Nanni

But can't depictions of queer people be real and honest and affirming without revolving on said queer people's love lives?

/probably unfair rhetorical question

So evidently I hate sloppiness and inaccuracy in all its forms - including the form which is me shying away from explaining myself and/or explaining myself badly SO.

Here we go. First off, I kind of hate talking about people who lived centuries ago who might very well ID as LGBT if they lived today, because well. It leads to sentences like that. Obviously it's a bit iffy to say that someone was gay or lesbian or trans or bisexual or asexual or genderqueer well before that was the paradigm. They wouldn't have had that language and they might very well not have thought have about themselves at all that way. The thing is, this gets used as an excuse to elide us completely (and it never applies to bisexuals. Apparently we are special and have always existed, even before lesbians, ever since gossip and scandals were invented, and must always be mentioned in connection with such). Queer people? We see no queer people!

...I might be slightly bitter. And we seem to be finally making some inroads on the sexual minority side of things, but not so much the gender minority side. It's still really hard to get historians writing popular books to even acknowledge the possibility. Even people who were almost certainly trans women (nobody works as a laundress for an entire regiment for years on end because they find it sexually kinky or fun performance art, that's clearly a matter of gender ID and what's open to women who need to bolster their husband's pay) get implied to be gay men who fitted into a regionally and actually, I am pretty sure, time period inappropriate subcultures that involved cross dressing. (It's not cross dressing if a woman wears skirts! Unless it's a kilt. Or otherwise feminine inappropriate skirt. If a woman wears women's skirts, it's not crossdressing!)

Anyway, you can't actually say this with any firm assurance, is the thing, because the courts and medical boards and discharge boards and chains of command didn't care how people defined themselves. As organs of authority, they were interested in defining people by authority's standards. Which usually have to do with what's in their underthings, not the life they're living. So often we don't have the testimony of the one person who could tell us, and there are lots of compelling reasons that, historically, cisgendered women have worn men's clothes and done men's work while passing for men.

That doesn't mean that all the people classed as crossdressers in court records actually were.

( Cut for Length and Quotes )

What I am saying is that no. We can't talk to people from the past and listen to what they tell us about who they are. In the case of LGBT+ people, most of the time we only have the writings and evidence of people who didn't want them to be who they were, or act on the inclinations of their hearts and minds. Because of the structure of the medieval and early modern Catholic church we have a fair number of voices of people who might today tell you that they are asexual, but reformist rhetoric has tended to pass these off as voices of people who were profoundly repressed and twisted by their culture, sometimes in ways that are hurtful and triggering. (Ah, the victim blaming of a marital rape survivor that I once ran across in an ostensibly feminist history of marriage. That was fun.)

It's important to recognize that in the sense that naming makes it so, there were no gay people, trans people, cis people, bisexual people, heterosexual people, or asexual people in these time periods. They wouldn't have called themselves these things, although if a rogue time machine snatched one of them from their context and dumped them in a supportive contemporary community, they might use the language to explain. Or they might not! Who knows? Even people raised within this cultural context don't always like the language and the thought patterns that go with.

But at the same time, it's important not to erase gender and sexual minorities. It's easy to do this by saying that we can't see them, and it's easy to do this by classing them all according to the powerful people who didn't see them at the time. It's easy to do this by refusing to recognize even the possibility that they existed. It's easy to do this by saying it's too hard to talk about them because the modern categories and words didn't exist, and I think it's important to guard against that.

And if you're going to say it's too hard to discuss queer women in your huge survey/overview because the words and categories didn't exist, then it would probably be a good idea not to constantly identify people as bisexual, frequently with no other information about them than their name and their most famous lover. I am just saying.

I am obsessing about a potentially hurtful thing I said over a year ago. Which is a thing I often do. I worry about hurting people a lot, and when I'm feeling down I loop into tracks about Did I Hurt That Person? I Hope I Didn't Hurt That Person, I Don't Think I Can Make Up For It Now.

In mostly unrelated thoughts, I'm feeling intensely ambivalent about lgbtfest. It's an odd thing. I like reading the fic that comes out of the fest, but I hate reading the prompt lists, because...

Okay, so this probably isn't entirely fair. But sometimes it starts to feel like a lot of the people prompting are basically prompting misery porn, and given that I have immense issues with the extent to which stories about LGBT people generally are. Not joyful. I mean, okay. As a queer teenager, I hated reading YA novels about queer people, because -

Well. Let me be honest here. I tended to get the feeling that those novels weren't for actual queer teens. That they were intended for straight teens, and that was why they were so horrible, and the people in them were rarely brought joy by their sexuality, and when they were it was frequently elided, while pain was examined and almost reveled in. It used to make me so mad.

It still makes me so mad. Because yes. Things are hard, and the closet sucks, and frequently so does being out, and people are always happy to tell you how you're not you enough, and sometimes it's hard not to believe them, and it's always dangerous, people might very well hurt you, and hurt you very badly, kill you even, and there is vulnerability and danger -

But damn it. Just. Just.

Fuck that, I'm going to be happy. Judging by the fic that gets actually written, a lot of people feel the same way.

(This might be somewhat ironic, coming from someone who writes incessantly about mental illness, which means I write a lot about fear and pain and sadness, but pfffffffft.)