Queer Theory and the History of Pride

[John] Welcome, everyone. Kristina, we're going to start recording. My name is John Dunlap. I'm the Chief Human Resources Officer for the UMass President's Office. It's my distinct pleasure to get to kick off today's event. This event is sponsored by the president's office DEIA team. The name of the event is "Queer Theory and History of Pride."

I'm going to get to introduce Jacob in just a minute. I do want to say, every time we do one of these tell your stories, I'm just so impacted by the degree to which people share their emotional capacity to tell their story but to just share so much of their heart, and to be vulnerable in such, and trust such a large group of their colleagues to hear their story.

I have had the opportunity to be involved with the preparation of this particular event. And what it taught me is that I'm getting old. There's any number of things that I experienced when I was about Jacob's age that you will now see on the slide. That is called history.

[LAUGHTER]

So that's what happens, I guess. Jacob Sturtz is the project manager on the innovation team in the president's office. He has been working with us since June of 2021, which is when he finished his master's in business administration from UMass Amherst. So we're excited to have you business analytics. So we're excited.

We're excited to have you both as a colleague and an alum. And he's also been an active volunteer with the DEIA communications committee, and he is the creator and presenter for today's event. Jacob.

[Jacob] All right. Hello. Spoiler. Thank you, everyone, for coming. Thank you to the DEIA committee for helping put on this event. Thank you to Kristina England, John Dunlap, Jacquie Kittler, and Cheryl Millett, as well as John Dawson for helping us set up this room today.

So just quick disclaimer before we get started. I'm going to be using the term "queer" throughout this presentation. It has previously been known to be a slur or used in a pejorative sense. But since around the '90s, it has been reclaimed by queer militants and is sort of used as a self-affirming umbrella term for the community.

So you may be wondering why we're having this event in October and not in June. And that's because October is LGBT History Month. And besides that, we all know how busy June gets. So LGBT History Month was founded in 1994 by Rodney Wilson, who was a Missouri high school teacher and wanted to support his LGBTQ+ students and help them feel seen.

The month also includes National Coming Out Day on October 11th and today, which is International Pronouns Day, which supports understanding, recognizing, and educating each other on personal pronoun use. Coming out refers to the act of disclosing a previously kept secret part of your identity.

Every queer person has their story of how they come out, how they came out, the first person they came out to, if or when they came out to their parents and grandparents, and how that went, if they've been outed before they were ready to disclose that piece of their identity. And some people live their whole lives without ever truly coming out.

So what is queer theory? Queer theory as a field of study that emerged in the early '90s, which examines the nature of sexuality and gender-based normativity and how society defines and polices this. Queer theory aims to deconstruct the status quo of what is acceptable or normal.

Heteronormativity is the idea that heterosexuality is the default and therefore the preferred expression of identity and sexuality. Queer theory at its core has always been tied to oppression, and I think it's important to understand the context of LGBTQ+ history to truly understand how it challenges traditional approaches and fights against social inequality.

So for this presentation, I'm planning to walk you through queer history, and then we'll revisit this concept at the end. So to keep this presentation within the hour, I'm going to start with American colonial life, although I implore you to do your own research on how queerness presented itself in ancient civilizations.

Additionally, it's important to note that Indigenous cultures have long been recognizing a diverse range of sexual identities and gender expressions on this land for much longer. But we can start with 1620. In our great state of Massachusetts was the founding of colonial Plymouth, and with that the establishment of gender norms and Puritan values, which established the nuclear family unit as the basis for all institutions going forward, including government and church.

Sodomy laws were put into place and remained until challenged in 1925. And participating in same-sex activities could result in whippings, jail time, or even the death penalty. Over this period, we had women dressing as men to fight for the Union in the Civil War. We had World War II and the birth of the US homophile movement.

In World War II, there was nearly 100,000 homosexuals that were rounded up and placed in concentration camps and marked with the pink triangle. The pink triangle is another symbol of the community that has since been reclaimed, that was originally rooted in hatred and oppression. Notably, they were the last population of people released from the camps after World War II, as homosexuality remained to be illegal in Nazi Germany's successor states.

