I’m so done with entertaining opinions about queer identity from people who don’t identify as queer. It’s easy to look in from the outside and complain about how queer as an identifier is “vague” or “useless.”

That is, it’s easy to reject queer as “vague” if you’re completely unwilling to listen to queer people. It’s easy to say that queer is “useless” if you have the ability to identify with labels that are already widely understood and widely accepted in LGBT spaces. What is telling, to me, is that most of those who I’ve seen reject the reality of queer as an identity are those who have no use for it.

For many of us, queer is obviously not a useless term.

When I was questioning, when I am questioning, in the future when I am questioning again–queer is my constant. A fact about who I am, a connection to my community and history, an open canvas of possibilities. Clarity.

Even as a constant, queer allows for fluidity and change. How I identify has changed a few times over the past decade. Across all that time, the queer community welcomed and supported and celebrated me, not in spite of my other labels, but because of them.

If, ten years from now, I identify in some other way than I do now, I know that I will still be queer, and that I’ll still be welcome in the queer community.

The same has not been true of my experience in the LGBT community. The farther I’ve moved away from being easily categorized as L, G, B, or T–the more intracommunity hostility I’ve encountered.

And, even so, I’m queer. Sometimes queer as in fuck you, always queer as in proud.

When the constraints of the gender binary and even the limitiations of nonbinary identity are too stifling, when I am a gender that is outside of what we consider to be gender altogether, when I am no gender at all, I am still queer.

As long as the LGBT community continues to define LGB identity as “For SGA’s Only”, I am still queer.

Queer is the rock I’ve held onto and the rock I’m constantly tossing through the window of every queerphobic and transphobic assholes’ house of cards.

Queer is and will always be the most accurate and most honest way for me to identify myself. Gender: queer. Sexuality: queer.

Queer is the quickest way for me to communicate that I’m not cisgender or straight without being forced to other myself.

“Why can’t you just say you aren’t straight, everyone knows what that means?” I thought we were fighting for the end of heteronormativity and straightness-as-default. Or is that a right reserved only for those at the front of the acronym?

Queer is breaking down gates and replacing them with solidarity.

Queer is smashing binaries and replacing them with freedom.

Queer is how these words are mine, and another queer person will have a different story, and yet we’re connected by shared pride and history.

Queer is anything but vague or useless to me.

Of course "queer" is a slur. That's why we reclaimed it in the first place.

We started to use “queer” to describe ourselves because to the people who hated us, any word that meant us meant “bad.” Didn’t matter if they said “queer” or “faggot” or “homosexual,” or “like THAT, you know,”– it was a bad thing to be. There was no room in the language for us to be us and proud of it.

So we said, “the hell with that,” and we took ground that did not belong to us, and we made it our own. They can’t insult you by calling you something if you call yourself that first. We said “queer” out loud and proud, and we stood up and marched under banners with “queer” written on them, and there were too many of us to stop when we came out in the daylight and shouted our names.

And there are still people who hate us, and whatever we call ourselves, they still think that word means “bad.” “Gay” can be an insult– “that shirt’s so gay.” And all you have to do is hear a conservative politician sneer the word “transgender” in talking about bathrooms to know that even our own words can turn to venom in the mouth of someone who hates what we mean by them.

But we worked our asses off to say that what we mean by them isn’t bad, and we could call ourselves those things, and be proud. And it worked. We took “queer.” We took it so well that it’s a technical term in academic institutions which sixty years ago would have fired someone just for the suspicion that they were one of us. We fought, and we won.

And when you tell me, “queer is a slur, don’t use it,” you’re telling me that that victory means nothing. That we did nothing to change what the word means. That we have to give back the ground we took, that our fight isn’t worth remembering.

I won’t call someone “queer” if they don’t like it, if they don’t claim the name for themself, if it makes them uncomfortable or brings back bad memories– that’s just rude. But I resent and bristle at someone telling me I can’t use the word for myself. It means what I mean, as “gay” or “lesbian” or “LGBT” doesn’t. And more than that– it means, we won this word. We fought, and a lot of us died, and we are still fighting, and some of us are still dying, though not nearly as many. We’re fighting for the meaning– that we can live the way that suits us, and love the people we love– much more than the word. But the word is a symbol, and I’m not willing to give it up.

FUCKING THIS OKAY

A good thread on whether “queer” is a slur and if it should be used or not.

