are you an impractical footwear even when it’s incredibly inconvenient gay, a practical footwear even when it’s incredibly inappropriate gay or a clunky boots gay who inhabits both spaces at once
#this is ‘i hate shoes’ gay erasure you’re absolutely right if you are a barefoot gay you are valid
As I am sure any cat owner will be able to tell you, someone else putting you in a box is entirely different from getting into a box yourself.
This is the most brilliant, concise, cute, and disarming response to the “but laaaaaaaabels are baaaaaaad” argument that gets used against people trying to self-identify as something as a way of making sure their boundaries are understood and respected.
no offense but yall gotta stop acting like its the end of the world if a bi girl ends up with a guy
but then there’s no cute lesbian-ness and that’s what makes it so gr8
honestly shut up
do these ppl realize that bi girls are actual people who aren’t getting into relationships for the sole purpose of performing good politics / cuteness / adequate proof of their same gender attraction / whatever else you’re judging them on 2day.. bi women’s relationships are Not For You, bi women shouldn’t have to wake up daily and think “how do I make my personal interactions with other people good and pure in the eyes of others.”
one of the most damaging things about biphobia is that girls attracted to multiple genders end up constantly and guiltily analyzing their personal (and I’m gonna repeat, personal) relationships for ideological purity, whether or not they’re performing LGBT-ness hard enough, etc etc, and that’s not at all conducive to a healthy relationship. when u have bi girls spending more time thinking of whether or not their relationship is good enough for others than, idk, if their relationships are healthy and loving and fulfilling or not, that’s an issue.
lesbians / bi women who primarily or only date women are going to perceive w/w relationships as more relatable, cute, or refreshing to see. that’s a reality and a personal set of feelings/reactions. but why would you think it’s even remotely ok to take that and hurl it at bi women in the form of over-scrutinizing their (once again personal)relationships to the point where it’s dehumanizing, why would you think it would be ok to tell bi women things like “aw but now u don’t have the cuteness of a w/w relationship” which directly imply that you see bi women’s relationships as yours for consumption and judgement??
besides, saying u approve of bi women in w/w relationships more because “it’s cuter” is such a fetishy way of looking at w/w relationships and lesbian/bi women in general, I can’t tell if the commenter is a lesbian/bi woman or not but if not that makes it even creepier, especially the way they talked about “lesbian relationships” being cuter like.. that shit harms and fetishizes both lesbians and bi women, knock it off.
while we’re on the topic of “inappropriate ways people approach bi women about their relationships”: bi women partnered with men do receive some conditional benefits from that which women partnered with women do not, it is ok to talk about this. it is NOT ok to pick apart bi women’s personal relationships to the point where their personhood is impossible to see in it all.
also, to address another common one, yes there are higher statistical likelihoods of bi women being hurt in certain ways in m/w relationships due to misogyny. it is ok to talk about this (especially when the discussion is led by bi women). it is absolutely NOT appropriate however to tell bi women how disappointing and a bad choice it is that they got into a personal relationship with a man (seriously guys, that rhetoric implies that it’s the bi woman’s fault if she’s hurt because “oh, well she went there, she chose 2 date a man” which is.. frankly a horrible way to respond to a woman being mistreated)
This post means a lot to me. It’s become difficult for me to not look at my relationships in a political way, I’ve been with people who made me feel like my personal life is political and it’s such an awful feeling.
I’m a qpoc, This is what I’m talking about when white people straight wash POC.
@hijabby may I hop on this post to make a point? You’re quite a bit younger than me, which isn’t a problem or a bad thing, it just means you will have still been in kindergarten or not even born yet when the events I am about to discuss took place and given the nature of queer history, it’s totally possible I learned stuff that’s faded into ephemera for your generation.
QUEER WAS THE ACCEPTABLE, ACADEMIC TERM FOR “LGBTQIA” IN THE EARLY-TO-MID 2000s.
