Like, people who identify as Queer know the word is used like a slur. Trust me, we know.
So when we say “queer is a slur” was started by terfs, maybe use some critical thinking and try to understand what we mean. That is, if you actually care about queer people and the damage terfs do, rather that just screaming “queer is a slur!” and ignoring the actual point.
Terfs did not like that queer was reclaimed. End of. This is a fact. Queer was too broad, too accepting, and embraced all the people they wanted gone. And I know y’all exclusionists feel the same but get pissed when we point it out so you deny it, but sit down and listen for a minute.
Queer was the preferred term for poc. For bisexuals. For trans people. For people with multiple identities. It neatly encapsulated everything, and was a friendly community to those who felt thrown under the bus by mainstream LGBT activism. It was a political and social statement, “you treated my like I was different and weird, and guess what? I am and that’s something to be proud of.”
So the response? “You can’t use that word. Its bad. Its a slur.”
And at the time, a lot of people rolled their eyes. Everyone knew why they didn’t like the word and brushed that off. It was fine.
So they started more subtly. “Just so you know this word is very harmful and is a slur so be careful how you use it :))) in case you didn’t know :)))) its a slur :))) friendly reminder :))) for the sake of other people of course :))))” type shit on every post involving the word, including and especially posts simply mentioning self identification.
Always worded in friendly, concerned ways, like the derailment was meant to be nice and considerate, and not about normalizing their rhetoric.
And what happened because of that was a younger generation of community kids growing up with these statements being thrown at them and absorbed on every. Single. Post. That. Mentionioned. Queer.
The result? That same generation of kids cutting it all short, removing the meant-to-be-palatable niceness, to just say “queer is a slur.”
Exactly how it was originally intended. “Queer is a slur.” People drop on posts where young queer people talk about it being a self identifier that actually fits them. “Its a slur,” they comment, with nothing else, on posts they clearly didn’t read past that word, written by people twice their age who had reclaimed it before they were even born.
Its nasty. Its disgusting. It’s plain old bigotry, whether the people saying know it or not. It is a terf tactic, plain and simple.
And no one wants to deny that it is indeed used as a slur (right along with all the rest of our identities.) No one wants to be insensitive and force it on people who haven’t reclaimed it.
But invading queer people’s posts to spit “queer is a slur” is flat out queerphobic. You do the dirty work of terfs, of cis straight oppressors, by saying in one simple sentence: “its a dirty word, there is no pride in it, you haven’t/can’t reclaim(ed) it.”
And regardless of your actual intentions, when you do this, that is EXACTLY what you are communicating and doing.
“Queer is a slur” is a terf movement. Stop fucking supporting terfs just because you want to pretend like it isn’t.
This is why I block people who say ‘Queer is a slur.’
You quack like a terf, I block you like a terf.
This thing was so weird to me when I first encountered it on tumblr, because like… in academia
queer studies
is a thing. Queer Theory is a thing. If I search my Uni’s library for ‘queer’ I get 138,481 results. Here are some of them:
Queer in Europe : contemporary case studies / edited by Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett.
Queer Phenomenology, Sexual Orientation, and Health Care Spaces: Learning From the Narratives of Queer Women and Nurses in Primary Health Care, / Cressida Heyes, Megan Dean, Lisa Goldberg.
Playing With Time: Gay Intergenerational Performance Work and the Productive Possibilities of Queer Temporalities / Stephen Farrier
Postcolonial and queer theories : intersections and essays / edited by John C. Hawley.
Showing Your Pride: A National Survey of Queer Student Centres in Canadian Colleges and Universities / John Ecker, Jennifer Rae, Amandeep Bassi
Mad for Foucault : rethinking the foundations of queer theory / Lynne Huffer.
Do those look like queerphobic texts? And do you think that most of the writers writing about queer theory are straight? Lols. If you don’t want to be personally be called queer, that’s cool. You don’t get to stop other people using the word though. It’s ours now and we’re keeping it.
There isn’t an epidemic of asexual people telling people not to show PDA at pride. There’s an epidemic of people making posts about asexual people doing that. There have been one or two posts from asexual people along those lines, but people are making it out to be a widespread issue when it’s not, and people are believing it and blowing it up more.
If someone wants to show me more asexual people genuinely being homophobic by saying not to do things like kissing/other publiclyappropriate PDA at pride to prove to me that there is this epidemic. Go right ahead. But until then, I’ve seen about 20 or 30 times the number of posts from exclusionists saying this is a widespread problem than people actually being homophobic about PDA.