So the homophile movement refers to the local and national sociopolitical movement that emerged following World War II. It is thought to be started around 1950 or 1951, with the establishment of two homophile groups-- one being the Mattachine Society for gay men and the Daughters of Bilitis or Bilitis for lesbian women to avoid the frequently raided bar scene.

What they did-- the Daughters of Bilitis also founded the first lesbian publication that was published nationally. And the Mattachine Society had a similar magazine called the Mattachine Review. They also organized what they called sip-ins, which were demonstrations where they'd go to bars, openly declare their sexuality, and dare bartenders or owners to turn them away. And if they did, they would then sue them for discrimination.

The Human Rights Commission at the time ruled that it was unlawful to not serve people due to their identity. And after that, police raids were temporarily reduced for a while, but they did not stop. It was a very common thing in the 1950s and '60s, where the underground scene where queer people would find each other was frequently raided.

So with that, the rare exception of places that would accept openly gay people were often bars, although the owners and workers of bars were rarely gay. The Stonewall Inn in New York City was run by the mafia and catered to some of the poorest and most marginalized people in the gay community, from drag queens to homeless youth, to the newly self-aware transgender community.

And the mafia connection might be surprising, but as long as they continued to turn a profit, they didn't care too much what happened to their clientele. There were even claims that they would blackmail some of their high-profile patrons who would want to keep their sexuality a secret.

So in the early morning hours of June 28th, 1969, the Stonewall Inn was once again raided by the New York Police. The NYPD shut down the party, but the patrons refused to disperse from the sidewalk outside the bar. When they started arresting people, it sparked a series of spontaneous and violent demonstrations fighting back against government-sponsored persecution of a marginalized people.

Notable heroes of Stonewall uprising include a Black trans woman, Marsha P. Johnson, and Latina American trans woman and drag queen Sylvia Rivera. The picture on the left here is one of the only recorded images of the first night of Stonewall, although the demonstrations lasted over six days, with thousands of people joining in.

Although this wasn't the first time that Americans fought back against police raids, it was a major turning point in the fight for queer rights. Some credit the death of the beloved Judy Garland that week as the tipping point between the rising tensions of the police and the underground bar scene. She died earlier that week, and that day was her funeral and the reason why many people were gathered in the bar that night.

Judy Garland is a beloved queer icon, and she's forever immortalized in the code in which gay men used to discreetly find each other. There's a phrase, are you a friend of Dorothy? Which is a subtle way of asking someone if they are a gay man or a part of the community without directly saying it. The Stonewall Inn is still operational in New York City. You can stop by there for a beverage next time you're in the city.

So on the one-year anniversary of Stonewall, thousands of people gathered at the Stonewall Inn and marched from there to the Central Park through the streets of Manhattan. It was known as Christopher Street Liberation Day and later became known as the first Pride parade in the US. The official chant of the parade was, "Say it clear, say it loud. Gay is good, gay is proud."

And it's important to note that it wasn't just gay men and lesbian women marching in this. It was people of all sorts of identities-- trans people, people of color, allies, and all sorts of diverse identities because social issues are intersectional. If you aren't familiar with the concept of intersectionality, it is the cumulative way in which the effects of discrimination combine and overlap in the experiences of many different marginalized groups. In the words of the late, great Marsha P. Johnson, "There is no pride for some of us without liberation for all of us."

So now we'll fast-forward to the '80s. In June of 1981, the CDC published a report requesting a drug to treat a disease called Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, which appeared in five previously healthy young men in LA. At the same time, a similar outbreak happened of Kaposi's sarcoma in New York in the same population of young, previously healthy gay men.

That combination really was alarming for health experts. And upon investigation, they thought it was likely to be through an infectious agent that could be transmitted through sexual contact, or through recreational drugs, or other external factors. They were also concerned that it could get into the blood supply and that it would start spreading through heterosexual population as well.

