One of the things that I have wrestled with in the last few years has been realizing the fact that whiteness has intentionally tried to eradicate any expressions of queerness in the world around us. Because of that, as white people have become more aware of gender and sexual expansive within ourselves, we do not have our own history to pull from to express ourselves. Thus, we appropriated queer expressions from other cultures.
Essentially, Europeans, through the expansion of Roman religion (Christianity), lost their own expression of queerness during the cultural genocide that Christianity carried out in Europe. In many ways, Europe was the first area to fall to Christian colonialism and are not completely responsible for the loss of queer expressions. However, they did soon become the colonizer.
As they started to colonize Africa and the Americas, they encountered cultures that did not view the world through a Christian/European, heteronormative framework. This caused Europeans to seek cultural and physical genocide on other cultures in the same way as Roman religion did to them.
However, they failed in the total elimination of gender and sexual expansive people in other cultures. In fact, many oppressed cultures worked to maintain their expression of queerness in spite of the fact that they faced harm if discovered.
In an interesting twist, queerness also persisted in white cultures. The problem is, white people did not their own expressions. So, white queer people did what white people do best, appropriate customs from other cultures.
This brings me to the thing that I struggle with, our expressions are not our own. The way that we publicly express ourselves are predominantly taken from Black people who were enslaved by white people.
Drag, trans women fitting into the “binary,” expressions of femininity by gay men to signal their orientation, the masculinity of lesbians, and so much more all first showed up in the US by Black queer people.
I find this problematic since we tend to whitewash queerness.
There is a movie retelling Stonewall that made up a white gay male to be the first person to throw a brick at police. Most popular Pride protest events focus on white people’s liberation, even though they have almost always been led by Black drag and trans women.
As white queer people, we need to recognize the fact that we are existing and continue to exist in a world that was created by Black, Indigenous, people of color and we owe our liberation and our ability to live as our “true self” to them, because of the work they have done and continue to do.
We wouldn’t have an ability to express ourselves if it wasn’t for others standing up to our whiteness.