“If I am unashamed of being queer, you do not get to give that word BACK to the fuckwits who made it a slur.”

you do not get to give that word BACK to the fuckwits who made it a slur

EVERYBODY WHO CAME OUT BEFORE YOU HAS TAKEN THE ROCKS AND BOTTLES AND MADE THEM INTO SHIELDS AND WINDCHIMES

Holy motherfucking shit. Don’t fucking come at me about Queer is a slur. I FUCKING KNOW IT IS. It was hurled at me like a fucking spear all through my youth. I know it’s a god damn slur. And it’s mine. You don’t get to take it away from me because you can’t take also away the scars it gave me while I was standing in front of my younger queer siblings in this community. 

always, always reblog this one.

If my enemy swings a sword at me and I take that sword away from them, it’s my sword now. And the person telling me I can’t use it because it belongs to my enemy and I have to give it back to them sounds quite a bit like an enemy themselves.

^^ god that analogy

The other thing about the word “queer” is that almost everyone I’ve seen opposed to it have been cis, binary gays and lesbians. Not wanting it applied to yourself is fine, but I think people underestimate the appeal of vague, inclusive terminology when they already have language to easily and non-invasively describe themselves.

Saying “I’m gay/lesbian/bi” is pretty simple. Just about everyone knows what you mean, and you quickly establish yourself as a member of a community. Saying “I’m a trans nonbinary bi woman who’s celibate due to dysphoria and possibly on the ace spectrum”… not so much. You’re lucky to find anyone who understands even half of that, and explaining it requires revealing a ton of personal information. The appeal of “queer” is being able to identify yourself without profiling yourself. It’s welcoming and functional terminology to those who do not have the luxury of simplified language and occupy complicated identities. *That’s* why people use it - there are currently not alternatives to express the same sentiment.

It’s not people “oppressing themselves” or naively and irresponsibly using a word with loaded history. It’s easy to dismiss it as bad or unnecessary if you already have the luxury of language to comfortably describe yourself.

There’s another dimension that always, always gets overlooked in contemporary discussions about the word “queer:” class. The last paragraph here reminds me of a old quote: “rich lesbians are ‘sapphic,’ poor lesbians are ‘dykes’.” 

The reclaiming of the slur “queer” was an intensely political process, and people who came up during the 90s, or who came up mostly around people who did so, were divided on class and political lines on questions of assimilation into straight capitalist society. 

Bourgeois gays and lesbians already had “the luxury of language” to describe themselves - normalized through struggle, thanks to groups like the Gay Liberation Front.

Everyone else, from poor gays and lesbians to bi and trans people and so on, had no such language. These people were the ones for whom social/economic assimilation was not an option.

The only language left, the only word which united this particular underclass, was “queer.” “Queer” came to mean an opposition to assimilation - to straight culture, capitalism, patriarchy, and to upper class gays and lesbians who wanted to throw the rest of us under the bus for a seat at that table - and a solidarity among those marginalized for their sexuality/gender id/presentation. 

(Groups which reclaimed “queer,” like Queer Patrol (armed against homophobic violence), (Queers) Bash Back! (action and theory against fascism, homophobia, and transphobia), and Queerbomb (in response to corporate/state co-optation of mainstream Gay Pride), were “ultraleft,” working-class, anti-capitalist, and functioned around solidarity and direct action.)

The contemporary discourse around “queer” as a reclaimed-or-not slur both ignores and reproduces this history. The most marginalized among us, as OP notes, need this language. The ones who have problems with it are, generally, among those who have language - or “community,” or social/economic/political support - of their own.

Oh hey look it’s the story of my growing up.

All of this is true.

This is also a very educational response because it takes apart the question in a very useful way. A good exercise for those of you who are interested in rhetoric and logic in discourse.

It’s also a good insight into the motivations and psychology of people when they send this type of messages. It’s couched as a personal attack on you (and it is!) but behind that is a person who is working through stuff badly, and trying to assign the blame for that to a different person (you). By studying that, you can understand more about the Discourse and the motivations behind it. It can also help to heal you (and others) from attacks of this type. When I read the initial ask, it made my body flinch: I felt that I myself was being publicly attacked by a strange and hurtful person, and that I had to defend myself, flooded with instinctive responses. Seeing the blogger’s thoughtful response calmed me.