friends of dorothy

        “I am a friend of Dorothy,” I say. 

        “Dorothy who?” you might ask; or, you might smile and say, “Me too.”

        To be a friend of Dorothy means something profound. In the mid-twentieth century, it was a flagging term used by members of the LGBTQIA+ community to identify one another without drawing unwanted attention. Today, this league of friendship has been decoded by the mainstream — for example, a character in the 1995 blockbuster Clueless is identified as a “disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde-reading, Streisand ticket-holding, friend of Dorothy” — but I believe now is the time for the queer community to reclaim it. Let’s embroider friend of Dorothy on the backs of our jackets, attach it to our email signatures, reintroduce it into our poetry, and remind everyone about the kind of people we have by our sides: one another. 

        It is commonly believed that the Dorothy in question is Dorothy Gale, the iconic leading lady of the Frank L. Baum books and the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Queer people of the time saw Dorothy’s story as a metaphor for their own struggles: like Dorothy, they escaped the black-and-white drabness of their everyday lives for the Technicolor world of clubs, bars, parlors, drag balls, and other places where they could let loose amongst their community. Being a friend of Dorothy crystallized an aching dream for a world that was “over the rainbow,” where prejudice and queerphobia were quashed before they could ever flourish. This was slang born neither of humor nor of a blasé pop culture reference — it was slang born of necessity.

        In my first year of high school, I took an elective course on queer history and culture. “We have always been here,” my instructor told us during our first class, “and we always will be.” That sentiment ensnared me. Through my growing interest in queer history, I became invested in my own queer present and future. Later that year, my instructor helped me explain to the Dean of the English department why a book in the ninth-grade curriculum should no longer be taught: its sole gay character was riddled with guilt and shame over his sexuality, and resorted to assaulting a woman in order to falsely establish that he was straight. My education about the endless battles fought by queer people throughout history gave me the courage to stand up as a queer student of ninth grade English who felt diminished and disgusted by a literary representation of queerness. When the Dean agreed that the book would no longer be taught, my heart soared. The rush of victory and gratification was addictive, and led me to continue ever onwards in my activist pursuits. 

        In sophomore year, I took up leadership of SAGA, my school’s Sexuality and Gender Alliance, which works with grades K-12 to create an environment of acceptance and understanding. I have taught classes to middle school students about queer history and literature, led workshops on queer theory and zine-making for lower school students, presented at assemblies for Queer History Month in October, and organized Night of Noise, a music festival that celebrates queer joy and community. I have introduced elementary school classrooms to the idea of “queerness” for the first time; I have seen the way the students' eyes light up and recognized myself reflected in them, a temporal mirror. 

        Without an understanding of history, we cannot craft a better future. My passion for queer pasts emerges from a desire to armor myself with the strength of my ancestors, who fought and loved and died in secret so that I could do the same out loud. I take great pride in knowing that queer people took the slurs thrown at them and turned them into shimmering banners of community — the word queer itself was once used to mark someone as “strange” or “other,” simply because they skewed from the norm. Today, I couch my life in queer, use it to describe my art, my taste in literature, and the very essence of who I am.

        Luckily for me, time will never stop moving forward, and so there will always be new queer history in the making. As I continue my studies of the past, I look even harder at the present and the future and ask what I can do to make change. Leading SAGA has given me a taste of activism within my school community, and as I look toward college, I aim to broaden my activist horizons by working with similar groups, hopefully on a larger scale. Queer history is my history, and my future will be a queer one, which proves to me that such concepts are irreversibly connected.

        So yes: “I am a friend of Dorothy,” I say, and I am proud.