^this
It’s literally a non-issue
This is the same tactic terfs use. They make up these fake scenarios and make it seem like they’re widespread. They also create fake troll blogs pretending to be trans or asexual. It’s fucking pathetic and transparent. This form of propaganda is stale as hell.
It’s interesting hearing ppl be anti-ace in pride month bc I think a lot of people think about ace spectrum as just, not being interested, and that it therefore affects your life to the same degree as not being interested in like, horror movies or a new AAA game might. That it’s a simple “opt-out” of any sort of sexual experience or identity altogether, rather than another set of complex interactions with a highly regimented, scripted societal concept of “normal,” e.g. hetero nuclear family with clear gender roles
You’d think for a community that focuses so much on the topic of representation in media, it would be a little more obvious that like…in almost every story, romantic/sexual love comes up as a theme or sideplot, and in many of them, it’s presented as a critically important key to happiness or success. As a culture, we recognize that anytime a character is in the same room as another character with the chance for there to be sexual tension, then that sexual tension p much automatically exists by default (assumed straight, but if the character’s label is revealed as gay,etc., follows accordingly). When the lead guy meets a woman with more than a few speaking lines and a meaningful interaction, they are a Romantic Sideplot, to the point where a lot of romantic writing is frankly lazy or forced-feeling simply bc it relies on ppl expecting it as default.
And the thing is, that sort of interaction follows you in real life in a lot of ways. It often feels like meeting people starts with the benchline of “am I or can I become sexually/romantically interested in you?” before moving down the lines of other ways to relate. And while I personally never really fell in the “I’m broken, I need fixed” mentality regarding my sexuality (demi-, to be clear), I have felt alienated or kept at a distance in the process of trying to disengage with this unspoken norm, to the point of it kind of becoming my default. As I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten more pressing, and it feels like many spaces for adults come with the caveat of being related to potential sexual/romantic availability
And it’s hard coming to terms with the fact that the world has designated the “most important relationship” as something that’s counter to you in some essential way. Like it’s a bit of a cruel realization to recognize that you’re probably always going to be playing second fiddle or be a step down in status to the people you view as most important to you because your relationship with them is not sexual or romantic. Being ace-spectrum is not opting-out of wanting meaningful relationships, but it sometimes comes with the resignation that you may have to accept that.
But that’s why representation and community matter. There’s a lot more discussion about things like queerplatonic relationships, about very meaningful but non-sexual ways of relating to others, and it’s awesome to see it come up in media, even if it’s just fanfiction. The notion that something like love, or more specifically, devotion, loyalty, commitment, accountability, compassion, or the act of cherishing/being cherished, can still exist for you outside of the realm of romantic or sexual situations, is something I think everyone deserves to see and understand. And I think that’s worth including in the discussion alongside other LGBTQ+ topics
I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: it comes down to whether you want more false positives or more false negatives. Do you want to have such stringent requirements for ‘counting’ as lgbtqiap that some people who many consider lgbtqiap get left out? Or do you want more lenient requirements so occasionally someone may ‘count’ who some people within the community think shouldn’t count, but get included anyway?
I am always going to err on the side of false positives and inclusion, because that’s the kind of community I want to be a part of. The potential negative impact of having a ‘faker’ or something in lgbtqiap+ spaces is far outweighed, in my mind, by the persistant negative impact of this sort of aggressive, vigilant gatekeeping that causes people to have to prove their oppression and hold it up to some shifting standard of what’s ‘oppressed enough.’
A community built on that kind of code doesn’t feel safe for many of us whose lives don’t fit a very specific narrative. Hypothetical false positives are far less damaging to our sense of community and inclusion than this sense that any of us could have our lgbtqiap membership revoked whenever gatekeepers come up with a good enough excuse to exclude us.
Miss me with anti-acearo discourse. “Cishet aces” aren’t a thing, because aces are by definition not heterosexual.
“But what if they’re cis, aromantic, and heterosexual? See what I did there? I’m clever because I figured out a way to exploit labels created by the queer community!”
No, you’re an asshole who seems to think the queer community should be run by rules lawyers.
The point of the term “cishet” isn’t “cisgender & heterosexual”, it’s cisheteronormativity. Aromanticism is incompatible with cisheteronormativity, and if you think you’re clever for bringing up “well straight men [sic] are taught that it’s good to fuck with no strings attached”? Well, citing toxic masculinity isn’t really helping your case.
