Queer

Save the Children from Anita Bryant Recognition, awareness, publicity, and conversation. Thanks to Anita Bryant, all of these words can describe the queer community in the late 1970s. Many queer organizations and ordinances were formed during this timeframe in The United States. The most successful and controversial was The Save Our Children campaign. Created by Anita Bryant, it is ultimately what led to the increased conversation about homosexual rights in America. Almost a decade after the…

members -- the queer and trans people of color -- in order to further their movement in the mainstream. In one instance of this, transgender issues were left out of a civil rights bill during the 1980s by the Gay Activists Alliance, an organization active in the Gay Liberation Movement, for being “too extreme” (Bronski par 5). In short, they were fighting for progress, but the so-called “progress” was really only progress for cisgender, white gay men. White, wealthy, able-bodied cisgender queer…

gay character, they will receive a check mark for diverse inclusion so that their show will continue to to get good ratings. In the past, while television was still in its early days, viewers only received vague hints of a character possibly being queer. This trend continued until around the nineties, where viewers were introduced…

empower…without…pulling the rug out from under ourselves” (Serano, 352) Again the language we want to use to empower those who are not heterosexual is itself relying on concepts, “cultural gender ideals” (Serano, 349) that exclude. The power of queer reemerges in this context. Queer does not shoulder ideas on gender, it does not refer to male or to female or to gender nonconforming or to genderflux. It does not hold to the binary, and therefore it is…

At the height of the AIDS epidemic, a melding of revolutionary ambitions and homophobic misrepresentations give rise to the empowerment of Queer Authors to challenge and shift the heteronormative systems of society (“Queer Histories”). Leo Bersani and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick are two queer Authors who have impacted the public and academic structures of knowledge during this crisis. Examining Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet,” both are positioned towards…

across the world is the LGBTQIAP+ community (often shortened to LGBT+). The acronym stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, intersex, asexual, pan/polysexual, and is made up of people from every religion, race, and social class. The LGBT+ community has gained tolerance and acceptance over the past decade. As more and more Americans become more accepting towards queer people, they have received more rights, which should have been a given in the first place. However, despite the support…

obvious is how we treat and act around our children when it comes to gender roles, especially those children that are thought of as “queer,” aka “[those that do] not conform to the wished-for way that children are supposed to be in terms of gender and sexual roles” (Bruhm and Hurley). Bruhm and Hurley explain that, to adults, it is alright if a child is seen as queer, “as long as the queerness can be rationalized as a series of mistakes, [play], or misplaced desires.” Parents get extremely…

about the struggles she faces as both a lesbian and as a black woman. She talks about how when she’s with her lover, a white woman she is able to forget the discrimination that she faces not only from white straight people, but also from the black and queer communities, and even her own family. Near the end of the poem the narrator says that when she does think about the hatred of others, she has moments of doubt, of hatred, but then looks at her lover’s face and overcomes it all, no matter what…

regarding LGB (lesbian, gay, and bisexual) mental health. Since then, there have been several research studies that indicate a correlation between queerness and mental illness (Cochran et al. 53, Meyer 685). The majority of these studies have been on queer American subjects, so that is the population for which we can draw scientific conclusions, and I will mainly cover ground in regards to people of that particular milieu. That said, regions that harbor similar social environments could be…

How Intersectionality is Reflected in the Media The media has just recently (in the past years) started picking up on queer and transgender representation. There are shows like Modern Family, Glee, and How to get Away with Murder that have gay couples as reoccurring cast; in these shows there are topics about common struggles in the LGBT+ community discussed. Although this is progression, there is not enough intersectionality portrayed within the media. Intersectionality is a huge determining…