My girlfriend Marna has been a queer activist since the late 80s. She’s told me about the incredible deliberation and debates LGBTQ+ activists had, in the late 90s and early 00s as the community began to see past the AIDS crisis and immediate goals of “surviving a plague” and “burying our dead.” There were a lot of things we wanted to achieve, but we had to decide how to allocate our scarce reserves of money, labour, publicity, and public goodwiil. Those were the discussions that decided the next big goals we’d pursue were same-sex marriage equality and legal recognition of medical gender transition.
From hearing her tell it, it seems like it was actually a wrenching decision, because it absolutely left a lot of people in the dust. A lot of people, her included, had broad agendas based on sexual freedom and the rights of people to do whatever they wanted with their bodies and consenting partners—and they agreed to put their broader concerns aside and drill down, very specifically, onto the rights of cis gays and lesbians to marry, and the ability to legally change your sex and gender.
As a political tactic it was terrifically effective. In less than two decades, public opinion in many countries has totally reversed on gay marriage, and we’ve won some truly enormous legal landmarks. Gender transition has entered public consciousness and the first landmark battles allowing people to define their own gender have been won. Marriage equality means that husbands and wives are protected from being banned from their dying spouse’s bedside, being forcibly separated from their children, or not being recognized as an important part of their spouse’s life.
The LGBTQ+ community knew they were taking a gamble, focusing so exclusively on marriage equality, and trans activists knew that they wouldn’t be able to achieve anything else until they’d gotten basic medical transition recognized. By and large, prioritizing things this way paid off. But they knew going in that there would be costs—and we’re reaping them.
Activists of 20 years ago chose to sideline and diminish efforts to blur and abolish the gender binary. Efforts to promote alternative family structures, including polyamorous families and non-sexual bonds between non-related adults. Efforts to fight the Christian cultural message that sex is dirty, sinful, bad, and in need of containment. Efforts to promote sexual pleasure as a positive good.
Those efforts have been going on for the last 20 years, but they’re marginalized—activists who had to decide where their finite time, money, publicity, and social capital went literally sat in committee meetings and said, “Marriage equality is our top priority. Legal gender transition is our top priority. Everything else will have to wait.”
This happened especially because sex education, sex positivity, and youth outreach were incredibly dangerous areas. Our enemies have been saying for years that all LGBTQ+ people are pedophiles, perverts, seeking to corrupt and recruit children to our cause; anyone trying to teach children basic facts about how to avoid disease, what’s happening to their own bodies, or what possibilities they have for identity and orientation, risks having their name, career, and life ruined. As a sex educator in the 90s, Marna had to tell teenagers, “I can’t answer your questions about safe sex now. Come back when you turn 18.”
So kids who grew up being told that girls and boys are different and ought to lead different lives, and sex is dangerous and sinful and gross, and you definitely shouldn’t want sex UNTIL you get married to your One True Love, only had that message tweaked a little bit. Now you can cross the floor from the Girl Side to the Boy Side or vice-versa. Now your One True Love doesn’t have to be a different gender from you. But those kids could survive with the rest of their worldview relatively intact. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in fandom, with an emphasis on “pure” OTP ships, on only including LGBT+ identities that use crisp, clear gender binaries and result in nuclear family life. The rest of those cultural messages about sex and love remain: men’s and women’s worlds are and should be different, “impure” sex degrades and defiles you, sexual urges that do not contribute to your One True Love and family life should be repressed, shamed, or destroyed, and sexual thoughts are every bit as bad as acting on them.
This isn’t because kids today are bad or stupid. It’s because as a community, we had to decide where our effort was going, and now we need to pay down the debt we’ve racked up over years of prioritizing marriage equality and legal trans recognition over sex positivity, sex education, and deconstructing gender.
TERFs, SWERFs, exclusionists, and transmedicalists have stolen a march over liberal queers because they’re doing the work to educate youth. While liberal queers have been staging protests and lobbying politicians, half a dozen of my undergraduate professors were radical feminists. Communities of exclusionists and anti-sex activists have honed their expertise at engaging teenagers with their ideas and theories. They’re the ones writing the FAQs, answering the asks, and doing the groundwork of saying, “Here is a basic framework of sexual ethics for you to follow.”
If we want to win back the culture wars, we have to step up our own efforts. Go back to the sex educators and gender activists whose good work has been ignored or underfunded for all this time and support them. Let major LGBTQ+ activist organizations know that their work so far is very nice, but it’s time to renew our focus on youth outreach and mentoring young activists. Brainstorm a way to help angry, isolated, disenfranchised young people form communities based around positive action and a sense of belonging. Get into mentorship or education yourself. Help us pivot as a community, to reach out to the kids who have obviously been underserved.
