Joe is a gay man. A real swell guy who parts his hair down the side, says his prayers, and pays his taxes. He just so happens to suck cock. Well, one cock at least; his husband's cock. They've been married for almost twenty years, have two adopted Filipino children, a labradoodle, and a mid-century craftsman with a white picket fence in the suburbs. Joe is also an usher at the local Lutheran church, works 9-to-5 for a Fortune 500 company and votes blue no matter who. Joe is LGBT, but he isn't Queer.
Sue isn't quite sure what the fuck she is, but she definitely isn't straight. She fucks guys, lots of guys, sometimes more than one at a time, but she fucks girls too or really anybody willing who happens to turn her on in the right way. She uses she/her pronouns but doesn't really consider herself to be anymore female than she does straight. She wears a dress but also wears a mohawk, six piercings, and more tattoos than she can count on two hands. She lives in a trailer on the weird side of town with two drag queens she calls sisters and a teenage runaway who calls her mom. Sue hasn't been to church since she was molested, makes just enough cash to get by making kinky videos on OnlyFans, and wouldn't vote for another Democrat if you paid her double.
Sue has zero interest in mainstream society. Sue may or may not be LGBT, but she is definitely fucking Queer and often feels too Queer for any of those letters.
This is a distinction that I feel needs to be made but nobody seems to want to make it because nobody wants to hurt anyone's feelings. I get it, and the last thing that I want to do here is play the gatekeeper telling who can identify as what and when. But there is a very big difference between being LGBT and being Queer and that difference seems to be growing. So, I feel that a few distinctions need to be made here before we cease to be a community at all.
The harsh reality is that while Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender are each specific categories of people who are traditionally Queer, 'LGBT' itself is more of a brand than an identity. It is a label used to market these sexual and/or gender minorities to straight people for mainstream consumption. Liberals love it because it's clean and neat and hyper-specific. Everybody gets a letter and every letter fits into a consumer-friendly box.
And plenty of L's, G's, B's, and T's embrace this brand but they often embrace it more out of a fear of isolation than anything else. Most of us come from some kind of trauma and the Christian Zionists on the right are always looking for new ways to burn us. But when it all comes down to it, 'LGBT' is little more than a form of domestication. It is a way to normalize people once defined by non-conformity and it's often done from above with the worst of intentions.
America is an empire, a huge conglomeration that is constantly expanding. This kind of megastructure thrives on annihilation; the erasure of any identity that might make its subjects less compliant consumers. Sometimes this means traditional genocide, just straight-up mass slaughter, but sometimes this means assimilation. Breaking down diversity and dissolving entire tribes in the melting pot of the newly secular, white Anlo-Saxon Protestant values that continue to define Western Civilization as we know it. There were too many Irish to kill, so we stuck the Irish in our armies and had them kill other Catholics in Mexico, and soon the Irish were white....
This is what LGBT is really about. Turning our culture into something safe so politicians and CEOs can take pictures next to it and prove how tolerant they are when they aren't busy throwing those too brown or too poor to conform into their marvelous new prisons and having the neurodivergent among us tormented and abused in their crumbling compulsory schools and no-voluntary, for-profit inpatient facilities.
That is LGBT and I won't have anything to do with it during June or any other month. Queer on the other hand is a tribal distinction for all sexual and/or gender non-conformists who wish to define themselves completely outside of mainstream society. We don't fit in and we don't want to fit in. We don't want to join your armies or pray in your churches or vote for your killers. We have our own families and traditions, and we don't appreciate seeing them degraded by Walt Disney so he can cover up the stink of his sweatshops.
I would even go so far as to suggest that we should tear a page from that closet queen Malcolm X and take this shit one step further. It is my closely held belief that Queer people are a stateless nation unto ourselves; a distinct, self-sustaining, cultural minority not unlike a race. While we come from many ethnicities, we have the shared distinction of being people once venerated in pagan societies from the Norse to the Yoruba and then cast out into outer darkness upon the forced Christianization of our former tribes. But from these ashes we formed new heathen traditions in the shadows of backroom speakeasies, all-ages punk shows, and musky bathhouses.
This counterculture was literally brought out into the streets during the revolutionary exorcism of the late 60s and 1970s. Organizations like the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and the Radical Faeries were built using the Black Power and Chicano movements that many of our elders of color were already involved in as models of revolutionary autonomy, and this is what we need to return to, now more than ever.
In a bleeding empire governed by two parties packed with cis-het sexual predators, "fitting in" should be the last item on the agenda. Fitting into what Exactly? Are we supposed to all get married and get rich so we can spend the weekends on some Zionist billionaire's private island, assaulting children that all available statistics show us will be overwhelmingly Queer? Or maybe we should all just join the straight man's army so we can drop more bombs on ancient cultures that still recognize the existence of third genders like the one in Iran?
Fuck that and fuck LGBT. This is a nation built on the same puritanical colonialist ideals that led to us being burned at the stake for being impure vessels of gender-bending gods that couldn't be consolidated beneath one church, and now they want us back! While those same flames threaten to consume their gilded temples of emptiness in one big karmic blaze? I say fuck them and let the fire burn. We will build our own institutions by the light of their flaming ruins. Our schools! Our temples! Our militias! Our nation! Divided under a hundred gods and a thousand genders!
Joe can go ahead and run for president of Hell as an LGBT person you can take home to Netanyahu. Sue will be pegging his husband with a twelve-inch strap-on in the trenches when the grid goes down, living her best revolution as something too Queer to fit in a box.
We are here. We are Queer. And we are ungovernable.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced This Post
* We Might as Well Be Strangers by Weezer & Wednesday
* Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill
* Tilted by Christine & the Queens
* Rock N Roll N***** by Patti Smith
* The House That Heaven Built by Phoebe Bridgers
* Slip Away by Perfume Genius
* Rockstar by Hole
* Tonight, Tonight by Snail Mail
* Breed by Nirvana
* Songs for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl by Yeule
