So I have something I want to ask to a group of Tumblr users. This is mostly a rhetorical question; I don't want your knee-jerk response, I want you to sit with this for a few minutes, maybe even hours or days, and think about it.
The group of whom I am speaking are the people who are violently against the word "queer," but claim they are not TERFs.
When I was in high school--we're going back to 2002-2006 here, if you're wondering--the slurs of choice were "gay" and "lesbo." There was, of course, the infamous slang "that's so gay" that was so prevalent there was literally a series of TV spots by GLSEN and the Ad Counsel about it. These aren't even the only ones that aired--they're just the only ones I could find. (and yes, "you're so gay" was a variant.) The phrase became one of the songs that launched Katy Perry to fame, and if you go ahead and click on that link, you're going to see there is nothing kind or positive about how she's using it.
I still remember getting the shit beaten out of me at one point while a group of girls screamed "fucking lesbo" at me. I wasn't out at the time; I wasn't even entirely aware yet that there was anything to be out about. But I was an outcast and it was the worst thing they could think of to call me. I tried, exactly once, to stand up to someone who was using "that's so gay" and the result was me opening my locker one day to find "your so gay", and the words "kill yourself fucking faggot," written inside in very thick Sharpie that the school then made me scrub out.
Now with all of that said, I want to ask: will you start tagging gay and lesbian as "g-slur" and "l-slur" for me? Or does that idea make you uncomfortable?
While you're thinking on that: I was born in 1988. The year I was born, the phrase "queer theory" was coined. Queer Theory is the name of a certain kind of academic study, and it can actually also be a verbed noun--for example, I went to an LGBTQIA convention, and one of the panels (which I attended, and which was awesome) was called "Queering Shakespeare." The idea was to read Shakespeare through a lens in which we did not treat cishet people as a default, and to think about how things like the crossdressing conventions of the day influenced his work. (Are there queer themes in Twelfth Night? You fuckin' bet there are, and if your teachers aren't acknowledging that they're not doing their jobs.) In 1991, the activist group "Queer Nation" was born, and with it, two slogans you should learn if you don't already know them: "we're here, we're queer, get used to it," and "not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you." These were a huge part of the political movement around LGBTQIA rights in the 1990s.
"Gay" still gets used as a slur. And yeah, I'm sure there are some places where "queer" does, too. But you can see the process of reclamation began a good 15 years before "gay" hit a tidal peak of being a slur.
It's "queer," the one that encompasses the entire community, the one we screamed in defiance of a world that wanted us to be cishet and "normal," that gets slammed into the "THIS IS A SLUR" box, while "gay" is being pushed as the umbrella term for the community (over "queer," which was the term when I was in college, and...also through much of the 1990s).
So I want you to sit with that for a few minutes, and think about it. And I don't want you to come back with "oh, it's okay if you call yourself that, just don't call other people that," because that is always how this question gets derailed. And yes, it is a derailing--it's basically saying we're fucked up but you'll let us be fucked up, aren't you so generous.
Sit with that for a little while.
Will you start tagging g-slur?
Or does it suddenly feel like you’re being singled out?
