Like, gay is a slur. I constantly heard it used as a slur in high school—I’m 23, so I graduated only 6 years ago, this coming spring. I’ve heard it a lot less since then, partly due to campaigns for people to stop using it negatively, partly due to where I went to college, and partly due to how it’s an age-marked thing, so young adults generally don’t use it when they’re trying to fit in with older adults (for example, in a workplace). But I’ve still heard it, in the last 6 or 8 months. “That’s so gay.” I had a panic attack.
So by rights I should be perfectly fine writing it as g*y or g slur, right? (Though the last also refers to something else.) And I understand that there are people who identify as g*y, but it is a slur and they should only use it for themselves, not for the entire community.
…
Yeah, right. I’m not actually going to do that, except as performance art. It’s offensive and ridiculous. But “gay” is if anything more of a slur than “queer” is these days, so you either have to censor both or censor neither. You can tell that doing it to “gay” would be offensive, so don’t do it to “queer.”
While you’re at it, you should censor autistic and disabled too! Because people using peoples identities as an insult is what makes them a slur, right?
I think you are proving my point and not the one you were trying to make.
People aren’t born queer. Queer is an adjective that can mean a multitude of things, and was used to describe gay and trans people as a SLUR.
We chose gay. We picked the word. A playground insult isn’t the same as a slur. You think that being bullied in high school while being called gay is compatible to being killed while being called queer?
There is so much suffering behind the word queer, but your feelings about it being written as qu**r are way more important than the people who face violence and oppression associated with the word, right?
#ITS NOT OFFENSIVE TO STAR A SLUR
Bless that fucking tag.
We chose “queer” too. We chose “queer.” We chose it because we wanted to take the word back. And like people have never been murdered while being called gay? Please. Nothing’s ever just a “playground insult.” Where something is a “playground insult,” you know there are beatings and even murders happening as well, in smaller numbers.
And you’re going to act like people have to be individually murdered to be able to have a say in how things should be done? How convenient, that the only people allowed to disagree with you are dead.
And on that note, a lot of people who were the original ones choosing to call themselves “queer” are in fact dead, because the US government took over a decade to bother to fund AIDS research because they wanted all the queers and druggies dead anyway and decided it was free eugenics. And a lot of the reason that any of that changed is that a bunch of people in ACT UP and Queer Nation called themselves “queer” and were like “Hey you, we’re exactly the undesirables you think we are, and we still deserve medical care and a chance to live anyway. We’re here, we’re queer, and you’re not fucking getting rid of us.” And a lot of them didn’t survive to see antiretrovirals come out, but some of them did, and the point is that they got the process started even if they didn’t live to see the end result. And the ones who are still alive are usually like “????” if they’re on tumblr, and the ones who are dead would be pretty fucking pissed that you’re walking over their memory like that, if there’s an afterlife, which is up for debate.
So, yeah, you don’t know your history, and you have no idea why your little asterisks are so offensive. And maybe you don’t want to learn, but when someone says something is offensive, at least listen to their reasons instead of completely misstating the entire situation. (As I have listened to yours, and found them completely detached from anything that exists in reality.)
That whole “gay isn’t a slur but queer is” is just plain old fashioned gaslighting and it really, really needs to stop.
Queer is powerful.
Queer is “I don’t fit in your tidy boxes and you just have to deal with that.”
Queer is “I don’t owe you an explanation.”
Queer is “I don’t have it all figured out yet, I just know I’m not completely straight and/or completely cis.”
Queer people are the ones who started talking about queer film and queer literature and began the queer studies departments in universities and queer resource centers and queer youth centers.
Bisexual and pan people and trans people and intersex people and ace and aro people–plenty of us aren’t gay. Using “gay” as the umbrella term erases a hell of a lot of identities, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
My identity is queer first and foremost. I don’t need to reveal to everyone at every occasion that I’m a demisexual kinky married genderqueer polyamorous pansexual. Queer pretty much covers it.
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