And by 1982, all of those hypotheses came true, and widespread panic struck America. And with that came rampant stigmatization and homophobia. They were calling AIDS the gay cancer. And it made it far more difficult to conduct research and invest in preventative measures when everyone was just afraid of it and used it to target an already marginalized community.

In 1985, a teenager with hemophilia, Ryan White, contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. Parents in his community were afraid that he would infect their kids, and he was barred from attending high school. He died in 1990 of AIDS-related complications. But that's just one example of the way people viewed with AIDS, people living with HIV.

And the Reagan administration at the time did not acknowledge the crisis until 1985, following 1950s and '60s actor Rock Hudson's death. He died of AIDS-related complications as well and was confirmed to be gay after that. It wasn't until 1987 when Princess Diana publicly shook hands with an AIDS-positive gay man, which totally changed the perspective on how people viewed the disease and was a groundbreaking moment in the fight against the disease.

It shows how an act of kindness and compassion can really go a long way. And since then, the fight has continued. Since 1981, more than 42 million people have died globally. And to this day, around 40 million people are actively living with HIV, according to the World Health Organization.

And since then, there's also been many breakthroughs in preventative measures for it and treatment for it. The biggest thing for AIDS prevention is knowing your status, knowing you are negative, and if you are positive, there's treatment available to the public where you can become undetectable and untransmittable.

There's a really impactful piece of art that I like by renowned artist Keith Haring. He was a gay man, an activist in the '80s, and he died in 1990 at the age of 31 due to AIDS-related complications. This was one of his last paintings, the last piece of work ever made. And I think it beautifully captures the way that the gay community was destroyed due to this crisis. And there was a loss of art and culture that came along with that.

The queer community has often been credited for pushing boundaries in terms of arts and culture. And with so many lives lost, so many great ideas were lost as well. To support this notion, I've compiled a list of notable queer icons dead and alive, from music icons like Freddie Mercury, who also died of AIDS, Elton John, to new breakthrough pop stars like Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish.

We have Olympic gold medalist Tom Daley. Most recently, Nava Mau became the first trans woman to win an Emmy award at the recent ceremony. And as much as I wanted to include our beloved queer icons like Cher and Diana Ross, I only included people who were confirmed to identify as part of the community or were confirmed posthumously. So you may recognize some of these people from the media you engage with. So now we'll fast-forward again to the year of 1998, the year that I was born and the year of the hate crime of-- OK. More seriously, also the year of the infamous hate crime murder of Matthew Shepard.

Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old college student at the University of Wyoming. He had just finished planning LGBT Awareness Week with some of his friends and went alone to a bar afterwards. Two men came up to him and were pretending to be gay and planning to Rob him, lured him into their truck, drove him a mile outside of town, tied him to a fence, and beat him bloody, and left him there to die. He was found 18 hours later and died five days later in the hospital.

News of his death broke across the nation. It was around the time when people were starting to find out things more easily, more widespread, and outrage was sparked across the nation. We had politicians and celebrities tearfully gathered on the steps of the nation's Capitol. Vigils were being held everywhere. And it was over 10 years later, in 2009, when the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act was passed, making it unlawful to cause willful bodily harm to someone based on how they identify, whether it's their sexual orientation, their gender identity, religion, race, anything like that.

After that, it was six more years, in 2015, before the Supreme Court ruled in the Obergefell v. Hodges case that states were required to license and recognize same-sex marriage. At the time, I was 16, working at an all-boys sleepaway camp in New Hampshire with limited access to cell phones.

I was closeted. I remember the next morning the assistant camp director announcing to the dining hall that the motion had passed and same-sex marriage was federally legal. And I remember the dining hall erupting in cheers of support. That was the first time I thought to myself maybe it was OK to be gay, although it was many more years before I finally said those words out loud.

It wasn't until my senior year at UMass Amherst when I started coming out to my close friends. And it was probably a year after that until I considered myself done with coming out, although you never truly are ever done coming out. It's something that-- like, when I started working here, at some point, I started talking about that I have a boyfriend, that I'm part of the community. But it's something that just never really stops in your life, but you just get really tired of it. I consider myself to be out at this point.

