MemoryGate, York: Theme Park for the Disenfranchised
A Feral Eulogy for Queer History
I try to stay calm, I really do. But I just watched a video where someone, in front of more than 45,000 eager listeners, declared, with gusto, that a certain figure was the first in queer history. The first. Really? Oh, how bold of you! Not a single thing they said was factually correct. Sensationalist, shallow, and incredibly wrong—but guess what? They got listened to. But it doesn’t matter, does it? The entire narrative has been hijacked, and history has been bulldozed into the ground, the Vogons have rocked up, and their poetry is outselling Rupi Kaur.
And me? Yes, I’ve got significantly less followers. A few comments here and there. I’m just a lowly PhD researcher trying to do my best by the history I research, and the writing & performance of it. Sure, I try to meticulously fact-check every single thing I write, but who cares? History is officially dead, folks. Fiction has flawlessly pirouetted and slumped right down into fact’s coffin, planted a tainted kiss on its lips, and wilfully claimed the stage as fact’s jealous understudy. History is over. Left is right. Black is white. And, you know what? I’m a rhubarb salesman from Saturn's outer ring road, with a wooden leg named Bert and a party trick involving an avocado that’ll knock you the fuck into next week.
Once upon a time, history was a thing. You know, researched, documented, scrutinised, and cross-examined by people who dedicated their lives to unearthing facts. But now? Now, history is the victim of a bizarre, postmodern fever dream, where facts are malleable, context is meaningless, and if your voice is loud enough, no one will bother fact-checking your nonsense. Hell, the algorithm’s already feeding them their next dose of misinformation-flavoured popcorn. I’m not for a second suggesting the way history has been recorded is necessarily right, but that doesn’t mean we can just replace it with any old Jackanory nonsense we feel like.
And I? Well, I’m left over here clutching my well-researched, citation-heavy notes like a lunatic in the town square screaming, “IT’S WRONG. IT’S ALL WRONG.” But it doesn’t matter, does it?
I’ve heard tour guides proclaim “this is the oldest pub in York” Nope! I’ve heard one tour guide say “the reason there’s scaffolding on York Minster is because the stone it’s made from doesn’t last very long so they’re always having to replace it” Bollocks! I’m not going to get into the realm of ghost stories, that’s a free-for-all all of its very own! Hyperreality isn’t even going to touch the sides there.
History Is Dead, Long Live Nonsense
Wait, wait—hold the fuck on, Marjorie, put down the rollers, and have a butcher’s at what the kids are doing online. Sherlock Holmes? The first queer figure in Western literature? Someone get me a shiny rhinestoned shitshovel right this fucking second, because I’m about to dig history out of the unmarked grave these people have dumped it into. History is DEAD, my friends. It’s been stabbed, drowned, and suffocated by the simulacrum, wrapped in a tacky shroud of misinformation, and now parades around like it’s alive. It’s Weekend at Bernie’s with Oscar Wilde done up like Guy Fawkes. Up is down. Night is day. Fact is fiction. Let’s all pop down the Shambles and shout “Reductio ad absurdum” and just see what fucking happens. A shedload of people dressed up like wizards are bound to shit themselves. And the street shall once again run red with the blood of freshly butchered swine! Queer history has become a damn kaleidoscope of lies that TikTok influencers have spun into a tapestry of nonsense, trying to sell you queer culture in the same breath they sell teeth-whitening kits.
Let me make something CRYSTAL bloody clear: Sherlock Holmes is no more the first queer literary figure than I am the number one greengrocer from a little picturesque village on Saturn’s third moon. Carmilla—a sexy, sapphic vampire—sank her fangs into Western lit fifteen years before Holmes ever touched down on Baker Street. Dorian Gray? He was prancing around in his vanity at the same time as Holmes was polishing his second-best magnifying glass (they were commissioned at the same bloody lunch meeting for crying out loud.) At least Dorian Gray was a little more explicit in his sexuality, an eternal twink doomed to wander through Oscar Wilde’s opium-drenched nightmares while the “true” image of him suffered in relative silence behind closed doors. And now, we might as well all be living in one of those nightmares too, but now it’s the image that’s peacockedly parading around in the digital stratosphere while we all wither away in the glow of that familiar blue light. Sherlock Holmes might be very loosely queer-coded, and probably canonically asexual at best. That doesn’t mean he can be mutilated as the poster boy for all things queer just because it suits you, sir.
