What Everyone Owes their Queer Ancestors
Pride Month is great. I love that there exists a sufficiently broad acknowledgement of queer people’s existence for Pride Month to be a thing. I love that there are parades and marches. I love that there are queer craft-ins and music festivals and dog walks. And those are just a few things from my neck of the woods.
I even love corporate pride efforts. Their motives may be ulterior, their efforts at times laughable but the fact that these corporations feel the need to engage with Pride at all underscores that they recognize our collective economic power.
But there’s something I haven’t seen recognized, and I think it should be. Mind you, I don’t think it should be celebrated, exactly, because it’s fucking tragic. But it damn well ought to be recognized.
You owe queer people your life
That “everyone” in the title? I mean it quite literally. I don’t know if you’re gay or straight or cis or trans or ally or hater or anything else. Yet I can say, with as much confidence as I can say anything, that you owe your life to queer people.
Whoever you are, wherever you live, you have queer ancestors. And if not for them, you would not be here today.
It’s a number’s game, and not even a complex one. The size of your family tree grows exponentially the farther back you look. A mere 200 years of family history is easily enough to net you 500-ish direct ancestors. A thousand years back, to the middle ages, blows quickly past a million. And that’s just scratching the surface of human history.
The exact numbers are difficult to calculate—for a variety of reasons—but the basic picture doesn’t change: you don’t exist without the very specific family tree those countless thousands of people created.
Some of whom were queer.
It doesn’t even matter what you think the true fraction of queer people is across humanity as a whole. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total fraction of everyone under the queer umbrella is somewhere between 10 and 20%. But even if you wildly lowball it at just 1%, once you’re talking about thousands or millions of ancestors it becomes statistically ridiculous to believe that none of your great-great-etc.-grandparents was queer.
Every person on this planet has queer ancestors and literally would not exist without them.
Think about what that cost them
Ok, so you have queer ancestors. So what?
Well, think about how queer people have been treated across history. In most places, at most times, it wasn’t great (and I know you don’t need me to spell that out for you). Queer people were faced with a stark choice: On the one hand, they could hide who they really were and participate in their own repression in order to survive a world that only valued the cis/het. On the other hand, they could hold true to themselves, follow their hearts, and face the consequences of being outcast, imprisoned, persecuted, discriminated against, or even murdered with impunity for daring to not act like a cis/het person.
No doubt some of them made the insanely brave choice not to hide anyway. Some of them even beat the odds and somehow carved out happy, fulfilling lives for themselves. I admire the hell out of those people.
But those aren’t the ones in your family tree. The ones in your family tree are those who played the game and passed well enough for cis/het that they had kids. They sacrificed their authenticity for survival. You have trans ancestors who lived closeted and suffered lifetimes of untreated gender dysphoria. You have gay and lesbian ancestors who lived closeted, putting up with spouses they didn’t truly love, or who hid their real loves in the margins of quiet infidelity, ever fearful of being caught.
Reputable estimates put the total number of humans who have ever lived at something like 109 billion people. that’s anywhere from 1 to 10 billion queer people across history, depending on where you put that fraction from earlier. Some goodly chunk of those people are in your family tree. They had to exist for you to exist. More than that, they had to live their lives the way they did, sacrificing authenticity for survival, for you to exist. Surely not all of them lived lives of silent misery, but just as surely some of them did.
The cumulative suffering of so many people over so many centuries is staggering. The misery, the tears, the self-recrimination, the discrimination, is an underground river of anguish flowing unseen throughout human history. I can’t wrap my mind around the true scale of it. All I can do is recognize that words like huge and vast and immense don’t do it justice.
This is why I say it is to be recognized, but not celebrated: Suffering on that scale is an incalculable tragedy.
No one should ever have to live that way
So let us grieve for the ancestors who suffered. They didn’t do it in order that we may live, but because they did it we do live.
Let us recognize their sacrifice. Let us be grateful for the rare privilege of life that their sacrifice grants us. Let us be grateful we live in a time when Pride Month does exist. When we have the chance to live openly and authentically in ways they didn’t.
Let us not squander that chance.
Neither let us forget the great toll of suffering behind the existence of every person on this planet. Let us also grit our teeth and clench our jaws in rage at the circumstances of prejudice that forced them into those impossible choices.
We can never repay that debt. But we can honor it, here in Pride Month and in every day that follows, by working for a world in which nobody ever has to choose between authenticity and survival.