Gay Genders

[lb_lee]

Mori: Okay, so, when we came of age, queerwise, there was this idea that trans people and gay people were two very different groups of people. Sure, maybe in those ignorant old days, the two were conflated, but that was wrong and now we are enlightened and know these are two totally different things (and also maybe we should not trust each other or affiliate with each other because trannies will make the gays look bad and cisgays are all privileged dipshits or whatever). This blog shows that history; "queerness" and "trans" are totally different tags because when we started using them, they were TREATED as completely different things.

But as we've been reading our older queer books, we're realizing that this plain isn't true! Gay people were gendering ALL OVER THE PLACE, and homogenizing them into "cis gay" ranges from misleading to outright insulting.

We are still fucking sick, so we're sticking with posting notes from the stuff we've read. Even we can't mess that up too bad!

The first place I started noticing this was with Marie Cartier's Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall. Published in 2013, the book covers a time period (and interviews with lesbians active in the bar scene) from the 1940s through the 1980s. Cartier lists short blurbs on all the folks she interviewed, which includes metadata like name, age, race, religions, and "butch/femmel or other gender identification" (pg, 46). In Appendix A: Demographics, Cartier explains that "identifier" is "self-identification of gender/sexual expression for time period discussed in interview. (If identification changed significantly at a later time, and was self-identified as such, then identification is followed by the new identifier in parentheses in the chapter biographical identifications of informants--but it is not indicated here. If there is a backlash then the informant held both identities throughout--but first most significant and so indicated here.)" (pg. 221) So you already have this idea of a gender that can change over time, a "gender identification" no less, and it feels a little disingenuous to pretend that this can't be compared to gender identity whatsoever, because of... why, exactly? She also lists her grand total number of informants as "93 women, 8 men, 1 transgender," (ibid) which I find a fascinating divide of how we consider THESE gender identities TOTALLY SEPARATE from the others. (And I have ideas as to why this is, but that's for a day when I am NOT sick and dumb!)

Cartier also, very conveniently for my sick brain, lists the data crunching all these things in Appendix A: Demographics, so you can track the identifiers over time, which stayed, which disappeared, and which are known now. I'm just gonna reduplicate those tables for convenience (pg. 222-224):

1940s Identifiers (# of Interviewers):
Androgynous: 1
Butch: 6
Femme: 1
Gay: 4
Homosexual: 1
Kiki: 1

1950s:
Androgynous: 1
Bull Dagger: 1
Butch: 7
Femme: 8
Gay: 3
Kiki: 1

1960s:
Butch
Femme
Lesbian

1970s
Butch: 7
Butch lesbian: 1
Butch/Lesbian feminist: 1
Feminist: 2
Feminist/butch: 1
Feminist/femme: 1
Femme: 2
Gay: 2
Gay/butch: 1
Gay/lesbian: 1
Lesbian: 2
Lesbian feminist: 3

1980s:
Androgynous: 2
Butch: 4
Femme: 4
Gay: 2

Rogan next noticed similar gay genders from the other side of the fence, with Lawrence Mitchell and Ned Asti's the Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, from 1977, which draws strong distinctions between the faggots and the men, treating them as separate categories:

"Pinetree was not a man and was not alone. He learned that he was a faggot and that there were lots of faggots" (pg. 96). "Lilac knew from an early age, mainly from his grandmother, that it was not so wonderful to be one of the men. He also was told from an early age, mainly by his grandmother, that he did not have to try to be one of the men if he did not want to. He never wanted to and so he never tried. [...] He lived in a world where he could be a mother or a father or a husband or a wife or a passive object or an aggressive force. He could be whatever felt like him. Some days he wore his grandmother's long dresses and some days he wore his own short pants. He was Rita and Lana and June as often as he was Van and Cary and Tyrone." (ibid)

Later queers fondly remember this book for the huge range of terms it uses for people: there are dykalets and faggatinas, dreamboats and faggots and queens and queer men and fairies, the strong women, the women who love women, and the book never bothers to define any of them, only that they are far more than just "men" and "women."

