Here’s my thing regarding using ‘queer’ as an identity term, y’all: I’m proud of it.
I’m proud of its history, the good and the bad.
I’m proud of the the queer people who constantly fought for their humanity to be recognized and respected by people who did nothing but demonize them for years.
I’m proud of the movements that erupted out of the sheer amount of queer rage that rattled through every single queer person’s bones.
I’m proud of the fact that those very movements, sacrifices, and community efforts gave us some of the freedom and resources that we are privileged enough to have now.
I’m proud of being queer and using queer for my identity AND as a communal word to capture all of the people who are similar to me.
People who live on the boundaries of two or more identities. People who are completely fluid and have no set label for themselves. People who are still questioning. People who are filled with rage and who use queer to spit back into the face of cishet people who have degraded them.
The LGBTQ+ community is a coalition. It’s not some kind of casual book club where y’all get to determine who ‘really’ belongs and who doesn’t. That defeats the entire purpose of it being a safe space for people to explore their identities who do not have the opposite or privilege to do it anywhere else.
The moment y’all start spitting on the history of the term ‘queer’ and its massive impact on our current society as LGBTQ+ people, you cause more of a rupture within the community.
You don’t have to like using the term for yourself. You don’t have to use it in any real life conversations. You don’t have to be full of 100% ‘queer rage’ 24/7. You don’t even have to like the word.
No one is asking that of y’all.
They’re asking y’all to stop assuming anyone who uses the term queer for themselves is just a ‘cishet person trying to feel special’.
They’re asking y’all to stop assuming that queer academics of any kind are born out of a cishet person’s understanding of the LGBTQ+ community or that all queer academics/professors are just ‘cishet people’.
They’re asking y’all to stop editing out the use and reclamation of queer by our predecessors in pictures, in videos, in text, and here on tumblr.
They’re asking y’all to mind your damn business if someone is identifying as queer for reasons you clearly may not know or even understand.
I understand where some of y’all are coming from when y’all say it’s because you’ve been traumatized by the word. I get that and I would never argue with someone over that.
My issue is not the fact that some people don’t want to be called queer. My issue is with people who don’t want to be called queer using their very personal experiences to determine for an entire community, with people who exist all around the world from various cultures, what words (reclaimed or not) the people of this community are ‘allowed’ to use.
Queer is a word that will always exist in the LGBTQ+ community. That’s just a reality. It will exist at Pride. It will exist at local LGBTQ+ groups. It will exist at drag performances. It will exist in ballroom culture. It will exist on city streets between various queer people and it will also exist in sleepy suburban towns between queer people there, as well.
You cannot suddenly stop the use of a word that has already had a powerful history of reclamation just because you hopped onto tumblr and read some white (and some non-white) LGBT leftist talk about how ‘queer’ is just ‘another word for cishets to use to feel special’.
Y’all really have to start learning how to put things in perspective and realize that the future of an entire community does not reside in one or two or twenty individual’s bad experiences with the word queer.
It resides in acknowledging that yes, you have been through awful stuff with that word, but there are other people with just as complex feelings about the topic as you and your one experience does not suddenly outweigh theirs.
(Y’all can reblog this but the moment someone starts spouting some dumb anti-queer crap without a hint of self-awareness or a basic understanding of the word throughout all of LGBTQ+ history, I’m blocking you.)
