īut I emphasize the word variably because queer activism and queer theory have never been one thing. Queer indexed a range of practices and identities that strayed from the ideals of the heterosexual family, be they held by so-called straight or gay people, or that stood outside a particular modern understanding of sexuality as constitutive of the self rather than as a set of situated practices. Queer activism and theory also provided an approach to what historians such as John D’Emilio or Jonathan Ned Katz argued: that sexual identities-in fact, the very idea of heterosexuality or homosexuality-are socially constructed and historically specific.
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In ground-breaking manifestos and theoretical texts alike-from Queer Nation’s “I Hate Straights” (1990) to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990)-activists and scholars variably offered analyses of and social alternatives to the social sedimentation of the normative terms of heterosexuality, primarily in U.S. The members of Queer Nation, founded in New York City in 1990, and the producers and readers of what was labeled as “queer theory” by the next year, were by no means the first to affirmatively or wryly reclaim queer, but they set the word into a new play that changed the language and the methods of both social movements and academic scholarship for years to come. Many lesbians, gay men, and those who would increasingly claim the category transgender who had felt the sting of the queer insult were quite surprised, then, to encounter the term’s reemergence in the 1990s, spurred both by a political formation of militant and creative LGBT activists and by a new cadre of academic scholars. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new social movement called for the rejection of labels such as queer and even homosexual (itself seen as pejorative and medicalizing) in favor of proud proclamations like “Gay Is Good.” It was often but not always offered as epithet and ascribed to others rather than claimed for oneself and by the twentieth century it was most commonly used for reasons of perceived sexual or gender non-conformity.
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Queer carried particular currency in scandal from the lingo of newspaper exposés and gossip columns to private epistolary speculation. Up through the nineteenth century the word was primarily used to mark individuals considered odd or outside social norms. HanhardtĪmong the first lessons instructors teach in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) history classes is about the changing definitions and uses of the word queer.
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At the heart of LGBTQ history are people, those who have persecuted same-sex sexuality, those who have challenged heterosexist oppression, and those who wanted to live a life free of persecution and judgment.Photo from the Seattle Municipal Archives () under a Creative Commons License 2.0 () Queer History Christina B. From the 1880s through today,Washington's LGBTQ history has been about laws, morality, understanding, cultural and political expressions, and city space. Transgender activists likewise fought for inclusion in nondiscrimination ordinances in the 1980s.
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Gay Washingtonians fought for nondiscrimination in the 1970s. Later, in 1893, they were declared a crime, and in the late 1960s, activists politically organized around same-sex intimacy. In the 1880s same-sex relations were of little concern to most residents. The story of LGBTQ in Washington State is over 130 years in the making.