"Since the queens looked something like women sometimes and since the women who love women look something like women sometimes and since the queens and the women who love women were friends the men lost the queens among the women who love women. [...] Since the women who love women look something like men sometimes and since the faggots look something like men sometimes and since the women who love women and the faggots were friends the men lost the women who loves women among the faggots." (100-101)

Rogan: I found this book comforting to read, as someone who always felt like I was never quite able to scrape into the category of "man," only "faggot." This book seemed to be for someone like me, despite all the current political forces telling me otherwise.

Mori: The anthology The Persistent Desire: a Femme-Butch Reader is from 1992, contains writings a good bit older, and there is ALL SORTS of gender discussion in it. Some of the writers became well-known in transgender stuff later (Patrick Califia and Leslie Feinberg, for instance, but there are others), but there are also people discussing body dysphoria, bodily modification for comfort, femme gender identity, and a lot of heartwrenching and soulsearching about the meaning of these identities and whether they are just "male-identified" (which, back then, did NOT mean a gender identity but basically meant "sucking patriarchy's dick"). The anthology is over 500 pages, too, so you get a WIDE range of experiences, and I could swear that SOMEBODY talked about this stuff as a race and class issue, not some magically separate  thing.

Mac bought a copy of Mark Thompson's Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning anthology from 1987, though many of the essays and works go back quite a bit earlier.

Mac: It wasn't the first place I'd found the idea of gay men being another gender, but it went deeper into it than I'd seen other places. (I mean, one the earliest horny kinky sacred sexuality book for gay men I know about, Christopher Larkin/Purusha's The Divine Androgyne According To Purusha: Adventures In Cosmic Erotic Ecstasy and Androgyne Bodyconsciousness has it in the damn title!)

Rogan: Especially relevant for this post is Harry Hay's "A Separate People Whose Time Has Come." At this point, Hay (who started the original Mattachine Society in the '40s and was at this time well into his 70s), writes:

"One day during a rap in 1974, I suddenly remember that, when I was in the fourth grade, the boys at school would tell me I threw a ball like a girl, but Maryellen Fermin and Helen Johnson said, 'No, you don't throw a ball like a girl. You throw it like a sissy!'

"In that 1974 rap, with my newly discovered gay window [perspective] offering flashes of insight, I was seeing that while these long-ago boys were saying that I was doing things in a nonmasculine therefore feminine fashion--'After all, what else is there?'--the girls equally had been saying, 'No, you're not being feminine. You're being... other. Not masculine--okay! agreed! But not feminine either. Other!' [...] Why was the not-masculine-but-equally-not-feminine boy they saw through their hetero-male windows [perspectives] so hateful in their eyes?" (pg. 282-283)

In summary: "Some of us may be a combination of both hetero masculine and hetero feminine, but mostly we are a combination of neither" (284)

Harry Hay immediately takes this idea and applies it to the idea of treating others as "subjects," rather than "objects"--not just the other gay men he loved, but also the fantasy of the love that existed for him, his teddy bear, "the talking trees and the handsome heroes in my picture-books" (286). Cartier also discusses this, though she puts it in terms of "I/Thou" rather than "subject-subject" the way Hay does.

Rogan: I'm positive that if I dug back into Mac's copy of Leatherfolk, I could find stuff like that there too. DEFINITELY Arthur Evans draws correlations in The Evans Symposium, with his love of ritual crossdressing and chasing it all over history.

And it's like, I feel like we're "supposed" to just be like, "well, these people were WRONG," but... I don't think they are! I think they really had something there, that there's something to all this. In Gay Spirit, they even TALK about how "assimilationist" gays were trying to claim manhood for themselves, while Gay Spirit is full of gays going, "but do we want that? SHOULD we want that? What does that mean?" It's like what we call "cis gay" got whitewashed (by themselves? by doctors? politicans? respectability politics???), a homogenized mayo jar of a bunch of different people experiencing gender in different ways, and then trans people were carved out and separated (by themselves? by doctors? politicians? respectability politics???) and we act like we never knew each other!

