“Queer” is still a slur, it is elitist, it is atomizing of the Gay community, it is another way of saying deviant.
The adoption of the term "queer" plays a key role in attacks on Gays by the Alphabet Soup.
This essay is just focused on the use of the word “queer.” Much of this essay is part of a larger essay which is my foundational Essay 1 about the politics of the Alphabet Soup. I provide the link to it at the end. However, for those just wanting to consider the issues with the word “queer” I provide this essay.
In the the various alphabet soups now presented to use, LGBTQ, LGBTQI, LGBTQIA, LGBTQIAP+ and I am sure there are more, Q stands for “Queer.” We now have queer studies and queer this or that.
It has three problems.
It is a slur which has been imposed on gays by elites and persons involved with the production and consumption of avant gardism without consideration of the feelings of the broad masses of the gay community.
It is straight-centric. All these communities under this umbrella term are define relative to a certain narrow heterosexuality. It is another way of saying deviants without saying “deviants.” It is an identity which stares at straights to define itself, it exalts straighteness as the primary element to define others. It is also part of Laundry List NeoLiberalism Liberation.
Assimilation. It drives an assimilationist political program. Whereas the great majority of gays need job and housing civil rights legislation, the agenda is to push marriage and marriage with adopted children for gays instead. This is not something that meets the needs of the great majority of gays, but is an assimilationist political program driven by straight-centric identies, where being gay is a personal variant from straights and not gay centric.
Queer first was adopted as a supposedly non-slur by a militant group Queer Nation on the basis that it co-opted the term and disarmed homophobes.
How the word 'queer' was adopted by the LGBTQ community
Last week, we talked about how "geek" had become almost a cool term for a computer savvy, but perhaps socially inept…www.cjr.org
This article in the Columbia Journalism Review above refers to this Newsweek article about Queer Nation below.
What Is Queer Nation?
For more than 20 years, gay activists campaigned against hate words--and got results. Only the most irremediable bigots…www.newsweek.com
Queer has been since been adopted by academics and the gay establishment as an all inclusive term.
One of the claims for adopting the term by Queer Nation was that they were co-opting it. From the Newsweek article.
Former OutWeek editor
Michelangelo Signorile and three New York activists founded Queer Nation last year, fed up with ACT UP’s focus on AIDS. The idea quickly caught on in other cities. Queer Nation wants to spread the word that gays are tired of being “bashed,” literally or otherwise, and aren’t going to take it anymore. By co-opting the word “queer,” QN claims, they have disarmed homophobes. “Queer Nation makes everybody else look reasonable,” says gay San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts.
Certainly a spirit of militancy needs to be adopted and the author has over the years lamented that enough gays aren’t militant and all too often are begging for acceptance. This usage of the term seems to be just throwing a slur back into the face of homophobes.
PART I — IT STILL IS A SLUR
The claim that it disarms homophobes is obviously at variance with the facts. Anti-gay agendas do not depend only on a particular anti-Gay slur or even a set of them. They are the instruments of choice of some individual anti-Gay people, but hardly the only instruments used to attack Gay people, or the deadliest ones. Generally their use discredits anti-gay individuals. Anti-gay agendas that are really deadly or dangerous to Gays avoid these words, at least publically, the use of these terms. Anti-Gay Evangelicals like to say, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” The Catholic Church has an ongoing agenda against Gays, but you won’t hear the Pope uttering slurs or for that matter any bishop uttering slurs. Anti-Gay groups know that using slurs undermines their agenda and builds public sympathy towards gays.
It is fairly obvious that the adoption of the term of “queer” by Queer Nation was an act of bravado and positioning themselves as radical. It is the production and consumption of radical identity. It is also the production and consumption of avant garde identity. Perhaps you could proclaim this identity while wearing a “Rage Against the Machine,” t-shirt. (Musical group whose name was a statement that they rage against the establishment.)
From this it has been adopted by those who wish to be progressive or seen as progressive. Reference to the Gay community or Lesbian and Gay community now disappears into the alphabet soup with “queer” being the short quick term for this soup.
It has been adopted without considering the sentiments of the broad Gay community at large. It is a term which has considerable negative sentiment, and its use hasn’t really reclaimed it. It might be used by one alphabet soup person speaking to another, but it wouldn’t really be tolerable spoken by a straight person and especially intolerable spoken by someone anti-Gay.
Of course there will be those who will want to adopt it, for they want to be avant garde and radical too! Look at me, look at me, I am just the most radical thing!
It is instructive to review what other minorities do in terms of self-naming and naming of organizations and fields of study.
Is there any religious minority that uses a slur in its title? Are there any Jewish groups that use a slur in their name? Are there any minority civil rights groups that use a racial slur in their name?
