Every time I get really scared about what the Trump administration is going to do to queer people, I remember the 1990s. (Because I’m that old.) Of course gay and trans people existed then, but in terms of visibility and official recognition in the US, we were either closeted or on the margins of society.
It was better than previous decades; if you lived in a liberal area and didn’t have any other strikes against you, you might get the live-and-let-live treatment. But if you did it was purely a personal favor, because nothing in the law or in society at large protected you. Sodomy laws could still be enforced. Same-sex marriage wasn’t legal, even in Massachusetts. You could get a murder charge cut down a degree or two by testifying that the victim had been gay at you. Ellen caused a huge scandal just by existing in public as a lesbian. “Gay” was standard teenage slang for “bad.” AIDS deaths were still common but finally starting to decline, with little help from a straight society that considered its existence to be a hilarious buttsex joke. “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” was a controversially progressive policy because at least servicemembers had the option to be closeted. The big debate in public schools was whether to teach children that straight sex exists.
(okay, that last one never really got better)
And it’s too simple to say “and we all got through it,” because we didn’t all. People absolutely did suffer and die. I stumbled through those years presenting as a weird straight girl, not with any kind of personal valor. There were gay and trans activists standing proud against the tide, and there were gay and trans people quietly but openly living their lives, but… fewer. It was harder.
But we, as a community, as a people, we got through it. We got all the way to where there were completely different reasons to dislike Ellen. We got to where there are openly trans people in government, and gay acceptance is so normalized that transness is routinely contrasted with decent, conventional gayness. (Not that being gay is entirely safe now, but it’s buck wild to hear conservatives say “I have no problem with the normal gays” when you’re old enough to remember 1995.)
I can’t promise when or how society will continue to progress, but history never literally goes backwards. Trans people are more visible and more explicitly targeted now than in the 90s, and that’s frightening; but we also have massively more legal and medical backing than we did then. And we have the Internet, making it impossible to completely repress the message that feels so obvious now that it’s hard for me to explain that I literally didn’t know this in the 90s: feeling ill at ease with which gender you’re supposed to be and which you’re supposed to be attracted to is a real thing and you are not alone. There is so much support and community that we’ve gained that we aren’t losing today.
And more important than hope for the future, what I want to give you today is hope for the now. Because while being queer in the 90s sucked, on a day to day basis it often didn’t. On that small scale I had queer friends and we cuddled and flirted and watched anime together on a horrible brown couch in my friend’s basement. We played with the cats and we wrote extremely bad fanfiction about boys kissing and we got in a big stupid fight about Final Fantasy VII and we… we lived our lives, you know? Without permission from society, without even fully understanding ourselves, there was still so much in our lives that was good.
(“Wait, how could you have a queer friend group if you were all closeted and didn’t even really know you were queer?” Well, you see, life could be very complicated that way.)
“I lived through the 90s” doesn’t sound very dramatic, but that’s my point. It was in some ways a worst-case-scenario compared to now, but it didn’t feel dramatic. It felt like life. But if you want a more dramatic example, here’s a quote from my grandfather.
I had a ball. Then I got to fighting with my mother. My mother got at me because I got lazy. When you have it good and you’re young, you just get lazy. Friday night, with all the commissars, we used to have parties. I used to go over Friday night and came home Tuesday morning. […] I just had a good time. In the morning I used to sleep till three o’clock. Slept the whole day, yeah, that’s what I did. And I worked only when I felt like it.
What he is describing, in this quote, is his experiences as a Jewish refugee in the USSR during World War II. Of course there’s a lot more to his story than this; he went through very painful times as well, he lost his home and many of his loved ones, and he had to be very lucky and resourceful to get into a situation where he had free time and money. I don’t mean to tell you that he just partied through the war. But he did party during the war. Life is like that, more often than you’d think.
The next four years are going to suck. We are going to lose things we took for granted and nobody knows how many or how fast. But we are also going to write some absolutely shit-ass fanfiction and get in extremely pointless arguments about it. We are going to have our first kiss and panic for a week about what it Means and then have our second kiss and realize this guy is kind of a dork actually. We are going to sit on the floor in front of the couch with an elderly cat on our lap and watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show in glorious standard definition and we are going to live every moment of our lives.
We are going to live as activists, as rebels, as outlaws. But we are also going to live as people. We do not need the government’s permission to do that. The next four years of your life will have happy memories, silly ones, naughty ones, ones that make you cringe when you’re older, ones that are simply part of the ongoing story of your life.
I can’t say “it won’t be that bad, we won’t be oppressed, it won’t really matter.” But I want you to know that you can be oppressed and still have days when you care much more about your fucking fanfiction argument.
Don’t give up. Don’t ask permission. Don’t comply in advance. Don’t comply afterwards either, if you can help it. Don’t confuse “illegal” with “impossible.” You will see horrible things on the news, it will always matter to someone and sometimes that someone will be you. And sometimes you will be terrified and miserable, and sometimes you will be a cool sexy outlaw, and sometimes things will feel normal but also like they could crack at any time, and most often of all you’ll put away the dishes and water the plants and text with a friend for a bit and then try to get some reading done before bed.
Leave a Reply