United Queerdom

From the Legends of the Gay Liberation Front to the Queers of Tomorrow

Dan Glass

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786998774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Throughout the 1970s the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) initiated an anarchic campaign that permanently changed the face of Britain. Inspired by the Stonewall uprisings in the US, the GLF demanded a 'Absolute Freedom For All' worldwide. Yet half a century on, injustice is rife and LGBT+ inequality remains. Complete LGBT+ liberation means housing rights, universal healthcare, economic freedom and so much more. Although many people believe queers are now free and should behave, assimilate and become palatable – Dan Glass shows that the fight is far from over. United Queerdom evocatively captures over five decades of LGBT+ culture and protest from the GLF to 2020s. Showing how central protest is to queer history and identity this book uncovers the back-breaking hard work as well as the glamorous and raucous stories of those who rebelled against injustice and became founders in the story of queer liberation.

PART 1

SEX

1

Chicken Soup

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. (Harriet Tubman)¹

If you don’t have roots then how can your leaves turn to the sun? Roots connect us to our past, help nourish our present story and lead us to our future. When they are broken it can take a lifetime to recover. When we find them, a whole world of possibility can unfurl.

Until the age of ten I spoke so little my family thought I might be deaf. The remains of my orthodox Jewish biological family came to London after the Second World War under a cloud of death. The fog seeped through the next generations. The mental pathologies of war and migration can confuse children already sensitive to sadness and the war seems to never end. Everyone was still in hiding. No-one, especially me, could come out.

Born of a long line of Jews, spanning Holland, Poland, Romania and Germany, my grandparents were hunted during the Nazi Holocaust. My parents and my generation didn’t find out about their stories until my grandparents were very old and their minds stopped looking forward and instead reverse crashed into the past, regurgitating the horror within. As a child every Chanukah, Rosh Hashanah and other key festivals, when our family would meet, at some point in the evening, the Holocaust would come into conversation. I could literally time it. Every new TV show, theatre show or documentary about the Holocaust was a must-see. Sitting around the dinner table surrounded by shelves of enormous books, with page after page of autobiographies connected by train tracks to Auschwitz, gas chambers, concentration camp inmates with ‘Juden’ signs, identity codes for the persecuted including yellow stars for Jews and pink triangles for homosexuals – my heart ached.

‘Never. Again. Ever.’ I heard on repeat every Holocaust Memorial Day and I became curious as to why some people seek to transform their traumatic experience, and others to perpetuate it.

Often war survivors open up to their grandchildren first so as to protect their children as only when they are old do they feel they can release. This is the bitter sweet my grandmother left me. We all carry our maternal grandmother’s pregnancy stress, bewitchingly called the ‘Mitochondrial Eve’, the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of all living humans. When our life began in our mother’s eggs during our grandmother’s pregnancy, the stress through epigenetic markers started their journey through the generations. At the time, the gravity of this was unknown to me.

Post war, Michalina my Polish grandmother, wore glamorous make-up and a sweet smile that disguised a raging defensiveness at the world. Occasionally, like a tiger ready to pounce, the sheen dissolved. Once in a restaurant we sat together and the waitress was slow to take our order. Maybe she was tired, hungover or stoned – not rare for teenagers like me. Watching her intensely, Michalina suddenly retreated into her seat. ‘She knows we are Jewish’, she whispered in my ear, whilst grabbing my arm ready to flee. And we were off. No time to waste.

Soon after I remember sitting with her after school one day slurping chicken soup, spellbound whilst she began to pour her heart out. She sat there teary-eyed talking on repeat about the day she said goodbye to her family not knowing if they would ever see each other again. She told me her Holocaust survival stories and what happened to the Jews of Cracow, Poland. Knowing that I was both Jewish and gay entering adulthood, I couldn’t help but wonder, where was the other half of me? It took me months to finally pluck up the courage to ask her, ‘What happened to the homosexuals? Did they fight back?’

Startled, ‘Sssh Daniel! Just eat your chicken soup. It’s getting cold’, she simmered at me.

So that was that.

I knew she survived thanks to the Polish underground resistance movement providing her with false papers. She recalled this to me until the day she died. During the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, the largest of all the Jewish open-air prisons in German-occupied Europe during the Second World War, she lived as a nanny and an undercover Jew in the anti-semitic ‘Jagielski’ household. She was 17.

It came as no surprise then, that Michalina had a deeply ingrained awareness of the depth and range of human emotions. She had an incredible instinct on how depraved humankind could become having witnessed it at its extremes. Her experience included nightmarish effects of calculated destruction and human wickedness, of the depths of people’s courage to struggle, of how much one’s spirit can withstand and ultimately how we can continue to confront injustice to liberate each other.

Soon after she died a letter was found on her bedside table.

His (Mr Jagielski) anti-semitic tendencies became clear to us when during the ghetto uprising, when the sky was red with fires and soot laid out on the streets, the fall-out of the flames, I made an inadvertent remark about how cruel the Germans were to the Jews. ‘Michalina’ he said, as that was my name, ‘this is the only way to get rid of these vermin.’

As a child my eyes were forced open to issues of injustice and the banality of evil. Once opened they could not be shut. As philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt reflects in her seminal work The Human Condition, which analyses the Holocaust, ‘The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil’.² The nasty residue this left for me was a critical awareness of the dangers of blind faith in structures that damage society, the dangers of indifference.

