#semi related the people who occassionally get really angry when people use butch/femme to just mean

[st-just]

My semi-endorsed nuclear take is that having a, like, coherent, defined 'queer/gay/lesbian culture' that's something you can meaningful talk about as distinct from the wider mainstream basically requires that queer people be marginalized and cut off from hegemonic/mainstream culture - if society becomes less homophobic and people don't have to deal with the very high chance of burning most of their interpersonal relationships and the culture they've grown up around to come out they...mostly won't? And if you don't need solidarity and the support and community of people you think are pretentious fucks or joyless ideologues or weird perverts or just assholes because the alternative is being left to die on the street, well, why would you put up with them?

So all the effort people put in to putting together a, like, sacral history of queerness with its own culture heroes and rituals and symbols everyone should know the significance of and respect is...I don't know, it feels a bit quixotic? Even when it's actually well-intentioned and not kind of off-puttingly parochial ('gay people were invented in Ancient Greece, then homophobia happens and until about 2012 they could only be found in New York and San Fransisco'), I'm kind of always left feeling like unless things go horribly wrong they're kind of doomed? At least insofar as they're trying to sustain a living culture and not assemble a museum exhibit.

Not that there aren't almost entirely queer subcultures around still of course but like, calling any one of them 'queer culture' excludes way more people that'd ostensible fit than it actually fits, I think.