Now, consider that I'm a white gay man living in Boston, arguably one of the least marginalized in the entire global community. There are people in states in the US that are less safe in their communities, people across the world where it's not legal to get married or live openly. I'm fortunate and privileged to feel safe in my communities, but that just isn't the same for people across the world. And that's why we continue to march during Pride Month every June.

Continued progress has been made over the last two decades. Pride parades occur across the country, and public support for the fight for human rights is more important than ever. While Pride is bigger than ever before, it's important to note how Pride has evolved over the years since Christopher Street Liberation Day.

With the Pride movement growing massively, opportunities for commercialization have also increased massively. I'd like to introduce you to a concept called pinkwashing. Pinkwashing is a marketing practice that involves using symbolism tied to social causes to appear in support while simultaneously downplaying or contradicting that support in other ways. This was originally coined when companies promoting products with chemicals linked to breast cancer were sporting the pink ribbon to appear in support of breast cancer charities.

Pinkwashing appears in mass every June 1st like clockwork. You'll see online on social media all these brands update their logos to rainbows. They have messages of love is love, without taking meaningful action to support the LGBTQ+ community. At parades, you'll see many corporate-sponsored floats with their employees walking alongside. And while we thank Target and TD Bank for showing up, that's not what Pride means to me.

Instead, I'd rather find the float of elderly queer people walking alongside it far more impactful as you look at them go by. And you know every single one of them fought their whole lives to see the progress that we have today. They probably lost loved ones during the AIDS crisis in the '80s and '90s. Some of them probably weren't able to live their lives authentically until later in life. So I find that piece of Pride parades far more impactful.

Pride is a celebration of progress made and is still a march for all the work yet to do. To revisit that concept of intersectionality, you can see this picture in the top right. It is a picture from the Boston Pride parade last year. And you can see all the different cultures, and flags, and social causes represented just in that parade right outside the Boston Common.

Another strong indicator of progress that has been made today is the way that, according to the statistics published from Gallup, a multinational analytics company, which displayed growth in those who self-identify as something other than heterosexual. You may think there's something in the water that's turning the kids gay, but it's actually the fact that people are feeling more comfortable and safe in their communities. And there's more education at a young age, where people can understand who they are and not have to try to figure it out later in life without resources available to them.

I'm still part of the generation that grew up with an abstinence-only, cisgender, heteronormative sex education. But I think there's a lot more being done in schools now where students can figure out how to be themselves earlier on. So you can see there's strong growth in self-identification statistics.

So now a little trivia section. So the way this is going to work is I've compiled a list of events in the LGBTQ+ timeline of rights. This first one will be between the years of 1620 and 1945. Whoever gets closest-- I don't know if anyone's actually going to know this. But when was the term "lesbian" first used in the medical dictionary?

[Kristina] And folks online can put your answer in the chat.

[Jacquie] And if you're going to answer, raise your hand.

[Jacob] I got prizes, so--

[Audience] Oh, yeah. We will.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

[Jacob] Close. A little before then. Yeah.

[Jacquie] Before 1926.

[Audience] Can we shout out our answer or no?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

[Jacob] Closer, Shahr. Shahr is closest so far.

[Kristina] We have 1850 in the chat.

[Jacquie] Shahr got the closest.

[Jacob] All right. Shahr, here you go. [CHUCKLES] Ally. All right. Yeah. So the term "lesbian" was first used in the medical dictionary in 1890. I'm planning to-- we'll send out these slides along with the recording so you can look. There's tons of stuff that impacted the timeline of LGBTQ+ rights over the years.

For our next round, we're between the years of 1952 and 1970. This one's an easy one to see if anyone was paying attention. What year was the Stonewall uprising? '69. I heard you, Meghan.

[Jacquie] Who got that?

[Jacob] Meghan.

[Jacquie] Nice job, Meghan.

[Jacob] All right.

[Jacquie] Well, Patrick Lynch got it right online, too.