You certainly won’t find an N-Word Studies Department in any University Anywhere.
At Brandies University it is still Judaic studies, not k-word studies.
Proponents of the word “queer” will point out that African Americans do use the n-word. What isn’t mentioned by these proponents is that within the African Amerian community there is also considerable resentment against the practice of African Americans using the n-word by other African Americans. It is used privately and it isn’t used formally. Also, it would be really be an inflammatory situation if a white person used the n-word, and further, if the white person said it was okay because African Americans use the term there would be a strong backlash.
African Americans who are militant often have names which incorporate the term “Afrikan” to denotate militant identity, but not the n-word.
I am sure that defenders of the term “queer” might search the Internet and find some marginal African American group using the “n-word,” there is bound to be some such group, but the generally and overwhelming and nearly universal practice is that African American groups don’t use the n-word in their names.
Why do minorities refuse to use slurs for organizational names and for university studies departments and why does the alphabet soup of LGBTQ etc. find it acceptable? Minority groups have strong identities and are a community and elites know that they need to respect this and couldn’t get away with adopting some racial slur to play at being avant garde. Gays don’t have strong group coherence and so recreational radicals can impose identities upon us.
PART II — QUEER, A STRAIGHT-CENTRIC WORD
The term “queer” is straight-centric. It is a term that stares at straightness, in fact exalts it and worships it. A group of widely different groups are lumped together whose commonality is they aren’t straight. The idea that not-being straight is the primary factor, a factor which over arches, is more important that other differences, that the differences between the letters of the initialism LGBTQ+ are minor, maybe even trival, to the the fact that they aren’t straight is the underlying meaning of the word “queer.” It also defines the primary aspect of each of the letters in the initialism LGBTQ, their meaning, identities, existentce, as not being straight rather than Lesbian-centric, Gay-centric, and for the other letters their lived experiences and communities if any, the central features constituting their lives and not centered on themselves.
It has to be considered what agenda is supported by identities that define themselves as not straight.
With the invention of genderqueer, I suppose there can now be straight individuals with heterosexual desires who are not normative in some supposed gender expression. It reduced being Gay as just being some variant from being straight.
The term has evolved such that it includes anyone who isn’t some manifestation of 1950s TV show heterosexuality, but even then I am expecting some scholar to publish some paper, “Queering the ‘Leave it to Beaver,” Show.” Perhaps at some point we will have to include an “S” for straight into the LGBTQXYZ. Or perhaps there will be some field expedition to track down the last totally straight person in some rural remoteness.
Before further discussing it, consider what the reaction would be if someone proposed that Black History Month, (February) should be People of Color Month or Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) Month? Or that Asian American & Pacific Islander Month (May) was made into POC Heritage Month? Or Hispanic Heritage Month, (Sept. 15th to Oct. 15th) was proposed to be POC Month? I think that this erasure of identity would be serverely rejected.
What would be the reaction to a BIHAAPIICP Month, for Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, Asian American, Pacific Islander, Indian, and Circumpolar Peoples Month? It would been seen as nonsensical. These are groups which are understood to be seperate communities and with different histories, though in some cases there are intersections, they are different groups that are self-defining themselves and within these groups they have conceptions of their identities and histories.
Also, African American groups tend to adopt names that assert an over arching commonality. They isn’t some title saying Afro-Caribbean, African, and African American.
However, gays get thrown into the alphabet soup as queer or with acroynms LGBTQIAP+, the “+” because the list of letters gets longer, is difficult to remember or tedious to write.
In this alphabet soup, disparate groups and types, some existing in communities and some not, instead as individuals, with concerns and issues that may not be common, which may or may not see each other in everyday social life, are thrown together in one big heap on the basis that they aren’t straight.
There are Lesbian bars and Gay bars and Lesbians and Gays represent real communities with neighborhoods and social venues for them. There are Lesbian and Gay bars having floats in the “Pride” parade. There is literature, movies, art specifically for these two communities. They each have their own language usages and practices. One of the more obvious development is that they are more and more seperate communities.
However, for these other groups, do they even exist as communities or have specific cultural practices? To what extent do asexuals exist as a community? Do they have a slang and specific ways of saying things? Is there an asexual neighborhood? Asexual cultural productions? What is the intersection of asexuals with the gay community? What are their life challanges and experiences verus the gay community? I am sure there are likely to be some tangential intersection. The author found online a site which had the comments of asexuals who identify as gay, complaining that gays think about sex too much. There was an interview with an asexual guy by a public radio channel who thought that the Pride Community needed to be toned down because it was too sexual and upset him. [I will have a link to an article on asexuals by myself which refers to these two items at the end of this essay.]
