Passion Overloaded

anyway so fast fowards to when i became a waitress and one day this group of scrubbyass kids came in and i had 8 other tables with other people to look to but i overheard that one kid wanted a milkshake but he couldn’t afford it and the other kids offered to pay but he was like “nonono it’s fine” and i looked over and he just looked real run down and sad and stuff —- later it just so happened that our kitchen had a mixup so we had an extra shake and since it would just be dumped otherwise, i snuck it out to their table and gave it to him for free

and his friends were so fucking impressed by this they pooled every fucking cent they had i got a $50 tip and later his friend’s mom came in and said “i heard what you did for that boy” and gave me another 20 and offered me a better job working with her

Secrets lie deep within Jupiter, shrouded in the solar system’s strongest magnetic field and most lethal radiation belts. On July 4, 2016, our Juno spacecraft will plunge into uncharted territory, entering orbit around the gas giant and passing closer than any spacecraft before. Juno will see Jupiter for what it really is, but first it must pass the trial of orbit insertion. For more information: http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu.

They’re going to be posting stuff all weekend, including early approach photos. And: once Juno gets situated they’re going to let people vote where to point the camera.

Besides, look what it’s carrying—these adorable LEGO people: Jupiter (the Roman god), his wife Juno, and Galileo Galilei.

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.

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