Mori: Feinberg runs full-bore with this in 1996's Transgender Warriors, including everyone from Lou Sullivan to Dennis Rodman to Quentin Crisp. Feinberg clearly knew what was what! I'll dig into that but I'm running out of gas, and the sickness is calling.

Rogan: So I'll just end this with a quote from Kate Bornstein's Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks & Other Outlaws, from 2006. She has a whole fucking section called "A Brief History of People Who Have Bucked the Bully System of Gender", where she talks about how early feminists "transgressed gender rules. They transgressed gender. They were transgender. People were mean to them because of that. In the minds of the institutions that oppressed them, they were no longer real women. They needed to band themselves together under some flag, so they called themselves the Women's Movement.

"Well, they weren't men, and it would have been terrifying to label themselves anything other than women. They were terrified to label themselves outsiders. But, in the simple act of calling themselves women, they named themselves after the systems that had oppressed them so long. It seems, in Minnie Bruce Pratt's words, that their imaginations were in thrall to the institutions that oppressed them.

"The next chapter of gender activism was written by the early gay rights activists. [...] And these pioneers transgressed a deeply rooted rule of gender. Lesbians and gays transgressed gender. Lesbians and gays are transgender. And they needed to band themselves together under some flag. But it's a terrifying thing to say, 'Hey, I'm a man who loves men, so maybe I'm not a real man!' And it's a terrifying thing to say 'I'm a woman who loves women, and so what if I'm not a real woman!' [...][ It was difficult enough to say the lesbian and gay stuff, and in most areas of the world, it still is. No one was ready to hear not-man, not-woman. So they call themselves lesbian women and gay men and they said things like 'we're just like you.' They named themselves after the system that had oppressed them. By the simple act of naming themselves women and men, it seems, in Minnie Bruce Pratt's words, that their imaginations were in thrall to the institutions that oppressed them.

"Next up on the march of gender liberation was the Bisexual Movement, and these folks really shook things up. [...] But they needed to band themselves together under some flag, and since it was terrifying enough to say that their love is mutable, they called th4emselves bisexual women and bisexual men. They named themselves after the system that had oppressed them for such a long time. By the simple act of naming themselves bisexual men and women, it seems, in Minnie Bruce Pratt's words, that their imaginations were in thrall to the institutions that oppressed them." (pg. 39-43)

Rogan: When I first read this book, over fifteen years ago, I was baffled by this passage. Now here I am, coming back to it with a bunch of queer history reading under my belt, and go figure, Bornstein had it all along.

She wrote, "I have this idea that naming ourselves beyond the either/or just might be the first step in freeing ourselves from the thralldom in which we're held by so many oppressive institutions. [...] I think we ought to be able to name ourselves, apart from the troublesome either/or language of the institutions that oppress us. [...] Are you good or evil, male or female, black or white, rich or poor? [...] Can we begin to question the bully questions? Can we begin to question our slavery to an archaic, oppressive system? Can we call ourselves more than either/or?" (pg. 36)

Well, now we live in a land of a gazillion microlabels, jealously guarded by wiki criteria and a million neuroses over which tiny box you fit in, but it's like we kept the tyranny of either/or and just made it the tyranny of a checklist instead. You might have a million more options, but they're all just as stranglery.

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

Oh yeah, there's a whole fascinating history of people living and understanding themselves in ways that aren't "sexuality and gender are completely different and unrelated categories." And I think there are people for whom "cis gay, nothing unusual about my gender, just gay" or "binary trans, nothing ambiguous, just someone who fits into one of the two most common genders while having been assigned the other one at birth" is a good fit, and they should be allowed to do that. But people keep trying to apply rigid rules to other people's identities where either everyone in the LGBT+ community is Queering Gender and Queering Sexuality or everyone is in a neatly-defined label and only that specific thing.

And yeah, it's replacing two constraining boxes with a million constraining boxes, rather than "What if you didn't have to be in a box at all?", "What if you could hop in and out of various boxes based on what's comfortable at the time, like a cat?" and "What if you could make your own box?" (I think some of the microlabel stuff started as "What if you could make your own box?" but then people started applying rigid rules about who was Valid.)

