bookhobbit | what is pride month for if not navel-gazing about queerness

So the Good Omens TV show is out. This isn't a Good Omens post. Good Omens is an illustrative example. The Good Omens show is out and competing people on my tumblr dash are saying "it's really hurtful to me how explicitly queerbait-y Aziraphale and Crowley are in the show" and "stop asking Neil Gaiman to confirm that Aziraphale and Crowley have an explicitly romantic/sexual relationship, because things that aren't those two but are still intimate and deep are also important."

It's stressing me out because I...think they're both right. I mean I haven't watched the show yet, but I've seen enough gifs to get the drift of both arguments and also obviously I've read the book many times and if the relationship is portrayed similarly (and I've been told it is) then yes, I understand.

It's like....one of my friends was talking about all the "is it or isn't it gay? watch them push each other up against the wall but never kiss!" relationships that made him desexualize himself and be unable to realize what he even wanted. And there's absolutely no shortage of those out there. I think probably only some of them are deliberately queerbaiting (and one cannot accidentally queerbait), some are just Straight People Are Oblivious To Queer Subtext. All of them separately and together outnumber actual queer romances by a vast degree. So, there are ENDLESS shows where two (usually white men) people of the same gender have a deeply intimate friendship partly forced upon them by circumstances and grow to care for each other and it's so TEDIOUS to watch creators go "ohoho look I have created A Het" in the face of this.

I'm not really saying that's what's happening in Good Omens. Good Omens, as I said, is an illustrative example. What I mean to say is that the people who are upset about Good Omens are probably - quite understandably - tired of that same thing. And it's hard to want real representation and have to deal with crumbs all the time.

My shameful secret is that I usually like the not-confirmed-romantic tender and intimate friendships that no one wants to canonize better than I like actual queer romances.

This is because queer romances are still usually romances. And I feel extremely alienated by most romance. I am queer, but I have never and will never have a queer romance, and it frustrates me that queerness=romance, for most writers. What I do have is intimate friendships. And thus I prefer to see intimate friendships in things I'm watching because I relate to them better.

BUT it's not ACTUALLY a win, because these intimate friendships aren't actually like mine, because almost always, the assumption is going to be that the people in them are straight. Quite often they will have love interests that take precedence over their friendships, or compete with them. Which I hate, because for me my intimate friendships (or queerplatonic relationships, which is what I actually call them) are the thing. I neither have nor want any other thing.

So regardless of which way I go, the assumption that romance is still the top dog is gonna be there anyway, usually, so I'm not ACTUALLY being represented. What I would be represented by would be explicitly queer characters in an intimate friendship who don't engage in romance. But that's not going to happen, so these queerbaity tv intimate friendships are the best I'm going to get.

But it makes me feel guilty to enjoy them so much because I know they're hurting, like the Real People. The ones who have been in the acronym the whole time. I mean partly because I don't want to see people get hurt, that's important, but also because I feel guilty for not being normal enough to fit into the Normal Gay model and be represented by it.

The reason I chose Good Omens as the case study is because Good Omens is very dear to me as an intimate friendship that is not expressly romantic or sexual and yet where the participants have no straight attachments*, but it's also so absurdly gay that I completely understand the hurt in this kind of halfway-confirmation. I think people on both sides - those who want more canon confirmation and those who say "it doesn't have to be canon confirmed to be meaningful" are right, and I...feel weird about it. And I hate having more weird feelings because I already have very mixed emotions about the adaption.

But really this is about the fact that I never feel like I'm the right kind of queer. Like I'm making the whole community a worse place with my inability to fit into the narratives I'm supposed to, like "love is love". Not gay, but weird, and therefore not real. Or something.

--

*"angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort" describes both my gender and sexuality with perfect accuracy, actually.

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like, I haven't actually seen that much content about it (idk, maybe I haven't sought out more actually active Pratchett-y people lately, or maybe it's just that I've always been highkey Discworld and far less so Good Omens) but still

how are you me.png

...and ily (platonically) book (and also? you-and-Keel) but it feels potentially bad and as if I should be told to go away because of strange one-sided internet intimacy, ...though I suppose this has probably happened with authors historically too...

<3 I feel flattered to be in vaguely the same category as Authors, tbh.

I know how some of that feels, with the -- feeling isolated by the narrative that queerness == romance. I stay away from queer media in general, because of the fact that it's almost always romance-focussed, which really really sucks! My queerness != romance, and part of my queerness is explicitly about not doing romance.

I feel so hard the desire for a non-romantic intimate relationship portrayed in media. If I could read queer genre fiction all the time I absolutely would.

Being a binary trans man primarily sexually attracted to men, I don't have the same total feeling of isolation in the queer community, but I feel similarly with regard to my ethnicity/cultural identity to an extent.

