Virginia Prince (November 23, 1912 – May 2, 2009), c. 1954. Photo c/o University of Victoria. Virginia Prince, who was born one hundred and four years ago today, “has to be considered a central figure in the early history of the contemporary transgender political movement,” Susan Stryker wrote in “Transgender History.” And this is “in spite of her open disdain for homosexuals, her frequently expressed negative opinion of transsexual surgeries, and her conservative stereotypes regarding masculinity and femininity.” In 1952, Prince (who, at the time, identified specifically as a transvestite, i.e., a cross-dressing man; in 1968, she began identifying as a woman) published two issues of “Transvestia,” which Stryker calls “arguably the first overtly political transgender publication in U.S. history.” The periodical, which was revived in 1960 and published until 1980, “made a plea for the social toleration of transvestism, which it was careful to define as a practice of heterosexual men, distinct from homosexual drag.” In the early 1960s, Prince founded the Foundation for Personality Expression, later known as the Society for the Second Self (or Tri-Ess), “as a platform to promote her personal philosophy about gender…that cross-dressing allowed men to express their ‘full personality’ in a world that required a strict division between the masculine and the feminine.” Despite her conservative views—Tri-Ess membership, for example, was limited to heterosexual men—Prince “undoubtedly played a key role in founding…an inclusive, expansive, progressive, and multifaceted transgender movement.” After beginning to live full-time as a woman in 1968, Prince focused her efforts on winning civil rights for those undergoing gender affirming processes. Virginia Prince died on May 2, 2009; she was ninety-six. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #VirginiaPrince
“THE UNKNOWN GAY - FOR THE 1000s WHO CAN’T AFFORD TO BE KNOWN. (yet!),” Gay Pride Parade, St. Louis, Missouri, c. 1980. Photo by Wilbur Wegener, c/o Scott Lokitz. With the holiday season here, @lgbt_history sends our love and support to the entire LGBTQ community, but especially to those for whom being with family means being in the closet and to those whose biological families have let bigotry damage relationships. Please remember that you are loved. Please also know that there are resources–including @trevorproject and @itgetsbetter–available if you need to talk. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory (at St. Louis)
“BISEXUAL WOMEN’S LIBERATION ♀♀♂,” New York Area Bisexual Network (NYABN) contingent, Heritage of Pride Parade, New York City, c. 1985. Photo by Bettye Lane, @harvard. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #BettyeLane (at New York, New York)
Pride history posts on here seem almost exclusively to revolve around Stonewall which can leave the impression that America is the only place where anything important ever happened and obviously is not true so I have compiled a few links where you can learn about LGBTQ history in other countries! Feel free to add
Members of the Blue Max Motorcycle Club, St. Louis, Missouri, c. 1978. Photo c/o St. Louis LGBT History Project. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #Weekend (at St. Louis)
Cuban refugees seeking asylum in the United States during the Mariel Boatlift, Miami, Florida, 1980. Photo c/o Patsy Lynch, via Julio Capó’s “Queering Mariel: Mediating Cold War Foreign Policy and U.S. Citizenship among Cuba’s Homosexual Exile Community, 1978–1994.” #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory (at Miami, Florida)
City Hall, San Francisco, California, November 27, 1978. Photo c/o AP. On the evening of November 27, 1978, thirty-eight years ago today, just after Dan White turned himself in for assassinating Harvey Milk and George Moscone earlier in the day, Bay Area residents came together in an impromptu candlelight march from Castro Street to City Hall. The nearly 40,000 people, most holding candles, made up what activist Sally Gearhart described as “one of the most eloquent expressions of a community’s response to violence that I’ve ever seen, and I think that we as Lesbians and Gay men, and all the straight people who were marching with us that night—and there were thousands—I think we said it. I think we sent a message to the nation that night about what our immediate response was—not violence, but a certain respect for Harvey and a deep, deep regret and feeling of tragedy about it, because Moscone had been our friend as well.” Tom Ammiano recalled seeing one man standing in the Castro shouting, “Where is your anger?” as the crowd passed; that night, however, there was a calm, a numbness as the city attempted to process its grief. Months later, on the other hand, when Dan White received the lightest sentence possible for his crimes, the Castro went up in flames as the gay community’s anger reached its boiling point. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #HarveyMilk #GeorgeMoscone (at San Francisco City Hall)
I was just explaining how I saw “To Wong Fu,” in the theaters as a 17 year old with a bunch of highschool friends and absolutely nobody was scandalized. This drag panic is entirely orchestrated and much ado about nothing.
