Oh, Nonny, you done got me all riled up about words. I don’t like to brag, but I’m pretty good at words; good enough to know that a thesaurus and a dictionary will only get you so far before you run headlong into common usage, which often gets you into trouble when the people you’re arguing with use the pages of your dictionary as toilet paper.
Words are malleable, shaped by their usage and their context. All too often, regardless of their origins, words get shaped into weapons. This happens with almost any word used to designate a group without privilege. Examples abound throughout history in pretty much any language, and I could list many that you could (rightly) find offensive for me to even mention, even though their origins have nothing to do with the pain that their modern usage can inflict on people. That doesn’t matter to the people who suffer these words as weapons, and it doesn’t matter to the people who use them as such, either.
Queer is one such word; so is gay. I’ve been on the receiving end of both, as weapons and as threats. It does not matter to bigots that one used to mean ‘happy’ and the other used to mean ‘odd/off/eccentric’; the fact is that both now largely mean ‘not straight’ in specific (not-entirely-overlapping) ways. That’s why homophobes use them as weapons, because they see being not straight as inherently lesser; thus ANY term that non-straight people choose for ourselves is subject to being appropriated by them and turned into a weapon against us (and against anyone who might conceivably be one of us, or might even be sympathetic to the fact of our humanity and our right to exist as non-straight people).
And you know the fuck what? I am strange, and weird, and other, and odd, and eccentric, and not straight.
I’m QUEER.
And anyone who thinks there’s anything inherently wrong with any one of those things has no right to limit my vocabulary because they choose to use the most appropriate term for me as a weapon against me. I won’t let them steal that or any other word from me. My vocabulary is not theirs to police, and anyone who says it is can go fuck themselves.
You may not be queer; that’s fine. I won’t use that word to describe you or anyone else who objects to the term. I’m not gay, and that’s fine, but anyone who’s ever called me ‘gay’ was using that term as a slur, and a threat. Its etymology does nothing to dull the sharpness of the weapon it’s been crafted into when used that way.
Contrariwise, the sharpness of queer does not excise the very powerful and uplifting usage it has for LGBTQ identity, especially for people who don’t identify with the L and G portions of the acronym. And as long as I’m alive, I won’t let that positive usage die.
sparksoffandommagic 