I first came to know the word “queer” when I was 12, as I sashayed around the car to help my mother unload groceries. I said some sassy comment, some quip. She lifted her head, looked at me, and said, “Don’t act queer.” I can still feel the sting of her words.
How remarkable that, just a few years later, a generation of people would come to use a word once associated with so much hate and violence to arm ourselves. Today, the word “queer” is a way for us to create space for those who have been othered by the LGBTQ+ rights movement, by social norms and customs, and by outdated notions of gender. Depending on whom you ask, there are a million conflicting meanings for the word. Many still see it as a degrading slur. Many others embrace it with pride.
“Queer” is not the first word of its kind to be reclaimed. But unlike others, “queer” seems poised to represent all of us. It’s a word charged with as many meanings, emotions, and historical perspectives as there are shades of LGBTQ+ identity.
What does “queer” mean and what is its history?
To give some historical context on the term, queer hasn’t always been used as a way to describe someone’s sexuality or gender identity. While many people today use it as an umbrella term to describe fluid sexualities and genders, “queer” was (and, in some contexts, still is) a common derogatory term thrown at LGBTQ+ people.
Because queer originally meant odd, strange, and unusual, cisgender straight people adopted it as a way to insult and alienate LGBTQ+ folks. The first recorded use of the term as a slur was in 1894, when John Douglas, the 9th Marquis of Queensberry, called his son Lord Alfred Douglas and his alleged lover Oscar Wilde “Snob Queers” in a public court trial. Soon after, American newspapers began using “queer” to refer to gay men in disparaging articles, which introduced it into the popular lexicon.
After the 1969 Stonewall Riots, which many consider the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, organizers began having conversations about what terms best describe our community’s shared experiences. While gay people, lesbians, and trans folks of all sexualities experience the world differently, cis-het society views us all as “queer.” Organizations like Queer Nation in New York City and individuals alike began to reclaim the phrase as a term of empowerment and collective unification. This trend only gained momentum in the 1980s, when LGBTQ+ people were organizing against the U.S. government’s handling of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
“Queer” remained an intra community term throughout the 1990s, until it found its way into the title of a widely-viewed TV show, Queer As Folk, in 1999. In the two decades that followed, the term trickled into official names of LGBTQ+ community centers, TV shows and films, and even the growing acronym of identities used to join us together under one roof.
The definition of “queer” has shifted over the years, and today, rather than being a term that excludes, many see “queer” as an inclusive way to refer to the broad spectrum of folks under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. Some people find it rightfully difficult to shake the term’s derogatory history, even if its colloquial meaning has shifted, but many others are reclaiming “queer” as a way to self-identify.
To come closer to understanding what “queer” means today, we sought nine perspectives from those who use it on what the term means to them.
Growing up, I identified as bisexual. While I’m still comfortable with that term, it doesn’t encapsulate the nuance of my sexuality. “Queer” feels better for me, because what I truly am is bisexual and homoromantic.
Here’s what that means. While I find cisgender men attractive, I am not authentically me when I date them. For me, “bisexual” means being sexually attracted to all genders and gender expressions, but “homoromantic” means I only have romantic feelings in queer relationships. Because this is a little complex, I just say “queer.”
Identities are personal, but they are also how we advertise ourselves, so they are often very circumstantial, too. For example, I’m queer, trans, non-binary, and Mexican, and this is how I’d express myself to a partner. But when talking to someone with whom I have a rocky relationship, I’ll simply be a “gay male.”
I’m 33. When I was a kid, “queer” was a pejorative. The neighborhood kids played a game called “smear the queer.” You’d toss a football back and forth, and whoever caught it was the “queer” for everyone to tackle. So yes, queer-bashing was literally a childhood ritual.
In middle school, kids followed me home calling me “queer,” “fag,” and more. As an adult, I've been harassed with these same slurs. So I understand why generations before me balk at the word.
That said, I know how empowering it feels to reclaim words that have been used to harm us, and I appreciate “queer” specifically because it has always carried a sense of undefined abstractness. Even as a slur, the word described those who exist outside of what society mandates, so it’s fitting that the term now defies all restrictions of love and self that the world has placed on us.
I'm a 40-year-old woman who identifies as queer. In middle school, I knew I was attracted to guys and girls. I dated a few women before marrying a man. The relationship was abusive, so I left and started dating a gender-nonconforming human.
At this stage in my life, given the experiences I've had, “queer” feels more inclusive to me. I know different people have different perspectives, but for me, it represents an inclusive umbrella term that speaks to me.
As a synonym for “not straight,” “queer” is a great umbrella word for a wide variety of people across a spectrum of sexual orientations and gender identities. I love the inclusivity of the term, but for myself, I prefer “gay” for its specificity.
“Gay” clearly communicates that I am a man who is interested in other men. Moreover, my preference for "gay" speaks to my age. I'm 33, and “queer” wasn't widely used when I was coming out. I think you'll find an inverse correlation between age and comfort with the “queer” label.
Previous generations have a strong aversion to the term. As The Advocate's social media editor, I routinely observe a backlash to “queer” (when it's used in a headline, for example) from older gay men who only know the word as a slur. This is part of the term's history — it was (and still is) a word used to hurt us that has been reclaimed.
Reclamation is powerful, but I also understand how those who lived through some of the darkest days of legal and societal discrimination are not comfortable using a slur that was sometimes used alongside physical violence in a celebratory way. Its usage, even in LGBTQ spaces, is triggering to some people.