I mean, somebody’s going to mention Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, or Flip Wilson as Geraldine, but way back in the fifties, Milton Berle was on Texaco Star Theater and your grandparents or great-grandparents loved it.
A reminder that drag is old. It's so old it's ridiculous. Drag has been done in theater since the beginning of theater. And sometimes those characters are supposed to be another gender [Peter Pan is usually played by a small adult woman, and Edna Turnblad from Hairspray is famously a woman's role that's supposed to be cast with a drag queen]. Sometimes it's just a part of the show. [Some Like It Hot, where the two male characters are disguised as women to hide from the mob, and one ends the movie with a wealthy man] Drag queens as a trope have always been sassy, world-weary, and absolutely confident in themselves and their ability to attract men. Hell, sometimes the joke is that they're [deliberately] making a straight male character uncomfortable and we're supposed to be laughing at the straight male's discomfort. Law & Order has shown drag queens for decades with asshole detectives referring to them as "ma'am" when they're in drag even as they're trying to avoid the sequins.
This rhetoric is frightening because of how quickly the neo-fascist movements in the US have managed to get it to take hold.
“KOSA wont pass, it got rejected the last two times!”
It wasn’t passed because people spoke out against it. People called and emailed their senators. So, CALL / EMAIL YOUR SENATORS. MAKE IT KNOWN THAT WE DO NOT WANT THIS BILL TO PASS!
“But its unconstitutional-“ There’ve been multiple bills passed before that are unconstitutional. This will not be any different to them, they do not care.
STOP KOSA!!!
KOSA made it out of committee, so now is the time to contact your senator and tell them to vote no on KOSA.
& if your rep is Dem: Remind them, please, that LGBTQ+ content - heck, SEX ED content - is considered obscene by the GOP membership, & maybe consider that keeping kids & teens from accessing either of these things is one reason your GOP colleagues are so eager to collaborate on this bill??
if your rep is GOP: Remind them that realistically, sites that host ‘adult’ content will likely have to collect & keep records of legal IDs, & data breaches happen *on the regular*? Do they know anybody who’s had their identity stolen? How excited are they for the day their *own* browsing habits are exposed by a data breach?
Remind them all that they might trust their opposite-party colleagues, but they *don’t* trust the opposite party any further than they could throw them, and think about every possible bad-faith interpretation of the bill before voting ‘yes’, for fuck’s sake??
I’m tired & deeply worried. The internet has been a relatively safe space for queer ppl the world over. If KOSA passes, it’s a big step towards waving goodbye to that world.
This is anti-LGBTQ legislation wrapped up in censorship wrapped up in "protect the kids" lies. And a bunch of Dems are falling for it, co-sponsoring and voting for it. We have to speak up loudly please.
Love that time I brought up how "transvestite" used to be a term du jur (not the only term, but a well-known term) before it fell out of favor for transexual and then transgender and was immediately given the "um actually it's always been a bad word sweaty :)" routine when like
[Image Description: the Wikipedia page for Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries". The opening paragraph says "Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) was a gay gender non-conforming street activist organization founded in 1970 by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, subculturally famous New York City drag queens of color. STAR was a radical political collective that also..." the screencap cuts off the rest of the article. End ID]
To drive the point home, it later changed its name Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries to reflect the changing terminology preferences but Jesus fucking Christ learn your damn history
(This is also why terfs and other transphobes claiming that Marsha P. Johnson was "only" a transvestite in order to de-legitimize trans involvement in queer history, activism, and liberation is such bullshit because that was the fucking term back then and had Marsha not been murdered there's good chance she'd be calling herself transgender now. Or not, there are trans elders who still call themselves transvestite and proudly so.)
The word was coined by the German LGBT pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910 and was used as an umbrella term for anyone who’d wear clothes that didn’t fit the gender they were assigned at birth.