Also, the insinuation that his “habit” of disguising himself as other people by altering his dress sense inadvertently makes him a queer figure is hardly reassuring. You dress as one old woman, once! And in that context, he’s hardly the first. Shakespeare. I’m not even going to finish that thought. And I don’t just mean cross-gendered performance either. Billy “ooh what a lovely sonnet I’ve wrote” Wobbledagger, himself.
This is Baudrillard’s nightmare in action—hyperreality. We’re not dealing with the real anymore, just knock-offs so distorted that you can’t even see the original. The map is now the territory, the knock-off is the product. It’s queer history in the funhouse mirror, stretched and distorted into something laughably false. We’ve been buried under layers of pastel-coloured fantasy so deep, we’ve forgotten what queer history even looks like. And it’s happened right before we ever had a clear-cut image of what queer history could and should be in the first place. It’s being warped as it’s being discovered, in real-time.
Queer History Isn’t a Bachelorette Party
Here’s the thing: Jean Baudrillard warned us this would happen. In the world of the simulacrum, reality becomes meaningless. And the TikTok queers are selling us a plastic-wrapped version of queerness now, all tarted up in rainbows and glitter. It’s hollow. It’s all performance and no truth—drag without the critique, all lip sync, no talent. As a Yorkshireman might say “all frills, no knickers!”
Michel Foucault is surely rolling like an interminable kebab rotisserie in his grave. His theories about knowledge and power are being taken out for a walk like an untrained labradoodle, and shitting all over history. TikTokers with more likes than brain cells have the power now—they are the gatekeepers of queer history, and they’ve reduced it to aesthetic choices. Pink washed. Homogenised. Packaged and sold back to us. But real queer history? It’s grim. It’s messy. It’s riotous. It’s the AIDS crisis, the criminalisation and policing of our bodies, the witch hunts that Oscar Wilde himself couldn’t escape. It’s the blood on the streets, not the glitter at Pride.
Wanna know how Sontag’s camp became this kitsch disaster? Susan Sontag saw it coming, too. Camp, that beautiful weapon of the outcast, has been commercialised into oblivion. What used to be a critique of power has become a performance for capitalist consumption. We’re buying back our own commodified queerness by the pound with a significant mark-up, and only being fed on the scraps & cheap cuts. It's all filtered and sanitised, but that’s the point, isn’t it? Baudrillard said it: The simulation has overtaken the real.
Queer History, Sponsored by Starbucks
And then we have Judith Butler. Ever heard of performativity? Butler’s theories tell us that identity is constructed through repeated performance. So here we are, repeating performances of queer history—badly—and creating an entirely “new” fake history in the process. The TikTok historians are performing queer history like a bad improv troupe. And guess what? When we keep seeing these performances, they become the truth. That’s the very real danger here. We now receive so much information, there’s scarcely time to question everything, so we just accept this clouded miasma of “truth” and move on with our lives, doomed to be forever misinformed. And inevitably, we’ll end up parroting the same horseshit to someone else, who also believes us, and trots on their merry way feeling very well informed, but actually armed with utter tosh of the highest order!
So when some random influencer says Sherlock Holmes is the first queer figure, that’s the history we’re doomed to repeat. We’re becoming a ridiculous fucking parody of ourselves. Queer history has become the Poundland version of a bastardised queer reality. Bulk-sized and empty, but at least it’s rainbow-coloured, right?
But here’s the truth: Queer history is a bloodbath. It’s Sappho, it’s Oscar Wilde, it’s James Baldwin, it’s Virginia Woolf, it’s Audre Lorde, it’s Allen Ginsberg, it’s Gertrude Stein, it’s Christopher Isherwood, it’s those who died in the AIDS crisis, it’s Langston Hughes, it’s Thom Gunn, it’s Radclyffe Hall, it’s the persecuted, the criminalised, the erased, it’s Jean Genet, it’s Adrienne Rich, it’s Anne Carson, it’s Eileen Myles, it’s Federico García Lorca, it’s Danez Smith, it’s Lord Byron, it’s Walt Whitman, it’s Anaïs Nin, it’s W.H. Auden, it’s Djuna Barnes, it’s Michel Foucault, it’s Keith Haring, it’s John Giorno, it’s the invisible, the feared, the flamboyant, the proud, the survivors. It’s the bones of queerness engraved in every line of literature, the in-betweens, the absences, the sighs, the screams, the loves unspoken but felt across time. It’s not a sideshow attraction at the cultural theme park. It’s dark, it’s dangerous, and it’s ours. And they want to sell it back to us, like they’re doing us a favour for stocking our product despite reservations. And not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes them look good. There’s your performativity. It’s just bloody virtue signalling at best.