I forgot where I read it, but recently I read a post about queerness and a sort of generational divide in activism: how in general there's a 'freedom from' vs 'freedom to' divide and it's creating a sort of more exclusionary drive from current younger activists.

Thank you, friend. <3 I think one of the really pernicious things about the whole "queer means sga" thing (one of many) is that it VERY very firmly situates queerness as exclusively being an experience of attraction. Which is reductive in many ways, I think, but for you and me and other aros it's like you say... I'm queer BECAUSE I don't do romance. I could use a different label if I wanted but a fundamental part of why I'm queer would still be Not Doing Romance.

That does make sense, and I'm sorry you feel isolated. <3

I hadn't seen this post but I mentioned it to Keel and he had and explained it to me. I definitely think that perspective makes sense.

There are so many intracommunity fights about this sort of thing that really boil down to hungry people fighting over crumbs, and it sucks.

You are not the one causing the famine!

That's a very succinct way of putting it, I think. It does suck. I wish there was more sense of nuance but I also know it is really difficult to be level-headed when you feel scared and hurt.

Hard same. I have... mixed feelings about romance in fiction and I'm often okay with characters being friends *or* romantically involved. To me it's more important that they are shown to care about each other, regardless of what 'type' of relationship that ends up being, but intimate friendships are much closer to what I've actually experienced than romantic relationships. But like you I also see the dire need for representation of queer romance, so yeah, it's tough to be in that position.

(Also seconding rugessnome...)

That definitely totally makes sense. Thinking about your reply also made me realize that romance isn't *always* written in such a way as to make it clear that the participants care about each other. Which speaks to the depth of bad writing out there sometimes I think.

<3

That's actually a really good point! I was thinking along the lines of 'it's often assumed that the Most Significant way of caring about someone is romance but it isn't like that for everyone' but your point is also true and I hadn't thought of that.

But it makes me feel guilty to enjoy them so much because I know they're hurting, like the Real People.

You are also a Real People.

I feel you on what you've said re: Good Omens in particular. I've also seen the discussions, but for my part, I've decided to roll with "I enjoyed it, and I will opt out of the queerbaiting/explicit representation discussion and just have fun". I have been on the Good Omens bus for roughly two weeks, so I'm also not one to talk big. :P

For me, what you said above, about "I'm queer BECAUSE I don't do romance" touches upon one of the biggest cruxes of the whole queer community - the sheer diversity of people under the umbrella, with many of its labels in contradiction with each other, will necessarily result in "queer(-coded) media" not representing every last facet of it. That is in-built, it's the nature of the beast. And people frequently - and understandably - feel left out are clamouring to be seen and represented. I get it. And I get that it's important to be visible in the media and not airbrushed away into "would pass as good bros, inspecting the grass closely, so no homo". But what gets left out of the discussion a lot is that there ARE people under the queer umbrella who are represented by NOT having explicit sex scenes, or NO explicitly defined emotional attachments that leave no room for, let's say, interpretation from an outside perspective - maybe not the textbook "LGBT", but the whole rest of the queers, who are queer because they don't fit the first four letters well enough, or don't want to. But because there's so little content to choose from, it's somehow become a queer duty (or ideal) to stand unified behind a single hive opinion of whether exhibit X is "good or bad for the community, according to the queers". But if you ask me, that's a divide-and-conquer approach if I ever saw one. That's not what "queer" means? So I don't think you should ever feel like a bad queer, or if the community is less for your contribution to it, or for where/how you see yourself (under)represented in the media; it's the exact opposite.

I think that's a really good angle and it's what I'm hoping to eventually land on. It looks like a REALLY fun interpretation of the ship at least so I'm looking forward to seeing that!

All of those are extremely good words. My experience has been that the amount of infighting I've *personally* been exposed to has been much higher in the last few years and that's why I feel more guilty about it now than I used to, I suppose. It's so *unproductive*.

It feels like I used to see all these conversations about how messy queerness was, by design, and how one goal was to stop drawing "here is your box, abide by it eternally" lines, and now they're...not gone, but not the loudest voices, unless I limit my circle very severely. Maybe it's just a problem of venue.

I suppose the real solution is always more real, actual representation of various sorts so there's less "squabbling over who gets to keep this one", but I think a little bit of nuance re:multiple interpretations would probably be good in some cases. Though I do get that it's difficult, especially for really young folks I think.

It's also my perception that the infighting has got worse over the past idk-how-many years I've been on tumblr. I want to believe it's because the (openly) queer community is getting bigger, and the voices louder and more diverse, and that the squabbling are ultimately a by-product of something positive, but whew. It really is unproductive and freaking exhausting so much of the time. I myself am a big fan of "multiple equally valid interpretations", but I have tried to make first semester lit students understand this, and I conclude that a lot of people are unhappy with that concept even when it's not applied to their view of themselves... :'D

what is pride month for if not navel-gazing about queerness

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