It costs you nothing to welcome acearo people who are as alienated by cisheteronormative bullshit as the rest of us are.
If you believe that ace, aro, and aspec people are “cishet”, unfollow me right now. You are not welcome here.
Edit: If someone is ace/aro/aspec and identifies themselves PERSONALLY as cishet and considers themselves cishet, then that’s fine since they chose to identify as that. But if you view ace/aro/aspec as inherently “cishet” until they seemingly ‘prove’ otherwise, that’s where I have an issue.
You can’t redefine what cishet means, asshole. An aro or ace person who is cis and straight is cishet and benefits from cishet privilege. I don’t give a shit whether or not they choose to use the label of Cishet.
“Cishet” was a word coined by trans people meant to describe someone who has full, unconditional access to straight privilege – that is, someone who is 100% perisex, cisgender, heterosexual, and heteroromantic.”
I am not redefining cishet. If someone is Aromantic or Asexual, they do NOT benefit from full straight cisgender privilege, seeing as though they are not Cis Heterosexual Heteromantic to begin with.
Not only this, but there aremultipleposts and blogs that actively provide sources and first-hand accounts that if someone is aspec they can, and do, face different kinds of oppression such as but not limited to: corrective rape, being seen as less than human, feeling “broken”, being seen as mentally ill or something being medically wrong with them for feeling this way, having partners acting as though the aspec individual is somehow denying the other their “right” to sex, being abused in multiple ways and manipulated to feel as though you’re being childish or selfish, others ignoring physical boundaries to try “fixing” you, and more. And in a society that seems to show sexual/romantic depictions as well as trying to play on people’s attraction towards those deemed “sexually appealing”, it can feel really awkward having to hear and see these things all the time. And yes, these things go for, you guessed it, the “CisHet” aspec individuals as well seeing as though these are ASPEC experiences.
While yes, if someone is cis they do benefit from being cis, and while being in some form of relationship with a different gender than oneself might appear to benefit the person from the view of outsiders since they’re then assumed to be straight, this does not negate the fact that many aspec individuals including myself face different pressures and issues that cisgender heterosexual heteromantic individuals DO NOT face based on their sexuality or romantic orientation. And if someone feels as though they’re cishet while also being aspec, then they can choose that for themselves if it feels right for them personally, but to force this upon everyone is just wrong since someone else cannot determine someone’s identity for them when it comes to incredibly personal labels such as these.
———
And just in case you and others don’t feel like hovering over the links, they are as follows:
And for those that want a little more on what that “A” in LGBT+ stands for, here ya go
———
With even the most basic of listening to what aspec people have experienced and felt, most anyone can tell that even “cishet” aspecs can and do face different pressures and problems that they wouldn’t have to face if they truly had all of that “CisHet” privilege that others claim that they have. And just because some people don’t experience the issues listed, it doesn’t take away how many others have experienced otherwise.
My girlfriend Marna has been a queer activist since the late 80s. She’s told me about the incredible deliberation and debates LGBTQ+ activists had, in the late 90s and early 00s as the community began to see past the AIDS crisis and immediate goals of “surviving a plague” and “burying our dead.” There were a lot of things we wanted to achieve, but we had to decide how to allocate our scarce reserves of money, labour, publicity, and public goodwiil. Those were the discussions that decided the next big goals we’d pursue were same-sex marriage equality and legal recognition of medical gender transition.
From hearing her tell it, it seems like it was actually a wrenching decision, because it absolutely left a lot of people in the dust. A lot of people, her included, had broad agendas based on sexual freedom and the rights of people to do whatever they wanted with their bodies and consenting partners—and they agreed to put their broader concerns aside and drill down, very specifically, onto the rights of cis gays and lesbians to marry, and the ability to legally change your sex and gender.
As a political tactic it was terrifically effective. In less than two decades, public opinion in many countries has totally reversed on gay marriage, and we’ve won some truly enormous legal landmarks. Gender transition has entered public consciousness and the first landmark battles allowing people to define their own gender have been won. Marriage equality means that husbands and wives are protected from being banned from their dying spouse’s bedside, being forcibly separated from their children, or not being recognized as an important part of their spouse’s life.
The LGBTQ+ community knew they were taking a gamble, focusing so exclusively on marriage equality, and trans activists knew that they wouldn’t be able to achieve anything else until they’d gotten basic medical transition recognized. By and large, prioritizing things this way paid off. But they knew going in that there would be costs—and we’re reaping them.
