Pits and Perverts: Queerness Beyond Sexuality
“When you’re in a battle against an enemy so much bigger, so much stronger than you, well, to find out you had a friend you never knew existed, that’s the best feeling in the world.”
When I heard this for the first time, it changed my perception of what identifying as queer meant to me. I watched this at a very young age, when I was first starting to explore my gender identity and my sexuality. I was already interested in politics and human rights, but never really knew that my identity could intersect with that. When I saw on my small kitchen TV a group of proud queer people fighting for workers’ rights while actively being gay, lesbian, bisexual, and loud, I knew that queerness had all to do with it.
The quote is from the 2014 film Pride, directed by Matthew Warchus and written by Stephen Beresford. It’s based on the true story of the LGSM campaign, the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners actions to support financially the Welsh miners on strike against Thatcher’s attempt to silence their unions.
The scene I chose to analyze from Pride is an example of queerness and how it can be used to identify a community of LGBTQ+ people fighting for human rights. My essay will analyze the specific scene using Queer Theory, and how the term Queer can be applied to it in a historical and political context.
Viewing Pride using Queer Theory
The movie was received with strong critical acclaim. It won the Queer Palm award at Cannes Film Festival, it was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture and three BAFTAs, including Best British Film. It was produced by BBC Films, Calamity Films, British Film Institute, Canal+, Ciné+, Ingenious Media, and Pathé. The film gained a 7.6 score out of 10 on Rotten Tomatoes, 79 out of 100 on Metacritic, and 16.7 million dollars at the box office. (Wikipedia, Pride)
The scene I’ll be talking about sees the LGSM discussing in their headquarters, the London bookstore Gay’s the Word. Their actions for the miners are starting to receive attention from the public, most of it being negative. While discussing a brick smashes the glass door and firecrackers start blowing up in the library. Once they diffuse the smoke and start cleaning up, they see that there’s a newspaper page tied to the brick. It’s the page with an article that talks about their work with the miners, and the title in bold reads “Perverts support the pits!”. The younger member of the group, Bromley, is shocked by what they’ve been called. Mark, the leader of the group, explains to him how they are able to go forward by claiming the insults they receive and making them something to be proud of. He decides to make use of the new attention they’ve been receiving to organize a charity concert for the miners, called Pits and Perverts.
For this essay, I’m analyzing the artifact through LGBTQ+ lenses/Queer Theory.
A definition of Queer Theory was given by Tyson (2014) in Critical Theory Today. “[…] If we restrict ourselves to its narrower theoretical meaning — its deconstructive dimension — queer criticism reads texts to reveal the problematic quality of their representations of sexual categories, in other words, to show the various ways in which the categories homosexual and heterosexual break down, overlap, or do not adequately represent the dynamic range of human sexuality.” (Tyson, Lesbian, gay and queer criticism, 2014, pg. 336)
According to Tamsin Spargo (1999), “Queer theory is not a singular or systematic conceptual or methodological framework, but a collection of intellectual engagements with the relations between sex, gender and sexual desire. If queer theory is a school of thought, then it’s one with a highly unorthodox view of discipline. The term describes a diverse range of critical practices and priorities: readings of the representation of same-sex desire in literary texts, films, music, images; analyses of the social and political power relations of sexuality; critiques of the sex-gender system; studies of transsexual and transgender identification, of sadomasochism and of transgressive desires.” (Spargo, What is Queer Theory?, 1999, pg. 9)
By reading both authors talking about queer theory we recognize that there’s not a definitive definition. Because the idea of queerness is relatively new and broad, defining what its theory is is still in the works. What we understand from this is that queer theory wants to dismantle categories of thinking, analyze different phenomena as connected, not take anything for granted. Sexuality, gender, identity politics, race, cannot be analyzed without taking the others into consideration.
My unit of analysis is the term queer. Again in her book Critical Theory Today, Tyson explains it through its history.