This is a delightful post and I’m delighted you linked it over on Dreamwidth, which is where I saw it. I’m sitting here and chewing it over and integrating it into my personal experience of being, y’know, a twenty-eight-year old who reaped many of both the victories–Coffee wouldn’t be right here, living with me, without DOMA going down; wouldn’t have health insurance without Obergefell; wouldn’t feel safe if anything happened to me without legal recognition of our relationship–and also someone who came from a really different microculture.
God, I feel like the “HI I AM BRINGING THE ACE PERSPECTIVE TO BROADER HISTORY” person these days, but here’s a thing that strikes me: my communities, growing up, were also out there having sidestepped the marriage discussion and instead having chosen to focus on youth outreach, education, and engagement. I mean, for a decade the central ace-spec community out there was AVEN, which literally chose to call itself the Asexual Visibility and Education Network.
And the thing is, the same community was also quietly but heavily influenced by a lot of those ideas about blurred gender binaries and new family structures. There have always been quiet but powerful sex-positive currents in ace communities, to the point that in 2011 there were quite a lot of us going “Hang on, hang on, why the hell are we the standard-bearers of how great sex is?” in frustration. Ace communities are such a haven for nonbinary folks that in 2011 fully 40% of the surveyed community for one widely published study found that people ticked their gender identity as something other than “male” or “female.” (This is counting folks who put down identifications along the lines of “male-ish” or “female-ish”, which was a viable option.) And anyone who has looked at an ace community for five minutes or listened to ace folks talk about fantasies of family has seen how much focus these communities place on alternative family styles.
A lot of that sort of burst back all over mainstream queer communities again circa 2010-2012ish, as AVEN shattered and ace communities sprang up without necessarily referencing it. But those discussions and those currents and those feelings go right back to the roots of what AVEN was, and more to the point they go back to the roots of those older activism strains that were deliberately unfed by many “mainstream” queer activists: for example, asexual folks probably didn’t come up with romantic orientation wholesale–I ran into it described as “affectional” orientation often enough in ~2005ish that I’m pretty sure it was picked up from bisexual communities and dialogues. But it was indisputably asexual culture that burst out around 2011 and repopularized the concept within younger queer communities, to the point that I’ve run into a lot of allo folks asking if it’s appropriation to pick up the concept and borrow it for themselves.
Or–I’d ask @coffee-mage-sans-caffeine for more input than me on early nonbinary/genderqueer communities, because they know more about those spaces than me by a country mile, or maybe @xenoqueer has thoughts. But for a while there, when I met any given person who didn’t identify as male or female I could often work out whether they were coming from an ace-influenced or a non-ace-influenced background just by seeing if they used the word “nonbinary” or “genderqueer.” I’m pretty sure I wrote something about it at the time, but I haven’t got the time to go digging right now.
So I’m sitting here tilting my head and wondering: because while mainstream LGBTQ activists, for lack of a better turn, might have given this fight up wholesale while putting their muscle and their blood and sweat and tears into marriage equality, I don’t think TERFs et al. were the only pockets of queer community who were going out and focusing very specifically on youth engagement. I actually think that ace communities–and maybe the non-ace nonbinary communities of trans folks–might have been picking up and incubating many of these ideals and engaging in outreach all on their own.
It’s an interesting thought, thinking about AVEN as the vanguard of all of these older, tactically silenced priorities for queer liberation. And it makes a certain amount of sense in the context of the inclusionist/exclusionist wars c. 2003-2004 within ace communities outside of AVEN, too.
Scarleteen is run by an amazing person – Heather Corinna – who is a disabled artist and just… if I started talking today about all the good they have done for me and everyone close to me, I wouldn’t stop until tomorrow at least. They don’t just run Scarleteen, they’re the kind of person who … just…
Look, I’ll start and stop with “they were instrumental in getting me out of an extremely abusive relationship and helping @dadhoc and I get together and get on our feet.”
All of the points above are everything I’ve been screaming forever, it feels like, and the only thing I can really add is that Heather is incredible and Scarleteen is an amazing resource and you should both use it and support it and I definitely don’t talk enough about how great it is and Heather is.
Also, I had heard of the word genderqueer before @mistresskabooms was born in 2000 but didn’t hear nonbinary until she was at least in late elementary school. So.