He’d also issue so-called “transvestite certificates” for them that allowed them to wear those clothes in public without being arrested for public nuisance.
There was a magazine called “Das 3. Geschlecht” (The 3rd Sex) aimed at them, which was the first trans magazine in history. You can read the English translation of three of its issues here.
The lesbian magazine “Die Freundin” (The Girlfriend) also openly included transvestites and came with an insert called “Der Transvestit” at times (The Transvestite).
Guys this was a correct term IN MY LIFETIME. I'm only in my forties, come on. Remember your history, I'm begging.
“SHAME ON YOU JUDGE” – “BEDNARSKI DROVE MANY MILES TO KILL A QUEER—WHO’S NEXT?—,” activists protest Judge Jack Hampton’s post-trial statements, Dallas, Texas, December 1988. Photo c/o BoxTurtleBulletin.com. [TW] In the 1980s and 1990s, it was common for Dallas-area high school students to travel on weekend nights to the Oak Lawn gayborhood to harass the community. On May 15, 1988, as the New York Times described, a group of high school boys were standing on a street corner shouting at passers-by when Tommy Lee Trimble, 34, and John Lloyd Griffin, 27, drove up and invited the boys into the car. Richard Lee Bednarski, 18, and a friend got in and the group drove off. After reaching a secluded area, Bednarski ordered Trimble and Griffin to take off their clothes; when they refused, Bednarski drew a pistol and fired. Trimble died immediately; Griffin died five days later. Despite the efforts of gay activists, neither the murders nor the trial gained much attention. On November 18, 1988, Bednarski was convicted of the double murder. Then, on November 28, 1988, twenty-eight years ago today, Bednarski avoided the maximum sentence—life—and instead received from Judge Jack Hampton the lenient sentence of 30 years. Two days later, in an interview with the Dallas Times Herald, Judge Hampton gave his thoughts on the trial: “The two guys that got killed wouldn’t have been killed if they hadn’t been cruising the street picking up teenage boys. I don’t care for queers cruising the streets picking up teenage boys…I’ve got a teenage boy…I put prostitutes and gays at about the same level, and I’d be hard pressed to give someone life for killing a prostitute.” It was, as one activist put it, an “elected judge declaring open season on gay bashing.” Hampton’s comments, far more than the killings, rallied Dallas’ LGBT community to action. A series of protests brought national attention, Hamption was censured, and he lost his 1992 bid for a more prestigious court seat. The uproar forced policymakers and police to pay attention. Despite it all, Bednarski’s sentence stood. On July 9, 2007, after serving less than 19 years, he was released on parole. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory (at Dallas, Texas)
Rita Hester (November 30, 1963 – November 28, 1998), c. 1995. Photo c/o DailyBeast. [TW] Rita Hester, who died eighteen years ago today, was a “renowned and infamous” trans activist in Boston, according to Reverend Irene Monroe. In 1997, after the brutal murder of another trans woman of color in Boston, Chanelle Picket, as her murderer, William Palmer, used the “trans panic” defense at trial, Hester told a local gay paper that she was “afraid of what will happen if he gets off lightly. It’ll just give people a message that it’s okay to do this.” Palmer received the lightest possible sentence: two years for assault and battery. On November 28, 1998, two days before her thirty-fifth birthday, Rita Hester was found in her apartment, stabbed twenty times in the chest; she was alive, though she died of cardiac arrest upon arrival at the hospital. Hester’s murder, reopened in 2006, remains unsolved. “What was different around Rita Hester,” trans advocate Nancy Nangeroni recalled, “was the reporting was egregious.” In the days following Hester’s death, as the national press continued respectfully to cover every detail of Matthew Shepard’s recent murder, not even New England’s gay and lesbian press could be bothered to respect Rita Hester, instead referring to her as “he” and placing her first name in quotes. The mainstream press, to the extent they covered the murder, was far worse. Boston activists fought back and, slowly, style guidelines for reporting on trans issues began to change. Moreover, in the wake of Rita Hester’s death, Gwendolyn Ann Smith, a San Francisco computer programmer, decided that, “if the media was going to ignore or misrepresent these cases,” she would create an accurate chronicle herself. Smith first created The Remembering Our Dead project, and then decided there should be an annual day of remembrance for Hester and other trans individuals lost to violence. In November 1999, Smith organized the first Transgender Day of Remembrance, an event that now is marked annually on nearly every continent. Rita Hester would turn fifty three on November 30. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #RitaHester (at Boston, Massachusetts)
