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.
Did I reblog this already? If I did, doesn’t hurt to blog it again.
I usually unfollow people who use the tag (or the equilivant) q-slur.
Because fuck you, I’m queer. Have been since like 1986.
Every so often a post comes across my dash accusing women who like gay porn (aka slash fandom) of being just as disgusting and exploitative as men who like lesbian porn. I disagree.
I am a gay, nonbinary trans dude. I didn’t really fully embrace this fact about myself until I was in my 30s. But I have known I was genderqueer since I was 19, and felt deeply uncomfortable with identifying as female or straight for even longer. In the 15 years between coming to terms with being genderqueer and actually starting to transition, slash fandom WAS my only real access to a community supportive of my queer identity or queer sexual exploration. Why? Because when I tried to come out to IRL gay friends I was called an attention-seeking faghag, a pervert and a dyke in denial. This attitude of ‘oh you’re just a tourist straight girl and your presence is a threat to our identity’ kept me in the closet for over a decade.
If we want to normalize the idea of queer people, we also need to normalize the idea of enjoying queer sexuality. Gay sex between consenting adults is normal, healthy sex. Enjoying queer porn doesn’t equate to harming IRL gay people or threatening anyone’s queer identity, no matter who is doing the enjoying. If liking queer sex is perverted then by necessity all queer people are perverts.
The grossness of both icky slash and icky mainstream porn do not come from straight people being straight in gay spaces. They come from the gender essentialism and violent misogyny that we have all been indoctrinated with since early childhood. Gender essentialism and violent misogyny are not integral to being straight, and the assumption that they are helps to perpetuate them.
it’s interesting learning which homophobic ideas are confusing and unfamiliar to the next generation. for example, every once in a while i’ll see a post going around expressing tittering surprise at someone’s claim that gay men have hundreds of sexual partners in their lifetimes. while these posts often have a snappy comeback attached, they send a shiver down my spine because i remember when those claims were common, when you’d see them on the news or read them in your study bible. and they were deployed with a specific purpose — to convince you not just that gay men were disgusting and pathological, but that they deserved to die from AIDS. i saw another post laughing at the outlandish idea that gay men eroticize and worship death, but that too was a standard line, part and parcel of this propaganda with the goal of dehumanizing gay men as they died by the thousands with little intervention from mainstream society.
which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media (off the straight and narrow [pdf transcript] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives.
it’s moving and inspiring to see a new generation of kids growing up without encountering these ideas. it’s a good thing. but at the same time, we have to pass on the knowledge of this pain, so we’re not caught unawares when those who hate us come back with the oldest tricks in the book.
So apparently last year the National Park Service in the US dropped an over 1200 page study of LGBTQ American History as part of their Who We Are program which includes studies on African-American history, Latino history, and Indigenous history.
Like. This is awesome. But also it feels very surreal that maybe one of the most comprehensive examinations of LGBTQ history in America (it covers sports! art! race! historical sites! health! cities!) was just casually done by the parks service.
i worry that the way we talk about stonewall decontextualizes the event itself – that saying “the first pride was a riot” implicitly disconnects the raid on stonewall from the fact that similar raids on gay bars had been happening for decades prior, and that lgbt activists had been actively resisting police violence all the while, at the risk of their lives and livelihoods and reputations.
police oppression of gay people did not begin in 1969, and gay resistance to police oppression did not begin with the stonewall riots. that’s not to minimize the extreme importance of stonewall, of course, or the indelible contributions to our history and safety that were made by activists like sylvia rivera and marsha p. johnson and miss major griffin-gracy and stormé delarverie. but they were standing on the shoulders of decades and decades of leaders and activists who had come before them, who had fought and died and endured total brutality at the hands of homophobic police.
gay bars, as much as they were allowed to exist in the decades prior to stonewall, were persistently targeted by undercover police officers and by violent raids. in los angeles, from the mid-1940s onward, the LAPD employed out-of-work actors to pretend to be gay and infiltrate these spaces, solicit men for sex, and then book them on charges of public indecency.