Activists of 20 years ago chose to sideline and diminish efforts to blur and abolish the gender binary. Efforts to promote alternative family structures, including polyamorous families and non-sexual bonds between non-related adults. Efforts to fight the Christian cultural message that sex is dirty, sinful, bad, and in need of containment. Efforts to promote sexual pleasure as a positive good.
Those efforts have been going on for the last 20 years, but they’re marginalized—activists who had to decide where their finite time, money, publicity, and social capital went literally sat in committee meetings and said, “Marriage equality is our top priority. Legal gender transition is our top priority. Everything else will have to wait.”
This happened especially because sex education, sex positivity, and youth outreach were incredibly dangerous areas. Our enemies have been saying for years that all LGBTQ+ people are pedophiles, perverts, seeking to corrupt and recruit children to our cause; anyone trying to teach children basic facts about how to avoid disease, what’s happening to their own bodies, or what possibilities they have for identity and orientation, risks having their name, career, and life ruined. As a sex educator in the 90s, Marna had to tell teenagers, “I can’t answer your questions about safe sex now. Come back when you turn 18.”
So kids who grew up being told that girls and boys are different and ought to lead different lives, and sex is dangerous and sinful and gross, and you definitely shouldn’t want sex UNTIL you get married to your One True Love, only had that message tweaked a little bit. Now you can cross the floor from the Girl Side to the Boy Side or vice-versa. Now your One True Love doesn’t have to be a different gender from you. But those kids could survive with the rest of their worldview relatively intact. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in fandom, with an emphasis on “pure” OTP ships, on only including LGBT+ identities that use crisp, clear gender binaries and result in nuclear family life. The rest of those cultural messages about sex and love remain: men’s and women’s worlds are and should be different, “impure” sex degrades and defiles you, sexual urges that do not contribute to your One True Love and family life should be repressed, shamed, or destroyed, and sexual thoughts are every bit as bad as acting on them.
This isn’t because kids today are bad or stupid. It’s because as a community, we had to decide where our effort was going, and now we need to pay down the debt we’ve racked up over years of prioritizing marriage equality and legal trans recognition over sex positivity, sex education, and deconstructing gender.
TERFs, SWERFs, exclusionists, and transmedicalists have stolen a march over liberal queers because they’re doing the work to educate youth. While liberal queers have been staging protests and lobbying politicians, half a dozen of my undergraduate professors were radical feminists. Communities of exclusionists and anti-sex activists have honed their expertise at engaging teenagers with their ideas and theories. They’re the ones writing the FAQs, answering the asks, and doing the groundwork of saying, “Here is a basic framework of sexual ethics for you to follow.”
If we want to win back the culture wars, we have to step up our own efforts. Go back to the sex educators and gender activists whose good work has been ignored or underfunded for all this time and support them. Let major LGBTQ+ activist organizations know that their work so far is very nice, but it’s time to renew our focus on youth outreach and mentoring young activists. Brainstorm a way to help angry, isolated, disenfranchised young people form communities based around positive action and a sense of belonging. Get into mentorship or education yourself. Help us pivot as a community, to reach out to the kids who have obviously been underserved.
I’m so done with entertaining opinions about queer identity from people who don’t identify as queer. It’s easy to look in from the outside and complain about how queer as an identifier is “vague” or “useless.”
That is, it’s easy to reject queer as “vague” if you’re completely unwilling to listen to queer people. It’s easy to say that queer is “useless” if you have the ability to identify with labels that are already widely understood and widely accepted in LGBT spaces. What is telling, to me, is that most of those who I’ve seen reject the reality of queer as an identity are those who have no use for it.
For many of us, queer is obviously not a useless term.
When I was questioning, when I am questioning, in the future when I am questioning again–queer is my constant. A fact about who I am, a connection to my community and history, an open canvas of possibilities. Clarity.
Even as a constant, queer allows for fluidity and change. How I identify has changed a few times over the past decade. Across all that time, the queer community welcomed and supported and celebrated me, not in spite of my other labels, but because of them.
If, ten years from now, I identify in some other way than I do now, I know that I will still be queer, and that I’ll still be welcome in the queer community.
The same has not been true of my experience in the LGBT community. The farther I’ve moved away from being easily categorized as L, G, B, or T–the more intracommunity hostility I’ve encountered.
And, even so, I’m queer. Sometimes queer as in fuck you, always queer as in proud.
When the constraints of the gender binary and even the limitiations of nonbinary identity are too stifling, when I am a gender that is outside of what we consider to be gender altogether, when I am no gender at all, I am still queer.
