It’s been literal years and I’m still not over Snape’s cloak-shrouded ass for asking an eleven year old muggle-raised kid the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane in front of the everyone on the first day. You want to know the difference? There is no fucking difference. They’re colloquial terms for the same fucking plant. He just wanted the intellectual upper hand over a goddamn little kid. “Haha, trick question”, so clever. you oily bag of tits
Honestly “queer” is so useful for people like me w/ a “complicated orientation” b/c instead of having to say I’m “asexual panromantic” and explain what that means, I can just say “I’m queer” and it tells you all you need to know (that I’m not straight).
yeah sure good for you but don’t ever ever use that word for someone who doesn’t identify as it themselves, it’s not an umbrella term for everyone. also “pan/ace” would definitely work, even if you don’t want to use it, other people could. i use ace lesbian and definitely not the q slur.
Wow its almost like they were just talking about using it on themselves for individual reasons and you butted in to be an ass and be condescending because you think you’re superior for not using queer, then you called their identity a slur right to them. But that can’t possibly be what you were trying to do, right?
Anyone is allowed to use it for themselves, I never said no one should do that if that’s what they want. Queer is a slur though. I just want people to be aware of that, I have no idea if OP is aware of that or not but some people using that word aren’t. I’m tired of people including me and other people who don’t want to be included in that word, and before anyone asks, I never meant that OP did that, because I literally have no idea if they do.
Queer is a slur as much as any other LGBT+ word, I just want you to be aware of that.
“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella - gay rights, gay marriage, gay community - when discussing the entire community.
Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.
Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.
Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.
So if you’re not going to come onto gay people’s posts for the same behavior, maybe critically analyze why exactly you feel the need to be so condescending to Queer people, specifically on posts that ONLY have to do with personal identity. Why you feel the need to insist to Queer people that their identities are slurs, to directly slap away the power of reclaiming a word from them by demanding it remain in the hands of the Straights as a perpetual slur.
I think an important difference between gay and queer is however, that queer started out as a slur used against members of the community and continues to be used as a slur in many places. Whereas gay began as a word the community chose itself to describe itself and was then later used by homophobes and heterosexuals in general in a negative way, meaning however, that gay doesn’t hold the same negative connotations as queer for many people simply because it was our word that they took, and not a word that they forced on us to make us “strange” or “other” like queer means.
That’s…. Not true. People think so because the history before gay was reclaimed is way older (older than any love community member’s lifetimes, probably,) but gay had the exact same origins.
It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.
The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”
There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.
The more recent history of the mid to late 20th century more prevalently favored queer as a slur, as is represented in our media. However its clearly undeniable that the switch back to gay as the popular community slur (along with the ever present f slur,) happened in the 2000s. Which is trying to be denied and rewritten by the anti queer crowd, who completely ignore the words popularity with community members who actually lived through when it was a popular slur.
Yes to all of this. When it comes to words for “not straight” there are hardly any choices that didn’t originate as ways to stigmatize or pathologize us. We are all using reclaimed slurs to describe ourselves.
Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet.
Somebody else pointed this out earlier to me, and of course I’ve lost the post, but it’s really suspicious that of all the reclaimed slurs, the one that gets the most pushback is the one that is most radically accepting of all identities
“hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it.
Queer is an ideology and an identity, historically and now. It is an umbrella for that ideology and an umbrella for those identities, historically and now. They can’t be conflated (with LGBT) and it’s super fucking disingenuous to pretend one is just the tarnished besmirched dirty slur version of the other. They’re different. In my particular work for example, Queer bioethics is different from LGBT bioethics and conflating the two will muddle any discussion you try to have about them because they lead to literally opposite conclusions in some cases.
Yeah I freaking love pancakes
Wait wrong post
By far the best addition to this post
This is one of those things where I feel like an old.
Like, *the* slogan I associate with pride is, “We’re here, we’re queer – get used to it!”
There was a TV show called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” that was total mainstream pap. (Not that the show wasn’t riddles problematic elements from the concept out, but ‘queer’ in the title was clearly meant as a positive.)
I just have a hard time processing queer as anything but reclaimed.
They actually shot “Queer As Folk” in my city!
TERFs and radical gender/sexuality bianarists are flooding social media and blogging sites with propaganda smearing the word queer in the hopes of silencing all of us who don’t identify with their hate politics. I fought hard to reclaim the word queer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it’s the one word that doesn’t worship exclusion. Which is why these people are trying to convince you not to use it. fuck that noise. there is literally no word i could use to identify my sexuality that hasn’t been thrown at me in hatred, fear, and violence. No way am I giving up the one of those that allows me to talk about all of my community without trying to put people in boxes they don’t fit in.
I will never not reblog this post. Queer, queer, queer here.
“Queer” has been claimed by queer people as a self-descriptor since at least 1910. It’s an insult to those historical people (and all the generations of queer historical people who have identified as queer since then) to pretend that the people using it as a slur owned it more than the queer people who used it as a self-descriptor.
Source: George Chauncey, “Gay New York,” page 101
They don’t want us to use queer because they don’t want to be lumped in with anyone who’s not cis gay or cis lesbian. So fine. You don’t like the word queer? You don’t want to be in the “queer” community? Get the fuck out, then. Y'all don’t welcome us in your community anyway, so we’ll just have our own.
And it’ll be queer as fuck.
I fucking love the word queer ❤
The pushback against queer is RECENT.
