Queer Theory, which nearly all of the gender and sexuality education in America is ultimately based upon, has nothing to do with “LGBT” education. This is evident to anyone who reads it, not only because its goals are diametrically opposed to LGBT acceptance and normalization in our society, but because they say so themselves very specifically over and over again. For one example, quoting Emily Drabinski, the openly politically Queer and Marxist current president of the American Library Association, from her 2013 paper “Queering the Catalog,” “Queer theory is distinct from lesbian and gay studies.” It could hardly be more blunt. She adds, “where lesbian and gay studies takes gender and sexual identities as its object of study, queer theory is interested in how those identities come discursively and socially into being and the kind of work they do in the world.” Her conclusion? “Lesbian and gay studies is concerned with what homosexuality is. Queer theory is concerned with what homosexuality does.”

What does Drabinski mean about “the kind of work they do in the world” when referring to “queer identities” and what they “do in the world”? She means activism. Nothing more and nothing less.

“Queer” is not an identity like gay, lesbian, or bisexual. It is by definition an explicitly and intentionally activist identity. That is, it is a political stance, not a fact of who someone is—in fact, not an identity at all. Again, this is by definition in Queer Theory. As David Halperin defined it in his 1995 book Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, a few pages away from a rousing discussion of the transformative potential of “anal fisting” as an ideal sex act,

Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.

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