“The use of the term queer can be seen as an attempt to reappropriate the word from what has been its homophobic usage in order to demonstrate that heterosexists shouldn’t be allowed to define gay and lesbian experience. The act of defining the terms of one’s own self-reference is a powerful move that says, among other things, “We’re not afraid to be seen”. […] As gay men and lesbians have learned, the term is a tool for oppression, but it’s also a tool for change. Furthermore, some lesbians and gay men have adopted the word queer as an inclusive category for referring to a common political or cultural ground shared by gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and all people who consider themselves, for whatever reasons, nonstraight.” (Tyson, Lesbian, gay and queer criticism, 2014, pg. 334)
Whittington (2012) explains it as: “To most readers, “queer” does have something to do with lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender authors, artists, themes, or representations. […] Yet queer theory, as formulated in the 1990s and practiced today, has used the term to refer to topics outside the range of lesbian/gay studies, employing it instead as a kind of position against normative or dominant modes of thought.” (Whittington, QUEER, 2012, pg. 1)
Queer has been used for years to identify the LGBTQ+ community as a unity. It has also become a new sexual and gender identity, a nondescriptive, “unlabeled” label, that means “I don’t identify with any idea of sexuality, I don’t conform to binary ideas of gender, I am me”.
Analysis of Pride
I chose queer as the unit of analysis because even though the word wasn’t yet used at the time of the events of the film, the concept of queerness and reclaiming slurs is at the core of the scene. The group reclaims the word perverts and takes pride in it.
“Now, there is a long and honorable tradition in the gay community and it has stood us in good stead for a very long time. When somebody calls you a name… you take it and own it.”
Another very important thing that ties the film to queerness is the intrinsic political intent behind it. The queer movement started as a way to fight together for equal rights, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trans people all together for the greater good, even if the fights were not the same. The same happens here: gays and lesbians get together to fight a fight that isn’t necessarily theirs, but they fight for morals. At the beginning of the movie, when Mark gets the idea to raise money for the miners, it’s because he recognizes that they are receiving the same treatment gay people always had.
“It’s a show of solidarity. Who hates the miners? Thatcher. Who else? The police, the public and the tabloid press. Sound familiar?”
They all get together to fight a common enemy, the Thatcher government and society. They’re convinced by Mark, who was very active in communist groups in the UK and was aware of class struggle and the importance of unionizing. In a way, that’s what they’re doing: they’re refusing to conform to what is imposed onto them and they’re fighting for what is right, even if it brings them hate.
When gay men and transgender individuals were suffering from AIDS, it was lesbians and queer women who were not afraid to be close to them and help them. In the 60s and 70s, when queer people were struggling with extreme discrimination, Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party encouraged black people to support the gay liberation movement and women’s liberation movement, recognizing the similar struggles they were facing. Queer organizations like Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club backing policing for affordable housing for families in cities like San Francisco. Bringing awareness to the violence that trans women of color face every day at alarming rates, creating safe houses and shelters for endangered youth, fighting for abortion access and reproductive health. All of these seem like different troubles that affect different people, but without communities supporting other communities, nothing ever changes.
This is what being queer is, it’s more than sexuality or gender; it’s community, support, intersectionality, fighting the norm.
I think this analysis can help us understand the history of the word queer as a political identifier other than another word for LGBTQ+. It can help dig deeper into the history of the queer community and how it’s connected to the social context of the time.
The message of the scene as well as the movie is that while words hurt, the less power we give them the more immune to them we become. Queer people and other marginalized groups have found power in reclaiming the hurtful words said to them and taking pride in them. Everyone should take pride in whatever makes them different than others.
The idea that being queer is more than a common identifying factor, that it can create a community based on love, inclusion, support, fight, can be seen perfectly in this movie. Being queer is reclaiming the pain that comes with it, the hate that the world throws at you and making it your strength. The scene from Pride is a perfect example of what queerness and being queer means.
References
YouTube. (2018). Pride. YouTube. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPQBYe-nfxs.
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Pride (2014 film). Retrieved November 10, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_(2014_film)
Tyson, L. (2014). Lesbian, gay and queer criticism. In Critical theory Today (3rd ed.). essay, Routledge.
Spargo, T. (1999). What is Queer Theory? In Focault and Queer Theory. essay, Icon Books Ltd.
Whittington, K. (2012). QUEER. Studies in Iconography, 33, 157–168. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23924280
(Analysis written during Writing About Popular Media — COMM344 GWAR)