[lb_lee]

Mori: exactly! And there was also a lot of societal and cultural pressure to fit INTO the boxes created, however many there were or weren’t. So the choice was less free than usual.

[mackerelgray]

oh this is really cool to read! we haven't had the chance to look into many queer history books, but I've written somewhere before that my gender is nonbinary but just as importantly it's bisexual - like, I dunno about other people, but I feel like it's actually pretty hard to untangle gender and sexuality when the two are so linked! The antonym to queer is cishet because you need to be a cis man and a cis woman who only want their opposite, and once you start breaking one of those boxes, doesn't the other one start looking a little more fragile? A gay man is denied patriarchal manhood because he doesn't want women in the correct way, a gay woman is denied patriarchal womanhood because she doesn't want men in the correct way, I'm sure that does something to a lot of people's genders! and being nonbinary means the gay/straight dichotomy gets even weirder!

--Jude

[pantha]

This is interesting, coming from the opposite/same perspective as a NB acespec person whose gender is definitely heavily influenced by sexuality (and by experiences of sexuality and sexual expectations from a society who makes binary gender assumptions, along with various other ones).

[mackerelgray]

Yeah! I've heard that there's a lot of nonbinary experiences in the aspec community, because gendered expectations are so wrapped up in who you're supposed to desire - I know my metamour has talked about how they feel completely disconnected from gender because they don't feel any desire to live up to the standards of an "attractive" binary gender, so they just Opted Out of the whole endeavor.

Like, for myself, a lot of my relationship with gender is that... binary terms are only okay in the context of queering my romantic/sexual relationships. I'm not a man or a woman, or a boy or a girl, or a brother or a sister, but I think it sounds delightful to be my boyfriend's boyfriend! And I'd want to be a woman's girlfriend, because I feel like it's gender affirming in that context to signal that I'm basically gay in both directions, regardless of my pronoun situation.

[lb_lee]

Mac: Yeah! Gay Spirit is FULL of guys discussing the idea that by the virtue of loving men, they turned into something else!

And while I still see myself as a man, I can’t lie, I don’t think I ever would’ve hot up the guts to wear dresses if I’d only dated straightly.

[mackerelgray]

well that's sure relatable! my gender expression kinda changes depending on who I'm into, in the sense that I like being a man's boyfriend and a woman's girlfriend, despite being neither a man nor a woman! like I'm femme whoever I'm into, but I tend to be attracted to queer masculinity, so I guess the expression that "this is a GAY relationship, I'm gay in both directions!" feels gender affirming to me! honing my bisexual swag where I maximize my amount of gay potential ✨

[phoenix_council]

Dang, we should really read some of those books, they sound awesome! Kinda reminds me of how we conceptualize transness in relation to plurality. We say the body is trans, not us. We weren't "born" when our body was born. No one "assigned" us a gender upon entering the world. We arrived exactly as we are, upon entering the system. Both cis and trans imply a relationship to a physical body, that your identity in either camp is related inherently to the body you inhabit. But what if we viewed our bodies as the cis or trans thing, for matching or not matching us? Our identities are stable, our genders are exactly what they are, and are just descriptors for our internal experience, cuz I'm not a woman in the same way as any other woman in this system, it's my own flavor, my own descriptor of my personality and views of myself. And I'm not a cis or trans woman, I'm a woman in a nonbinary trans body. Just like living in a house from the 60s doesn't make me a boomer. My experiences were shaped by the "house" I live in, but my identity and concept of myself exists separate from it. Whatever this body looks and sounds like, whatever society reads it as, I'm still me. This is my house, it's not me. Place your labels on it, because I've always been me and will always be me, whatever it looks like.

[lb_lee]

All are good books! And at least two of them are on archive.org!

We also found Leslie Feinberg really digging into this stuff in 1996's Transgender Warriors, and that book is even miraculously still in print after almost thirty years!

There's a growing scholarship on trans and plural stuff, which is great since until pretty recently, the idea that plurals even COULD be trans was this whole morass nobody would touch.