[Jacob] All right, Patrick.

[Jacquie] We'll save a bracelet for you, Patrick.

[Jacob] So this next one, between the years of 1973 and 1979. The first elected official to-- the first openly gay elected official, Harvey Milk, was the supervisor of San Francisco. And him, along with the mayor, George Moscone, were assassinated in what year? Who said '78? Was that Amy?

[Jacquie] Amy Ryan, 1978.

[Jacob] Sorry. [CHUCKLES] All right. This last one's a double one between the years of 1981 and 2024. The legislation called Don't ask, don't tell was instated and then repealed. It allowed gay and lesbian-- it allowed queer people to serve in the military without having to disclose their sexuality. When they would do the interview for enlistment, they were not asked to disclose their orientation.

So I'm looking for what year it was signed into law and what year it was repealed from the law. So Shahr, it was '93 that it was signed into law. Does anyone know what year it was repealed?

[Jacquie] 2013 over here.

[Jacob] 2013 is close.

[Jacquie] 2011 online.

[Jacob] Someone said 2010? Here you go.

[Jacquie] 2010.

[Jacob] All right.

[Jacquie] Yeah. Nice job.

[Jacob] [CHUCKLES] Your extra one? Yeah. All right. So, again, queer theory aims to dissect the binary and ultimately raises the question of whether the notion of fixed sexual identities is desirable or even tenable. This connects back to the reclamation of the word "queer" as a preferred self-identifier for those who do not wish to be put in a box.

A similar example of this is people who prefer to use they/them pronouns, as they do not feel represented in the binary of he or she. For queer theorists, sexuality is a complex array of social codes and forces, which then form individual activity and institutional power, which then interact to shape the ideas of what is normative and what is deviant. This creates a rubric for what is natural.

While this presentation highlighted many of the challenges and tragedies projected onto the LGBTQ+ community by society, queer history is far more nuanced than that, than a series of unfortunate events and societal treatment. Against all odds, queer people have always found a way to navigate, survive, and thrive in the face of oppression.

From the underground bar scenes of the '50s and '60s to the millions of people who march globally in Pride parades each year, queer people have always existed and will continue to exist and thrive in a society which was not built for them. So I hope you all learned something from this presentation. And if you're eager to engage with the subject matter further, I've compiled a list of movies and books you can read.

These movies range from comedies, dramas, historical non-fictions. There's recently a new Netflix movie starring Will Ferrell, Will & Harper. It's really great. It follows an SNL writer who came out as a trans woman very late in life. And they go on a road trip across the country and see how the new life is treating her.

If you do watch some of these movies, pay attention to the way queerness is represented in the different years that these movies came out. While some of these older comedies are very funny, they're not necessarily a fair depiction of what queerness looks like in 2024. So that's all I have. We have a Q&A section if people want to ask questions. But thank you all for listening.

[Jacquie] Mike Durkin.

[Jacob] We can take questions from the Zoom chat as well.

[Mike] Jacob, thank you very much. You used the term "cis male," "cis female." Could you elaborate a little bit on what that means?

[Jacob] Yes. And I meant to define that at the beginning. So cisgender is similar to the way that, instead of being homosexual, there's heteronormative. Cisgender is the idea that you fall within one of the binary default gender expressions. You identify as the gender you were assigned at birth, but a trans person would not be cisgender. Yeah.

Any other questions?

[Audience Member] What was difficult about putting together this presentation, Jacob?

[Jacob] So, honestly, the density of this content. I feel like any of these slides could have been their own hour-long feature presentation. I had to really condense what exactly I wanted to communicate through queer history and the idea of queer theory. I feel like I wish I could have dived more into different types of identities and elaborate more on things like what it means to be cisgender versus transgender. But I wanted to keep it high-level, hit all the main points of queer history, and try to keep it within an hour. [CHUCKLES]

[Jacob] Shahr?

[Jacquie] Hold on, Shahr. I just want to make sure the people on Zoom hear you.

