people that until 2004 not only were we not allowed to legally formalise relationships that in some cases had existed for 30 and 40 years, but in many cases long-standing partners were prevented by hospitals from saying goodbye to their loved ones and would then, because of IHT, often lose their homes when their partner died. I went to a flurry of CPs in 2004 where ageing lesbian and gay couples, some with serious health issues, wept once the register was signed because it meant that they finally had some security.

Until 2004 bars and shops and other services could refuse goods and services to you for being LGB. I was living in Wales at a time when a bar in central Cardiff had a sign in the window saying No same-sex couples allowed.

The Queer generation has no understanding of what it's like to be an actual second-class citizen, which is what we were.

Great posts. It’s reminded me of this Twitter thread, for some reason I can only view it on what looks like Russian Twitter.

mobile.twitter.com/tucker_shaw/status/1041839498999603202

@FindTheTruth

Radio 4 might as well have said "Michel Foucault lens" as"Queer theory" was coined by scholars influenced by him in the late 80's/early 90's.

A "Michel Foucault lens" is chilling

Indeed. Universities are usually very hot on unearthing the problematic histories of this or that institution, theory, name and so on, and stepping away from them. Not so with Foucault, it seems.

I've always thought it seems offensive to LGB people to have all these other letters lumped onto them when they have no relation to sexuality?

That is why the LGB Alliance was formed. There are also LGB Alliances around Europe, South America and now the US as more and more LGB people realise how homophobic the T and Q are in their insistence that gender and not sex is what matters. How can we have same-sex relationships if sex is irrelevant and you can choose — and change — your gender?

lgballiance.org.uk

Please subscribe to their e-newsletter and even make a donation or become a friend. They need all the help they can get. LGB people are literally fighting for our right to identify ourselves and not be subsumed into the T and Q mess.

Second that recommendation.

The very fact that the LGB Alliance is attacked for its focus on LGB people, while they tell those of who object to the Q that we don't belong in the 'community' shpuld tell you something significant about how the LGBTQ+ adherents actually view LGB people.

That slogan 'No LGB without the T' looks more like a threat to me than ever.

That does sound threatening. "We're LGB who stand with T" would work for LGB people who actively want to be part of the same group and want to state that. Or the "No LGB without the T" would work if it was heterosexual groups who were trying to force a split. But when it's specifically aimed at LGB people who are choosing to split, then I don't think it can be interpreted as anything other than a threat.

This is interesting. I recently had a Discord discussion with some women who identify as queer about why they identify with that word. They agreed they do so because they like how uncomfortable the word makes straight people.

I like the fact they give no consideration to it making some gay/bi people uncomfortable. I can't stand the term personally, it makes me cringe - and I'm a bi woman in a monogamous, heterosexual relationship.

Don't get me started on people who would claim my husband and I are in a queer relationship. We are not.

For people who are all about 'you are whatever you self identify as', they're remarkably disrespectful about other peoples choices of labels.