A Brief History of the LGBTQ+ Community Part I

                     A Brief History of the LGBTQ+ Community Part I

                             The canon of non-binary ideologies

Said

Foucault

Butler

Our narrative begins with an idea. An idea that has superseded the fundamental freedoms of all individuals and the equality of all peoples. It is an ideology older than recorded history. It is the ideology of the other. This ideology was identified by Palestinian professor of literature, Edward w. Said at the university of Colombia in his 1978 publication Orientalism. Said’s critique of western cultural representation posited that there exists a power dynamic that actively subverts populations at the time deemed The Orient, a term used to describe cultures outside of the western canon. The first and most substantial population to experience such subversion was women. Now I understand this is a crash course in the plight; and yes I do mean the plight of the LGBTQ+ community, as this is a community that has existed for the entirety of human history, and for a substantial fraction of that history has been subjugated to intolerance, injustice, exclusion, and in the modern context an implicit segregation. However, all communities that fall outside of the dominant racial, religious, and sexual ideologies are but the latest victims of a binary. Before gay rights, before civil rights; there must be women’s rights.

     There are histories to the gay rights movement, each letter in the acronym of a different color and time. But to understand a movement, forged by adversity and quickened and refined by a knowledge of the aforementioned histories, one must understand the ideologies that exert a near equal and opposing force to the march of progress. To elaborate, the history of the LGBTQ+ community is consolidate in a single political movement. It was Camus who said that the only way to deal with an unfree world is to be so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of defiance. To be born this way is a political statement. This isn’t a political blog, but the gay community is a political community. There’s a video called how we got gay and its link will be provided at the bottom of the fifth post concerning the brief history of the LGBTQ+ community. To continue the discussion on the politics that govern and regulate the intricacies of human nature, one need looks no further than Foucault’s History of Sexuality. In his essay concerning the power dynamic between sex and the governing ideologies that repress it, he had this to say, “To say that sex is not repressed, or rather that the relationship between sex and power is not characterized by repression, is to risk falling into a sterile paradox. It not only runs counter to a well-accepted argument, it goes against the whole economy and all the discursive "interests" that underlie this argument”. Now as Foucault was more than likely aware of the history of precolonial homosexuality in the America’s, he wasn’t referring to it directly. He was referring to post-industrial culture in Europe and the States. However implicit, the argument remains relevant. Before any parallels can be drawn there’s a need for historical context. Namely the history of gender and sexuality in north America. The following points are explicit examples of the well accepted argument that Foucault speaks of in his essay. Upon contact with Spanish colonials from the mid 1500’s to the mid 1800’s, Natives were found to be complicit in the otherization of women.  It must be noted that while the thread of homosexual is the common denominator of all civilizations, by a more inclusive definition of the term, without the implications of European imperialism, there exists another tragically familiar common thread. To indict a population with the independent invention of similar ideologies, which were brought to fruition upon exposure to a systematized sexual exploitation of women, with a heightened efficacy as the magnitude of cultural impact is directly related to the increase of economization, is to expose the falsity of the aforementioned sterile paradox. Repression is as inevitable as disease, and the accountability of all populations is vital to rectifying the steady course of our evolution. The inherited European power dynamics concerning masculinity and femininity, facilitated the socio-political and economic commoditization of women. Before European influence, females, a term used to avoid the implications of gender performance, as posited by Judith Butler, an American philosopher and gender theorist who as influenced political philosophy, fields of ethics, feminism and queer theory; sates, “ Because there is neither an 'essence' that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis. The tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of its own production”, in which case corporeal females, who had who were prone to exhibiting the same gender fluidity as men in Native American society maintained relative equality, with men, by virtue of living in a society without the European caste, that put binary gender roles in opposition; therefore females could exhibit the same sexual fluidity as males, one would imagine. Yet today, there’s very little recognition of lesbianism in native American communities. Where there’s no acknowledgement, there is repression. 

     However subtle, homosexual behavior among women is not only fetishized, but is also subjected to the lack recognition that would render it invalid. Therein lies another paradox as irresolvable as the paradox of gender performance. Contrast is the primary mechanism with which Foucault’s comment on sexual repression is judged. Let it be known that there is a clear connection between gender and sexuality which will be elaborated upon in the next post. So let the representation of gender be an equal representation of sexuality. There is a rich history of gender nonconformity. In the Arikara tribe there’s a mythos about a wolf-like creature that causes mischief, often to teach someone a lesson. They were usually portrayed as male. They would dress as women or identify as women, and marry men. In one story, a trickster transformed a beautiful woman, married a man, became pregnant, and was only discovered as a trickster when they gave birth to wolf pups. How does this compare to the post-colonial reality of native tribes such as the Arikara? The Spanish conquest of the American Southwest was sexual, cultural and religious as well as geographical. Such sexual conquest was imposed under the guise marriage in the vein of the catholic canon. Similar influences were present in the American Northeast where the total diffusion of power from men to women was facilitated by fur trading with the French. The subsequent trade of women was sexual and cultural dominance disguised as a means of integration. This is but a fraction of the histories that define the community, and there’s more to come.