Matthew Shepard (December 1, 1976 - October 12, 1998), c. 1996. Matthew Wayne Shepard, who died at the age of twenty-one, would turn forty years old today. . “Matt’s gift was people. He loved being with people, helping people, and making others feel good. The hope of a better world free of harassment and discrimination because a person was different kept him motivated. All his life he felt the stabs of discrimination. Because of that he was sensitive to other people’s feelings. He was naive to the extent that, regardless of the wrongs people did to him, he still had faith that they would change and become ‘nice.’ Matt trusted people, perhaps too much. Violence was not a part of his life until his senior year in high school. He would walk into a fight and try to break it up. He was the perfect negotiator. He could get two people talking to each other again as no one else could. . Matt loved people and he trusted them. He could never understand how one person could hurt another, physically or verbally. They would hurt him, and he would give them another chance. This quality of seeing only good gave him friends around the world. He didn’t see size, race, intelligence, sex, religion, or the hundred other things that people use to make choices about people. All he saw was the person. All he wanted was to make another person his friend. All he wanted was to make another person feel good. All he wanted was to be accepted as an equal.” – Dennis Shepard, November 4, 1999 #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #MatthewShepard
""All I can tell you is what I see," I insist, and they reply:
"Okay, tell me that." All right. On the one hand I see butch as a historical construct, butch as a way of gender that is separate from both man and woman, and every other gender. I see it as a deviant gender, a transgender, a way of being gendered that is neither normative nor recognized as such either culturally or sociologically. Often, but not always, a female masculinity; occasionally also a man's way of being a man that is so queerly consonant with the best of considered masculinity that ze steps out of the gender of man. But transgressive, nonetheless.
In real terms, in its most common, most delicious, female masculinity incarnation, butch looks queer. Queer in the old way: queer as in different, peculiar to the normative eye. It looks like a way of being in the world that does not conform to the standard cultural gender binary. Strictly in terms of the text of the body that is available to the public gaze, butch is a place of difference, and butches have long struggled with that and chosen to honor one another for it, for that exact way of deviance that the culture finds abhorrent, or at least confusing."
-"Border Wars” Butch is a Noun, essays by S. Bear Bergman (2006)
Has anyone on tumblr talked about the deadly homophobic attack on O’Shae Sibley, a Black gay man, for the crime of dancing in public yet? Homophobic and transphobic attacks, often with a racist character, are on the rise. We shouldn’t ignore this.
On Saturday night at a gas station in Brooklyn, N.Y., a group of friends were dancing to a Beyoncé song when another group of men, who witnesses say used homophobic slurs, told them to stop. Surveillance footage shows one of the friends, O'Shae Sibley, a 28-year-old gay man who was a professional dancer, confronting the men. An argument began. Within minutes, police say, one of the men stabbed Sibley.
New York Police are investigating the fatal stabbing as a potential hate crime; Mayor Eric Adams referred to the incident as one on Monday.
Otis Pena, a close friend of Sibley's, says he tried to stop the bleeding by pressing on the wound but Sibley was pronounced dead after being taken to Maimonides Medical Center. “They murdered him because he was gay, because he stood up for his friends,” Pena said in a video posted to Facebook hours after the stabbing.
LGBTQ advocates highlighted that the fatal stabbing comes amid a string of violent incidents. “O’Shae Sibley’s shocking murder follows a disturbing rise in violence and harassment against LGBTQ people across the U.S. This cannot continue. No one should have to fear for their safety just for being themselves,” said GLAAD director of local news Darian Aaron. “O’Shae Sibley had the audacity to live without the restraints of patriarchy and toxic masculinity, embracing freedom and joy. He should still be alive to celebrate all that made him great and inspired others to live their truth.”
The EU is doing a big survey for LGBTQ people who live in the EU about how it is for them right now. That's the kind of survey that's used for official reports and for laws so it's super important that it has as many people taking it as possible. You can take it in every EU language. (You can change the language in the top right corner) Share it with your friends!
