Look, if you want to be heteronormative and cisnormative and mononormative and considered “normal” by society, if you want to conform and assimilate and just be a socially normative, Acceptable gay, then “queer” absolutely is not the word for you.
If you reject the word “queer” because you don’t want to be counter-to-the-norm, you don’t want to be seen as outside or strange to the fucked up society you live in, then I agree, you are not queer. You’re gay, or bi, or lesbian, or whatever word you prefer for yourself.
Queer is critical of and rejecting of heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and binaries.
Queer is a verb more than it is a noun. I am queer but I also actively queer the world around me, engage in queer theory, dismantle the assumptions I was raised with both internally for myself and externally in the world around me.
Queer is anti-assimilationist.
Queer is a reclaimed slur. They called us “strange” and “other” and “peculiar”, and we said “yes, you’re right, and damn proud of it, we reject the dominant social paradigm and all its oppressiveness and erasure and mundanity, we are queer as fuck”.
And yes. It’s become an umbrella term for “the entire lgbtqia+ spectrum” and it’s become “don’t want to specify gender/sexuality/romantic orientation because it’ll take an essay and saying queer is just easier”, and that’s also reclaiming the slur. That’s a softened queerness, but still expansive and nonspecific which is in and of itself revolutionary in binary dualistic societies. (May not be as relevant for less dualistic ones, ymmv.)
And if you don’t want to be part of that, you reject the label “queer” and don’t want it applied to you? That’s your right. I won’t apply it to you because if that’s the case then it clearly doesn’t fit you.
But we also probably aren’t in the same community. I don’t tend to hang out with the normative assimilationist gays, we don’t really have anything in common and our politics are probably not compatible.
Queer is a beautiful versatile term that has potency and fire. There’s such power in reclaiming slurs, and in the reclaimed slurs themselves: “Fuck you, I take your attempts at tearing me down and I wear it as a badge of pride and honor.”
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