uinenmessedupagain:

somethingsomethingbutterfly:

c4bl3fl4m3:

makingqueerhistory:

Queer history did not start with Stonewall. That doesn’t make Stonewall unimportant but it is critical to realize that by only talking about queer history in context of Stonewall and America is erasure, and feeds into the attitude that queerness is somehow a recent development.

Even if it is not intentional, the impact of not directly addressing the fact that there are queer people and queer movements before Stonewall is harmful.  

This. This times a million.

In fact, I have a special interest in pre-Stonewall queer history in America, but even I know that goes back further than my interests take me (usually to the beginning of the 1950s) and is an international thing.

(Wanna start somewhere? Research Frank Kameny and see where that takes you. Wanna read some historical fiction? Try Stone Butch Blues.)

And you wanna talk about erasing queer history? I never hear anyone talk about Canadian queer history. They’ve got a history of their own, which is part of greater queer history.

I never hear anyone talk about the Toronto Bathhouse Raids of 1981.  I never hear anyone quote the famous ‘the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation’ quote that was coined in the late 1960s, when homosexuality became decriminalized (amongst many other sweeping leftist reforms).

I can forever complain about how white colonizers destroyed traditional genders in many Indonesian ethnic groups, but nowadays ~traditionalists~ think it’s a recent Western invention, and that us Indonesian queers are just kids being “Too Westernized”.

Or how many white people I had the displeasure to interact with legitimately believe that queer people were already oppressed before white colonizers arrived (completely ignoring the huge diversity between Indonesian ethnic groups), and that “we should be thankful” that white people “introduced the concept of queerness to us”.

There’s also a lot of german and jewish queer culture and activism (lets call it that for now) starting as early as the end of the 19. century, that was largely wiped out by the nazis. Look up Magnus Hirschfeld and his work