A Glance Like Sunlight

Then I realized

I see a lot of white cis queers calling for more cops at Pride events right now. I’ve already seen them, walking through Boystown in Chicago, armed police silently watching us in their bullet proof vests. We forget that this is not comforting for a lot of the most vulnerable members of our community.

Most Pride events won’t be attacked. Honestly, as afraid as we are, most likely, this isn’t going to happen to us. Most Pride events are going to go off without anyone mass murdering us.

The thing I’ve noticed is that when cops go in expecting a fight, but don’t get one, they get bored. When cops get bored, they go looking for a fight, and they find it with people of color, and with trans/gnc people, and with sex workers. 

And make no mistake, these are often the people doing the most for the queer community, the most radical, the most fired up. The most vulnerable members of our community are stuck in this place where they face a threat from both armed gunmen and cops. Bringing in more cops actually increases the likelihood that they’ll face trouble because again, these events have a 99.9% chance of not being attacked by homophobic citizens with guns, but now they have an increased likelihood of an altercation with police.

White cis queers, we have the privilege to not be bothered by this, but let’s not revel in this privilege. Don’t create a safe space for yourself at the expense of queer PoC. Reject increased police presence. Don’t trust them. Watch them. Protect our PoC, trans/gnc, sex worker community members from them. Don’t let more injustice happen so you can feel personally safe from a boogeyman.

She posted a picture of herself at a gay club when she was a "straight" teen, and said even though she didn't "belong" she felt safe and welcomed there--and I think that's a feeling that a lot of us have experienced and are kind of reeling from right now. That a safe space, a place where we were /welcomed/ unconditionally, was targeted exactly because we thought it was safe.

Someone scolded her and said that she definitely *didn't belong* there, and shame on her for talking about it and co-opting the queer community's pain. And Mara kind of gently talked around the edges of coming out and said yes, I know, it's my pain too, that's my point. The commenter scolded her again, saying that "allies" don't get it, and that Mara was out of line for sharing her story. And Mara finally said, "I'm more than just an ally; read between the lines." Her comment about the Kinsey scale came even later.

I mean, it wasn't "hey stop talking about these dead queers and pay attention to me." It was a queer person in mourning, who was attacked for not being queer enough to mourn--so she came out.

Not when used as a self-identification, and not when used as an umbrella term within the community, at least.

See, here’s the thing: The most common identifier used by bi, pan, and trans people to describe their sexuality? Queer.

Given that multiple studies have shown that bi people alone comprise about half the community, that makes it by far the most common term we use to describe ourselves.

What’s more, it’s not just an identifier: it’s a rallying cry. It’s a banner the whole community has assembled under forever. “We’re here, we’re queer” is a cliché for a reason. It’s a statement of power, and of pride - yes, we’re weird. We don’t fit into the “acceptable” categories cisheteronormative society gives us. And that’s a good thing. It’s a call to demolish those “acceptable” boxes, to build a world we’re all part of.

Its rejection is a relatively recent move by the same homonationalism that brought us “Bi people don’t belong,” the thrilling sequel “Trans people don’t belong,” and the stunning conclusion “Ace people don’t belong.” It’s a deliberate strategy employed by respectability politicians seeking a seat at the table - taking the work we’ve put in and distancing themselves from us so they can tell the straights “We deserve your respect because we’re just like you! We even hate queers!”

(And don’t think it’s a coincidence that the community suddenly forgot the massive, massive overlap between “queer” and “poly” when building the very self-conscious image of two clean-cut upper-middle-class smiling young professional men or women either. Anything that wasn’t “respectable” enough had to go. My deepest thanks to the person who pointed this out.)

In the rush for our place in an oppressive hell, we’ve lost our revolutionary edge, lost our fire, and lost a lot of what drove us in the first place. Fuck. That.

I’ve never seen “q slur” used before Tumblr, and even that only in the last maybe two years. I’m not playing the whole “you kids turn everything into a trigger” game, that’s not the point. My point is that almost uniformly older LGBTQ+ people on this website associate “queer” with empowerment, and it’s teenagers and early 20-somethings (who are almost the same age group as me, I’m 27) constructing this idea that it has always only been a slur, that it’s more prevalent than any other slurs still in use, and that this is somehow the “historically correct” view of the term and everyone using queer is ignorant of history. Which is just not true.

So anyway, here are some great functions of “queer” that aren’t replicated by any other term:

1) Wide relevance. Queer can be related to gender, sexuality, or both.

2) Opacity. It can be a stand-in for some other term (gay, bisexual, trans, etc), or it can actually mean something else altogether! Something that isn’t fully covered by any of those categories!

3) Queer could, therefore, actually function as an umbrella term (yeah, I know I can’t get away with that in the present climate, thanks for that). Calling everything gay, as has become the norm on Tumblr, isn’t only sticking it to The Straights ™; it’s also sticking it to all the LGBTQ+ people who don’t identify as gay specifically (not to mention straight trans people), and who never see ourselves brought up in casual conversation anymore. It’s back to “gay rights” style language.

