From AIDS to Orlando: Why being queer is still a fight for survival

Queer Mourning – by La JohnJoseph

Queer people are ineluctable. We are not aberrations, but our difference is precious.

Shaped by adversity, LGBT culture has fashioned history since time was first recorded, and in all likelihood before. Queer pharaohs, Empresses, Popes, Sultans, scholars, scientists, artists, and dancers have all shaped the world, in spite of incessant persecution, from every hypocritical socio-political infrastructure.

But, almost universally, every notable LGBT historical event has been straight-washed, and as such their legacy has been erased, leaving LGBT history to be read synonymously and with invisible loss and visible humiliation.

The only gay histories which remain in the public vocabulary are the gruesome warnings, Edward II’s horrifying murder, Alan Turing’s suicide, the imprisonment of Monique Coverson and Larissa Joseph.

All that is left to queer people is a staggering history of grief, one horror after another in an overlapping catalogue of atrocities, a grief which has become sacred.

The recent homicidal attack in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, like last month’s in Mexico’s La Madame, and last year’s at Pride Tel Aviv, was an infernal crime which targeted unarmed people, singled out for murder for their sexuality.

I can’t simply say that you oughta chuck some glitter on and dance away the horror, because the horror is an inextricable part of the deal. Orlando left the queer world heartbroken not just because of the monumental sorrow summoned by the sight of 49 siblings slaughtered, but because it underscored exactly how at risk all sexually non-conforming people are, still.

When we wept it wasn’t because we were facing that oft-quoted feeling of, “Gee, that might have been me”, but because we were squarely acknowledging, “Fuck, I could be next.” And that’s a very different sentiment.

Not a lack of empathy but an over-familiarity with it, a deep-seated rage more powerful than fear, shot through with the overwhelming injustice of these latest losses.

Ask any queer person, and they’ll be able to roll out a list for you of aggressions they’ve endured since before becoming fully-conscious of their sexuality. From casual familial homophobia and schoolyard bullying, through being jumped in the streets, verbally harassed on public transport, mocked by colleagues, being denied employment, and subjected to constant humiliation from an intrinsically anti-gay media.

Alexander_Geist_by_Alexa_Vachon

Orlando was nothing new, only a reminder of the duress queer people live under. We are primed and prepared to grieve; queer mourning is intrinsically second-nature. Think of the generation allowed to die in the most horrible ways imaginable, rejected by society and practically thrown in the gutter, when AIDS first visited the gay community 30 years ago.

And just four decades earlier the Holocaust saw as many as 65,000 gay and trans people sent to concentration camps and prisons (many of those people remained in jail even after the liberation of Europe, because their “crimes” were still illegal).

People were hanged for acts of sodomy in England until the mid-19th century, and before that there lie centuries of queer people dismembered, disembowelled, decapitated, and burned at the stake as heretics and witches.

Orlando is not new. Orlando is as much a part of queer culture as Polari, drag, casual sex, and diva worship. I don’t mean to suggest that we ought to accept this state of affairs, merely that we have to see it as it is, in its realistic context.

People in many countries are still subject to the death penalty for expressing (or even being suspected of) queer desire, and even those gay people who don’t face the daily possibility of execution still endure disproportionately high rates of mental health problems, youth homelessness, and suicide.

Do we sit by and watch? No: We campaign for greater freedoms, for equality, and legal protection; we come together to comfort one another, and even occasionally witness some significant victories.

But we must recognise ourselves as people who have been written out of history, or consigned to a place of abjection and ridicule within it. Our attempts to take power into our own hands, and affirmatively announce our dignity was always going to aggravate the status quo.

Each advance in social justice triggers a reactionary backlash. The horrendous attack in Orlando proves just how much has been achieved in the queer quest for justice – but sadly shows how much further we have to go.

GEIST by La JohnJoseph is at London’s Arcola Theatre Saturday 2nd & Sunday 3rd July. For more information and tickets visit arcolatheatre.com.

For the best deals on tickets and shows, visit tickets.attitude.co.uk.

In This Article: