WE WILL NOT BE ERASED BY MARK ALLAN GUNNELLS

17/4/2023

“Wherever books are burned, men in the end are burned.” And I believe that. People who want to ban queer representations from literature and movies would not be sad to see us dead.

I grew up in the 1980s, a rough time for queer people.

Granted, all of queer history in this country before the 1980s had been rough, but immediately preceding this time there seemed to be some progress. The hippie movement of the late 60s had helped lower some people’s inhibitions toward sex in general, and the Stonewall Riots in 1969 had created a strong push for pride and activism among the queer community. In 1973, the APA voted to finally declassify homosexuality as a mental illness. We seemed to be on a positive trajectory.

Then came the 1980s. They ushered in an ultra-conservative period in this country, almost in direct response to all the progress that had been made by queer people, and people of color, and women. At the same time came the AIDS crisis, and growing up in that time period, it felt as if almost the entire country turned against us.

AIDS is a disease, and as such cares nothing for sexual orientation. However, because early on the disease manifested most prominently in the queer community, people thought of it as a queer disease. Early on the media called it “the gay plague” and the first name given by the scientific community was GRID, which stood for Gay Related Immune Deficiency. So we became the scapegoats, blamed for the disease while also declared deserving of it. According to the many, it was God’s punishment, proof being queer was dirty and wrong and deviant. So many seemed to delight in this, and what it made clear to me growing up was that a large number of this people in this country wanted queer people dead.

I grew up in that atmosphere, and it definitely had an effect on me. And when I say people wanted us dead, that isn’t hyperbole. That doesn’t mean everyone in the country was capable of murder, they wouldn’t go out and beat a queer person to death, but I suspect they didn’t mourn too deeply at the cases of Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard. They didn’t even try to hide this, because their ultimate goal was to eliminate us from society.

However, the queer community is strong. We fight back, we do not go quietly into that good night, but we rage. We have fought, gained allies, and seen more progress than I would have ever imagined when I was young. And odd as it sounds, I think much of that progress has come from getting our images out there in popular media. Not to discount anything else, but books and television and movies have helped a great deal. It has humanized us for people who did not know any queer people in their everyday lives, and didn’t think they wanted to. It has brought us into people’s homes and thus their minds and ultimately their hearts. Advances like marriage equality might not have come when they did if the visibility of queer people hadn’t been raised by pop culture.

And the opposition knows this, and that is why censorship is their bread and butter.

What I see now with the push to remove queer-positive books from libraries, the “Don’t Say Gay” bills, the tossing around of the word “groomers,” and the attack on trans people is all part of a deliberate campaign against the queer community. And what I find most disturbing is how few people who call themselves allies are taking it seriously. They dismiss it as an annoyance but don’t realize how dangerous it truly is. Because the bottom line in this campaign is they don’t want queer people to exist. I don’t mean just in literature and movies, but in life. And getting us out of popular media is just the first step for them.

There is a quote from Heinrich Heine that goes, “Wherever books are burned, men in the end are burned.” And I believe that. People who want to ban queer representations from literature and movies would not be sad to see us dead. That’s the plain truth people don’t want to face. The reason these representations bother them so much is because it reminds them we not only exist but we are thriving.

These people want to go back to a time when the queer community at least had the decency to mostly stay hidden in the closet, trying to “pass” and living in quiet suffering. Our joy, our pride, our progress offends them, I suspect, because it highlights how dull and empty their own lives are when they harbor such hate in their hearts. Instead of looking inward and healing their own wounds they lash out at those of us who refuse to live under such oppression.

If they can’t wipe us from existence, they at least want us tucked away where we aren’t seen or heard. And that starts by removing us from books and movies and TV shows. They say they want to protect their children from discussions of sexual orientation at too young an age, but I call bullshit because they aren’t calling to remove any reference to the heterosexual orientation. They aren’t questioning children’s books with cishet mother and father figures.

I have long suspected even most conservatives recognize being queer is inborn, not a choice. So the real reason they don’t want their children exposed to queer-positive representations is because they want queer children to be ashamed and to hide in the closet. They want a return to the fear and hatred of the 1980s that kept us “in our place.”

That’s why it’s more important now than ever to continue fighting, to continue pushing, and for us storytellers to keep putting representations in our work. That means making work that is innately queer and speaks to the queer experience, but also simply showing that we are everywhere, even in stories that don’t revolve specifically around being queer. My upcoming novella Septic probably could have been told with two heterosexual characters, but if the sexual orientation doesn’t matter (which is an argument many critics make when queer characters show up in a story) then it’s just as valid for them to be queer as not. And I loved putting queer characters in a story set in the 1980s to show that we were there even when the world was acting as if we weren’t.

So I call for more queer creators, more queer content, more queer representations, more drag queens reading to children, more exposure, and more visibility. Because no matter how hard the opposition tries, we will not be erased.

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MARK ALLAN GUNNELLS

Mark Allan Gunnells loves to tell stories. He has since he was a kid, penning one-page tales that were Twilight Zone knockoffs. He likes to think he has gotten a little better since then. He loves reader feedback, and above all he loves telling stories. He lives in Greer, SC, with his husband Craig A. Metcalf.

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