Okay, I'm not going to the movie. I'm thinking on "proper" Midwesterners' internalized homophobia.

[fflo]

They're encouraging line-quoting and talking back to the screen for this screening of The Princess Bride, so I might miss stuff.  That's no way to see a film the first time, unless it's Rocky Horror or something.

The mobile notary came.  Got that stuff signed.

Now I have Before Stonewall on in the background.  It keeps making me think of how there's this "queer"-phobia in the chorus I sing with.  It's like some (vocal) people have never heard of reclaiming a slur.  Plus they seem to think that most old people---even those coming to our shows---feel the same way.  They also don't like references to sexuality, so I couldn't even refer to Hair (the musical) as having broken barriers around once-scandalous things, cuz some of these Midwestern homos find them scadalous to this day!

The other night the President of the chorus wanted to talk to me about the patter script, in which it had already been decided we would stick with the "Osqueers" theme (the show is movie songs).  So she grabbed me at break and brought me the script, on which she had numbered every occurrence of "Osqueers" with an ordinal number in a circle in the margin.  She then told me how I wasn't in the group last year so I don't know but the audience survey showed how by far most of our audience is 60-65/70 years old.  And so that's what the complainants were talking about, and they appreciate my creativity (which is actually irrelevant to the subject at hand), but we don't have to use the term so much, do we?  Like how about here, or here, or here....  Then she said---I shit you not--- that we don't need to hit people over the head with the queer AND THE LGBT stuff, do we?

I took the queer out of the bit she'll be speaking and changed it in one other place.  But then I added one back in, now that I know we do have a group of tap dancers.  The Osqueers Tappers.  Ha!  Suck my queer dick.

Another board member made up logos for the fake award show.  I wrote him to say something like watch out, we may have reclaimed that pink triangle decades ago, but you never know with this bunch.

I could go on at some length about "queer" as both an umbrella term and a particular way many people identify.  Not to mention rail against the lack of political awarenss or gratitude for those who went before us.  And such pious crap!  But I'm just gonna recall and take comfort in how that other board member referred to these late-stage complaints as lobbed-in (at us) bags of flaming poop.  It IS flaming poop.  And it's really weird to live somewhere where the queer chorus has multiple people who dare not speak our names, and think they should restrain the rest of us from doing so.

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Well, the organization is called the "Out Very Quietly Chorus," isn't it?

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

This is all fascinating. Like, the chorus has come around to a different culture from the concept it was founded under, and promoted as, and under which all its members found it and joined it. They sought out and desired a queer chorus, but now are ashamed. It’s like that old quite, “I wouldn’t want to be part of any group that would have me as a member.”

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

And Monica went to that movie, not knowing that audience participation was encouraged, and she agreed that it would have been annoying if that were her first time seeing it. Actually she found it annoying, not knowing it was encouraged.