1997

In this world, everybody’s horny. From bondage and pet play, to inflation and vore, it seems like people get off to just about anything. Well, that’s where I come in. My name is Cole, and I’m here to try and find the one thing that nobody is horny for. This is:

I didn’t know the kid that well and I didn’t have any classes with him so I never really talked to him that much. I knew his name. His name was Kevin. Sometimes I’d see him at parties on the weekends. He still had his baby bottle. He would fill it with beer and rum.

He dated my sister’s friend, Emily, for a little while. I had known Emily for a long time. She had been a friend of my sister’s since they were five or six. They were really good friends. She spent a lot of time at our house for sleepovers and stuff. Sometimes she would pee the bed, but I never made fun of her for it. I think most older brothers would have loved the opportunity to make fun of their sister’s friend for peeing the bed and I think she really appreciated that I never mentioned it even though I definitely knew about it because after the sixth or seventh time, my parents started paying me to clean everything up instead of having to do it themselves.

I asked Emily why Kevin only ever drank out of a baby bottle and she said that she didn’t know. They had only been dating for a very short time at that point and she didn’t want to bring it up and offend him or anything. I asked her to tell me if she ever found out. They broke up right after that and I kind of forgot about it because Kevin stopped going to school. I don’t know if he transferred or dropped out, but I never saw him at lunch or any parties after that.

I hadn’t thought about him in a long time, but Emily happened to mention him while she was over at our house recently and I immediately remembered the baby bottle thing.

“Did you ever find out why he drank out of that bottle?” I asked.

“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella - gay rights, gay marriage, gay community - when discussing the entire community.

Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.

Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.

Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.

It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.

The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”

There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.

Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.” 

This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet. 

Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it. 

Queer is full of the types of people who don’t make good poster children for the middle class assimilationist cis gay couple just looking to get married and have some kids. Queer forces us to realize the fight didn’t end with gay marriage, and cis gays are gonna have to step out of the spotlight sometimes, and realize cis gays have privilege, and fight for someone with less. Trans people, nonbinary people, people in nontraditional relationship structures, aromantics, asexuals, sex workers. Heck more and more bisexual people these days are switching over to queer because the amount of biphobia in the so-called lgBt community is so alienating, and also because so many of us feel the term bisexual reinforces a false gender dichotomy and we’re too tired of jokes about kitchenware to use pansexual.

Text of a manifesto originally passed out by people marching with the ACT UP contingent in the New York Gay Pride Day parade, 1990. -

An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred. (We have been carefully taught to hate ourselves.) And now of course it means fighting a virus as well, and all those homo-haters who are using AIDS to wipe us off the face of the earth. Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It’s not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It’s not about executive directors, privilege and elitism. It’s about being on the margins, defining ourselves; it’s about gender-f— and secrets, what’s beneath the belt and deep inside the heart; it’s about the night. Being queer is “grass roots” because we know that everyone of us, every body, every c—, every heart and a– and d— is a world of pleasure waiting to be explored. Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility. We are an army because we have to be. We are an army because we are so powerful. (We have so much to fight for; we are the most precious of endangered species.) And we are an army of lovers because it is we who know what love is. Desire and lust, too. We invented them. We come out of the closet, face the rejection of society, face firing squads, just to love each other! Every time we f—, we win. We must fight for ourselves (no else is going to do it) and if in that process we bring greater freedom to the world at large then great. (We’ve given so much to that world: democracy, all the arts, the concepts of love, philosophy and the soul, to name just a few of the gifts from our ancient Greek Dykes, Fags.) Let’s make every space a Lesbian and Gay space. Every street a part of our sexual geography. A city of yearning and then total satisfaction. A city and a country where we can be safe and free and more. We must look at our lives and see what’s best in them, see what is queer and what is straight and let that straight chaff fall away! Remember there is so, so little time. And I want to be a lover of each and every one of you. Next year, we march naked.

I came of age after they discovered HIV and before they discovered how to treat it.   THAT is how old I am.

I worked and marched with friends and loved ones and the banner that brought everyone together was “Queer.”   The word doesn’t need to be reclaimed.  It has been reclaimed.  Before a lot of y’all were ever born. 

Today’s Valid Character of the Day is: