Finding a place in the queer mythology

Finding a place in queer mythology

ONE OF THE MOST HURTFUL TYPES OF QUEERPHOBIA IS THE PREVAILING MAINSTREAM UNDERSTANDING THAT WE DON’T EXIST. QUEER PEOPLE AREN’T THE HEROES OF MYTH OR THE LEADERS OF RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS. THERE HAS BEEN A CENTURIES LONG SILENCING OF QUEER PEOPLE, EXCLUDING US FROM THE NARRATIVES AND THE HALLS OF CULTURAL ICONS. WE’RE TAUGHT THAT EVERYONE HAS BEEN LIVING HETERONORMATIVE LIVES AS LONG AS HISTORY HAS BEEN WRITTEN. IT’S A LIE.

In the myth of Pelops, our hero is murdered by his father, Tantalus, and served to the gods in an act of hubris. The gods realise they had been tricked before tasting the food, but Demeter, absent minded and mourning her daughter Persephone, took a bite of Pelops’ shoulder. The gods brought Pelops back to life, and Hephaestus constructed an ivory shoulder for Pelops. Later, Pelops became a lover of Poseidon and for many years Pelops was his chariot driver. To this day, the Peloponnese in Greece is named for Pelops.

Finding the invisible queers in our cultural memory was something of a lifeline for me. My life in a fundamentalist Christian family wasn’t unique. The stories are found all over. Just scroll through /r/insaneparents for long enough and you’ll find one. They’re controlling, illogical, and often suspicious of the so-called ‘mainstream’. But the unique cocktail that raised me left me without any LGBT representation for a very long time.

One thing I did have was mythology. It seems weird in retrospect that my parents and their church were fine with mythology. After all, Pokemon and Harry Potter were banned in my house for being immoral. But the rules were often random. Queer representation has come a long way in the last ten years. The space for new queer representation is growing and I love that. Every time I see a queer character in a new show today, my heart warms for the LGBT youth growing up right now who get to see that.

But I think it is about time we stopped thinking about it as making a new space. We’re reclaiming one that has been stolen from us. History and mythology tell us we’ve always been here. It has just been shoved in the closet, when the dominant narrative pretended we didn’t exist.

I advocate for any queer person, feeling a bit lost, to read about queer icons from our cultural memory. It gives me a lot of strength to know that people like me have existed for thousands of years. And they are household names even today.

Next time someone tells you “the gays” are some modern trend or that “marriage was always between a man and a woman”. Perhaps remind them of some famous queer characters. They might’ve heard of Alexander the Great, Adonis, Sir Gawain, Amaterasu, or Odin.

Queer mythos gave me a way to connect to culture. It gave me a place to understand myself, as a queer person. I didn’t get to see any culture watching television (it hardly existed anyway, and I didn’t get to see what there was). I didn’t get to read about it in fiction.