Queer Exandria: Pride vs Prejudice
You know what I think about sometimes? The hypothetical state of a queer community in Exandria.
Pop off all the pithy platitudes about oppression not defining queerness that you want, but the queer communities of Earth do, as a matter of fact, stem from our oppression. We travel in packs for safety. We made spaces and symbols for ourselves because we were not welcome in most places and we needed to be able to identify each other—for companionship, for love, for sex, for someone who understood—without being overt enough to be, you know, murdered and/or experimented on by our respective countries. We formed whisper networks. We built safe havens, because the world at large was not safe—and it’s not now, but in many countries it’s just about the safest it’s ever been since certain religions infested the planet. The privilege of being openly queer, of being out and proud, without being arrested for it is very recent.
So we’ve banded together for centuries, first in little groups, then in larger communities, and for most of that time it was all underground. When a group is forced to build communities under duress, under threat of violence from the state and the public alike, that builds strong bonds. It forms a sense of cohesive identity. Just look at Black culture in America, or Ashkenazi Jewish culture around the world: when everyone else is against you, and they have the power and bloody-minded vicious hatred to pick off anyone they can, the group by and large sticks together, close enough that culture forms. A shoal beset by sharks schools closest. And make no mistake, I love the queer community, and I’m boundlessly, depthlessly thankful to live in a time when I can exist as a queer person openly without losing my job, my home, my family, my freedom, my life, and that so many others like me can do the same; I am glad that we’ve come to a point where we can afford to be quarrelsome. These are merely the facts of how we came to be.
I don’t think a queer community wouldn’t exist without oppression, either. People will always seek out those like us, especially when it comes to matters of sex and romance, or even lack thereof. In a more perfect world, one without all the various stripes of queerphobia that make it unsafe for us to congregate among those we don’t know are either like us or supportive of us, I imagine we would be something more akin to book clubs or fandoms: a purely optional community, or set of communities, united by a likeness of “interest” rather than sheltering from a storm.
So enter Exandria, a setting that canonically does not have queerphobic power structures; where a fluidity of sex and gender factors heavily into at least one entire culture; where another culture is shaped and ruled by people who can remember being a variety of sexes, genders, orientations, and even species; where homophobes are distasteful outliers, not the status quo. What does the queer community look like there? Are there gay bars, or are there just bars? Is it common for queer Exandrians to congregate in friends groups among themselves? They certainly don’t need to, but I can still imagine some might want to, and besides, it’s common enough for people to have multiple circles of friends—at least those with the privilege of reaching a large number of people. Is there such a thing as gay fashion, or is clothing loosely-gendered enough that cross-dressing is just dressing? Are there drag queens & kings? How do non-binary Exandrians signal their gender? I can’t imagine there’s an equivalent of a hanky code, because that was constructed as a way for queer men to find and hook up with each other in a way that gave them plausible deniability because sex between men was a crime. What use would they have for Pride and all its symbols when no one has ever tried to make them feel ashamed?
I think about these things a normal amount
