Posted on 04/10/2022 9:26:20 PM PDT by definitelynotaliberal
From Mariupol to Missouri, in real wars and culture wars, soldiers like to film themselves in battle. Twitter is awash with footage of Ukrainian and Russian troops showing off their tactical prowess and grisly exploits. US culture warriors do likewise. A recent video of a young teacher, for example, shows her awkwardly speaking into a camera: “There is a way to be sneaky about supporting, say, queer students in your classroom, and I want to show you it.”
The camera pans to a homemade-looking pink triangle on her dry-erase board. The teacher continues, “The pink triangle was used in concentration camps to identify gay women and also people who were asexual and now has been co-opted by the queer community to be a symbol of a safe space. Dropping a pink triangle somewhere in your room makes a huge difference, because kids look for that.”
Uploaded to Twitter by the popular “Libs of Tik Tok” account, the video caused a stir online. The ensuing brouhaha—which culminated in the doxxing of its creator as an educator in Missouri’s Ferguson-Florissant School District—fed the growing controversy over Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay bill, which bars teachers from discussing gender and sexuality with children under 9.
Lost amid these ferocious skirmishes, however, is the principle of factual probity. Far too often, what passes for “discussions of gender and sexuality” and “allyship” among the educator-activist class is, in fact, propaganda that traduces actual LGBT history and insults the intelligence of the wider community. And it’s all done to maintain narratives that serve the interests of the educator-activist class, whether they be personal or political.
The teaching of LGBT history is already required in four states: California, Colorado, Illinois, and New Jersey. The AIDS crisis and the fight for same-sex marriage were pivotal moments in recent US cultural and political history. So it isn’t unreasonable for school districts to include discussion of the gay-rights movement in their curricula, probably at the middle- or high-school level. But just as we expect kids to learn factual information about say, Late Antiquity, so more recent history should be taught accurately. “The Nazis didn’t, in fact, systematically persecute lesbians.”
This makes the Missouri TikTok video in question all the more disturbing. The Nazis didn’t, in fact, systematically persecute lesbians. Nor did they target “asexuals,” who didn’t claim their status as a distinct sexual identity until well after World War II. Homosexual men were persecuted, and the pink triangle was used to designate them as such within the camps. Before the symbol was apparently co-opted by the generalized “queer community,” it was used by AIDS activists at the height of the crisis to symbolize the US government’s perceived silence and indifference, which they believed was tantamount to a state-imposed “death sentence” against patients.
The video’s one true statement—that some ambiguous “queer community” has co-opted the pink triangle—reinforces the general trend of writing gay people, usually men, out of their own history and expanding it to include all “queer people.” The modern use of the term queer itself represents this flattening phenomenon well. It is a “reclaimed slur,” used increasingly by people who would have never had it hurled at them as an insult, and who never claimed it back when it would have resulted in social condemnation, rather than celebration. The term’s vagueness allows it to be used by virtually anyone—including, apparently, the journalist Terrell Jermaine Starr, who recently “came out,” stating he was “attracted to a wide range of women, but not men at all.”
The problem precedes the march of apparent heterosexuals into the “queer community.” Overstating or outright fabricating the place of minorities within the community happens often. And these “histories” are often written like mad libs: Insert the name of a group, add an adjective, a verb, and a place, until somebody’s son comes home from school asking about the asexuals at Treblinka.
The claims in the TikTok were novel, but other myths are older and better-established. One of the most popular is that a transwoman of color threw the first brick at the Stonewall Riots, although there is no direct evidence to confirm that account. The supposed transwomen of color usually named, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, were both drag queens who sometimes called themselves transvestites, but never transgender or, as was more common at the time, transsexual; they weren’t even there the first night. But since no one knows who “threw the first brick,” those inclined can generalize that, if not Johnson or Rivera, some transwoman must have thrown it, or at least could have.
Trans people and catchall “queers” aren’t the only ones guilty of distorting history, nor is such revisionism merely a byproduct of the ever-growing divisions within the “community” (which often arise from the increased emphasis on the sex-gender dichotomy, the ongoing fight between transwomen and second-wave-style feminist lesbians being the most visible example). Ahistorical accounts go much further than TikTok videos or online debates over the origins of Pride month. Sometimes, they become enshrined in laws, or at least their names do.
Eleven years after the murder of Matthew Shepard, President Barack Obama signed The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act, cementing Shepard’s status as a martyr for a persecuted minority. Due in no small part to the work of activists, this is still largely believed to be the case, despite the overwhelming evidence presented, most notably, in Stephen Jimenez’s 2013 book, The Book of Matt. Jimenez demonstrated that Shepard was killed in a dispute over drugs and money, and that at least one of his two killers wasn’t a homophobic stranger, but a former sexual partner the victim had known for at least a year.
In 2004, before his book’s publication, Jimenez had worked with ABC News on a 20/20 segment re-examining the case, which provoked outrage in the gay press and earned a rebuke from Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. According to Jimenez, GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign also attempted to intervene editorially before the film’s release.
It is difficult to argue that the teaching of LGBT history in schools isn’t propaganda, when large portions were written as such. Since LGBT groups have made great strides in winning legal and cultural acceptance, it seems obvious that material interests are the chief motive for proliferating these fake histories. NGOs such as the Human Rights Campaign, which focused almost single-mindedly on gay marriage, didn’t go away once they achieved their goals. They immediately turned their sights on the trans-rights movement, fundraising off so-called bathroom bills in red states and the Trump-era ban on trans military service.
Meanwhile, more “grassroots” activists online fundraise through sites like GoFundMe, which has been flooded by throngs of “queer WOC” soliciting assistance to escape “a dangerous living situation.” One transwoman went so far as to fake a kidnapping to garner attention for a GoFundMe; the fraudster earned $53,000 in one day. The notion that transwomen of color were at the forefront of the gay-rights movement can elevate simple GoFundMe charity into a sort of reparations for unrecompensed labor.
A politically charged, DIY approach to “queer history” lies behind TikTok’s pink-triangle fantasies. For three decades, that approach has triumphed over objective research by serious journalists and historians. Combatting the conservative charge that LGBT history is a tool for ideological warfare begins with gay people acknowledging the gun in their hands. Until then, we can only watch the shots being fired, one convenient story at a time.
LGBT history? Sodom and Gomorrah!
And visit Man’s ports like Mykonos, Key West, and San Francisco on the HMS Raging Queen…
Later.
The Cabin Boy, the Cabin Boy.
The dirty little nipper.
He lined his arse with broken glass
and circumcised the Skipper.
Gee. What other “Nazi” ideas are they using?
The predators are out of the closet.
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Friggen in the riggen
“Here he is, our own.... Captain Ned!” I always thought that this skit went down the memory hole years ago. Haven’t seen it since 1979 or so. Good find!
I remember when “black studies” became a thing back in the 70s. Every ancestor was a learned king or queen, and African civilization was more advanced than China or Europe...
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