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So kids who grew up being told that girls and boys are different and ought to lead different lives, and sex is dangerous and sinful and gross, and you definitely shouldn’t want sex UNTIL you get married to your One True Love, only had that message tweaked a little bit. Now you can cross the floor from the Girl Side to the Boy Side or vice-versa. Now your One True Love doesn’t have to be a different gender from you. But those kids could survive with the rest of their worldview relatively intact. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in fandom, with an emphasis on “pure” OTP ships, on only including LGBT+ identities that use crisp, clear gender binaries and result in nuclear family life. The rest of those cultural messages about sex and love remain: men’s and women’s worlds are and should be different, “impure” sex degrades and defiles you, sexual urges that do not contribute to your One True Love and family life should be repressed, shamed, or destroyed, and sexual thoughts are every bit as bad as acting on them.
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I want this on a fucking wall-print. I’ve been saying queer communities online (especially Tumblr) that focus on moral and sexual purity are a direct result of Good Christian Children who are allowed to be gay now taking EVERYTHING ELSE about toxic christian upbringings into the queer community and using it to hurt other queer folks who have more experiences and a broader worldview.
This is a very intuitive concept and unfortunately it is about 100% wrong. For one thing, ace cultures have always included heteroromantics, and in my experience it has been more common for someone to identify as ace before they add other LGBTQ identities, not after–and the main exception is folks identifying specifically as bi or pan under the theory that they’re equally attracted to multiple sexes at once. Furthermore, ace communities have been infamous as places that ignoring and repressing your sexuality is nearly impossible for decades.
The asexual community has two primary origins, depending on whether you’re interested in why asexuality would emerge as a sexual orientation or whether you’re interested in the modern asexual community as it is today. The first origin is, oddly enough, the reification of homosexuality in Western thought around the turn of the twentieth century. That sparked the reification of heterosexuality, because you need something to contrast your homosexual people (as distinct from regular ol’ people who prefer to sleep with other folks who maybe have the same sex or gender as they do) against. Note that the concept of homosexuality and sexual orientation hadn’t actually completely taken over even among what we’d today call MSM until between the 1930s and the 1950s (depending on social class; the concept of homosexuality/heterosexuality as we know it today was adopted first by middle classes and slowly spread both up and down class ladders simultaneously).
(If you’re curious about that, I highly recommend Gay New York by Chauncey. It’ll give you a lot of information about early queer history, particularly the strains of folks who would probably identify as gay men and/or transfeminine today.)
So you have homosexuality spreading as a medicalized concept, and heterosexuality pops up as a contrasting identification. Then you have a number of people who go… “hang on, this binary doesn’t actually apply to me or all these other folks?” and in the 1950s you start getting Alfred Kinsey et al. going “hold on hold on bisexuality, it’s a thing?” And early bi communities form, except that if you aren’t familiar with the history of bisexual communities you should maybe think for a minute, because early bisexual communities contained basically everyone who didn’t identify as straight or gay, including a whole lot of early nonbinary/genderqueer people, people who later would identify as asexual, quite a lot of trans people, and generally everyone who in some way violated the homosexual/heterosexual binary. Except all of that ran into a whole lot of suspicion and marginalization both in straight and gay circles, which resulted in a lot of conflict over whether or not bisexuals were welcome. These early anti-bisexual efforts resulted in the formation of the LGB and later the LGBT acronyms.
What all this conflict does is create a situation wherein, by the time the internet filters around, the concept of bisexuality as meaning “interested in/attracted to men and women” is solidifying (in large part because of cheerful straight and gay community ignoring what bi folks are saying). You also get, as far as I can tell–and the genesis of pansexual communities is not my thing, so I’d be happy to be corrected–with folks who would previously have fit in just fine with bisexual communities effectively re-inventing the wheel in a reaction to the extra-community definition of what bisexual means and there’s a whole lot of conflict there that smells like fragmentation and people talking past one another. The big thing, however, everyone is focusing on? Attraction and who you’re sexually attracted to.
So you wind up with people who haven’t spent much time in any of these communities going “well, shit, I ain’t sexually attracted to men, women, and I certainly am not attracted to both; what is happening? What box do I fit in?”People who feel lonely and isolated, and they start talking to each other because thanks to the Internet, now they can also find one another. And that’s the second half of how we got here to this modern asexual community, which tbh I’m not getting into now because it’s already been too long.
But that’s where it really came from: a reaction to the increasing hegemony of the sexual orientation model.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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