Look, kids. I’m officially Old. And when my little queer (bisexual, grey-asexual) arse was realising this, I was in HIGH SCHOOL. And you know when that was? This was before AZT use was widespread. HIV was a death sentence. You know who nursed those guys, ran their errands and sat with them as they were dying from AIDS? Well, me, for one (mostly I was just doing grocery shopping but I sat my fair share of deathbed vigils as a young teen) but it was the queer community. That was how we identified. And lesbian women and trans folk and people from ALL KINDS of orientations got together and cared for these people (mostly gay men and trans women, and a lot of sex workers in there).
We were queer. And we were, and still are, fucking angry. Betrayed by our governments, in lots of cases disowned by our families, all we had was each other. And we were queer.
And then later, we had queer studies and queer theory at uni. This is over 20-30 years ago. They do not name university courses after slurs. They named it after OUR IDENTITY.
So you children, who never nursed your dying friends want to come along and declare MY IDENTITY A SLUR?
FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU.
YOU ARE WRONG. YOU ARE AHISTORICAL AND YOU. ARE. WRONG.
Fuck you. Fuck your exclusionary politics. Gay has been used as a slur far more recently than queer. As has lesbian.
You want to police the queer community. You want to gate-keep. You want to exclude people like me, you want to define what a woman is, what genders people can be.
WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER. Get used to it.
Honestly, the way some people act it’s like. . You can’t reclaim slurs, but you can’t create new words without being branded the butt of a joke, so people who don’t feel like outlet labels fit them are supposed to just sit and suffer in silence.
If you don’t want to be called queer then fine, but don’t erase the history of those who used it, who fought for it TO be used as an umbrella term. If you don’t want it applied to you then fine, but don’t say what it should and shouldn’t be used for. I know that many people hear it as a slur and don’t want it applied, but to say it can’t be an umbrella term based on that doesn’t make sense. “Gay” is one of the absolutely most common slurs I have ever heard used in my life and it still gets used and applied to umbrella situations. If we went off of if things have been used against us as slurs then we wouldn’t have anything to call ourselves.
I’m here, I’m queer, and it took me a damn long time to get used to it and I’m not going back now.
This post has helped me. I am asexual, autistic, i have issues due to sexual trauma, i am agender… I thought i couldnt use the word queer. Thanks to you guys i feel welcome.
I am queer, thanks.
if you get no thing else out of this post (because i know its long) i suggest you at least try to get this:
It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
because it is fantastic
you can get a phd in Queer Literature.
enough of this terf shit. learn your history and stop being the private army of anyone who sounds offended.
As someone who’s 32 and still haven’t figured out completely what the fuck I am in terms of gender OR orientation, “queer” is a fucking godsend.
Also I love the defiant, freeform, radically-accepting, revolutionary associations it has. Queer as in Stonewall, queer as in “you’ve come in and harassed these people without pushback for the last goddamn time,” queer as in “you do you,” queer as in riots when necessary, queer as in the audacity of caring for each other when the rest of the world won’t, queer as in not being silenced, queer as in we don’t need a pedigree and three references and proof of which box you fit into, queer as in artful, creative, and to-the-point effective solutions to whatever problems thrown at us.
It just resonates right, as an elegant call to arms for a battle that is as much about creation as it is about fighting. A connective identity, as much about us as it is about you or me.
In 1972, she ran away from home. She was gone for several months, and when she got home my grandmother started shaking her and screaming about how someone had told her my mother had no shoes and my grandmother was sure it meant my mom was dead.
She finally calms down, and they piece it together: my grandmother had gotten a phone call from someone who breathed two or three times, said “Cathy’s in bare feet,” and hung up. Except that’s not what they said–my grandmother had written the date in on her calendar, and on that date my mother was in Bare Feet, Arizona. She knew definitively that she was in Bare Feet because on that date she called home to talk to my grandfather, who told her Uncle Jim had died–“got himself shot”–and that she had missed the funeral. Ready for the glitch in the matrix part? Here we go:
–My grandfather had no recollection of the conversation–which would have been a strange conversation indeed, since Uncle Jim was still alive and, in fact, didn’t die until 2009, eight years after my grandfather. However, my mom did miss the funeral, thanks to a delayed flight. Cause of death? Supposedly, it was suicide, but there were enough indications for the family to believe that was a pile of horseshit, not least that shooting himself in the head with the rifle indicated would’ve been near-impossible.
–My mom was going by the name Patricia Danko when she was on the run–she had a fake ID and everything. She hadn’t called herself “Cathy” since leaving home and nobody knew she was traveling under an alias.
–According to my mom, she never gave a name for herself–either Patricia or Cathy–when she was in Bare Feet, and she would’ve had no reason to. Bare Feet had maybe a hundred people in it, and they were just stopping for food and gas.
–This isn’t just an account from my mother–my dad was with her at the time, and he remembers both the phone call and the truckstop.
But that’s not the weirdest nor the creepiest part, which is this:
–I’ve been trying for three years to find Bare Feet, Arizona–on the Internet, on old maps, by talking to old Arizona cowboys, and there was never a Bare Feet, Arizona. My mom convinced my dad to drive “through Bare Feet” on the way back from Texas in 2013 and there was no town anywhere along the highway, not even the abandoned bones of one. I’ve looked for Bare Feet, Barefeet, Bear Feet, Bare Feat, Bare Foot, Barefoot, and Bear Foot. None of these exist.
My mother stopped in a town that doesn’t exist, ate in a restaurant that never was, made a phone call that could not have happened and was apparently answered by a ghost from 40 years in the future, and later that night someone called my grandmother from a number that turned up on her phone bill only as a pay phone in Arizona to say that single sentence, “Cathy’s in Bare Feet.”
I didn’t initially want to reblog things here, but this is just too far up my alley. I think I’ll start collecting stories of incidents like this, weirdling magic at its most potent.
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