the police department would give these officers quotas to meet on a weekly basis – round up and jail a certain number of homosexuals, or else. frequently, they would arrest men simply for appearing gay, or for having the bad luck to walk through a park or use a bathroom known as a gay cruising spot. this policy was a cash cow like none other, because these men would always plead guilty, would always agree to pay hefty fines in order to settle the matter and keep it quiet and avoid having their reputations ruined.
and the police would stop at nothing to bully people into pleading guilty. it was commonplace for police to handcuff their charges, shove them into the backseat of their cruisers, and then drive in circles for hours, looping to the outskirts and back, intimidating and harassing them all the way. by the time they finally pulled up at the police station and booked their charges, they would be so shaken by the abuse they’d just experienced that they’d plead guilty without a second thought, cough up whatever money they could spare in order to go free.
in less extreme cases, police officers would simply verbally abuse the men they’d arrested, but just as often, the officers would physically beat, sexually abuse, or rape these men. oftentimes, the sexual abuse and rape would be part of the arrest itself – an officer would solicit sex from a man, the man would turn him down, and the officer would force him into sex anyway and then report that the man had initiated it.
like, this was daily fucking life for lgbt people for decades before stonewall. and fledgling gay activists fought it with everything they had, early. in 1952, the los angeles mattachine society established the Citizens Committee to Outlaw Police Entrapment after one of their founders, dale jennings, was stalked home by an officer, sexually assaulted in his own bedroom, and then booked for public indecency. rather than simply plead guilty, jennings chose to contest the charges and take them to trial – a totally unprecedented move – with the aid of socialist lawyer george shibley. and the jury voted 11-1 for acquittal, and he walked free. in 1952. seventeen years before stonewall.
but this shit kept happening, everywhere, for decades – new york city didn’t end its policy of police entrapment of lgbt citizens until the mid-1970s. and all the while, there was organized resistance. all the while, organizations like the mattachine society and street transvestite action revolutionaries fought back.
it’s super, super convenient for heterosexual society to claim that there was just one inciting incident, and one moment of spontaneous, courageous resistance, that sparked the gay rights movement as we know it today. but we can’t fall into that trap. there were decades of brutal, violent police oppression, and there were decades of structured, well-organized resistance to that oppression.
for a long time, the gay struggle against police violence was the only fight there was. in the late 1940s, at the dawn of formal organization, nobody was agitating for their right to live openly as gay or avoid employment discrimination or get married or adopt children. the movement emerged in opposition to the systematized detainment and torture and rape of gay people by police.
and that is why lgbt people don’t owe the police shit, and why any police department with the audacity to demand time and space in a pride parade needs to be met with loud, unequivocal resistance. not because of one raid or one riot, but because of decades and decades of unapologetic brutality.
@allthecanadianpolitics Relevant to the recent Toronto Pride discussions. If people think this was exclusively a US problem, they are sorely mistaken about Canadian history.
Good information. Thank you.
Adding onto this, around the same time Stonewall was going on all of this was also going on in Canada:
If any one is looking for a more in depth read about state violence against queer people in Canada, I recommend The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation by Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile.
“From the 1950s to the late 1990s, agents of the state spied on, interrogated, and harassed gays and lesbians in Canada, employing social ideologies and other practices to construct their target – people who deviated from the so-called norm – as threats to society and enemies of the state.
Reconstructed from official security regime documents released through the Access to Information Act and interviews with gays, lesbians, civil servants, and high-ranking officials, The Canadian War on Queers offers a passionate, personalized account of a national security campaign that violated people’s civil rights and freedoms in an attempt to regulate their sexual practices. Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile disclose not only the acts of state repression that accompanied the Canadian war on queers but also forms of resistance that raise questions about just whose security was being protected and about national security as an ideological practice. “ (Source)
Also the Gay archives in Quebec is a group trying to create a gay history so we know our roots in Quebec.
And the exposition “Revolution” at the Museum of fine arts has a section dedicated to the riots of lgbtqa activists and the decriminalization of homosexuality by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau government.