[Shahr] Joking. As an ally, how best do I support family, friends, and colleagues who are queer?

[Jacob] Yes. That's a great question, and I was hoping someone would ask that. And I feel like-- so allyship is always welcome from the community. I think it's important to be real with where you're at as far as queer issues. If someone were to, say, come out to you, it's important to not be afraid to say the wrong things because we've all said the wrong things at times.

It's important to be real with them, show empathy and compassion, ask questions. I know for me personally, when I came out and my friends started asking me questions all about it, it felt like such a release to finally be able to talk about things that I've kept bottled up for the first 22 years in my life.

Yeah. I'd say just support, compassion, taking your own time to educate yourself on some issues. Even showing up to this today is a form of allyship. Yeah.

[Kristina] Maria has a question on Zoom. Maria?

[Maria] Thank you, Kristina. It's actually coming from our UMass Amherst intern, Aba.

[Aba] Hi, Jacob. Thank you so much for the presentation. My question is, what do you think are some of the current issues facing the LGBTQ community?

[Jacob] So there's many issues facing the LGBT community right now. There's anti-trans legislation. There's states that are actively trying to reduce the rights of the queer community. Florida recently passed the Don't Say Gay bill, which is stripping resources from the education system, the ones that I previously were talking about, that only provide safety and understanding to the community.

And keeping them in the dark and not allowing them to get educated on that is quite dangerous rhetoric. Thank you for the question.

[Jacquie] Any other questions? Oh, Megan.

[Megan] Do you feel like you feel more seen after sharing this with your colleagues?

[Jacob] Yes, I do. So honestly, I think the first two years that I was working here, I just didn't mention anything about my personal life to anyone. I wasn't really sure why I was kind of keeping it a secret because I was already out in my personal life, like to my family, to my friends. I think part of that is that idea that you never really stop coming out.

And another thing is the idea of, yes, it's a part of my identity, but I don't want it to be the primary identifier that people view me. If I come out in the workplace, I'm not just Jacob, the project manager. I'm Jacob, the gay project manager. So there is that aspect to it. I do feel great. This was kind of me taking a leap and doing something like this, really opening up and talking about something that even four or five years ago I would have never said anything to anyone about. So I do feel seen. Yes, and I appreciate everyone who came today.

Yeah.

That's right. All right. Any other questions?

[Maria] Jacob, just may I add something?

[Jacob] Yes.

[Maria] You had touched on sexual ed in elementary schools. I have two children in Northampton schools. So I speak from a place of privilege, as you stated about growing up or living in Boston. However, both of my children received a very, very inclusive sex ed at their elementary school in Northampton, and it continued at their middle school. And I thought that was really powerful.

And although I know it is a place of privilege, of progress, but I think to really cast a far ripple just takes one stone. And I think we're doing that here in Massachusetts and at this university. It's so powerful. Thank you so much for today.

[Jacob] Yeah. Thank you. That is great to hear that progress has been made in elementary and middle schools.

[Jacquie] Nice job, Jacob.

[Jacob] All right. Thank you, everyone. Very nice. Thank you all. If you liked what you saw today, the DEIA events committee has some upcoming events. At the end of the month, we have "Sheryl Faye Presents Historical Women." It's a one-woman show that portrays women in history. The one that we're having is on Anne Frank.

We also are doing the Diwali luncheon again in Westborough on November 6th. We're having the Veterans Day "Tell Your Story" on November 14th. And our very own president's office employee Chanda Wolf is doing a book reading of her own children's book which she wrote called A Dozen Delicious Donuts, which captures the journey of the immigrant experience.

And she's doing a reading in Lowell and in Brookline over the weekend on October 19th and November 3rd. If anyone remembers, Chanda also did a DEIA event, "Tell Your Story." And this connects directly to that. So check it out if you can. All right. Thank you, everyone. We have apple cider, donuts, and other refreshments. Please enjoy.

[Audience] Yeah.

Well done.

Well done.

[Jacob] And thank you to everyone who joined on Zoom. All right. That's all, folks.