Generation Queer

Queers are the problem children.

Society attempts to pin down and define us and once we are quietened for just a moment, our own rules change. It is notoriously tough if not impossible to define what Queer was and is. Even using the term, queer, creates chaos as the original use was an offensive way of describing a gay person, especially a man. Many still hate the word but many of us embraced it for its universality and the act of owning a word that use to be thrown violently at us to disparage and attack. That reclamation started over 50 years ago and then exploded in academic circles in 1980s and 90s. Everything was Queer.

It was a useful break from the gay liberation past where we were finally being heard and then through the harsh politicisation we experienced during the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  Queer identity was formed out of a new wave of homophobia and the stigma of infection. It was also a not so deliberate way to differentiate ourselves from the earlier homophile movement and that movement’s more radical offspring, Gay Liberation. For the purpose of this post, I would like to is use a definition of Queer that accurately depicts what it meant to me in the 1990s as an identified radical Queer man:

They [Queers] don’t pretend for a moment that they can alter the dominant culture- gay or straight. They don’t want to. …. They’re trying to create an alternative culture in and around it.

Dennis Cooper, Queercore, 1996.

I repeat, this would be the closest definition I would use as my own as a Queer (gay), white, twentysomething man in Melbourne Australia of the 1990s.                                    

Self awareness of my queer identity coincided with the explosion of New Queer Cinema- My Own Private Idaho, Young Soul Rebels, Edward II ( all 1991), The Living End and Orlando (both 1992) and later, Go Fish (1994) and Happy Together (1997). These were a mixture of indie and semi-mainstream flicks dealing with outright sexuality, race, homophobia, HIV, gender fluidity all wrapped up with a message about patriarchy. I fucking loved it. It was like a roadmap to help Queer Generation X to differentiate us from the Boomers. To me at the time, this was a generational shift in a post-Cold War world- those weird years of Bush Senior’s presidency where the intensity of the eighties was fading into something a bit more stable and without the threat of nuclear annihilation. It was a time to get our breath back and reflect on what a shitstorm that past decade was for gay rights and really for the world as a whole. It may have been a great time for music and film (debatable) but let’s be frank; it wasn’t a time for anyone outside the heteronormative sphere. Jesus! We weren’t even using words like that, yet.

Queer culture was not only on the periphery of hetero culture, it wanted to be an alternative to the night clubs of the Gay and Lesbian communities with its own subculture. There would be no Kylie Minogue of Madonna playing at a queer night the straight bars would let us have once a week. I cannot remember who we replaced them with but I do recall dancing to a few Bjork’s songs and I distinctly remember hearing Tori Amos’ Professional Widow (Its Gotts Be Big) remix (one of many remixes).

The Queer scene tended to attract those who were not goodlooking enough for the mainstream Gay and Lesbian scene or didn’t want to be. It was somewhere there amongst the pop queens, muscle Marys, the leather bars and the good old public bar. We were likely fitted out in flannel shirts taking a cue from grunge but then evolving into gay skinheads with bovver boots but not the red suspenders. “Queer as Fuck” motifs on t-shirts could be spotted, but of the homemade variety; I don’t think a t-shirt printing service would be willing to print one. For the lesbians, fashion would from the traditional butch dyke look to a grrrl dancing at a warehouse party in what looked like a Laura Ashley print dress, I spotted once. Lipstick Lesbians abounded though they were in all scene remembering that 1993 was the Year of the Lesbian: possibly the first hint of the pink dollar chase by corporates.

Politically, we were indifferent or radical but not revolutionary; there was very little room for anything conservative and moderates were suspect. Marriage and children was for the breeders. We jumped in and out of relationships, moved in with each other and moved out. We were likely promiscuous or pretended not to be. Closet doors opened but not in the same numbers of the following decades. We read Camille Paglia, Judith Butler and pretended to read Foucault because Queer Studies demanded we do, even if we didn’t understand him.

We continued to laugh at the straights and poured scorn on fellow queens who were still obsessed with looks and gyms and fashion. We inadvertently destroyed ourselves in an obsession to be anything BUT them. Though we never could pin down who them were.

We hooked up without apps, using newspaper and magazine personals which required patience. Or there were the sex clubs and saunas. We were the first to use the internet as it boomed in the final years of the century. Java chatrooms were the norm and suddenly we were global, talking to studs in the USA, Costa Rica, Germany or in the same internet cafe. But when asked, how we met, we were still too uncomfortable to say over the net; bars seemed more respectable.

I was happy to have been part of Generation Queer. It seemed more edgy than the generation before and those after us. I still do not understand the assimilation of much of our culture into the straights exemplified with the Same Sex Marriage debate. I still feel that SSM was our misguided desire to be accepted in the mainstream by respectably mirroring the straight family, white picket fences and the 2.1 children we laughed about thirty years ago. But the world seems to have become conservative and even fascist with a sharp turn to corporatism, and the gay and lesbian community have followed.

Possibly inevitable, but I would love to see a Queer as Fuck t-shirt again.