And let’s not forget that just before the Montreal Olympics they arrested 200gays to “clean the city” before the event…
This search for niche groups led Subaru to the 3rd rail of marketing: They discovered that lesbians loved their cars. Lesbians liked their dependability and size, and even the name “Subaru.” They were four times more likely than the average consumer to buy a Subaru. […] Subaru decided to launch an ad campaign focused on lesbian customers. It was such an unusual decision—and such a success—that it pushed gay and lesbian advertising from the fringes to the mainstream.
If you’ve ever wondered why people joke about lesbians driving Subarus, the reason is not just that lesbians like Subarus. It’s that Subaru cultivated its image as a car for lesbians—and did so at a time when few companies would embrace or even acknowledge their gay customers.
and even the “red&blue gays” thing with the car colors
joke’s on the straights, subarus are fucking indestructible. i have a hybrid now bc seebs wanted one, but generally i’ve had subarus since i was 16, when my dad bought a junked powder blue 1984 subaru 4wd wagon, had it towed to our yard, and told me, “if you can fix it, you can have it. otherwise i’m breaking it down for parts.”
i fixed it. i drove it until like 1992. it was easier to fix and more robust than any other car i’ve been under the hood of. it was better off road than some trucks i’ve driven. it handled the cold better, was about even with overheating when gridlocked on a summer highway, and never gave me problems with condensation in the fuel or brake lines the way some other cars have when it’s humid or they’re drenched from heavy rains or driving through shallow water.
hell, i once drove that wagon through a storm runoff puddle that turned out to be up to the top of the wheel wells, and it powered on through. i hit a patch of black ice and steered the skid into a window-high snowbank to avoid spinning into the opposite lane, and the only problem i had backing out and getting underway again was the fact that the car was full of screaming freshmen at the time.
er. so what i am saying is. i’m a car nerd. and super gay. and it’s cool of subaru to appreciate that.
“You don’t own me
I’m not just one of your many toys
You don’t own me
Don’t say I can’t go with other boys
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And don’t tell me what to do
Don’t tell me what to say
And please, when I go out with you
Don’t put me on display…” – “You Don’t Own Me” (Madara/White), recorded by Lesley Gore, 1963.
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Picture: Lesley Gore (May 2, 1946 – February 16, 2015), c. 1963.
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At the age of sixteen, Lesley Gore, who died two years ago today, burst onto the pop charts with “It’s My Party,” and quickly followed it up with other hits like “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” the protofeminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me,” and “Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows.”
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Although Gore largely dropped out of the pop scene in her later career, she continued to make music. In 1980, Gore and her brother received an Academy Award nomination for their work on the soundtrack of the 1980 film “Fame.”
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In a 2005 interview, Gore came out publicly when she announced that she had been in a relationship with jewelry designer Lois Sasson since 1982.
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Lesley Gore died of lung cancer on February 16, 2015; she was sixty-eight. She was survived by Sasson, her partner of thirty-three years. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #LesleyGore
LESLEY GORE WAS GAY OMFG I HAD NO FUCKING IDEA
As great as the lyrics to You Don’t Own Me are, they gain so much in the performance:
The other thing about the word “queer” is that almost everyone I’ve seen opposed to it have been cis, binary gays and lesbians. Not wanting it applied to yourself is fine, but I think people underestimate the appeal of vague, inclusive terminology when they already have language to easily and non-invasively describe themselves.
Saying “I’m gay/lesbian/bi” is pretty simple. Just about everyone knows what you mean, and you quickly establish yourself as a member of a community. Saying “I’m a trans nonbinary bi woman who’s celibate due to dysphoria and possibly on the ace spectrum”… not so much. You’re lucky to find anyone who understands even half of that, and explaining it requires revealing a ton of personal information. The appeal of “queer” is being able to identify yourself without profiling yourself. It’s welcoming and functional terminology to those who do not have the luxury of simplified language and occupy complicated identities. *That’s* why people use it – there are currently not alternatives to express the same sentiment.
