My queerdoes, come to EqualityCamp

So during the last big San Francisco election, in 2006, Chris Daly was running for supervisor. He was getting a lot of flack from “neighborhood” groups who wanted him to “do something” (read: put more folks in jail) about evidence of drug use and prostitution in their neck of the Mission, which is, well — you want to live in the suburbs, you know where they are, right? Exit stage 101 south. In frustration with all the name calling and rhetoric, someone or a group of someones went and wheatpasted this fantastic sign on Valencia Street near 14th, that read:

DIRTY DIRTY QUEERDOES FOR DALY

And somehow I’d escaped the term “queerdo,” in my years of verbal torment from public school students. Mostly, they called me a freak. Sometimes, a witch. Usually, they’d append it all with dyke. Being queer and strange, it was all the same to them — just like getting harassed for it was just part of growing up outside of a real city (which, with syringes and condoms, also teem with grown-up gay people).

The fifteen year old part of me, that’s still a riot grrrl, and really wishes she’d had the courage and foresight to start a band called Ramona and the Quimbys? She’s definitely a queerdo.

I’m a bad gay myself. I keep sleeping with boys. I’m a bad straight. I keep on fucking, and not getting married. I don’t think I’ll ever get married, even though I almost did when I was 23. I don’t think I’ll ever be gay or straight. Bisexual is a term that barely even fits. I gave up on this notion that I’d only ever want to sleep with or love someone of “my gender” or its “opposite” a long time ago. I don’t even know what the “opposite” of my sex is anymore. I forgot before I even moved to San Francisco.

So for lack of a better word, queerdo will do.

And if I have a generation — I barely have one of those, straddling X and Y as my birthday does — we’re the queerdoes. We don’t fit. We grew up with the internet. We barely had to come out. We’re hyper and more likely to get our community organizing chops from teaching our baby queer friends how to have safer sex with a latex glove, how to sneak into a dyke bar, how to cruise boys on the subway, than how to organize a rally. We learned what we know about politics from fucking and keeping our communities together amidst all the fucking. We’re spastic and driven and can do eight things at once.

My queer community welcomed me as warmly as its designated sex party planner as it did when I dragged the PA up to the student union steps for National Coming Out Day. There’s a photo. I have an awkward butch hairdo. I look more like, as Gina de Vries puts it so delicately, “femme chicken” than the earnest lesbian I thought I was supposed to be.

We can do all of that, the rallying and the loving. We just don’t always get credit for it from the folks who came before us. Who hire straight PR people to be their face rather than risk us, the wrong kinds of gays, getting too much press.

And it’s been like this, since I was 17, when my closeted health teacher took my best friend and I into her classroom to lecture us for having run around with the Lesbian Avengers, waving the evidence in our face — the front page of the Boston Globe, with a photo from the Pride parade featuring topless women in black leather suspenders making out on a float, that was really just a queen-sized mattress, which they crashed the Parade with after being denied a permit.

We got the message: we’re going to have to figure out how to survive on our own, if even our gay elders aren’t going to stick their necks out for our right to be young for ourselves. And so we didn’t rally around the right to marry, to be a soldier, to buy a nice house in the nice part of town with our nice spouse. We went to work in health clinics, and faith organizations, and started magazines, and made porn, and went to demonstrations against war and war and war and took home the cute people, and kept warm together in the dark.

It’s been twelve, thirteen, fourteen years since then, since coming out seemed like the biggest thing in the world I could do. It no longer feels that way. I’ll keep doing it, but what I’m going to do next — after organizing a major sex worker day of action in San Francisco, hos first — is make sure that I bring a few people to EqualityCamp, which is on January 3rd and will be a chance for all of us overly-internet-ed activists to put our heads together and figure out what to do next, now that history has handed us what we didn’t do to hold onto the right to marry, that a lot of us would never exercise anyway.

I’m never getting married, I’m sure, but I’m going. Because I don’t ever want another campaign for “my rights” run without people I love in the middle of it. Because those of us who haven’t been in the middle of these ornate political sideshows have been doing hard work that has made us ready for it, even if we didn’t know that at the time. Because there’s a lot of us who’ve been off being queer in a way that the Human Rights Campaign and their brethren will never notice, never call to the middle, never give a seat at the table. Because we’re queerdos: we spend too much time thinking about all this gay stuff, and honestly, too much time online. I’ve seen you on Twitter. You can’t hide.