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A Queer Discourse

A Queer Discourse explores the dichotomies between queerness’ inherent radicality and widespread acceptance, cultural transmission in the face of generational erasure, and the changing ideas surrounding what it means to be queer, examined across multiple cultures and generations. These environmental portraits and interviews trace threads of a narrative that begins before Stonewall and runs into the present day. Regardless of the disconnects that drive us apart, we share in the collective history that contextualizes our daily existence, despite the omissions that often obscure its full breadth.

SUSANNA: “During the AIDS crisis as a lesbian there was this weird feeling of guilt that our community was so much better off, that as a lesbian the [lower] chance of transmission... The kind of homophobia that a gay man was gonna get hit with compared to what a lesbian was gonna get hit with were completely different. I was still on the younger end of that. [My brother and his wife] took me to an AIDS march, and I can remember feeling really proud to be walking in that march. They had this call and response thing where a facilitator up on stage would say “we take you into our hearts,” and then they did all the public figures first, but then they just kept going for the audience. There was a guy standing maybe two to three people away from me and he just kept going, and he kept listing, and he must have listed a hundred names of people until he finally just fell down in sobs. It was one of the big transformative moments in my life of understanding how deeply painful and how hard-hitting that was in the community.”

DANIELLE: “All of the friends I made in middle school and high school were all friends and then all of a sudden we were all queer. I don’t know how that happens, but I feel like so many people say that that happens to them, or say that maybe you find each other before you even know that that’s why you’re friends. All of my friends are just not straight, pretty much.”

JORMA: “The big thing is about being a gay cop. It always sells. You know, it always turns into that.”

PETER: “A lot of the young gay guys take for granted what other people had to go through so they could walk down the street holding hands with their boyfriends. In the late eighties, even in New York City, if you walk down the street holding hands with your boyfriend, you could get beat up. There were still vans of yahoos from Jersey coming into the city in vans with their baseball bats and gaybashing- That’s when gaybashing was still happening. They would get out of the vans, a bunch of them, and they would gaybash people. They would beat people to death with their baseball bats. Usually it was one skinny little guy walking through the village, that’s when they had the pink panthers, the roving bands that would patrol neighborhoods. You could still get killed for being gay.”

DJIBRIL: I’m disconnected as fuck as well because I live in a bubble, and I didn’t really realize this until I was put in a situation where I was basically homeless for a few months. So it means that i didn’t have this privilege that I was kind of aware of, but only peripherally. I kind of have class privilege- I don’t make that much money, and my parents don’t make that much money, but just the fact that I was able to go and have this education and be able to hold a job that will allow me to be a gentrifier or live in a gentrified space, that’s a power in itself. I think that a lot of queer kids who are people of color, who have had the opportunities that I’ve had, are able to shield themselves a little bit better. Which is not to say that racism or homophobia or whatever the fuck doesn’t exist, because it does and it affects us all, but there’s definitely that shielding. And yeah, I get by a lot of the time because people just think that I have money, but I don’t.

ALYSSA: “Race is almost always at the forefront of my mind. There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t think about race, but sexuality? Almost never. I go out with Erika and I hang out with a lot of gay people and go to gay bars and shit; I go to drag shows and I’m surrounded by queer people a lot of the time, but at the same time the discrimination against queer people is not something that I think about a lot... With race, when you see somebody, you see them, you know? People who say they’re colorblind, that’s not a real thing. You can tell someone’s black. But you don’t look at somebody unless they’re really presenting that way, you don’t look at somebody and say oh you’re gay or oh you’re a lesbian or you’re trans or whatever. But it’s much more of a visual reaction when it comes to race.”

SAM: “I think most of what’s happening in progressive communities is word games and fighting over word games, because people don’t realize that words aren’t real. Words are real and do have impact, but they’re not real real in some sense. Words are not fixed in their representations of reality.”

JAY: “I don’t know that I felt like part of that community at all. We were just fighting for women. We were just fighting for our gay rights and for our right to be out and to be lesbians and not so much focusing, in this sheltered area, on the [AIDS] epidemic. It wasn’t in our everyday conversations. Part of it was just about being a rebel, and this was the trend that I was going along with.” “I don’t really label

Is it possible to be non-confrontationally queer? In the Northeast and on the West Coast, some queer young adults have now grown up without being stigmatized as a result of their sexuality, gender identity, and presentation. The millennial generation often views AIDS as a relic of a bygone era; the rate of new HIV infections peaked in 1997 while annual AIDS deaths peaked in 2004. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was implemented in 1994 and repealed in 2011, while gay marriage was legalized nationally in 2015. Though today we stand near the high water mark of queer acceptance in the United States, we continue to wrestle with a government that endorses anti-queer policy, hate speech defended by educational institutions as “free speech,” and a legal climate wherein people can be fired for their gender identity and sexuality in 27 states. Queer existence is itself a radical act, even in progressive communities where a queer person’s daily existence may not suffer the aggressions of stigmatization.

When the national government supports an anti-queer agenda, queer existence is itself a radical act, even in progressive communities such as San Francisco and New York City. Generationally, we are removed from the direct legacy of the queer rights movement that grew out of the Stonewall Riots, from the millions whose deaths help normalize, even embrace honestly the undeniable humanity of queer lives. Regardless of this disconnect, we share in the collective history that contextualizes our daily existence, despite the erasures that obscure its full depths. These collected experiences uncover what was before obscured, restoring pieces of the patchwork quilt of queer experience from Stonewall to today.

A Queer Discourse explores the divisions between queerness’ inherent radicality and widespread acceptance, cultural transmission in the face of generational erasure, and the changing ideas of what it means to be queer, examined across multiple cultures and generations. The series utilizes a series of environmental portraits and interviews to trace threads of a narrative that runs from Stonewall into the present day.

Daga J. Kenseth

daga kenseth

A Queer Discourse