Queer Icons Quotes

I call myself black. I call myself queer. I call myself beautiful. I call myself eternal. I call myself iconic. I call myself futuristic.

Seeking young single roommate for 3br apartment upstairs, 6th floor. $700/mo. Must be queer & trans friendly. Must not be afraid of fire or dogs. No Libras, we already have one. Call Niko.

Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts.The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true.

As it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large. They become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context. And that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings. They don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility.11 They can be what they are.

... Blake is a ready-made patron saint for those wanting to elevate their marginality, dissent, and queerness into strength. The relative futility of Blake's battle during his lifetime make him all the more attractive. In the intertextual heritage of queer art, Blake has become an honorary icon.

Take a look at the bridge of “Mean” by Taylor Swift: “Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me” says it all. Becoming something so supermassive that you transcend your self, your human form, and metamorphose into a larger being: a billboard, an icon, a thing that’s representative of a groupthink, a collection of a generation’s conscious thoughts—that’s the goal, right? One can harm a person, but one cannot harm an idea.

As it turns out, queer villains become far more interesting among other gay characters, both within a specific project or universe and the zeitgeist at large. They become one star in a larger constellation; they are put in context. And that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings. They don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility.11 They can be what they are. We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people.12 They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough.

I always saw black excellence around me and online but it didn’t feel like it was mine because I was not perceived as fully black. I felt queerness made me even less black. Being both black and queer, affirming that I exist, I am here and I have been here long before this moment, the first people were black and queerness predates its modern meaning. Queerness predates its derogatory meaning. Queerness predates colonialism and Christianity. Queerness predates any hate attached to it. I call myself black. I call myself queer. I call myself beautiful. I call myself eternal. I call myself iconic. I call myself futuristic.

I’m not sure anyone still says gadzooks, but it was from God’s hooks—the nails used in Jesus’s crucifixion. We can see Odds bodkins emerging from “God’s body” in Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part II has a line “God’s body! The turkeys in my pannier are quite starved.” (It’s not one of Shakespeare’s more iconic lines.) The Bard added the “cutesifying” suffix -kin later when Hamlet says, “God’s bodykins, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” Leaving off the g and y, then, yields the queer little locution Odds bodkins! we now vaguely associate with men in stockings fencing on staircases (or at least I do).

Queer contagion, including the anxiety triggered by gender nonnormativity, found its viral materiality in the early 1980s. The diagnosis of gay cancer, or GRID (gay-related immune disorder), the original name for AIDS, was a vengeful nomenclature for the perversion of existing in a world held together, at least in part, by trans/queer undoing. Found by chance, queers began showing symptoms of unexplainable illnesses such as Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP). Unresponsive to the most aggressive treatments, otherwise healthy, often well-resourced and white, young men were deteriorating and dying with genocidal speed. Without remedy, normative culture celebrated its triumph in knowing the tragic ends they always imagined queers would meet. This, while the deaths of Black, Brown, and Indigenous trans and cis women (queer or otherwise) were unthought beyond the communities directly around them. These women, along with many others, were stripped of any claim to tragedy under the conditions of trans/misogyny. Among the architects of this silence was then-President Ronald Reagan, who infamously refused to mention HIV/AIDS in public until 1986. By then, at least 16,000 had died in the U.S. alone. Collective fantasies of mass disappearance through the pulsing death of trans/queer people, Haitians, and drug users - the wish fulfillment of a nightmare world concertized the rhetoric that had always been spoken from the lips of power. The true terror of this response to HIV/AIDS was not only its methodological denial but its joyful humor. In Scott Calonico's experimental short film, "When AIDS Was Funny", a voice-over of Reagan's press secretary Larry Speakes is accompanied by iconic still images of people close to death in hospital beds. LESTER KINSOLVING: "Over a third of them have died. It's known as a 'gay plague.' [Press pool laughter.] No, it is. It's a pretty serious thing. One in every three people that get this have died. And I wonder if the president was aware of this." LARRY SPEAKES: "I don't have it. [Press pool laughter.] Do you?" LESTER KINSOLVING: "You don't have it? Well, I'm relieved to hear that, Larry!" [Press pool laughter.] LARRY SPEAKES: "Do you?" LESTER KINSOLVING: "No, I don't.

I didn’t admit to my mom that I had no idea how to be a part of my community, because there seemed to be a whole second step after coming out, and that was finding your people. I mean, I had cis gay male friends, I did community theater growing up, but they didn’t really feel like my community. And Nova certainly hadn’t invited me into her community, and even if she had, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a part of it. But that night at Candace’s felt like I had inched closer to the thing that I wanted. They were just. So. Gay. Effortlessly so. Each with their own iconic style and vibe and fluent in a language that made my head spin. But unlike Nova’s elitist group of self-proclaimed Celesbians, I felt welcome here. Wanted. It was thrilling, and terrifying. It had been four months since that queer hang, and I finally looked forward to having weekend plans. Candace invited me everywhere, like Gay Bowling Tuesdays at the alley in town, and queer book club, and she binged all of Atypical with me in two nights. But even though we were close, there was still something that made me feel distant from everyone else. Like if I got too close, something terrible would happen.

For nearly two centuries, everyone but trans women have monopolized the meaning of trans femininity. Fearful of interdependence, many have tried to violently wish trans femininity away. The non-trans woman has become gender critical, willing to dispose of her trans sister to secure her claim on womanhood. The gay man celebrates queens as iconic but separates himself anxiously from faggotry’s intimacy with trans femininity, claiming he is only on the side of sexuality, not gender. The straight man acts out in violence to disavow his desire for the girls he watches in porn, the girls he cheats on his wife with, and the girls from whom he buys sex. The state has used trans femininity most of all to generate the pretense it needs to expand its sovereignty as a monopoly on violence. And even queer and trans people, whether as cultural producers, activists, or scholars, have used the symbolic value of trans femininity to guarantee their political authenticity. But this is only to tell half of the story. The anxious and angry rejection of everyone’s interdependence with trans women is an attempt to refuse a social debt accrued, to refuse the power trans femininity holds.