Gay flannel
Here at Autostraddle, planning content around Lgbtq+ fest can be a bit of a conundrum. It’s frustrating to see mainstream outlets only elevate in-depth content about the LGBTQ+ collective and only really work with a bunch of homosexual and trans writers for one month out of the year, when we’re queer everywhere all the time. At the same day, Pride is immensely important to us here at Autostraddle and to a lot of our readers. It’s an ongoing part of LGBTQ+ history and resistance. It’s a complex month, which even the most well intentioned mainstream media Lgbtq+ fest packages don’t always capture. We’ve arrive up with a really rad theme for our Self-acceptance package this year that harnesses some of that complexity, and I can’t wait for it to be revealed to you.
But first, a little drama, a little tease. For the first time ever here at Autostraddle, we’re COUNTING DOWN to Pride! Because let’s be real, June may be Lgbtq+ fest month, but it’s not like we only exist as out, proud, noisy gay people from June 1 to June 30! Self-acceptance events — tiny and large — have been in the planning stages for a while now. Hell, I started planning Movement content back in early A
Pennsylvania high school boys wear flannel to celebrate "Anti-Gay Day"
In April, a band of Pennsylvania tall school boys wore matching flannel shirts and pasted hateful poster on male lover students’ lockers. Some say they also drafted a "lynch list".
Intimidation of GSA students
As many as 100 students at Claysville’s McGuffey Sky-high School took part in the "Anti-Gay Day" a daytime after the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance held its Day of Silence. "The Morning of Silence was organized to doodle attention to and condemn bulling against gay students. The homophobic students, mostly boys, wore flannel shirts and wrote "anti-gay" funeral crosses on the backs of their hands. The group stuck offensive posters on gay students’ lockers and intimidated Gay-Straight Alliance members and their supporters.
Other students said the group had a “lynch list”, although they did not say what exactly the list meant. McGuffey Superintendent Erica Kolat said officials have not seen the rumoured list, but that the school district was investigating the allegations.
Supportive action of mentor and management
Teachers ran out of their classrooms and took the offensive posters down.
The Gay-Straight Alliance a
It starts with a photo that came up in a slideshow of things from Elizabeth Daingerfeld Zwicky’s image trove: Steven Levine and me, both in flannel shirts, in a time and a place and on an occasion that neither of us could identify — and EDZ wasn’t any help.
(#1) The flannel guys
Steven put it at roughly 20 years ago, because the shirt he’s wearing is one that he wore lovingly to death some years ago (cue Donovan singing “I Cherish My Shirt”). I still have my shirt, however, because it was one of a set of 5 or so L.L.Bean flannel shirts I bought late in the last century and have been carefully rotating over the intervening years, to create them last through as many winters as feasible (I do love those shirts; among other things, they are lined).
Ned Deily then cracked the case. First, he extracted a date stamp from the file: 2004-02-15. Then, in his own words:
I was momentarily at a decrease to place it when I saw it but quickly realized it must have been at a Bay Area shape mention singing. [Both Steven and I are shapenote singers.] Consulting my calendar archive, I see it was indeed: at Carolyn Deacy’s house in San Francisco [in the Glen Park n
To Flannel or Not to Flannel?
I remember my first flannel. I stood in front of the dressing room mirror at Charlotte Russe, sizing up the pink and grey fabric swishing around my torso. This is it, I thought. Liberation. Pride. Acceptance. Finally, I could put my queerness on display for the world to see. This was the beginning of a novel era in which everyone could take one look at me and know that I’m interested in girls. I could connect other queer women and converse about queer things and shop at queer places. Right?
Well no, not really. My life hasn’t changed drastically since that fateful day two years ago. I haven’t cut my hair compact. There are no edgy piercings anywhere on my body, not even on my ears. My footwear of choice is flats, not black combat boots. I guess I’m not very nice at being a lesbian. And therein lies the problem.
Even though I know it’s just a stereotype, I can’t shake the association between wearing flannel and gayness. It’s definitely a social construct (there’s nothing inherently lgbtq+ about flannel), but I sense just a tad bit gayer in it. To me, wearing flannel is not just another article of clothing. It’s about breaking societal norms about sexuality and a