And you know what, of course it is, because “LGBTQ+” and other versions of the abbreviation aren’t catchy. “Gay” is catchy. “Queer” is catchy. But for some reason, gee I wonder why it could be, “the community” has decided to eliminate precisely the term that does actually by default encompass a wide range of identities. And replace it with one that again gives primacy to “gay” as the default descriptor, as if the rest of us just don’t matter or should be happy with being “obliquely included” (that is to say, erased). We’ve come up with all this specialized terminology for gender and sexuality, but when it comes to being actually talked about aside from specifically describing yourself in an intro to your blog, it’s underused.

I could go on about how targeting “queer” disproportionately affects MGA and trans/nb people, including people with multiple marginalizations, who especially are likely to have a problem with all these discrete one-dimensional categories and feel that “queer” expresses something the other terms can’t. But that’s already covered in the OP under good old respectability politics.

Queer was widely used at that point among LGBT+ people to refer to ourselves and our community, and while you’d look askance at a straight person using that word, it was most definitely acceptable to call another LGBT+ person queer.

And now y’all are telling me “Queer” isn’t an acceptable umbrella term to use and it just feels like another way you’re using subtle language policing to tell me that really the only people you want in your community are gold-star LG folks. 

Those of us who like the word queer because it accurately reflects our misfit status are basically being told that this self-identifier is dirty and wrong, this is no longer the “queer community”, and the message yet again is that we don’t really belong.

I get it if someone doesn’t want to be called queer, and I would never call another person queer against their will but holy hell please stop acting like it’s common knowledge that queer can’t be used as an umbrella term for our community when it was for DECADES

When I first started participating in any kind of LGBTQ+ stuff online (so, 10 years ago), “queer” was by far the most common descriptor. It was pretty much agreed it had been reclaimed enough to be safe (I mean, show me an active slur that has academic disciplines named after it?) and people seemed much more keen to explore the ambiguity the term offers, rather than sticking with predefined categories. By “q-slur” logic, we should’ve been much less accepting of it back then if we simultaneously believe that LGBTQ+ rights are advancing over time, but the opposite is true.

So I would say that the current stigmatization of queer is based on two things: 1) reactionary essentialism (seeing “queer” as too dangerous for the more clear-cut categories), and 2) respectability politics.

Now by taking away “queer”, we don’t have any other term that’s both catchy (no version of the abbreviation is) and broad enough to actually be inclusive. Gay is not an umbrella term. It always has a default connotation that’s very specific. It only reminds me of all the time I wasted on bad gay-only discourse when I was first questioning my own identity, and for this reason it took ages to arrive at the conclusion that I’m just attracted to multiple genders and also trans without dysphoria (because the other bullshit I had to contend with was the truscum narrative of transness). So, gay is not a safe term for me. It doesn’t describe me and if I used it, it would actually misgender my own relationship. I’m not doing that for any of you, sorry.

Do you know who the majority of the people who still use “queer” are? Trans and MGA. Yet again, we have a political line that privileges cis LG people who are fine with binary categories over the most routinely erased parts of the community. Of course.

This, I imagine, is also why so many bi/pan and trans/nonbinary people aren’t against aces being included. Chances are most of us, at least those who are 25+ or so, have experiences like this, with either being actively policed out or just unable to find the right identifiers for ages because of the stigma and general ignorance surrounding them.

And now you’re telling us we HAVE TO use gay, which isn’t a functional umbrella term, because queer suddenly isn’t acceptable based on this new logic? Do you even hear yourselves?

–

“But!” I can already hear the gatekeepers protest, “This all relies on a bunch of personal anecdotes!”

And Queer, more so than other words, felt inclusive of people who, at the time, referred to themselves as “genderqueer” as well as people outside the binary, as well as bisexuals, who couldn’t claim gay or lesbian.

It was, at the time, being reclaimed at a time when all the words were being used as slurs, so there was a real reason to reclaim them.

When you campaign against words like “queer”, to those of us in the older generations, what it looks like you’re doing is trying to roll the nomenclature back to the bad old days when cisgender gay men were treated as the only “real” members of the community, and everybody else was lumped together as this peripheral pack of weirdos who were expected to be slobberingly grateful to their betters just to be acknowledged at all.

Hell, I clearly recall a time when the leaders of mainstream gay rights activism would routinely castigate even lesbians as parasites and invaders - and be applauded for doing so. It’s difficult to overstate just how deep it went.

It’s a movie by an able-bodied person about a disabled person of 2 years choosing the kill themselves and give everything they own to an able bodied person they’ve known for 6 months. This decision hinges on the fact that this able bodied person can “be happy” with their able bodied partner when the disabled person is finally gone

The actor who plays the disabled person is able bodied. The entire plot of the movie revolves around how being disabled affects able bodied persons. The lead actor did an AMA and refused to take any questions from disabled persons.

Do not see this movie. It is horrible and truly a hot mess of a film. Go see Deadpool again instead.