Done 👌🏻
Go and do it, people! This is so so so important!!
Gay Freedom Day Parade, San Francisco, California, c. 1975. Photo © Ilka Hartmann. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #FridayVibezzz (at San Francisco, California)
"So YoU'rE sAyInG mEn HaTe OtHeR mEn?"
Yes. Yes I am. And you can ask literally any marginalized man and they will tell you American Patriarchy hates them, too, specifically because they are being men in the "wrong way".
Like fuck, this is feminism 101.
Edit: it's non-radfem feminism 101.
Just look at the way that manosphere wierdos talk in reference to other men: they are competitors to be dominated either socially or with explicit violence. The whole grift is built on selling men the idea that they can climb their way to the top of the pile
^^^ This. It's like a pyramid scheme of abuse. "If you throw fifteen men under the bus and convince five of your friends to throw fifteen other men under the bus, you can Win at Patriarchy, we promise!"
I can't agree enough with this, and it's something more and more men are speaking up about, even if our voices aren't being heard.
Man box culture, as some call it, starts when we're young. It's pervasive - the competition to be a real "man" as defined by violence, dominance, and this absolutely fucked up concept of emotional detachment. It's a raw struggle to not appear weak, and it starts with how adult men treat male children - the toxic values they instill, sometimes with words and sometimes with fists. And even if you grow up in a less toxic and more loving environment, you're never really free from it. Your male role models, male adults like teachers and such, but especially male friends who are your age, all get caught up in this toxic system of abuse. And "real men" don't have emotions, right? So you have to bottle all that up rather than understanding any of it because it's *weakness.* All of that tends to come out in the one emotional state that men allow each other to display: anger. Shit, by the time most boys reach high school, they've been struggling against each other for years. All that hate, that anger, that uncontrollable rage? That's been taught to them long before teenage testosterone hits. And by that time, it's gotten worse because the patriarchy has defined how "real men" see and treat women. Underneath everything is this deep, deep fear of failing and becoming the weak punching bag. There's so much shame to it all.
It isn't always like this for every boy growing up, but no one is left unaware of its existence. And the only true way to stop it begins when we are young.
This is fucking heartbreaking.
One of my friends in law school once opened up to me and a few other people in our mixed-gender friend group that he didn't really have friends before he knew us, even though he thought he did. We sort of nodded like, yeah man, we're glad you're our friend too, sorry people back in your home town were shitty – and he stopped us like, no, you don't understand. He told us that he thought he had friends, and that those people thought that they were his friends – but that his all-male small-town social circle constantly hurled abuse at each other, and that they all thought that that was normal. He told us that he used to go out partying with them, and whereas when we'd go out, we'd talk each other up – like, man, nice shirt, love what you did with your hair, I bet chicks are gonna dig it, etc. – back in his old circle of friends? All they'd ever do before going out was talk each other down. You're dressed worse than your friends? You look like trash. You're dressed better than your friends? Why do you care so much about you're appearance, are you gay? You're dressed exactly the same as your friends? Wow, look at this loser copying other people's look. You could never win, you could never even break even, and you were expected to not only put up with this, but to participate, because that sort of normalized constant stream of verbal abuse was the main way that you and other men your age socialized. He literally did not realize that men could have actual, real friendships – with women, sure, but also with other men – until he met us, because to him, the act of hanging out with people who you weren't dating was so deeply intertwined with toxic competitive expectations that he flat out didn't know that there was a different way to be until he moved halfway across the country for law school in his late 20s.
It's incredibly fucked up, and men should be able to talk about what a patriarchal culture like that does to them without being silenced.
Tough Guise came out before the turn of the millennium for fuck sakes!
This used to be settled feminist theory! I studied it in uni! It wasn’t controversial!
This rad fem bullshit has set us back decades....
“I’M JUST A ‘Stereotype’ BUT I’M ALSO PROUD!”, Christopher Street Liberation Day, New York City, c. 1975. Photo © Tom Miller. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #Saturday (at New York, New York)
“ACT UP” pinback, c. 1991. c/o @lgbt_history. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #Night