Against the backdrop of silence and death, the engine of my soul began to hiccup and purr – could homophobic trauma ever be a force for change?

2

An Inalienable Right

The love that dare not speak its name. (Lord Alfred Douglas, poet, journalist and the lover of Oscar Wilde)¹

Depression, abandonment issues, drug addiction, fear, instability and self-destruction are all consequences of being submerged in a society that ignores you, erases you and tries to throw your entire identity under the bus. There’s no easy road map to queer empowerment, we have to travel it for ourselves.

Fast-forward 20 years and I wake to a new dawn. Last night, I dreamt of my boyfriend Dan’s neck and the way he makes small yelps in his sleep like a dog looking for love and attention.

This morning, I thought of his eyes. Those times when we are locked together and regardless of the drama and the tumultuous roller coaster, our love for each other is as deep as the sea. I know, pass the sick bucket. And to think that this is a man with the same name. LOL. Ridiculous!

We met five years ago in 2015 in Berlin. I was working on a project with grandchildren of Nazis, Jews, Roma and other descendants, like myself, to make sense of our inheritance 70 years later. He was grieving the recent loss of his father. Both of us on a quest to find belonging in a lonely world.

I remember so vividly the hot times in the early days we fell onto the pillows and stared into each other’s eyes. That look of simultaneous bliss and terror, so bittersweet. To know that the pain of loneliness, so raw, could actually end. Now we are two cuddle queens. The ‘hankie code’ has been a prominent colour-coded form of clandestine identification for queers over the centuries to share their sexual preferences; my favourite code is not a hankie but the ‘teddy bear’. I’d rather a good hug and some soul classics than a leather orgy, any day.

It seems that none of these adventures in queer freedom-seeking and queer family-building would be possible without Dan – or perhaps that’s just the unhealthy codependency singing sweetly. The love-force we have cultivated together to take on the world of inequity is both fragile and extraordinary. It’s a sculpture, something we, or indeed anyone whose relationship falls outside of societal norms, have had to carve out delicately and ferociously at the same time. Every day we face the challenge of stigma, belittling, disregard – not to mention the relentless systematic marginalisation in society.

Our love is a threat to the system and my fuck, can it feel good.

We wake up every day to centuries of compounded internalised shame, walk past homeless queer youth on the streets as we get our milk from the shops and end the day speaking with more queer friends who are struggling to stay afloat. Yet without hope we are nothing and without celebrating our heritage we stay small.

The history of the queer liberation struggle is one of individuals who built movements and took on the often lethal task of raising the profile of oppression of queers to such heights that the public could no longer claim ignorance. They knew their work was sacrificial; internment and death was the fate of many of them.

I have my own heroines: Willem Arondeus bridged the connection of my heritage. A queer anti-fascist in 1943, he blew up the records office that the Nazis were about to pilfer from saving thousands of lives. Just before he was executed his last words on this planet were ‘Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards’.² The Queen of the Stonewall uprisings is Marsha P. Johnson, a queer trans person of colour, who catalysed the protests against the homophobic police invasion at the Stonewall Inn in 1969.³ Today we have many legends such as model and trans activist Munroe Bergdorf, refusing to be co-opted by L’Oréal by speaking out against racial injustice and systematic oppression, truly in the spirit of ‘All injustices are connected’.⁴

Queer culture has never been a walk in the park (well actually it has been a mince in the bushes, but more of that later) and so every day we have to shake off our fatalism and understand that progress is made in a myriad of ways. Without meaning to sound like an extra in the film The Exorcist, I feel ghosts all around.⁵ I am sure many queers do. The concept of ‘Hauntology’ resonates deeply – that being the feeling of ‘the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive’.⁶ Not just the ghosts of my family murdered in the war who I’ve learned about in my past, but the ghosts of my living present that I’m only beginning to find out about. Where are our queer icons and elders, and what framework should I use to make sense of myself and understand the world?

Denied, killed, lobotomised, silenced.

When there is no affirmation of your existence, you can’t understand yourself. When there is no sense of being or purpose in the world you turn in on yourself. Especially when you’re a child.

As a teenager at my local secondary school, survival was the only lesson I learnt. During my whole formative education I didn’t hear the word ‘gay’ used once in a positive light, only in an attack when someone’s head was being flushed down the toilet (bog washed) or kicked like a football on the school bus. That was our homosexual identity and our destiny. I presumed this was just the way things were. I pretended to shrug the shame off, but its tentacles were already making a home inside me.

A five-year-long study commissioned by LGBTQIA+ mental health charity Pace, resulting in The RaRE Research Report, found that 34 per cent of young LGBTQIA+ people under 26 surveyed had made at least one suicide attempt in their life. Forty-eight per cent of young trans people had attempted suicide. This is compared to 18 per cent of heterosexual and 26 per cent of cisgender young people – cisgender people being those whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth. The two main causes o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Language and Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Sex
• 1 Chicken Soup
• 2 An Inalienable Right
• 3 Shafted?
• 4 Sprawling Anthills Deep Underground
• 5 Leave the Gay Donkeys Alone
• Part 2: Power
• 6 The Golden Egg
• 7 Coming Into
• 8 Janine
• 9 As Soon as this Pub Closes
• 10 Here We Dare to Dream
• Part 3: Space
• 11 Sex Litter
• 12 Over Our Dead Bodies
• 13 Homo Hope
• 14 Spirit of the Camp Road
• 15 Liberation or Slavery
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index