The Importance of History
Feb. 25th, 2026 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeRogan: we grabbed Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder Harry Hay from the library because Hay said some things that caught my eye in the 1987 anthology Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning in his piece “A Separate People Whose Time Has Come”:
That was a pretty radical, trans way of seeing things in the eighties! But what got my attention even more was this, when he was talking about how when he was young and seemingly the only queer in the world, he would fantasize about someone else who was too, someone he could love:
It is still uncommon to hear anyone discuss a fantasy as worthy of being treated with respect and equality, and I kept his name in mind. And sure enough, in Radically Gay, Will Roscoe says right off in the introduction, regarding the importance of gay history:
When I first joined the soulbonder and multiple groups on Livejournal in 2007, it didn’t take long for me to become another young buck determined to overthrow the preexisting medicalist DID order and impose a better politics. Previous reading of the bad old MPD-DID books of yore gave me just enough understanding of said bad old days (and the Memory Wars were still casting their long shadow) to make them personally and practically relevant—a benefit of old, outdated library books! At the time, I read them because they were all I had, and many of them truly were terrible; I didn’t expect that reading to become the start of my multi historical education.
But all of those books were limited. They were overwhelmingly what singlet doctors thought of us, and even those books multis wrote themselves seemed to agree with the doctors that being multi wasn’t a state of being worthy of culture, community, or respect; it was an illness, a flawed aberration from one’s proper “healthy” self. Or, to borrow Hay’s phrasing: “in 1948 there was no such thing as a ‘Gay person’ and no one lived a ‘Gay lifestyle. Gays were merely ‘sick heteros’ leading schizophrenic lives of secret desperation.” (Radically Gay, 5) Multiples were merely “sick singlets.”
So in 2007, fuckin’ Astraea and fuckin’ Pavilion Hall’s ideas that being multi didn’t HAVE to be just a sickness, that it in fact could be neutral or eve positive, hit me at JUST the right time. I wouldn’t find out until much later that Astraea often acted as a strangler fig, preying on their own community and partners, then yoinking their accomplishments for their own, though it took us and Zyfron very little time to discover how much an “inactivist” group Pavilion Hall was. Even so, I learned useful shit from them, just as I had from the bad old books earlier. But even though Astraea squatted on a stack of records like a truck-stealing gargoyle (I know, they showed and shared some with me, when we were helping their roommates escape), they didn’t really use them to give much historical context to what Pavilion Hall’s struggles were ostensibly about. for a multi activist group, Pavilion Hall said shockingly little about ableism! It was all about representation in pop culture or press releases and proving we weren’t impaired (despite obvious evidence to the contrary).
When I discovered myself homeless and unemployable and in the miserable early paroxysms of memory work, I grew more humble to those early MPD/DID folks, more understanding of why, in such agony and cultural crushing, the idea of multi being a neutral (never mind positive!) state of being seemed so insulting and cruelly wrong. But my agony didn’t last forever. I discovered that contrary to my previous thought, I could not live fully in the present without allowing myself to digest and compost my past. I adapted to my pain, began to respect and understand it, and once again I spiraled to my older belief, now more nuanced, of how being multi can still be a source of power, joy, and its own culture, beyond the little box of saintly suffering sickness. It was just that now, I understood the power of multi through lenses like disability liberation (the right to exist in public life), feminism and antiracism (women and “lower races” as inherently feebleminded and ill), and queerness (what if your “mental illness” was directly related to your oppression?)
And I became interested in history. I became interested in other kinds of multi-being: personhood-sharing, channeling, possession, spirit-touching, spirit marriage, imaginary friends, beings from fiction and dream and art. Pavilion Hall’s mealy-mouthed semi-acceptance of midconts/medians and soulbonders suddenly seemed laughably narrow-minded: there was so much MORE! So much beauty and strength! I found power and consolation in Ida Craddock’s wedding an angel in the 1890s, in San Juan de la Cruz's ero-for-Jesus poem, “Noche Oscura” in the 1500s, in Alma Z.’s getting along with themselves and their loved ones in the 1890s. Multi expanded in my mind to all sorts of experiences and beings not considered “real” by the ruling local societies: how big a difference is there between a headmate who cannot front and one who chooses not to, or a being from a psychological world and a being from a world that they insist is material, just not detectable here? The more I looked and studied, the more relevant and important everything seemed to be, even if I didn’t personally understand or relate to it. There are plenty of plurals in my own country and subcultures who live that plurality RADICALLY different than I do! One lives across the street! I went to his house party last week!