As long as the LGBT community continues to define LGB identity as “For SGA’s Only”, I am still queer.
Queer is the rock I’ve held onto and the rock I’m constantly tossing through the window of every queerphobic and transphobic assholes’ house of cards.
Queer is and will always be the most accurate and most honest way for me to identify myself. Gender: queer. Sexuality: queer.
Queer is the quickest way for me to communicate that I’m not cisgender or straight without being forced to other myself.
“Why can’t you just say you aren’t straight, everyone knows what that means?” I thought we were fighting for the end of heteronormativity and straightness-as-default. Or is that a right reserved only for those at the front of the acronym?
Queer is breaking down gates and replacing them with solidarity.
Queer is smashing binaries and replacing them with freedom.
Queer is how these words are mine, and another queer person will have a different story, and yet we’re connected by shared pride and history.
So the topic of “queer as a slur” came up in a fb conversation and my answer pretty much distilled out a lot of things that Tumblr has been saying for a while on the subject, as well as my personal experience.
See, here’s the thing. I marched in the streets using the word Queer as a word of power. “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.” We worked hard to reclaim that word and it’s been publicly reclaimed longer than the word “gay” has, tbh. Gay was being used as an insult within the last decade. We had to do a coordinated public service campaign to get people to stop using it to mean “bad”.
Queer studies have been a thing for decades. Academics study “Queer theory”. It IS the one word we have that is inclusive, and the only reason people keep editing themselves out of it is because of a concentrated campaign from trans exclusionists, which got picked up by biphobes and aphobes and everyone who is not comfortable with the umbrella being inclusive.
This is an act of infiltration and subversion from conservative elements. It’s a common tactic for conservatives and right wingers to send people into groups and twist the message to divide the group. Radical feminists got in bed with the religious right on the subject of sex work, and used the inherent isolationist tendencies of the gay and lesbian community to make it sound like there are “limited resources” which “shouldn’t be divided among too many people”… which is completely the opposite of the truth, which is that the larger the umbrella, the more people working together, the more collective power people have to change things to be better for everyone.
It hurts NOTHING to be loving and open and accepting of everyone who says, “I’m not straight, and I’m on your side.”
We don’t get to second-guess people’s identities. We don’t. That’s sacred. And people who reject “queer” are doing just that.
I identify as queer. Every time someone says “q-slur” or shies away from saying the name of my identity, they’re giving MY WORD back to the assholes.
So I flat out don’t trust people who say “q-slur” or act like my identity is a bad word. People who do that are stating loud and clear that they don’t value me, don’t see me as a person, and that my identity, the word that means the most about who I am, is “bad” to them.
It makes me think that people who use that word are listening too much to bigots and not enough to the most marginalized people in this ridiculous attempt at community.
I marched in the street for my word. People DIED for my word. Fuck yeah, it was a slur. But it’s not when I use it. It’s not when people use it as a positive identifier. Because we fucking reclaimed it.
You know what else was a slur? Gay. Lesbian. Trans. Even bisexual has been used to mock people. We don’t have many words that weren’t slurs, because what makes a word a slur is not the word itself, but how it is used.
People use “woman” as a slur, when they speak the word like a sledgehammer. But there is nothing inherently derogatory about the word.
When I say “Queer” I’m saying “You’re welcome here. The storm is scary out here, but my umbrella is big and we accept you. We welcome you. We CHERISH you.”
When someone refuses my word? They say the umbrella is not for me, and I do not accept that.
18 years ago when I was coming out, y’all made the word “bisexual” so dirty that for years the only word I felt was accessible to me was “queer”, if I had any chance at having a community.
Queer was widely used at that point among LGBT+ people to refer to ourselves and our community, and while you’d look askance at a straight person using that word, it was most definitely acceptable to call another LGBT+ person queer.
And now y’all are telling me “Queer” isn’t an acceptable umbrella term to use and it just feels like another way you’re using subtle language policing to tell me that really the only people you want in your community are gold-star LG folks.
Those of us who like the word queer because it accurately reflects our misfit status are basically being told that this self-identifier is dirty and wrong, this is no longer the “queer community”, and the message yet again is that we don’t really belong.
I get it if someone doesn’t want to be called queer, and I would never call another person queer against their will but holy hell please stop acting like it’s common knowledge that queer can’t be used as an umbrella term for our community when it was for DECADES
“q-slur” is a very new concept, kids.
