💁🏽 'Mother' is Mothering... 💁🏽

QUEER WORD
MOTHER

What it means:

An online moniker assigned to certain female celebrities, often by queer internet culture, as a term of reverence and adoration.

Let’s use it in a sentence:

Beyoncé just dropped a surprise album, and the gays are in shambles. That’s mother.

A little bit of history:

Have you noticed that any female celebrity with even a hint of queer appeal is suddenly being dubbed mother on social media by a legion of chronically online homosexuals?

If not, let's take a look at a few examples just to get you up to speed:

This usage has been creeping into queer internet slang over the past few years, and to those unfamiliar, it might seem like it appeared out of nowhere. But in reality, the roots of the term in queer culture run deep.

So, where did this come from? What are the criteria for being mother? And who was the first?

Tracing the Origins

Since mother is such a common word, it's perhaps no surprise that it's been repurposed in different ways throughout history. In queer communities specifically, the concept of mother has carried significant weight long before Twitter and TikTok users decided to adopt it as their go-to declaration of praise.

Let's take a look at a few ancestors of today's mother usage:

Mother Clap – Perhaps the queer community’s first mother, Mother Clap was a cisgender woman who ran a molly house (a kind of coffee house that was a precursor of the modern gay bar) in 18th-century London. She was a fierce ally, not only providing a safe space for queer men to meet and socialise, but lying in court in order to protect them. Seriously, she provided false testimony in order to get one of her lodgers acquitted of charges of sodomy. That’s mother.

Gay Men and Gendered Language – For decades, gay men have playfully used feminine terms like girl or sis to refer to each other, reinforcing a sense of community. In this application, mother would be used to describe older, influential gay men, showing that this gendered honorific isn't exclusive to women.

The Ballroom Scene – Perhaps the most direct predecessor to the current use of mother comes from the ballroom scene. Emerging in the 1970s in New York City, ballroom culture was pioneered primarily by Black and Latinx trans and gender-nonconforming individuals. In this world, house mothers - often older, experienced queens - mentored their chosen families, offering guidance, a strict hand, and a sense of belonging.

With the rise of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a tv show that often pays tribute to ballroom culture, slang from this scene has gone mainstream, regurgitated and commodified by the masses. Heck, RuPaul herself has even released a song instructing you to ‘Call Me Mother’.

This is likely what planted the term in our collective consciousness, and it wasn’t long before folks of the internet took it and ran.

So, What Makes Someone Mother?

That’s the history covered. Now, you might be wondering what the criteria is for someone to be dubbed mother?

Well, if I’m totally honest with you, I have no clue.

Just when I think I’ve gotten a hang of it I find an exception to the carefully curated checklist I’ve created.

What I can tell you is that, more than anything, it’s a feeling, a vibe, a state of being. Some are anointed mother for their talent, their cultural impact, or the confidence they exude. For others, though, it appears to be down to the whims of a random gay with enough of a Twitter following for the claim to gain traction.

And, whilst I can’t tell you the exact criteria you need to meet in order to be dubbed mother I CAN tell you what you don’t need.

• you don’t need to actually be a mother

• you don’t even need to display stereotypically maternal qualities

• you don’t need to bake cookies or tuck anyone in at night. You could, however, dramatically flip a table on a reality show. Because, apparently, that’s mother.

And, Why Has This Term Taken Hold Now? 

Is it that, in these bleak times where things feel more than a little helpless, we all need a strong parental figure to nurture and comfort us?

Or, is it just that chronically online queer people have exhausted other terms such as ‘queen,’ ‘icon,’ and ‘legend’ and needed a fresh way to express their parasocial relationships with celebrities who don't even know they exist?

Whatever the reason, I have a sneaky suspicion that mother is here to stay.

But what do you think? Have you found yourself declaring someone mother without really knowing why? Or are you, like me, still trying to figure out what it actually means?

QUEER JOY
News to make you smile...

👩‍⚖️ A federal judge has issued a nationwide preliminary injunction on the US transgender military ban, blocking the executive order that she describes as ‘dripping with animus’. Oooh, good use of the word ‘animus’!

💒 How a tiny village in a deserted part of Spain became a centre for gay weddings

🖼️ JK Rowling said some nasty things about London’s Vagina Museum on Twitter. It ended up back-firing massively, as hundreds then donated money to save the museum!

🐧 Viral lesbian penguin video? Say no more!

👂️ A Wisconsin man who showed up at a town hall meeting to support an ant-trans bill does something very surprising…

QUEER THOUGHTS
Last week’s poll

In last week’s newsletter I asked why people backtrack on LGBTQ+ support, and the results were pretty much a resounding 'all of the above.'

Some of your comments included:

🦁 B: Cowardice, plain and simple.

🗳️ Z: A lot of public personas are trying to make themselves “more supportive and inclusive” to gather followers and attention - if the trends shift, they just back away.

🙅 H: Can we not just get rid of them all and start again?

I wish I had something more uplifting to say here, but I think we’re all pretty much feeling the same way — it’s going to be a bumpy few years as we find out who our real allies are and who was just performing all along.

QUEER RAGE
News to make you go ‘grrrr’...

🇭🇺 Truly scary stuff - a proposed anti-LGBTQ+ bill in Hungary would ban Budapest Pride and allow use of facial recognition software to track anyone who may attend!

✂️ Just weird - a new bill proposed in the US state of Arkansas could prevent hairdressers from giving gender non-conforming haircuts to minors. How? What? Huh?

🏳️‍⚧️ A new study by Australian researchers discovers that the mental health of trans Australians is getting worse

⚧️ ACTION - if you’ve got a minute sign the petition that calls for the U.S. Government to reinstate reference to transgender people in the Stonewall Uprising's Legacy (and if you missed the original story you can read about it here)