I wanted to build a tolerance for that difference, without making it about my own ontological angst of “am I real? Does this prove I’m FAKE???” Which meant I had to find peace in myself, which the learning itself helped me to do. Turns out there truly is nothing new under the sun!
Plus now I’ve been around long enough to BECOME the history people have already forgotten. I remember my utter bafflement when the “genic war” first crossed my dashboard on tumblr in 2014. How laughably absurd and stupid the concept of a traumagenic/endogenic binary seemed! Thank goodness THAT would surely blow over in a week! (It did not.)
The more time I spent rooting myself to my present, the more I wondered how we got here. In a present where my country is behaving like an out-of-control locomotive that everyone decent is frantically trying to stop before it runs over even more people, it only becomes all the more clear to me that the past casts a long shadow. Ignoring it is dangerous, whether it personal (the amnesia of dissociation), political (the idea that democracy is communism goes back to the 1840s), or cultural (no, multis didn’t become irrevocably associated with trauma until the ‘70s or ‘80s; it is not a cosmic truth). History (and learning how we decide what BECOMES history) matters!
We are forever relearning. And history can save a lot of pain.<\cut>
(LOL I totally wrote a similar post about this last year: https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1396350.html)
One day during a rap in 1974, I suddenly remembered 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!”
[...]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 [...] But not feminine either. Other!” (282-283)
That was a pretty radical, trans way of seeing things in the eighties! But what got my attention even more was this, when he was talking about how when he was young and seemingly the only queer in the world, he would fantasize about someone else who was too, someone he could love:
Of course, I had perceived my fantasy love as subject—in exactly the same way as I perceived myself as subject, in exactly the same way I had always perceived my teddy bear as subject, in exactly the same way as I had always perceived the talking trees and handsome heroes in my story-books as subjects. Oh, I knew that all the other kids around me were thinking of girls as sex objects, to be manipulated—to be lied to in order to get them to “give in”—and to otherwise be treated with contempt (when the boys were together without them). And, strangely, the girls seemed to think of the boys as objects too. [...] in that long-ago fantasy, [...] the one thing we would not be doing was making objects of each other. (285-286)
It is still uncommon to hear anyone discuss a fantasy as worthy of being treated with respect and equality, and I kept his name in mind. And sure enough, in Radically Gay, Will Roscoe says right off in the introduction, regarding the importance of gay history:
Today’s [gay] activists [...] show a marked disinclination for making these kinds of historical evaluations. The general attitude seems to be that the Lesbian/Gay movement began whenever one’s own involvement with it began. If anything noteworthy happened before that time, it is part of the Gay Dark Ages and irrelevant to the present, so there’s no need to know about it.
This lack of historical consciousness is due in part to the continued exclusion of factual information about homosexuality and homosexuals not only from popular media and school textbooks, but from scholarly histories as well. [...] There is no mechanism, except by the initiative of the individual, for Lesbians and Gay men to learn their own history. And that is a VERY serious problem [...]. An extreme pragmatism, originally a makeshift imposed by the assaults of the Radical Right, and, above all, the disaster of the AIDS pandemic, is now touted as a virtue by most Queer activists. What passes for “theory” today—clever essays in arcane terminology with the word “Queer” in the title—rarely offers points of articulation with daily life struggles. (7)
When I first joined the soulbonder and multiple groups on Livejournal in 2007, it didn’t take long for me to become another young buck determined to overthrow the preexisting medicalist DID order and impose a better politics. Previous reading of the bad old MPD-DID books of yore gave me just enough understanding of said bad old days (and the Memory Wars were still casting their long shadow) to make them personally and practically relevant—a benefit of old, outdated library books! At the time, I read them because they were all I had, and many of them truly were terrible; I didn’t expect that reading to become the start of my multi historical education.
But all of those books were limited. They were overwhelmingly what singlet doctors thought of us, and even those books multis wrote themselves seemed to agree with the doctors that being multi wasn’t a state of being worthy of culture, community, or respect; it was an illness, a flawed aberration from one’s proper “healthy” self. Or, to borrow Hay’s phrasing: “in 1948 there was no such thing as a ‘Gay person’ and no one lived a ‘Gay lifestyle. Gays were merely ‘sick heteros’ leading schizophrenic lives of secret desperation.” (Radically Gay, 5) Multiples were merely “sick singlets.”
