Your identity is a slur
I’ve been really preoccupied mentally with this ‘queer is a slur’ thing going around. I’ve seen a lot of ppl explaining the histories behind queer and its reclamation by queer folks, but I wanted to riff a little bit about the reasons, for me, that reclamation makes sense as a reaction in the first place.
When I was a young gay, growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, I remember there being one slur I heard a lot that I don’t really hear anymore. I don’t know if this was just an Alabama thing, but pretty much every gay person I knew had heard or used this word at some point and lots of str8 folks used it too: flamer.
It was short for ‘flamboyant’–used primarily to describe gay men. I cannot even begin to describe to you my loathing for this word. Not only did I just fundamentally think it sounded stupid, I hated that: (1) it was consistently used to gender-police gay men, because of course acting flamboyant was all about not being sufficiently masculine; (2) the idea that to be acceptable queer folks need to hide their queer ways and act like str8s is distasteful; (3) str8 ppl would sometimes mis-define by claiming that it was because “gay people would burn in hell”; (4) gay men used it against each other as much as str8 ppl used it against gay men.
One of my best friends back then was a guy named Josh. Big, cuddly, sweet, I-dare-you-to-no- love-this-guy Josh. There was nothing particularly effete about Josh’s appearance, but he was not remotely interested in the trappings of masculinity; one of his many affectionately given nick-names was “Spirit Sparkles.” Josh often referred to himself as a flamer–he took a lot of pride and pleasure in the term. Sometimes he would introduce himself that way to other gay kids we met. It was a really aggressive stance, because it flipped the tables on anyone who wanted to use the term pejoratively.
What I mean to say is that in a situation where one person called another a flamer as a derogatory term, you’d have to pick the term apart and point out all the things wrong with it: “Hey, you shouldn’t use that word because it implies that there’s something wrong with acting gay and anyway how does someone act gay that doesn’t make any sense, and also it sort of implies that men who have feminine attributes are wrong and that’s gross.” On the other hand, to embrace the term was to signal that everything deemed ‘bad’ by its use as a slur was in fact a source of pride. Moreover, it put the other person in the position of having to say what was wrong with being flamboyant. In this way, this act of reclamation was a Gordian knot solution–rather than untangle the term, reclamation allowed Josh to cut through all the bullshit.
One of the persistent problems with terminology in the queer community is that there are no words for us that haven’t been at one time or another a slur because for an enormous chunk of our history in Western culture the dictionary definition of who we are was itself imbued with negativity. Even the word homosexual was a pathologized medical term for a psychological disorder until 1974. In this context, reclaiming slurs as markers of pride is one of the only courses of action open to us: and, in fact, this is one of the key concepts in Pride parades. They sprung up in the wake of the 1969 Christopher Street Riots as an explicit way of saying to str8 communities: these people you denigrate the most (drag queens, transgender individuals, POC) in the gay community are a source of pride for us. We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going anywhere.
My identity is a slur. What I do and what I am are offensive to people. I cannot escape this, but I can embrace it. I can take pride in the very aspects of myself that others find perverse. I can–and I do.
(via windbladess)
