[Image ID: A photo set of a series of sensitive portraits of Butches and Studs of varying ethnicities and presentations, photographed in various urban environments. In each of the portraits, which are mostly from the thigh up, the subject gazes squarely at the photographer, giving them a sense of presence, power, and autonomy. End ID]
the word “queer” being used by someone who uses that word to describe their own experience of love and their cherished community should not ever sound the same to you as it does coming out of the mouth of a homophobe. acting like these two types of people are the same is unbelievably cruel
^^^
Adding on once again: there is no word for our experiences that has not been used as a slur and isn’t *still* used as a slur.
My mother never said fag but she sure could say “gay” in a way that made it clear that was what she meant 🙃
“Homosexual” in the mouth of a Southern Republican US Senator is more vile than “faggot” in the mouth of a 50-year-old gay man from Seattle, where they made an attempt at one point to reclaim the word. (Unlike queer, it didn’t really work.)
Hell. “Those people” in the mouth of a homophobic mom to a closeted gay teen is probably fouler than either of those.
Just chiming in here from over on the disability side of things, where we can testify that it doesn’t matter what you call yourself, your terminology will get used as a slur by people who don’t want you to exist because you fuck up their ideas of how the world should be. So, call yourself whatever you want, and don’t yield to the people who don’t care what you’re called, because your greatest crime is existing in the first place. They’re never going to have a polite word for you anyway.
It’s also the respected academic term?? The acronym isn’t static and it’s usage is varied by things like generational difference, location, and knowledge of the community. Even just in the U.S. in the last few decades the common usage gone from GLBT to LGBT to LGBTQ, to LGBTQA/LGBTQIA/LGBTQIAP/etc (Which, let me tell you as someone who has given presentations in the past using these updated acronyms, are all real mouthfulls), to LGBT+.
Also yes, queer is more inclusive! Especially coming at it from an academic standpoint, people didn’t always use or identify with the terms we use now and you can’t always try to cram them into our modern perceptions of sexuality. We can argue for years about whether a famous historical figure was gay or bisexual or straight and trans or whatever, but if we can all agree that they were somehow queer then using that term allows us to move past the debate and into productive discussion. And not everybody everywhere shares the same terms for sexual and gender identity, or even the same concepts of those things, so queer really is a more inclusive term in a lot of cases.
Like yeah if you’re talking specifically about gay or trans people you can just say gay or transgender, but if you’re talking about more than one identity or someone who doesn’t conform to our perceptions of ‘LGBT,’ or a person or people whose identity you don’t know, queer is just the better word.
Everything is like “QUEER history” and “List of QUEER young adult books” or “Top 10 QUEER movies” and queer this and queer that and for the love of god please just say LGBT.
“That’s SO gay”, “Oh my god, you’re not a LESBIAN, are you?”
Your words are slurs, too. Why do you get your words, but I don’t get mine? What makes you so special?
I’m here, I’m queer, go fuck yourself.
queer is not a slur, stop drinking the TERF koolaid
every time one of you fools spout about ‘queer is a slur’ a terf laughs because their fucking plan to make that word ‘taboo’ is fucking working you dipshit.
I did not get my degree in queer literature for you all to keep pulling this bullshit.
baby gays,,,, i beg of you to learn your queer history and stop listening to terf bullshit
every single one of our labels has been used as a slur against us.
terfs and -phobes are always going to try and hurt us with what we identify as. but the fact remains these are OUR labels and always have been.
we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.
I don’t know if this is just because I’m not American but I’ve never heard queer used as a slur. Ever. Meanwhile gay was the insult in the 2000s here. Everything you didn’t like was ‘soo gay’. Queer wasn’t even a word most of us knew back then.
It just baffled me that people would think an identifier is automatically a slur just because someone uses it to mock someone. If we did that gay would be a slur. Stupid would be a slur. Autistic would be a slur.
The reason people are upset about the word queer is that it’s a unifying term. You can say you’re queer and all people will know is that you’re part of the community. But you can’t say you’re LGBT, you have to say you’re gay or trans or ace. They don’t want you to be ambiguously queer. They want you to say which kind of queer you are so they can decide whether you’re undesirable.
yeah in the 90s and early 2000s kids would call each other “gay” as an insult. But no one ties themselves in knots over whether “gay” is a slur. So yeah, please ffs learn your history.
In high school I didn’t have the greatest friends, and had gay friends calling other gay friends gay as an insult. It wasn’t even denoting anything besides “stupid”. It was a weird brand of homophobia.
tbh it doesn’t rly hurt teenagers to incorrectly id as ace like… what’s the worst than could happen? they don’t have sex till they’re older?? lol
“ohh but it’ll take them longer to realize they’re actually gay” i know my experiences aren’t universal but like. if i wasn’t ready to face my lesbianism then i was Not Ready, you could’ve eliminated every other label in existence and i still wouldn’t have accepted it. if anything, the ability to try out different labels helped me learn about myself, explore the community, and accept that maybe not being straight wasn’t so bad.
also lots of people identify as bi before realizing they are gay, lots of people identify as gay before realizing they’re bi, lots of people identify as gay before realizing they’re trans, etc etc etc!!! exploring and getting it wrong is a necessary part of the process!!! why is it so different for aroace identities?????
you know parents make such a big deal about explaining homosexuality to their children but when I was a kid I watched a show where one of the villains was a satanic cross-dressing lobster and never once questioned it
You never once questioned why a character meant to be a gay man was portrayed as satanic and evil?
As a five year old in the 90’s, I can assure I was not aware of the socio-political ramifications of the cartoons I watched. My apologies.
Wow. JVN spoke his truth about being abused by an older boy at his church, filling his emotional void with junk food and then drugs (meth and coke) and sex, selling his body to make money cuz he was too embarrassed to ask his mom for help, flunking out of college, relapsing after rehab twice, and finding out at 25 that he was HIV positive. His journey’s been harrowing and yet he seems like such a radiant and positive person. He’s even braver than any of us realized.
anything lgbt
