#queer community history
Here’s the thing about LGBT+ vs. Queer.
I’m ace, nonbinary, and demiromantic. With LGBT+ I’m included in the plus. And I’m happy to be included! Indeed, folks pointedly using LGBT without the plus makes my hackles raise.
But. I am sick of being in the fucking plus sign like an afterthought.
And no, adding more to the alphabet soup doesn’t help that feeling. There’s a limit to what human brains can cram in. I don’t think it’s reasonable to make folks say an increasingly long acronym every time they mention the community. I appreciate the effort, but you’re always going to either leave someone out or cram them into the miscellaneous field the plus sign represents.
With Queer I’m just there, alongside my queer siblings. The details may be different, but I’m just as queer as a cis allo gay man or a trans allo straight woman or a genderfuck individual.
We already tried to meet folks who don’t like queer as a word halfway with MOGAI. Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignment, and Intersex. It’s inclusive without using the Dreaded Q-Word. Surely, if the objection was to “queer” as a Terribly Traumatizing Word (just like, oh, every other word used for us: “gay” was the slur of choice where I was growing up), MOGAI would be the perfect solution, yes?
And yet, that was thrown back into our faces and turned into an insult. So, at that point, I said fuck it and fuck you. I’m queer,and if its inclusivity makes you mad, good.
People hate Q*eer because it’s still used as the slur of choice in most of the world that the isn’t terminally online.
Also friendly reminder that Demisexual (and demiromantic by extension) were literally made up by some asshole online as an excuse for why he didn’t want his hypersexual OC to have sex with a few specific people. It’s literally the definition of using a made-up identity to feel special which the Transphobes and Homophobes in power use as justification for harming the LGBT community.
Being LGBT doesn’t make you special, and the entire goal of the community should be reinforcing that statement. We don’t want to be seen as different and special. We just want the opportunity to live our lives
I say in the post that I’m suspicious of folks who pointedly use LGBT without the plus. Congratulations on adding another validating data point to that.
So, you wanna go? Let’s fucking go.
1.) Until I see similar pearl clutching over gay, which as I said in the post was the slur of choice where I was growing up, you can cry me a river. I don’t know how I can emphasise enough that EVERY. FUCKING. TERM. WE. HAVE. has been and probably continues to be used as a slur by someone, but weirdly, none of them have the same pushback queer does. There are words that make me uncomfortable that I won’t use for myself, but if someone for example calls himself a proud faggot and wishes to be called that, I will salute that proud faggot.
2.) a.) [citation needed] - This reeks of the same kind of lying aphobic bullshit as “a-spec is stolen from autistics” or “allosexual is a bad word because uuuuuuhhhh reasons”.
b.) Don’t care even if the cite checks out. What, you think a word having some kind of Deep Dark Secret Origin is gonna stop a proud queer?
c.) How fucking dare you tell me my identity is made up, shithead? As if I don’t know myself enough to make that call? As if you’re the arbiter of what strangers on the Internet can call themselves? I almost wish I had that kind of arrogant confidence.
3.) Respectability politics will not save you. You cannot be one of The Good Ones forever. Homophobes want to shove the most milquetoast 2.5-children-and-a-white-picket-fence gay and lesbian couples back into the closet and take their kids away for corrupting them to boot. Transphobes will use the trans panic defense to murder even the Best Passer. Throwing anyone who doesn’t vibe with L, G, B, and/or T specifically under the bus isn’t going to suddenly make you okay in the minds of the folks who want to destroy us.
4.) Fucking speak for yourself. That’s the core difference between queer and LGBT-pointedly-no-plus. Queer folks admit that we are strange and different.Itis an anomaly, in the most basic sense of ‘doesn’t match the majority of the data’.
The queer folks say, and so what? The queer folks say, yes, we are weird. And the queer folks say, but that does not make us lesser.
The queer folks say: we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.
Who the fuck ever said we don’t want to be seen as different? We fucking ARE different, that’s the entire fucking point. Labels give us the chance to finally not feel like an outcast freak, we’re *queer* and we have a place to be with other queer people where our simple existence isn’t seen as a negative.
The goal of the fucking queer, LGBTQ+, gay, lesbian, trans, whatever you want to call it movement (personally I like queer) is to emphasize that WE’RE DIFFERENT AND WE’RE PEOPLE, TREAT US LIKE IT. Being the same as everyone else doesn’t do shit, it just lets that “everyone” continue to pretend they’re somehow better. So until being different isn’t seen as a reason to remove rights and harass, insult, and murder people, the point of the QUEER movement is to be loudly, blatantly, belligerently different and demand equality while doing it.
No idea where the “Demisexual was made up by some dude wanting to protect his hypersexual OC” or whatever story came from. “Demisexual” was first coined by someone who used to moderate the AVEN (Asexual Visibility & Education Network) forums back in the 2000s. He went by (and still goes by) sonofzeal online, and demisexual was a term he came up with to describe his own experiences with his sexuality. He wrote about it on his website here, and you can find more info with original sourcing back to the AVEN forums here.
He’s also a really good friend of mine. I hang out with him and his wife (who’s been my best friend since high school) every week. I remember how stressful modding AVEN used to be for him back in the day — I can recall times when his future-wife and I would visit his apartment and he’d be visibly frazzled and need to ask us to wait a few minutes while he sorted out some drama. He could passionately go on for hours about the difference between romantic and sexual (and aesthetic and sensual) attraction, about how asexuality (and aromanticism) is a spectrum. He cared a lot about the Asexual community (and the greater LGBTQ+ community) and still does, even though he’s not actively modding anymore.
“Gay” was the slur of choice where (and when) I was growing up — not for the “terminally online”, but for the people you say every day at school and work and the grocery store. But even putting aside the fact that all of our labels are slurs, I just look at it this way:
Given the choice between the company of “LG(BT-if-we’re-feeling-generous)” exclusionists who parrot whatever propaganda they hear fourth-hand from other baby-gays who can’t be bothered to learn their own history, and bully others as harshly as they worry they’ll be bullied; or the company of an open and accepting queer community that makes everyone feel welcome, supported, and protected, and takes delight in helping people understand themselves and each other better … I personally, as a bisexual/pansexual, demisexual person, will proudly stand with and among the queers every time. That’s what Pride is all about.
Thank you for providing this community history, and for citing your sources to do so.