So in 2007, fuckin’ Astraea and fuckin’ Pavilion Hall’s ideas that being multi didn’t HAVE to be just a sickness, that it in fact could be neutral or eve positive, hit me at JUST the right time. I wouldn’t find out until much later that Astraea often acted as a strangler fig, preying on their own community and partners, then yoinking their accomplishments for their own, though it took us and Zyfron very little time to discover how much an “inactivist” group Pavilion Hall was. Even so, I learned useful shit from them, just as I had from the bad old books earlier. But even though Astraea squatted on a stack of records like a truck-stealing gargoyle (I know, they showed and shared some with me, when we were helping their roommates escape), they didn’t really use them to give much historical context to what Pavilion Hall’s struggles were ostensibly about. for a multi activist group, Pavilion Hall said shockingly little about ableism! It was all about representation in pop culture or press releases and proving we weren’t impaired (despite obvious evidence to the contrary).
When I discovered myself homeless and unemployable and in the miserable early paroxysms of memory work, I grew more humble to those early MPD/DID folks, more understanding of why, in such agony and cultural crushing, the idea of multi being a neutral (never mind positive!) state of being seemed so insulting and cruelly wrong. But my agony didn’t last forever. I discovered that contrary to my previous thought, I could not live fully in the present without allowing myself to digest and compost my past. I adapted to my pain, began to respect and understand it, and once again I spiraled to my older belief, now more nuanced, of how being multi can still be a source of power, joy, and its own culture, beyond the little box of saintly suffering sickness. It was just that now, I understood the power of multi through lenses like disability liberation (the right to exist in public life), feminism and antiracism (women and “lower races” as inherently feebleminded and ill), and queerness (what if your “mental illness” was directly related to your oppression?)
And I became interested in history. I became interested in other kinds of multi-being: personhood-sharing, channeling, possession, spirit-touching, spirit marriage, imaginary friends, beings from fiction and dream and art. Pavilion Hall’s mealy-mouthed semi-acceptance of midconts/medians and soulbonders suddenly seemed laughably narrow-minded: there was so much MORE! So much beauty and strength! I found power and consolation in Ida Craddock’s wedding an angel in the 1890s, in San Juan de la Cruz's ero-for-Jesus poem, “Noche Oscura” in the 1500s, in Alma Z.’s getting along with themselves and their loved ones in the 1890s. Multi expanded in my mind to all sorts of experiences and beings not considered “real” by the ruling local societies: how big a difference is there between a headmate who cannot front and one who chooses not to, or a being from a psychological world and a being from a world that they insist is material, just not detectable here? The more I looked and studied, the more relevant and important everything seemed to be, even if I didn’t personally understand or relate to it. There are plenty of plurals in my own country and subcultures who live that plurality RADICALLY different than I do! One lives across the street! I went to his house party last week!
I wanted to build a tolerance for that difference, without making it about my own ontological angst of “am I real? Does this prove I’m FAKE???” Which meant I had to find peace in myself, which the learning itself helped me to do. Turns out there truly is nothing new under the sun!
Plus now I’ve been around long enough to BECOME the history people have already forgotten. I remember my utter bafflement when the “genic war” first crossed my dashboard on tumblr in 2014. How laughably absurd and stupid the concept of a traumagenic/endogenic binary seemed! Thank goodness THAT would surely blow over in a week! (It did not.)
The more time I spent rooting myself to my present, the more I wondered how we got here. In a present where my country is behaving like an out-of-control locomotive that everyone decent is frantically trying to stop before it runs over even more people, it only becomes all the more clear to me that the past casts a long shadow. Ignoring it is dangerous, whether it personal (the amnesia of dissociation), political (the idea that democracy is communism goes back to the 1840s), or cultural (no, multis didn’t become irrevocably associated with trauma until the ‘70s or ‘80s; it is not a cosmic truth). History (and learning how we decide what BECOMES history) matters!
We are forever relearning. And history can save a lot of pain.<\cut>
(LOL I totally wrote a similar post about this last year: https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1396350.html)
no subject
Date: 2026-02-25 11:28 pm (UTC)