It’s not people “oppressing themselves” or naively and irresponsibly using a word with loaded history. It’s easy to dismiss it as bad or unnecessary if you already have the luxury of language to comfortably describe yourself.
There’s another dimension that always, always gets overlooked in contemporary discussions about the word “queer:” class. The last paragraph here reminds me of a old quote: “rich lesbians are ‘sapphic,’ poor lesbians are ‘dykes’.”
The reclaiming of the slur “queer” was an intensely political process, and people who came up during the 90s, or who came up mostly around people who did so, were divided on class and political lines on questions of assimilation into straight capitalist society.
Bourgeois gays and lesbians already had “the luxury of language” to describe themselves – normalized through struggle, thanks to groups like the Gay Liberation Front.
Everyone else, from poor gays and lesbians to bi and trans people and so on, had no such language. These people were the ones for whom social/economic assimilation was not an option.
The only language left, the only word which united this particular underclass, was “queer.” “Queer” came to mean an opposition to assimilation – to straight culture, capitalism, patriarchy, and to upper class gays and lesbians who wanted to throw the rest of us under the bus for a seat at that table – and a solidarity among those marginalized for their sexuality/gender id/presentation.
(Groups which reclaimed “queer,” like Queer Patrol (armed against homophobic violence), (Queers) Bash Back! (action and theory against fascism, homophobia, and transphobia), and Queerbomb (in response to corporate/state co-optation of mainstream Gay Pride), were “ultraleft,” working-class, anti-capitalist, and functioned around solidarity and direct action.)
The contemporary discourse around “queer” as a reclaimed-or-not slur both ignores and reproduces this history. The most marginalized among us, as OP notes, need this language. The ones who have problems with it are, generally, among those who have language – or “community,” or social/economic/political support – of their own.
I recall being in a conversation with a gatekeeper once (the sort of “monosexual is a homophobic term!” “MOGWAI means kinky people count as queer!” “asexuals don’t belong in the queer community!” type of asshole) and they said of a fictional character: “He’s definitely gay. Totally gay. Maybe bisexual. Queer at the very least.”
That’s when it clicked for me: Gatekeepers honestly think that any sexuality beyond straight and gay is just Gay Lite. Bisexual is half-gay, asexuality is, like, 0.05 percent gay, and just identifying as “queer” is a quarter-gay, maybe.
This is why they lose their shit so badly whenever someone thinks a character is bisexual and not gay, why they accuse others of erasing their representation. A bisexual is just half a lesbian, so how dare you try and water down our portrayal in the media! Asexuals are such Lite Gays that they might as well be straight, so don’t you dare take away my representation with your ace headcanons!
Never mind if the source material itself is ambiguous. If it’s not gay or lesbian, it’s not real representation. If you don’t want real representation, you’re siding with the straights.
It’s such a pathetic and limited way of looking at the world. I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t such jerks.
Some do this in relation to trans headcanons as well. They’ll go into one hell of a performative outrage against TERFs and other assorted bigoted shits… and then have a fucking meltdown when a young trans man on this site says ‘I headcanon this character as a demisexual trans boy’. This person got dogpiled by dozens of the usual suspects involved in the most virulent anti a-spec discourse, all of them shouting ‘she’s a lesbian!’, ‘lesbian-only!!!!’ The fact that all of this was over headcanons about the goddamn moon in the sky just made me cross myself and go ‘these people are the future of the community? I fucking weep for it, then.’ Honestly, someone can post all they want about how ‘TERFs are Bad’. it becomes mere performative drivel when one engages in pretty damned TERFy bullshit in turn.
Also, he’re as example of this particular dogpiling in action re: a bisexual headcanon. Notice, again, the usual suspects involved and the rejection of any headcanon other than gay. But sure, sure, m-spec people and a-spec people and trans and nonbinary and agender people are ~*~totally valid~*~ and other meaningless buzz-words tossed round like candy for placation. Valid until any of the aforementioned groups want to work at seeing themselves represented by identifying with a character and having personal headcanons for a character whose sexuality and gender are never black-on-white stated in a give canon.
just moving along like everyone else 