this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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Queer. Not all gay men (the one group I can safely speak about) like to be associated with an ex-slur and its connotations.
I am someone who really likes the term for myself, because it can encompass a whole bunch of complex identities across gender and sexuality. It feels like it simplifies things for me, and has helped me to properly understand the necessity of LGBTQ solidarity. There have been times when I have been told it's inappropriate for me to personally identify as queer because some people find the term offensive, which I find absurd because such a large and heterogeneous community will never be unanimous on what terms or labels to use.
However, much more frequently than that, I have seen people being insensitive to the reality that there are a ton of people who have pretty legitimate beef with the term and who don't want it applied to them. I'm talking about situations like "queer folk like us " or "the queer community". It's a pretty reasonable request if someone says "hey, if you're referring to a group that involves me, I'd prefer you not use queer as a blanket term". The appropriate response to that is "I'm sorry, my bad", but I have seen way too many people start arguments that actually the (usually but certainly not always) older gay men are obstacles to Progress.
I like the way that a friend of mine framed it when he said that he's actively jazzed to see a word that did such harm being reclaimed by a new generation who are finding great power and solidarity in it. But that's never going to erase the sting he still feels when remembering being victimised for years by people who'd shout that word. "You can't reclaim a slur if you ignore all its history and disown the members of your community who experienced it as a slur".
It boggles my mind that there are people who are heavy advocates of the power of self determination of one's identity, but who don't see the issue in forcing the label of "queer" onto individuals who have expressly rejected it.
I've always thought queer had 2 connotations. The first being the slur. The second is a catch all for someone not lgbt or someone who doesn't know what they are yet.
Agreed!
But there's also a certain expectation of "flamboyance" from the gay community, or you're "not gay enough" and I think a lot of self-identifying queer peeps are to blame.
On top of the poor history of the word, I just don't want to be associated with colourfulness and energy because that's simply not who I am. People from outside looking into LGBTQ+ assume that that's who gay men need to be because of media representation... It makes me tired.
I feel this is due to a noticeably high level of what I've come to call "the ladder-puller generation" among gay folk. Y'know, the white faux-upper-class guys or girls who got the white collar job, do everything in their power to maintain a pristine aura of political 'good-one-ness' even when it means throwing their disadvantaged supposed-kin under the nearest bus. The ones who pulled up the ladders behind them as soon as they got to 'routine brunch-goer' level. I put it on them, and the compatibles that just welcome cops and corporations into Pride when it was supposed to be a riot against those forces.
If someone isn't loudly and proudly out around me, if someone goes to bat for rainbow-washers that shuck and jive for thirty days just to pump extra profit, then I automatically assume they're a ladder-puller that would sell me out to whoever for whatever if it meant they could get a little bit further in the cosplay-cishettry that is their life; because sometimes, it's the ladder-puller gays that are more dangerous to us than the cishet settlers.
tl;dr, they might fuck like us, but they not like us; and it'd take a near-government level background check for me to trust someone like that. From where I sit, the ladder-pullers, the pristine-optics gays? They let all of our artists, our creators, and the gays actually worth knowing die to AIDS, 'cause it'd have been icky to cede them help. That's why I don't trust the optics-bothers. Because the optics-bothers and ladder-pullers were the only ones to make it out.