This is something
that’s completely overlooked, by the same people who fling the word
“ahistorical” at every viewpoint they disagree with.
When I first started
participating in any kind of LGBTQ+ stuff online (so, 10 years ago),
“queer” was by far the most common descriptor. It was pretty much
agreed it had been reclaimed enough to be safe (I mean, show me an
active slur that has academic disciplines named after it?) and people
seemed much more keen to explore the ambiguity the term offers,
rather than sticking with predefined categories. By “q-slur”
logic, we should’ve been much less accepting of it back then if we
simultaneously believe that LGBTQ+ rights are advancing over time,
but the opposite is true.
So I would say that the current
stigmatization of queer is based on two things: 1) reactionary
essentialism (seeing “queer” as too dangerous for the more
clear-cut categories), and 2) respectability politics.
Now by taking away
“queer”, we don’t have any other term that’s both catchy (no
version of the abbreviation is) and broad enough to actually be
inclusive. Gay is not an umbrella term. It always has a default
connotation that’s very specific. It only reminds me of all the time
I wasted on bad gay-only discourse when I was first questioning my
own identity, and for this reason it took ages to arrive at the
conclusion that I’m just attracted to multiple genders and also trans without dysphoria (because the other bullshit I had to
contend with was the truscum narrative of transness). So, gay is not a safe
term for me. It doesn’t describe me and if I used it, it would
actually misgender my own relationship. I’m not doing that for any of
you, sorry.
Do you know who the
majority of the people who still use “queer” are? Trans and MGA.
Yet again, we have a political line that privileges cis LG people who are fine with binary categories
over the most routinely erased parts of the community. Of course.
This, I imagine, is also
why so many bi/pan and trans/nonbinary people aren’t against aces
being included. Chances are most of us, at least those who are 25+ or so,
have experiences like this, with either being actively policed out
or just unable to find the right identifiers for ages because of the
stigma and general ignorance surrounding them.
And now you’re
telling us we HAVE TO use gay, which isn’t a functional umbrella
term, because queer suddenly isn’t acceptable based on this new logic?
Do you even hear yourselves?
–
“But!” I can already hear the gatekeepers protest, “This all
relies on a bunch of personal anecdotes!”
In which case,
buddy, I have bad news for you about the vast majority of all modern
LGBTQ+ history.
I first came upon Queer as both an umbrella term and a field of academic study. This was in the early 90s. There were queer studies, queer histories, “queering” of the text, queer theory…
And Queer, more so than other words, felt inclusive of people who, at the time, referred to themselves as “genderqueer” as well as people outside the binary, as well as bisexuals, who couldn’t claim gay or lesbian.
It was, at the time, being reclaimed at a time when all the words were being used as slurs, so there was a real reason to reclaim them.
I’ve problem with using words that people are comfortable using, but not at the cost of erasing parts of our history.
I guess now is the
time we’re hitting New Essentialism and Respectability Politics 2.0
from people who aren’t old enough to remember any of this.
Yeah, that’s something a lot of folks in the younger generation don’t get.
When you campaign against words like “queer”, to those of us in the older generations, what it looks like you’re doing is trying to roll the nomenclature back to the bad old days when cisgender gay men were treated as the only “real” members of the community, and everybody else was lumped together as this peripheral pack of weirdos who were expected to be slobberingly grateful to their betters just to be acknowledged at all.
Hell, I clearly recall a time when the leaders of mainstream gay rights activism would routinely castigate even lesbians as parasites and invaders – and be applauded for doing so. It’s difficult to overstate just how deep it went.
And, like, that wasn’t all that long ago – I’m only 33 and I’m old enough to remember that horseshit.
I’m never gonna stop reblogging this, so.
Here you go. More queer history.
I seem to recall a rather popular Pride chant “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!” And it wasn’t just trans and MGA people shouting it. For the whole time I’ve been aware of LGBTQIA* culture (personally, I like QUILTBAG), queer was acceptable, so long as the mouth it came from wasn’t straight. People in the drag show would call it “the Queer bar.” On the other hand, a friend of mine (similar age) says when he was coming up, queer was never good and only now seems acceptable. Which just goes to show, YMMV, I guess. Experience is individual, labels are personal, and you can’t tell me what to call myself, nor can I do that back to you, but this culture belongs to everyone whose sexual or gender identity is not straight. We’re here. We’re Queer. Get used to it.
Here’s a bunch of different queer studies departments & degree programs:
i'll apple your turnover 