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djgrayhavingbeenbreathedout:
septembriseur:
but like @ this whole issue of tumblr’s lack of historical awareness (in this case, re: the use of the term “queer,” but, let’s face it, there is a huge lack of historical awareness about almost everything on tumblr), it’s not even a question of “this term was deliberately reappropriated by queer people and is a very common neutral term all the way up to its official situation in Queer Studies/Queer Theory.” If you go back and actually read what queer people were writing about themselves and other queer people, certainly in the early half of the 20th century/prior to the queer rights/gay rights movement there were people using the term “queer” as a casual way of describing themselves and things that were relevant to their experience of non-normative attraction. Example from my own particular area of interest: in 1940, Peter Pears recommends a W. Somerset Maugham novel as “terribly good… & of course the whole thing, in his subtle way, is quite itching with queerness.” When, in 1963, Pears writes to Britten that the two of them are, after all, “queer & left & conshies,” neither “queer” or “conshies” is a radical political statement, but rather a factual description of their orientation/situation in regards to “mainstream” society.
Christopher Isherwood also used the term “queer” neutrally in his midcentury letters, to describe people he’d met (in 1961, describing Franco Zeffirelli as “queer and quite attractive”) and characteristics and themes (also in 1961: “Frank Wiley, with a friend, just stopped by to deliver the manuscript of his Sta. Barbara campus queer novel”).
And these are off-the-cuff examples that I just happen to be able to pull out and cite without effort.
Yes, this is true of my particular area of interest as well (e.g. Lytton Strachey, WWI & Bloomsbury), as well. And, as I’m fond of pointing out, George Chauncey’s “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion?: Homosexual Identities and the Construction of the Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era” thoroughly documents same-sex-attracted men in Rhode Island in 1919 using “queer” as an umbrella term in a nuanced system of sexual taxonomy:
The [gang of] inverts [within the US Navy in 1919 Newport, Rhode Island] grouped themselves together as “queers” on the basis of their effeminate gender behavior, and they all played roles culturally defined as feminine in sexual contacts [sic]. But they distinguished among themselves on the basis of the “feminine” sexual behavior they preferred, categorizing themselves as “fairies” (also called cocksuckers), “pogues” (men who liked to be “browned,” or anally penetrated), and “two-way artists” (who enjoyed both). The ubiquity of these distinctions and their importance to personal self-identification cannot be overemphasized. Witnesses at the naval inquiries explicitly drew the distinctions as a matter of course and incorporated them into their descriptions of the gay subculture. One “pogue” who cooperated with the investigation, for instance, used such categories to label his friends in the gang with no prompting from the court: “Hughes said he was a pogue; Richard said he was a cocksucker; Fred Hoage said he was a two-way artist…” While there were some men about whom he “had to draw my own conclusions; they never said directly what they was or wasn’t,” his remarks make it clear he was sure they fit into one category or another.
A second group of sailors who engaged in homosexual relations and participated in the group life of the gang occupied a more ambiguous sexual category because they, unlike the queers, conformed to masculine gender norms. Some of them were heterosexually married. None of them behaved effeminately or took the “woman’s part” in sexual relations, they took no feminine nicknames, and they did not label themselves–nor were they labelled by others–as queer. Instead, gang members, who reproduced the highly gendered sexual relations of their culture, described the second group of men as playing the “husbands” to the “ladies” of the “inverted set.” Some husbands entered into steady, loving relationships with individual men known as queer; witnesses spoke of couples who took trips together and maintained monogamous relationships. […]
(The quote goes on from there; the whole essay is fascinating.)
This is one of the first citations in the OED of “queer” as applied to same-sex-attracted people, and it’s plain that it is part of a system of self-definition originating from within queer culture, not without. And the fact that the events Chancey describes were happening in direct response to a culture and reputation that the American Navy had been developing for quite some time, leads me to believe that it’s a safe assumption this terminology existed within queer Navy circles at least back through the early years of the War.
