Uneducating Queer

Confessions of an Uneducated Queer
by Lauren Zuniga (trigger warnings)

"Everything I learned about being queer, I learned from poets.

Poets are cheaper than college."

Zuniga starts by talking about not understanding Judith Butler and mispronouncing Foucault at a party... It took me about seven years to really understand Judith Butler while I was reading her. I read Gender Trouble at least three times, and it wasn't until I'd spent a lot of time reading the French theorists that Butler is basing her work off of that I came back to GT and amazingly, shockingly, alarmingly, GOT IT. I pretty thrilled when I turned in a summary of Butler and got high praise for having such a good grasp on what Butler was saying, and being able to condense it so well. What a rainbow feather in my cap! Oh, I got the ideas long before because you can't hang around gender studies without absorbing the general idea, and even better, the trans theorists who critique her do a better job of breaking her down.

(FYI, Butler's early works are so difficult because 1) They were meant to be that way. Theorists sometimes torture language that way to help disassociate from meaning, and 2) She was working through these concepts as she was writing them. And as a teacher of writing, I'll tell you, that's when your prose falls apart. Read Butler's more current work and it's a lot more easy to parse.)

(Here, have a link of Judith Butler as explained by cats.)

But honestly, academic queerness isn't the only way to be queer. Queer studies exist to break down culture and concepts and study them. It's not supposed to be a way of shaming people. And as Zuniga points out here, it's not the only way to learn about queerness. The community is the best way, and reading is another way, both memoirs and fiction. Listening to other people.

My first experiences with LGBTQ characters: Mercedes Lackey's Last Herald Mage series.  

A series. About wizards. With talking horses. And gay people.

(Yay!)

Through multiple moves, and selling of my stuff to pay car repair bills and medical bills, and my ceiling literally caving in with water, I still have that damn book. I didn't come out until I was 19, and I couldn't conceptualize it really until then. I lived in a very small town growing up. That town still doesn't have a single Starbucks. It was a big deal when we got a Walmart. For a while, every time I thought about it, I pushed the identity aside. It didn't seem to fit. I couldn't wrap my head around that and me.

There were no gay characters on television, aside from evil lesbians on DS9. The only reason I was exposed to LGBTQ characters, the only reason I saw someone representing it as normal, even as a trait that heroes might have, was because of books. 

And I was a voracious reader.

It's so important. Our communities, and our literature. Our creations. We teach and change through the common channels, the ones that don't have pre-requisites.