I feel like one thing the âqueer is a slurâ crowd overlooks...
âŠis that the word gay has been used so overwhelmingly as a pejorative, as a slur, that most children in the U.S. in the past several decades likely grew up learning âgayâ as a word for bad, strange, or wrong before they fully understand that there are âgayâ people, and that itâs not just a word with negative connotations.
Kids grow up hearing âThatâs so gay!â said with such vehemence relating to topics that those same kids arenât remotely educated about, and they just internalize that itâs bad. This is how you get elementary schoolers saying, âMr. Hopkins gave us homework, heâs so gay,â and the same elementary schoolers grow up to be high schoolers and adults who say, âWhat? I donât mean gay like gay people, I mean gay like stupid or bad.â
And some of them arenât overt homophobes in any other way⊠but dang, you teach little kids that a word that describes a class of people means âbadâ and âwrongâ before they know those people exist, and thatâs bound to shape the way they think about things, isnât it?
And in contrast you get queer kids who start to put 2+2 together about what âgayâ really means a little bit faster than the kids around them because theyâre desperate for some information, some hints of meaning⊠but theyâre also hearing the same lessons as everybody else, that gay=bad, gay=wrong, gay=undesirable, gay=something no one ones and no one should be, gay is the worst thing you can be.
In the small town I lived in and the school I went to, nobody ever hit me and called me queer. No one ever shouted âqueerâ from a moving car while I was walking home. No one ever threatened or inflicted violence on me with the word âqueerâ on their lips.
Gay, though? Yes. And variations on the f-slur, but gay itself was enough of an invective, enough of a pejorative, to the people flinging it.
âGayâ was the slur that cishet people threw at me as a form of violence, often in corollary with physical violence. âQueerâ is a word that I learned online, from members of my community. My experience of the former word is as an attack, while the other was as a sanctuary and respite from that attack.
Now, Iâm not a gay man, but a bisexual trans woman. I was still sorting that out at the time, but I doubt it would have made a difference to many of my tormenters if Iâd been able to explain it properly.
So when âgayâ is used as the happy-go-lucky umbrella for what I would personally call the queer community, gay with even its positive connotations strongly coded as male, Iâm not just being misgendered/swept under a default label of male along with a lot of other women and non-binary folks, Iâm being forced to accept a label that I never sought, one that is definitely used as a pejorative and a slur, and a slur that was specifically used as a weapon against me.
Both âgayâ and âqueerâ have the same problematic histories and problematic presents. They have both been subject to reclamation efforts. To me, the difference is how those efforts are organized.Â
âGayâ is an attempt to normalize, to assimilate, to take the elements of our community that are most palatable to the heteronormative homogeneous hegemony and emphasize them, making those elements even more palatable and altering or hiding the other elements of the community.Â
âGayâ is like trying to get into an exclusive school that you fear is likely to reject you for prejudiced reasons, so you keep your nose clean, make sure you take all the right extracurriculars, polish your cover letter and personal essay, and try to make the right contacts with influential people on the inside⊠and if you have to hide some of your past activities, break ties with friends who are less presentable, and de-emphasize your family to make sure the admissions office doesnât get the wrong idea about what youâd bring to their institution, well, itâll be worth it, because thatâs what you have to do get a, you know, fair shake.
âQueerâ rejects that. Queer rejects homogeny, it does not demand that we sand down our rough edges or smooth out our contours. It does not seek to reshape ourselves or our community to fit ever-evolving standards designed to keep us out, but it challenges those standards.
If âgayâ is trying to appeal to a bigoted admissions board by being smooth and shiny enough to slip in, âqueerâ is challenging the admissions board to accept or reject you on your own merits as you exist, and challenging the bigoted assumptions that underline the power structure as revealed by this. Itâs bypassing the admissions board by creating your own infrastructure for sharing resources and information.Â
I have a suspicion that a certain percentage of the intra-community backlash against the word âqueerâ is not because the negative connotations of the word hurt us as listeners, but rather that the radical connotations of the word hurt the effort to make the community acceptable to a presumed default âgeneral audienceâ, to assimilate gayness into heteronormativity.Â
I.e., it is less, âQueer makes people think itâs okay to bash us.â and more âQueer makes people think weâre not like them.â
Most people end posts in defense of the label âqueerâ and the umbrella term âqueer communityâ by saying âI wonât call queer if theyâre not comfortable with it,â and most of them get told, âBUT THATâS WHAT YOUâRE DOING WHEN YOU SAY âQUEER COMMUNITY!â
Iâve never yet seen anybody talking about the gay community have to disclaim that theyâre not using the word to people who view it as unreclaimed slur or who just plain find it too hurtful to have even given that discourse any thought.
I wonât call someone queer if they donât think of themselves a queer. I will use queer as an umbrella term. If thatâs not you, you can cheerfully include yourself out of it.Â
And heck, Iâm doing you a solid. If you didnât have a queer community to point to, you wouldnât have anyone you could point to when you want to clarify that youâre not like those people.
dailybridgerton
2087
discoholicmusic
titsay