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septembriseur:
but like @ this whole issue of tumblr’s lack of historical awareness (in this case, re: the use of the term “queer,” but, let’s face it, there is a huge lack of historical awareness about almost everything on tumblr), it’s not even a question of “this term was deliberately reappropriated by queer people and is a very common neutral term all the way up to its official situation in Queer Studies/Queer Theory.” If you go back and actually read what queer people were writing about themselves and other queer people, certainly in the early half of the 20th century/prior to the queer rights/gay rights movement there were people using the term “queer” as a casual way of describing themselves and things that were relevant to their experience of non-normative attraction. Example from my own particular area of interest: in 1940, Peter Pears recommends a W. Somerset Maugham novel as “terribly good… & of course the whole thing, in his subtle way, is quite itching with queerness.” When, in 1963, Pears writes to Britten that the two of them are, after all, “queer & left & conshies,” neither “queer” or “conshies” is a radical political statement, but rather a factual description of their orientation/situation in regards to “mainstream” society.
Christopher Isherwood also used the term “queer” neutrally in his midcentury letters, to describe people he’d met (in 1961, describing Franco Zeffirelli as “queer and quite attractive”) and characteristics and themes (also in 1961: “Frank Wiley, with a friend, just stopped by to deliver the manuscript of his Sta. Barbara campus queer novel”).
And these are off-the-cuff examples that I just happen to be able to pull out and cite without effort.
Yes, this is true of my particular area of interest as well (e.g. Lytton Strachey, WWI & Bloomsbury), as well. And, as I’m fond of pointing out, George Chauncey’s “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion?: Homosexual Identities and the Construction of the Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era” thoroughly documents same-sex-attracted men in Rhode Island in 1919 using “queer” as an umbrella term in a nuanced system of sexual taxonomy:
The [gang of] inverts [within the US Navy in 1919 Newport, Rhode Island] grouped themselves together as “queers” on the basis of their effeminate gender behavior, and they all played roles culturally defined as feminine in sexual contacts [sic]. But they distinguished among themselves on the basis of the “feminine” sexual behavior they preferred, categorizing themselves as “fairies” (also called cocksuckers), “pogues” (men who liked to be “browned,” or anally penetrated), and “two-way artists” (who enjoyed both). The ubiquity of these distinctions and their importance to personal self-identification cannot be overemphasized. Witnesses at the naval inquiries explicitly drew the distinctions as a matter of course and incorporated them into their descriptions of the gay subculture. One “pogue” who cooperated with the investigation, for instance, used such categories to label his friends in the gang with no prompting from the court: “Hughes said he was a pogue; Richard said he was a cocksucker; Fred Hoage said he was a two-way artist…” While there were some men about whom he “had to draw my own conclusions; they never said directly what they was or wasn’t,” his remarks make it clear he was sure they fit into one category or another.
A second group of sailors who engaged in homosexual relations and participated in the group life of the gang occupied a more ambiguous sexual category because they, unlike the queers, conformed to masculine gender norms. Some of them were heterosexually married. None of them behaved effeminately or took the “woman’s part” in sexual relations, they took no feminine nicknames, and they did not label themselves–nor were they labelled by others–as queer. Instead, gang members, who reproduced the highly gendered sexual relations of their culture, described the second group of men as playing the “husbands” to the “ladies” of the “inverted set.” Some husbands entered into steady, loving relationships with individual men known as queer; witnesses spoke of couples who took trips together and maintained monogamous relationships. […]
(The quote goes on from there; the whole essay is fascinating.)
This is one of the first citations in the OED of “queer” as applied to same-sex-attracted people, and it’s plain that it is part of a system of self-definition originating from within queer culture, not without. And the fact that the events Chancey describes were happening in direct response to a culture and reputation that the American Navy had been developing for quite some time, leads me to believe that it’s a safe assumption this terminology existed within queer Navy circles at least back through the early years of the War.
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