Growing up, “queer” was not a term I heard weaponized — at least not as much as “faggot” — so I recognize that I lack a certain emotional response associated with its use.
For me, queerness encompasses my sexual identity as someone uncomfortable with binary presentation. It also encompasses my rebuke of cisgender and heteronormative privilege and the intersection of these privileges with white privilege. LGBT+ labels tend to presume a binary origination, and their usage coincides with a social movement that seeks assimilation and erases the existence of non-binary identities. Using “queer” as a catch-all umbrella term, whether intentionally or not, silences that important fringe voice.
My queerness encompasses that voice, my voice, as a Black, male-assigned, non-binary individual who harshly critiques the status quo. I embrace “non-binary” because I am naturally androgynous — puberty gave me a physical and emotional blend of masculine and feminine traits. I’ve learned over time that navigating societal rules of binary presentation is always going to be a unique challenge for me. “Queer” helps me face that challenge.
I believe in taking power back from words used to dehumanize us. I say “nigga” regularly and love being able to say it, because it reminds me of the dual relationship all black people hold with our blackness. That joy of blackness is tied with the sadness of knowing just how much your people have suffered due to that blackness. So, I like the reclamation of slurs. However, just as I wouldn't call every black person “nigga,” I wouldn't call every LGBT person “queer,” only those who self-identify with the term.
“Queer” challenges the assumed binary of sexual and gender identity. Many use the term as being synonymous with “gay”, but to me, that misses its meaning. “Queer” is about non-normativity, creativity, and diversity far beyond homonormative culture.
The gay identity stereotypically comes with expectations around gender performance, politics, body standards, and sexual desires, and these feel oppressive to many people. For us, “queer” allows for community-building with those who don’t subscribe to gay standards.
Queerness liberates me by showing me that living non-normatively (living outside the ideals of toxic masculinity, femme-phobia, being a top or a bottom, or solely dating cis men) is all healthy and valuable. I apply the lens of queerness to my work in psychology, where I “queer” all that psychology, culture, and media have told us about how to love, relate, express, and have sex.
Seeing gay male friends reclaim “queer” makes me happy for them, but I’m still ambivalent about the term being “reclaimed” (acquired? co-opted? expanded?) by younger generations to mean anything they want it to mean.
On the one hand, I'm glad that younger people won't have to fight as hard as I did for inclusivity. On the other hand, I feel like I’m watching youngsters steal history from those who struggled and died for it and turn it into something that is, at times, both powerful and farcical.
I’m a trans man. When I was younger, I identified as “bisexual,” but now I identify as many things: transgender, transsexual (I’m both), and more. I came to grips with my gender identity when I was 38, began social transition in 2018, and began medical transition last January. At this point, I don't feel like any sexual entanglement I get into can be anything but “queer.”
As I discussed in my book, “queer” has three overlapping (but not synonymous) meanings. The overlap between these meanings results in what I call “conceptual inflation” of the term. Simply put, people use the word and identify with it, and they assume others mean it the same way they do.
First, there is “queer” as an umbrella term. Rather than use the alphabet soup of LGBTQQIIAAPSS+, “queer” encompasses any non-cisgender, non-heterosexual identity, relationship, behavior, or desire. I use “queer” this way because I think it includes a wide variety of ways people are non-cisgender and/or non-heterosexual.
That said, “queer” as an umbrella term does a lot of flattening, and this flattening is what certain people — namely those who identify with “queer” as a kind of leftist political stance of “identity-less non-definition” — take issue with. They don’t use “queer” as a term meaning “all definitions,” but rather as “no definition.” Since everyone is unique in their desires, behaviors, and communities, shouldn’t their identity be uniquely theirs? Some people use “queer” to mean this uniqueness.
I say this usage is leftist because I’ve found it associated with a kind of ultra-left political critique of power structures (which often appears, as I and others have pointed out, like a profound misreading of Foucault). This is the queer you’ll see at a queer political event, a queer with an identity politics that often says, paradoxically, that the truth about an issue can only come from someone with the correct combination of marginalized identities to speak on said issue.
It’s paradoxical because these queer leftists are usually white, and they pepper their events and issues with a kind of “diversity by numbers” approach. I call this approach “queernormativity.” Like heteronormativity, they identify a “right” way to be queer and argue that everyone else is doing queerness incorrectly.
The third group of people who use “queer” reject that there is any right way to be queer, and this rejection of any “right” way to do anything is what makes them queer. This is “queer” as in “queer sex radical,” a queerness rooted in anti-respectability and focused on fun and pleasure. A queer in this vein might not identify with the term, but they reject the normal and are committed to living an alternative lifestyle that emphasizes pleasure in a world of violence.
The queer having bareback sex in the back room of a club might not identify with the term “queer” or think of their actions as political, but in rejecting what society says they should be doing, they are queer.
As I said, these terms are overlapping. I identify as queer: “queer” in my rejection of respectability, “queer” because my identity doesn’t fit within simple boxes like “gay” or “man,” and “queer” because I fall somewhere in that umbrella of non-hetorosexual, non-cisgender identities. I would tell a stranger I’m a “gay man” because I assume they’re unprepared to understand that I’m neither.
“Queer” is all these things. And for some people, it’s none of them — it’s just a slur thrown at us for being different. But I am different, and I like that.
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