today I met a professor who does queer studies. she told me that her teenage gay son yelled at her recently for using the word “queer” in describing her discipline and demanded to know how the university “could get away with calling it that.”

so of course she’s baffled right, and asks him where on earth this is coming from. and he told her he read it on Tumblr. 

listen if you don’t want to be called queer and don’t want to be lumped in with folks who comprise the queer community, that’s fine. that’s totally fine. it is 100% okay. people are allowed to have complicated histories with that word. it’s a fraught signifier. it’s a mess and it’s allowed to be. 

what’s not cool is telling young LGBTQ+ people that queer is a slur in all contexts because now you are stripping away not just the language that we use to describe ourselves but also the language that creates the discipline that lets us study our own lives and our cultures. Queer studies has been a part of American academe since the 1970s (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask). “Queer” has been a functioning and largely unproblematic signifier in American academe since ten years before the AIDS crisis. If you don’t at least know that much, you have absolutely no business trying to educate LGBTQ+ youth about queer history.

Trying to censor the word queer from our collective cultural lexicon is 1) impossible. it’s here now. and 2) an erasure of our lineage of scholarship. I could spend all day lobbing criticisms at American academic culture and I do, but queers created space for ourselves in academe. We built a queer world inside the tower that tried its best to keep us out and now we have a place here. 

underpaid server: 

Tony: Well according to this history book I fucked my way through the entire population of New York and was the father of every second-generation superhero. Does that make me Zeus?