… I’m bi and trans. I’m not even either ace or aro, just bi and trans.

I also haven’t seen a single argument that makes sense to me against any of those terms, other than I guess that the ace/aro community didn’t know the term allosexual has a specific unrelated meaning in Québécoise and is trying to find a better term to use.

As somebody who you would think “counts” as being in the queer community: I love the word queer. I think it’s important and powerful. I’ve been in the queer community for 20 years and the only place I’ve seen a movement away from that term is here, on Tumblr, very recently.

Like, just as with terms like lesbian and bisexual, there are always people who hate the word and prefer something different personally. But the community as a whole has been using the term queer consistently for decades because it’s inclusive in a way that gay and LGBT are not.

I think this “q slur” subculture is a real shame, because the net effect is that people don’t have an inclusive term, and immediately start excluding people who have always been a part of the community. Not only aces/aros, either. Like, when was the last time you saw somebody remember to include intersex people??

I also think it ends up being biphobic and transphobic, not intentionally, but in its effects.

Because more than half of trans people use the term queer to identify their sexuality.

And I don’t know what the statistics are for bi+ people, but a VERY high number of us use the term “queer” instead of bi because they feel more comfortable with it.

It’s the only word that works for a lot of people who don’t fit into a gender binary, either in their own gender identity or in their sexual orientation.

And in a world where we have queer studies programs and queer history courses and Queer As Folk and Queer Eye For The Straight Guy and in which this is used very consistently in the LGBTQIA media to be inclusive, it sucks that there’s this movement trying to get away from it.

It especially sucks that as far as I can tell, it stems from second wave/radfem politics dragging us backward. Like. There’s a reason that they don’t want us using a term that’s very inclusive of, and useful to, the bi and trans communities.

New rule: anybody who doesn’t know enough history to know that aces/aros have been here and contributing to the community for fucking ever has to sit down and listen.

means that they probably dump anon hate in other people-they-think-are-ace’s boxes.

Like, that’s pretty fucked up.

The split model of attraction is “oppressive” because reasons.

It’s not the first time, it’s not the last time. It’s an old and awful argument, and here’s a primer in it.

People say the split model of attraction is homophobic because romantically-non-SGA people with SGA sexual attraction don’t want to date gaily, and romantically-SGA people with non-SGA sexual attraction don’t want to fuck gaily. 

Since aro/ace-spec people are the most common users of the split model of attraction (an possibly the originators, I’m unsure), it’s used to bash aro/ace-spec people and our communities pretty aggressively, though honestly anyone who is queer but isn’t perioriented SGA gets into some kind of splash damage from this. 

So in this case any use of “____romantic” labelling is considered homophobic and bad.

However, of course, it would be MGA people using the split model who receive the most aggressive attacks because it’s seen both as evidence that bi people are inherently homophobic and have oppressive power over perioriented lesbian and gay people, but also as proof that bi people are liars who are faking their MGA for attention or whatever. So “biromantic” is the specific label that gets the most shit, in this front. 

1) There is no catch-all term for LGBTQ+ in common usage now, and so people start using “gay” that way even though that pretty definitely has a specific connotation that then serves to erase everyone who isn’t specifically SGA, not to mention all gender-based “queer” identities.

2) There is no term that can be applied as broadly as “queer”, covering both sexuality and gender depending on context. There’s also no way to express that purposefully unspecified quality that is an integral part of many queer people’s identities, including mine. And when we try to describe it some other way (nonbinary trans pansexual, in my case), the precise terminology we adapted is ROUTINELY IGNORED and just replaced with gay. Which is neither accurate for the situation nor a useful umbrella term.

3) Unequivocal slurs don’t generally get entire academic fields named after them. What we’re seeing is that it’s deemed okay to lose meanings that don’t have an equivalent to them because of what? Respectability politics.

Now, I’m not advocating to call anyone queer who doesn’t want that term associated with them. But this idea that it shouldn’t be reclaimed, or that it’s somehow okay to call people something else without their consent as long as it’s not “queer”, that’s all pretty new.

Like honestly. If you have the time to police this, then your focus is petty and aimed at people who are already being erased all the time.

this is a very good point. and now, people frequently accuse aces/aros of “deliberately using words that harm us when we’ve asked you not to” for using “allosexual.”

you are right, you guys genuinely will never win with those folks for two reasons:

1. the argument i see against every term for “non-asexual” is “this is categorizing us as sexual and therefore it is hypersexualizing us and therefore it is homophobic”. like even if you were like, “allosexual now only refers to straight people, we will call everyone else non-ace lesbians, non-ace bi people, etc.” people would be like “you’re basically calling us SEXUAL LESBIANS why are you such lesbophobic trash”

2. they’ve decided to project their abusers onto you, and you couldn’t change their minds even if there were mass ace executions in the streets. they’d be like “look at the heteros turning on each other lmao finally”

like it’s just

who are living on caffeine and prescription pills

whose time is filled with doctors appointments instead of business meetings.

here’s to the the twenty-something’s who are fucking tired