The message from my fellow QUESTer — another Queer University Employee At Stanford — Ryan Tamares, on a postcard mailed to me on 6/19, in the middle of Pride Month:
Happy Pride !
Pride always ! !
— RESIST —
The holiday moment has passed, but now we’re in a world where we have to actively resist, on a daily basis, against the brownshirts and blackshirts serving our overlords. And join with the drag queens and thrown-away club kids who, in one of our foundation tales, fought back against the cops who came to ruin their lives, and ours.
The image on RT’s card:
(#1) A stylized Gay Power fist from the Ritzy Rose company
Now: a digression on Ritzy Rose; a note on an earlier use of (a version of) this image in a Happy Pride Month card from RT, with comments on the Gay Power fist; and notes on the world of MMS (male-male sexuality) and the larger world of SSS (same-sex sexuality), the worlds the Gay Power fist in some sense speaks for.
Ritzy Rose. From the company’s About page:
The Ritzy Rose [founded by Jennifer Diehl and Jason Diehl] is a handcrafted American brand. We specialize in wedding signs and brooch bouquets. Everything is created by The Ritzy Rose team in our studio just outside of Columbus, Ohio. The Ritzy Rose has been a part of thousands of weddings around the world since 2010, providing our brides unique accessories for their big day. As our family has grown so has our selection of signage, now including all of life’s moments such as baby announcements, first birthdays, graduations, holidays and anytime we want to say more with our pictures.
Their products are wider than this description would lead you to expect. They offer holiday cards for the following occasions: Christmas, Hanukkah, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day, Pride, and Mother’s Day. Yes, in between Father’s Day and Mother’s Day there’s Pride, with a nice assortment of rainbow-colored gay-celebratory cards, among them #1.
The Gay Power fist from 2021. From my 6/12/21 posting “Political rainbow”:
One more rainbow for the season, in my USPS mail yesterday: from Stanford QUESTer Ryan Tamares, wishing me Happy Pride Month, this LGBT Lives Matter postcard (with the “LGBT Lives Matter” legend abstracted away from the postcard):
(#2) [caption:] Logo designed and sold by AthleticHeroes on redbubble.comNote the POW, or PUNCH, lines surrounding the central image, a drawing of a raised clenched fist, with a long (presumably polished) thumbnail — either female, or gender-nonconforming male.
The raised clenched fist can express a variety of meanings in different contexts: solidarity with some movement or political group (with the LGBT Lives Matter — GLM, for short — movement, in this case, but sometimes with the government, even an oppressive one); resistance; or protest. Or some combination of these.
The GLM fist is modeled on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) fist, and both developed from the corresponding, and older, Power fist (Gay Power, Black Power) … a stylized Gay Power fist:
(#3) [caption:] Logo designed and sold by sweetsixty on redbubble.com
I don’t know who the ultimate designer of the logo in #1 and #2 was.
Who does the fist in #1 and #2 speak for? The shortest answer is: everyone in the world of same-sex sexuality, but now I’ll argue than even careful approaches to explaining who is in that world (on which occasions, for which purposes) force us to accept all manner of indeterminacy, fuzzy borders, and multiple conflicting criteria, so that the easy answers will involve a lot of corner-cutting, just so we can get some very roughly usable concepts (and labels for them) to make some sense of the sociocultural universe we live in.
Start with (biological) sex, surely the basis for talking intelligently about same-sex anything. Yet, as actual biologists are quick to point out, the notion is much more complicated than you would have imagined. On this point, there’s a nicely provocative tweet (as in Twitter, now X) by biologist Rebecca Mead running through the complexities — much cited, and quoted in many places, but the link to the original tweet is now dead, so that I can’t give it to you.
But we press on, coasting on mostly two sexes, female and male, plus an assortment of special cases, including people whose biological sex and what I’ll call their experiential sex are at variance, and a fairly sizable group of people who experience their sex identity as neither female nor male or as both.
We then come to the sexual worlds of men with men, and of women with women. In my 3/4/22 posting “The construction workers that bloom in the spring, tra la”, I introduce the label MMS (male-male sexuality) world, explaining that
I use MMS to sidestep the issues involved in using the existing modifiers homosexual, gay, and queer, because these labels fail to embrace the broad range of sexual tastes / desires, sexual practices, and sexual identities in the world in question.
The result is an extraordinarily large assortment of ways of living in the MMS world (and in the corresponding WWS world), some combinations of desires, practices, and identities coming to be recognized as cultural forms in a particular society (at some place and time), and some of these even getting vernacular labels. kThe sort f stuff that keeps this blog in business.