Coming Out of Cancer by Victoria A. Brownworth

Senate, to governor’s races, our LGBTQ identities are being misrepresented and put in danger. These include “Don’t Say Gay” bills, parental control laws, and laws restricting trans kids from gender-affirming care and trans girls from participation in girls’ sports.Īs I write this, midterms are a scant few weeks away. There are a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures. I’ve reported a few dozen stories in 2022 about our current precarious placement in U.S. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was a compromise, allowing lesbians and gay men to serve in the military, but covertly.Īnd 1992’s truth is not 2022’s truth, even as so many elements of the anti-LGBTQ fervor that quelled Clinton’s youthful efforts to change gay and lesbian history remain in play. Clinton soon learned that making changes to benefit LGBTQ Americans was considered too radical. Yet it didn’t get us closer to equity but further away from it, as the backlash from the right was swift and harsh.

Clinton put wife Hillary in charge of wooing Congress into Universal Health Care and he had gay friends as well as gay and lesbian advisors in the White House. I voted for Bill Clinton for president because I was a radical AIDS activist who had been arrested in protests and Clinton presented a dramatic shift in consciousness in the White House after 12 long silence = death years of Reagan/Bush. And for 30 years, Curve has provided the pages and the space for that record.Įven as we have done that reclamation work, what was true to me and many others in 1990 when Curve was founded-especially about queer politics-has shifted dramatically. Our lesbian and queer history is a palimpsest, a draft of our lives as we wish to live them and have them recorded. Much of reclamation is refutation: writing about ourselves rather than being written about, seeing through our own lens rather than the lens of the oppressor. I have worked hard at dismantling the master’s version of our history, to borrow from Audre Lorde’s famous quote.

In the nearly 30 years I have been writing about lesbian history and queer politics for Curve, I have focused on uncovering and reclaiming queer women whose lives or lesbianism were purposefully hidden from history. How does our history- herstory -mesh with our political reality? When we look at LGBTQ history, what is it we celebrate-if at all? Are we represented or erased? Is it getting better or worse in 2022 America? And how is it different for Black, brown, Indigenous, Asian, disabled, poor or gender nonconforming queer womxn.

Coming Out of Cancer by Victoria A. Brownworth