The Grand Old Dupe of York
Let’s talk about York, my beloved city, once a hub of trade and intellect, now a laughable tourist trap—a theme park for people who want a quick hit of history without any of the grit. You can’t swing a branded tote bag without hitting a coffee shop or souvenir stand selling a sanitised & curated version of our city’s past. But the truth? The people who keep this city running can’t even afford to live here anymore.
History has been turned into a spectacle, a sign that points only to itself. York has, ironically, become a ghost of what it once was—a simulacrum of history, packaged for easy consumption, just like queer history. The cobblestones are slick with nostalgia and Starbucks. The real York is buried under layers of overpriced lattes and Instagrammable moments.
But it’s not just York. This is what they do with queer history, too. The dark, rebellious, dangerous past of our community has been buried under corporate rainbows and cishet-friendly drag brunches. The history of Stonewall isn’t about throwing bricks anymore, it’s about selling merch in Primark. “The first pride was a riot” as though it was something fun, a laugh riot. No, it was a long fucking time coming. Centuries, if not millennia, of tension building up, and then something snapped, and skip ahead, skip ahead, here we are. Isn’t it all twee and lovely now? Well, of fucking course not.
Hyperreality for Dummies
Enter the Hyperreality Improbability Death Drive, where history is no longer history, and we’ve collectively hit the big shiny button without knowing if we’ll come out the other side as humans, holograms, or figments of our own imagination. This is post-history—post as in “post it on social media,” the reality of our age where every second is a narrative, an archive, a meme, a simulacrum.
Douglas Adams, in his divine wisdom, gifted us the Infinite Improbability Drive, where “anything you can't possibly imagine happening, will.” Now, we’re pushing that metaphorical button, not to sail through galaxies but to ride the waves of fake news, meme politics, and the collapsing towers of historical fact. We’re like passengers on a ship powered by sheer improbability, guzzling down reality-shattering Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters—those heady concoctions that feel like your brain is being “smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.” And let’s be real, that’s where we are in history: smacked in the face by surreal absurdity, infinitely wobbling between existential dread and a comedic apocalypse. The world is literally on fire and it seems like there’s sod all we can do about it. Let’s just print “eat the rich” on a million t-shirts in a sweatshop and see if that keeps them on their toes.
The Death Drive—that deep-seated Freudian urge toward destruction, self-annihilation, and the pull towards the void—has now gone digital. It’s clicked into hyperdrive and slipped right into Baudrillard’s realm of Hyperreality, where nothing is real, and everything is a simulation of a simulation. You’re not reading this because it’s real—you’re reading it because you clicked, and clicking is all that matters. Welcome to the Post-History Era, where historical narratives are shaped by algorithms, where everything is plausible and nothing is true, and we’re all complicit in the game of rewriting the past one click, tweet (fuck you, Elon), and TikTok at a time.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
It’s like Sedgwick’s entire approach to Queer Theory accidentally got funnelled through the hyperspace improbability drive: identity, history, desire—they’re all free-floating now, unmoored, untethered to any grand narrative. Free to the highest bidder! Baudrillard would have a fucking field day. The entire structure of history has dissolved into endless simulacra—Facebook memories popping up like ghosts, reminding us of the people we pretended to be five years ago, ten years ago, while the future—our hyperreal future—is lost in an infinite doom scroll.
And yet, this is where the Hyperreality Improbability Death Drive takes a glorious, absurd turn: we want this. We crave it. We perpetuate this system endlessly. We’re the ones pushing the buttons. We’ve become addicted to the blurring of lines, the erasure of fact and fiction, the thrill of not knowing what’s real, but performing it anyway. It’s the ultimate queer coding of history, except no one can be arsed trying to decipher it anymore. Judith Butler taught us that gender is a performance—well, so is history. And for the ever-loving & unholy sake of fuck, we are all on stage now, vamping it up, playing the most dramatic, drag-infused historical re-enactment you’ve ever seen. And tickets are selling like hot teacakes.