But largely the gay community is nearly entirely a different community with different issues from the asexuals and there are even conflicting needs in opposition to each other.
Intersexuals, do they form a community like gay people do? Do they exist in sufficent numbers to do so? I don’t know. The fact is that their existence is largely outside the experience of most people in the gay community and gay people will learn about them through the same media that others do. This is true of asexuals also.
As for bisexuals and pansexuals, (Has the discussion of these two terms and what they mean relative to each other ever come to an end?) do show up in the community. Their life choices are very different than gay people. The life trajectories of male pansexuals and bisexuals are not within the Gay community but travels through the straight world visiting the Gay community when the individual sees a need.
Though there is some overlap, both gays and bisexuals are potential victimes of laws against same-sex sexual activities and discrimination against same-sex couples, but they have radically different life choices and issues. Also, bisexuals often face persecution only in as much as they are acting homosexually. There is no government and never has been a government in which homosexual acts are legal and heterosexual acts are legal but an individual practicing both would be prosecuted.
The issues transgender people face are nearly an entirely different set of issues that Gays and Lesbians face. There is collision between the two groups as transgender complain that Gays and Lesbians won’t consider having relations with them.
PART III. ASSIMILATION.
The Alphabet Soup is composed of those who have widely divergent identities, some identies have communities, and some largely don’t exist in communities. They may have some common interests, primarily religious zealots and sexual conservatives as enemies, but they also have very divergent situations and can have conflicting interests also.
Queer is an erasure of these different identities into one class with an over arching commonality that they aren’t straight, that is that they are deviant from the larger group of straight people. It is equivalent to adopting one word for Hindus, Muslims, Taoists, Buddhists, Jews, Shinto, and others to just slop them together in a bucket as non-Christians. Actually this is what Christians used to do, and it was another slur, “Heathens.” Probably not a word that non-Christians will want to reclaim either, but then again, they have a sense of self worth that would prevent this, nor are they marginal in society such that this can no longer be imposed upon them by elites.
The use of the term queer is atomizing. That is it considers being Gay or Lesbian as just an individual identity and private sexual activity that is not straight and not having seperate communities or seperate cultural practices, like the religions just previously mentioned, such that lumping them together with the rest of the alphabet soup wouldn’t make sense. To mash together these different groups and individuals it necessitates a conceptualization where they are atomized into individuals. They are just individual members of the tolerant neoliberal society with these individual different practicies which the neoliberal state says is okay along with the rest of the alphabet soup. As individual types they are put all in one slop bucket to be managed under one header by social welfare agents and a portfolio of types defined and described by academics in their journals.
It is a disintegrating force against the formation of Gay and Lesbian group identity and cohesion by relegating Gay and Lesbian identity to being individual practice as part of a queer community which exists as a grab bag individuals in the neoliberal state instead of self-defining and directing communities. This queer grab bag of individuals isn’t really a common community excepting for social welfare agents who provide services for different letters of the alphabet soup and academics who want a broad portfolio for their studies.
When you conceptualize Gays as being variant from straights in term of personal sexual practice then you tend to think of what Straight people have that the Alphabet Soup doesn’t. This drives a politic
s where Gays can adopt and Gays can get married and be a close imitation of straight family. It is a goal where respectability Alphabet Soup people can hope to channel Gays and other recalcitrant elements into respectibility with these ersatz Straight lifestyles. Meanwhile you haven’t gotten job and housing civil rights passed for LGBTQXYZ which not only is needed to support this imitation straight life, but isn’t really of use to the great majority of Gays who are not likely to be ever married, in a society in which marriage is in precipitous decline. Marriage is increasingly an upper class and middle upper class thing.
CONCLUSION
It can be argued that all these letters of the alphabet soup should be allies. Arguably there are many cases where this is true, but allies are when different groups work together on specific issues, not homogenized as not-straight and not assuming that all interests of each of the Alphabet soup letters are shared by all the Alphabet soup groups.
The word Queer needs to go. What gays could do to stop being pulled into this classification needs to be defined. One move would be to pull back out of the LGBTQXYZ thing. When you write, write as a gay person. Support activities that promote gay identity, and withdraw from those that don’t.
This is a link to an essay in progress which will corporate a lot of the concepts developed in this essay.
ESSAY 1
For all the essays in the series.
TOPICS
NEWS
For all the Internet Gay Partisan Sites and IDs.
THE FACEBOOK PAGE
Gay Partisan
Edit descriptionwww.facebook.com
CLICK ON THE FACEBOOK LINK ABOVE TO MOBILIZE AGAINST THE REPRESSION OF THE GAY COMMUNITY.
For Reddit there is:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaycentric/