10 Q Things

Real

HISTORY

BLACK HISTORY MONTH. WOMEN’S HISTORY

Month. Pride Month. You see the difference?

Pride is about visibility. Being seen and being heard. Being acknowledged. Being safe. Being out and being proud. Displaying our diversity, our beauty, our presence. It should also be about history and education.

How did we get here? What was queer life like before Stonewall? What was the context of the riots of the 1960s and the queer rights movement around them? What happened in the following decades? Who was Anita Bryant? Who was Harry Hay? What is poststructuralism and how did it contribute to queer theory and our progress on pronouns? Imagine the puzzled looks from non-queer people on these topics. Sadly, it’s not only straight people who are ignorant or misinformed about even the most basic plot points of gay liberation. There is a huge gap in our knowledge about the queer rights movement and the lives of queer people before the 1970s.

THE WHOLE STORY Should we be discussing the the sexual and gender identities of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln in public education? Should we tell the kids what Eleanor Roosevelt was really up to while her husband was off saving the world and flirting with his cousins?

That would all be fine. I’m always down for good gossip. But what’s more important is teaching young people the real history of the LGBTQ civil rights movement. Alongside African American civil rights and women’s suffrage and liberation, our own movement is the real history of America. The unique character of this country was achieved through marginalized and oppressed groups seeking recognition, empowerment and equality. The shift of political power from white male property owners to everyone else, down to every last trans person of color brave enough to be themselves, that’s the true center of the American bildungsroman. Democratic reforms and political activism — sometimes moderate, sometimes radical — are how things got better. We live in a country where queers were once unheard-of, or if they were heard of, they were better off dead. A half-century later, we were political candidates winning presidential primary caucuses.

FORECAST Those movements and changes are what actually makes America great. That’s the part of us that sets an example to the rest of the world. Not wars, assassinations and half a condescending page in a history book. That’s just distraction from the military-industrial complex with a poisonous hard-on. If we educate the public about queer history and the LGBTQ civil rights movement, we will no longer need to explain why Pride exists. Imagine the leaders we might elect once everyone knows what it took to get us here. Imagine the respect younger queer people might have for the generations that preceded them. Imagine if school children across the country could quote Harvey Milk and James Baldwin as readily as Martin Luther King Jr. and Neil Armstrong. What a wonderful world it would be. Teach queer history. Scott King lives and writes in Atlanta.

SCOTT KING

Photo from the film Kiki.