Queers Built This is our project about queer inventiveness and DIY culture then, now, and tomorrow.Whether we're creating, sustaining, or defying the culture, queer people have always turned to our own bodies as the most potent tools in our arsenal to effect change. This is because queerness—whether it’s a queerness of sexual attraction, or a queerness of gender identity and expression—starts with accepting the truth of the queer body.
Advertisement
Queer people have historically offered up our bodies to force the reality of our existence on a society that did everything it could not to look at us. From these physical confrontations, new art forms were created, people protected one another from violence and bigotry—and, occasionally, justice was served in the face of political discrimination. Here is a timeline of just a few instances in which LGBTQ people put their bodies on the line for the sake of queer rights, culture, and liberation.
LGBTQ people have turned to their physicality to create the lives they wanted for themselves, making it easier for later generations to find more accurate ways to live in their own bodies, too.In the late 1950s, a young woman named Aleshia Brevard left the farm and her life as a boy behind her and moved to San Francisco in order to live her life as the woman she always knew she was. After spending some time in the drag scene as a Marilyn Monroe impersonator, she realized that working as a drag queen wasn’t the life she wanted. To move closer to a truthful existence, she self-castrated in order to force a doctor to undertake her transition. She went on to become a television actress, Playboy bunny, and eventually a theater professor, creating art and living in the body she knew was hers, even if she had to go to extreme lengths to get anyone else to see her that way. We live in a time when the medical community understands and accepts transgender identity in a way Aleshia could only dream of in her youth, but she was one of many who put her own body in front of the world of medicine and forced the people in it to contend with her existence.
Aleshia Brevard, c. late 1950s
Advertisement
Compton's Cafeteria riots, 1966
Advertisement
Stonewall riots, 1969
Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, 1973
Voguing at Rikers Island, c. late 1970s
Advertisement
Robert Mapplethorpe, 1978
Stormé Delarverie, c. 1970s and 1980s
Advertisement
Philip Mills and Vegas in Space, c. 1980s
The Lesbian Avengers, 1988
Advertisement
Section 28 had already passed before they plummeted into the proceedings, and caused decades of damage to queer rights in the UK, but the Lesbian Avengers made headlines and passed into legend with their protest, inspiring future queer activists who spent decades working to get it repealed, which they finally accomplished in 2003, finishing the work a group of bold and brave queer women started when they threw their ropes over the balcony.Around the same time their British sisters were acting like superheroes, Barbara Vick turned to the lesbian community in San Diego and rallied them to donate blood at the height of the AIDS crisis, knowing that their gay brothers were prevented from doing so, even as the need for transfusions became dire.Barbara organized the Blood Sisters of San Diego, a group of queer women who laid their bodies down, stuck out their arms, and gave of themselves to help their fellow gays live a little longer.On September 14, 1989, Peter Staley, a 28-year-old AIDS activist, committed to getting the public to see how much people with AIDS were being ignored and allowed to die.Peter, along with fellow members of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), climbed the stairs to the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange and chained himself to the railing, in order to protest the exorbitant prices of the only drug available to AIDS patients at the time, AZT.
Barbara Vick and the Blood Sisters of San Diego, 1988
Peter Staley, 1989
Advertisement
Within a week, Burroughs-Wellcome, the manufacturer of the drug, dropped its price by 20 percent, solely because of the public outcry.We can watch aspirational and accurate portrayals of queer lives on TV and film now because people threw their bodies in front of the dream-making machine of Hollywood and forced it to examine its prejudices, too.In 1991, the group Queer Nation staged a kiss-in at the 64th Academy Awards, barring attendees from entering the ceremony by mashing their faces together and making out in front of Hollywood in order to protest its long history of portraying LGBTQ people as psychopaths and deviants, and to specifically call out the nominated films Silence of the Lambs and JFK for their egregiously transphobic and homophobic depictions. Transgender representation would continue to remain terrible for some time to come, but gay representation shifted dramatically in the 1990s, a decade which ended with Will & Grace and the newly out Ellen DeGeneres on major network television series.
Our queer identities and our queer bodies are completely bound up in one another and cannot be separated from our shared history. To thank for our lives and freedoms—for our art, and our culture—we have generations of bravely fierce queer activists and artists. At a time when the spirit of protest is alive in the streets, when Black people, trans people, and their allies are marching and screaming, inhaling tear gas and taking physical blows from police—facing down shields, and batons and pepper spray; when they are throwing their own bodies in front of their oppressors just to get the world to see that their very lives matter: Take a moment to raise a fist, a flower, a voice, or a shot glass in honor of the bodies who pushed their way through, in the most physical senses they could, to create a path for our own bodies to keep pushing on today.Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez are the publishers of their eponymous website, TomandLorenzo.com, and the authors of Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life. Follow them on Twitter.
Queer Nation's Oscars kiss-in, 1991
Our queer identities and our queer bodies are completely bound up in one another and cannot be separated from our shared history. To thank for our lives and freedoms—for our art, and our culture—we have generations of bravely fierce queer activists and artists. At a time when the spirit of protest is alive in the streets, when Black people, trans people, and their allies are marching and screaming, inhaling tear gas and taking physical blows from police—facing down shields, and batons and pepper spray; when they are throwing their own bodies in front of their oppressors just to get the world to see that their very lives matter: Take a moment to raise a fist, a flower, a voice, or a shot glass in honor of the bodies who pushed their way through, in the most physical senses they could, to create a path for our own bodies to keep pushing on today.Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez are the publishers of their eponymous website, TomandLorenzo.com, and the authors of Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life. Follow them on Twitter.