Archive link here -
https://archive.md/Cknna#selection-801.54-801.422 Its definitely worth reading and not too long
Thanks, I did not think to check archive.md. The article is reposted below for other readers' convenience.
I’m Gay, but That Doesn’t Make Me ‘Queer’
My sexuality doesn’t require me to reject all that is ‘normal’ and ‘legitimate.’
I was 29 in 2012 when I volunteered for Maryland’s marriage-equality campaign. That November, my home state became one of the first in the country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. I was euphoric—and hungry. I wanted to keep chasing the feeling that came from being on the right side of a righteous cause.
Two years later, I got married. At the time I was working as a hairstylist, a career I’d fallen into after dropping out of college in my early 20s. One night over dinner, I admitted to my husband that I felt stalled. If I wanted to do serious work on behalf of gay people, I needed more than slogans and passion. I needed an education. With his encouragement, I enrolled in community college. A year later, I was accepted to Columbia University’s School of General Studies.
I arrived at Columbia in my 30s with the earnestness of a convert. I enrolled in courses like U.S. Lesbian and Gay History and Muslim Masculinities, absorbing everything my instructors had to say about “queerness”—until I learned what they actually meant by the term.
Before Columbia, I would have dismissed right-wing complaints about queer, postcolonial, critical race and other “critical” theories as culture-war hysteria. I soon came to understand that in Ivy League humanities classrooms, critical theories aren’t fringe ideas. They are foundational ideologies with real-world political ambitions.
Critical theory treats moral norms, scientific categories and even common sense as products of power. It tells us that the only reason we believe certain things are true is because it serves the interests of “dominant” groups for us to believe them. It follows that liberation requires dismantling inherited forms of knowledge.
Queer theory applies this approach to sexuality by framing sexual identity as a site of resistance. One of the earliest readings I encountered was by the theorist David Halperin, who defined “queer” as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.”
Once a slur that implied homosexuality was shamefully deviant, “queer” was “reclaimed” in the 1980s by gay activists as a synonym for “gay.” But queer theory rejects that equivalence. Most gay and lesbian Americans seek what minorities have long sought: safety, dignity, stable relationships and the freedom to live ordinary lives. Queer politics, by contrast, encourages deviation from social norms. Its definition of “queer” isn’t that different from Archie Bunker’s.
Seen through this lens, contemporary phenomena that appear baffling begin to make sense. The members of Queers for Palestine know that Hamas would imprison or execute them for their sexuality—but they share a common enemy in Israel and America. Liberal democracy, capitalism, national borders and Enlightenment notions of truth are the primary enemy. Sexual politics is merely one front in a much broader civilizational struggle.
I learned all of this at Columbia with growing unease. I was gay, I had faced discrimination, and I had fought for my rights. But now that gay rights had become “LGBTQ” rights, I found myself force-teamed with a lot of people whose values were nothing like mine. I didn’t experience my life as a rebellion against reality. I didn’t want to be an identity insurgent. I wanted to participate in the world as a normal person.
The most important thing I learned at Columbia was this: I am gay, but I am not queer. My sexuality doesn’t obligate me to embrace a particular ideology or to reject the moral inheritance of the society that made my life possible. Progress happens by acknowledging shared human values and working within our reality rather than declaring war on it.
Mr. Appel is author of “Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.”