And now, let’s pull back in Monsieur Foucault. Will someone please get Michel down off the spit, he’s wanted downstairs for a very serious finger wagging! After all, he’s the master of power structures, and isn’t that what we’re up against? A power structure that erases truth, packages it as consumer content, and leaves us grasping for meaning in a world that’s nothing more than smoke and mirrors? Every historical fact is now a commodity, bought and sold on the black market of ideas, endlessly recycled through the social media machine. It’s not about controlling the narrative anymore; it’s about fracturing it into a million pieces and letting the chaos drive us forward. Screw the panopticon—we’ve built an empire of clickbait and influencers, and that’s where the “real” power lies.
We are witnessing the death of history, and we are LOVING it. We love a good car crash. Reality TV isn’t enough anymore. We’ve had a deranged & predatory TV star in the White House, and what is a Twitter feud anymore when one of the most controversial creatures on the planet owns the bloody thing? The sooner they all fuck off into space the better. Though if it impacts my rhubarb sales, I’ll play merry hell!
But let’s not mourn. Instead, let’s embrace the chaos, and revel in the absurdity. The death drive has been turbo-charged by hyperreality, and we’re all along for the ride. Oscar Wilde once said, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” Well, it’s safe to say that now, life doesn’t even bother pretending to imitate anything anymore—it’s pure performance, pure simulation. History is now an improvisational theatre piece performed by millions of people at once, where everyone is both the actor and the audience, the creator and the critic, all barrelling down the intergalactic freeway armed with a Hyperreality Improbability Death Drive button under one hand, and a martini in the other hand and a stupid fucking grin plastered on their face. The question is, who is driving this thing? (Ah, that’s right, Zaphod Beeblebrox had a secret third arm. And obviously, that’s exactly who you want driving this thing right now, isn’t it? At least he had a Heart of Gold and two heads!)
Our destination? Who knows. That’s not important. What matters is that we’re here, in this moment, and nothing has ever been more surreal. So let’s raise a glass (Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster preferred) to the death of history, to the improbable ride, and to the grand, glorious mess of it all. And let’s laugh—because what else is there to do when reality is just another fiction, and we’re all protagonists in the most absurd story ever told? Cheers to that, darlings.
Wake the Hell Up
Queer history deserves better. It’s not a fucking product. It’s not something you can sell in a gift shop. It’s messy, it’s violent, and it’s filled with ghosts who haven’t been laid to rest because we keep burying them in endless swathes of fresh bullshit. You think you’re honouring queer history by posting thirst traps under the hashtag #Pride? Newsflash: that’s just feeding the machine.
We need to reclaim our history before it’s erased by this faintly rainbow-coloured hellscape of consumerism. Foucault, Butler, Sontag, Baudrillard, hell, even Derrida, they all warned us this was coming. And here we are, standing in the wreckage of reality, holding nothing but a massive Starbucks cup and a vague understanding of what queer history once meant.
Maybe history isn’t quite dead yet. Maybe it’s on life support, waiting for someone to pull the plug or shock it back to life. And that someone is all of us. We need to hold onto the real history, to insist on nuance, context, and fact-checking. We can’t let the clickbait brigade rewrite the past just because it plays better on social media. It’s time to shit or get off the pot.
RIP History, but also—get back up. We’ve still got work to do.
So, what now? Do I give up and just join the masses of people rewriting history with every TikTok video, every viral post? Nah. I’ll keep writing, keep fact-checking, keep fighting the good fight. But don’t be surprised if you catch me quietly losing my mind in the process. There’s a bloody good reason my icon on here includes Gustave Courbet’s self-portrait titled The Desperate Man.
It’s time to dig it all up. To stop letting the world sell us back a plastic version of ourselves. Queer history is dangerous, radical, and real. Let’s keep it that way.
Admittedly, this piece would have been far better placed during my month-long series of “Pride” related posts, alas, it is now here. Taking up space in amongst my intended “Spooky Season” material. Ah well, there should always be one camp spectre at the feast. And Oscar Wilde can’t be expected to do all the heavy lifting. Not in that hat.
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