Since #QueerHistoryMonth starts this weekend: I think we are undergoing a massive shift in the meaning of queer identity RIGHT NOW - the 2nd one in American history [🧵]
First, something to keep in mind as we go: this Gallup poll from February, which saw upticks in every category of queer identification among Gen Z, but in particular, bi and trans identities  news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lg…
What’s going on here? You might have heard TERFs freaking out about “social contagion” and “disappearing lesbians” – as though lesbian identification wasn’t also rising (science isn’t their strong suit). 
I think we are seeing a fundamental realignment in what it means to be queer. To understand it, we have to go back to the middle of the 19th century: the creation of the city, the death of the invert, and the birth of the homosexual.
Before the urbanization of America in the 19th century, the most recognizable queer figure is what some termed “the invert.” Inverts combined/collapsed elements of what we call being trans, being intersex, and being gay.
The important parts: 1) being an invert was about gender, not sexuality. Your ability to perform what we see as “good heterosexuality” was just a part of your gender, not a stand alone identity category you could fail at. And…
2) inversion, like everything we now call personality or psychiatric disorder, lived in the body. This was a eugenic time. Your body WAS your identity. Inverts couldn’t change or hide. They were simply considered defective, like pickpockets, Black people, and “born tireds.”
As America urbanized in the mid-19th C (starting in places like Brooklyn), our new cities drew hoards of people who were expected to live sex stratified lives - this was the Victorian era after all.
On docks and in women’s schools, people we today would call “gender-normative homosexuals” began to find each other in great numbers, and in so doing, began to conceptualize themselves as a typology; a people - an IDENTITY.
THIS IS THE START OF OUR FIRST AMERICAN REVOLUTION IN QUEER IDENTITY - the birth of L-G-B-T
These were folks like Walt Whitman, who dubbed “them that love, the way I myself am capable of loving” his “comrades” or “comedados.” As a token of affection, he chose the calamus reed, which is named for a queer Greek legend & looks like a big dick. whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1…
His terms, however, did not hold. Why? Because straight people got in the way. Eugenicists & sexologists rushed to study these new identities - often expressly for white supremacist reasons (Black people were the external threat to the white race; queers the internal).
As one such sexologist, RW Shufeldt, wrote in 1905 about studying queer people: “How can we ever hope to improve the tissue of which our race is composed unless we are familiar with every cell now included in its composition?”
A first order question for them: where does queerness “live,” in the body - or as Freud would soon suggest about everything - the mind?
As we inched towards an understanding that sexuality was separate from gender & lived in the mind, several important things happened:
1) sexologists decided we needed separate words for the emerging-interrelated communities of people who desired wrong (homo/bisexuals), people who desired to be wrong in body (trans ppl), and people who already were wrong in body (intersex ppl)
2) people we call heterosexuals began to act differently. As examples of and knowledge about homosexuality spread, heteros stopped seeing homoSOCIAL love as the paragon of expression, something to be immensely proud of.
Before this, people understood they had different sexual desires, but homosocial love largely hid them - even from themselves. It was normal for men to love other men, women other women. Some people were just “excessive.”
NOT ANY MORE. Before, an invert was recognizable, but now a gender-normative homosexual could be anywhere - anyone - and you had to be on guard at all times to prove you weren’t one (because it was now in the brain, not visible on the body). Enter modern homophobia.
This growing homophobia would be turbocharged by 1) the system of “women’s justice,” a program of forced feminization masquerading as a court/prison system, targeting queer and Black women/trans ppl for failures to live up to gender expectations & being dangers to white men; and
2) WWI and especially WWII, when millions of Americans at war and at home had the concept of homosexuality explained to them - always through the lens of a flaw; already indelibly inscribed with homophobia as it was being promulgated.
By the 1950s, we enter a time of conservative retrenchment / attacks on the once-vibrant pre-war queer communities & knowledge. Our new system of thinking (what we today call LGBT) was firmly entrenched, but the people at the center of that knowledge were punished for it.
THIS IS AROUND WHERE WE ARE TODAY IN THE 2ND AMERICAN REVOLUTION OF QUEER IDENTITY
Our new revolution in identity has a common root with our old: new communities finding and naming themselves via new ways of living: in this case, the internet and especially social media.
This really takes off in the 1990s, when we see an explosion in terms for, and uses of, trans terminology (very similar to what happened at the end of the 19th C). gizmodo.com/an-oral-histor…
These new communities named new pathways of queer identity, some of which do not gibe with our current 20th C ideas, which see sexual/gender identity as dominated by two things: sexual orientation, and permanent, binary, body-at-birth-based gender identification.
So, along with, say, naming “trans” as an umbrella term (for the moment), these communities have also named things that operate independently of sexual orientation - like 1) the idea of sapiosexuality, or an attraction to the mind,
2) body-based-realities that render the hetero/homo divide…stickier, to say the least, like women with penises who do not aspire to have vaginas and the people attracted to them,
And 3) people whose gender is not binary and/or not permanent (sometimes referred to as enbies, for non-binary)
You have probably started to notice these changes yourself - new identities that don’t make sense to you, OR make so much sense it shocks you, perhaps scares you.
Or maybe you’ve been perplexed by the sudden alliances between white fascists and TERFs/gender critical “feminists,” teaming up to attack trans and queer youth. They’re allying to preserve a system of knowledge that has structured their lives by rigid gender/sexuality rules.
We are currently seeing an explosion in laws aimed at trans youth - efforts to take control of this phenomenon, these people, their bodies, and the future. Efforts to divide LGB from T are desperate, reactionary attempts to hold back the future.…
And they will be excruciatingly good at slowing it down. And they will torture many trans and queer people - especially youth and people of color - along the way. BUT…
Remember that Gallup poll? Conceptually, they’re losing. There are now more pathways to articulate queerness than ever, and so there are more queer people than ever. news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lg…
Sexual orientation and gender identity aren’t going anywhere - but they will have to share the market when it comes to determining how we love, live, fuck, and name ourselves.
This is a hope born of decades of study of the queer past. Want to know more? Check out this essay, or… electricliterature.com/writing-my-com…
Read WHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER, my first book, about the 19th to mid 20th century in queer Brooklyn. Or… us.macmillan.com/books/97812501…
Check out my new book, THE WOMEN’S HOUSE OF DETENTION, about a prison in the heart of Greenwich Village, the queer & trans people who made it matter, and a queer argument for prison abolition, OR… boldtypebooks.com/titles/hugh-ry…
Subscribe to my Patreon for more! patreon.com/join/HughRyan
Happy queer history month!
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