I took classes in Queer Literature. We discussed Queer History. Some of my professors–who were themselves gay, lesbian, and bisexual, mind you–referred to historical figures as queer on the basis that those figures did not exist in societies that had a modern-day understanding of sexuality, and so trying to box them into modern labels is an exercise in futility. I went to marches where we screamed “we’re here, we’re queer, we want our civil rights.”
All of this, by the way, spawns out of the Genderqueer and ACT UP movements of the 1990s; they’re the ones who invented the chant on which the above chant was based, the one you may have heard elsewhere: “we’re here, we’re queer, get over it.” I’m proud of my own part in queer history, but those people, the ones who created the AIDS quilt and the die-ins and the fierce demands for same-sex marriage so they could visit partners dying in the hospital, they’re the real heroes. And they called themselves queer.
And?
Most of them were not white.
I am. The radical activism of my generation looks very different from generations past because, I’m sorry to say, white queer folks sat back and let queer folks of color do the hard part, and then we grabbed the baton and charged over the first big finish line while the sportscasters talked about the stunning race we’d run. I’m not sorry to be an activist or to be working in my own generation, but I’m very deeply sorry that queer activism en masse has widely ignored the nonwhite, noncis people who got us where we are.
“Queer” has more uses than just being a slur that was reclaimed 30+ years ago. Queer is a useful term if, say, you’re 15 and you’re not sure if you’re asexual or a late bloomer, but you don’t want to just say “oh yeah, I’m gay/straight.” Queer is a useful term if, like me, you escaped a fundamentalist church and your whole life has been defined by strict labels, and you just want out. Queer is a useful term if you’re from a country where gender doesn’t fit a Western binary but you want a quick term to describe yourself to Western people.
And do you know what else queer is?
Queer is hated by TERFs because it encompasses trans people.
Because it embraces aroace people.
Because it says “you are here, you are welcome, you belong” to people who say “I know I’m not straight, but I don’t know what I AM.” What you are is queer, and queer is enough. Queer is the place you can sit, rest, and figure it out at your own pace.
TERFs started the narrative of “queer is only a slur, has never been anything else, and was never reclaimed and you should never ever say it ever” in order to gatekeep our community. When you try to deny this term, YOU ARE DOING THE WORK OF TERFS.
Queer is not a slur. Queer is a reclaimed word that is of huge help to people across the community, but most especially to our fellows who aren’t “just” LGB, and to the nonwhite members of our community who do not fit into the gender binary.
Stop. STOP. Stop listening to TERFs who pretend nothing of queer rights existed between 1880 and 2015. Stop being ahistorical and disenfranchising.
We’re here, we’re queer, get the fuck over it.
In addition to all of this, The Bi community in the 80s and 90s used Queer a lot as well because the word Bisexual was less tolerable so to still feel a part of the community they rightfully were a part of, they used Queer. Granted, this was when they were rallying and making sure people saw “Bisexual” on posters and pins but it made gay people uncomfortable and not every Bisexual could handle that.
So when I see things like “Q Slur” what it looks like is the active invalidation of lgbt+ people who find safe haven in a word that is all-encompassing without specification. When I was confused and having panic attacks over the fact no label fit me - Queer saved me.
I think people have a right to choose not to use a reclaimed word for themselves, marginalized people get that choice. But to demand NO one use it often comes with the implication of an unawareness to the history behind it and how our community fought tooth and nail for that word to be reclaimed for us to use - decades ago.
The other thing about the word “queer” is that almost everyone I’ve seen opposed to it have been cis, binary gays and lesbians. Not wanting it applied to yourself is fine, but I think people underestimate the appeal of vague, inclusive terminology when they already have language to easily and non-invasively describe themselves.
Saying “I’m gay/lesbian/bi” is pretty simple. Just about everyone knows what you mean, and you quickly establish yourself as a member of a community. Saying “I’m a trans nonbinary bi woman who’s celibate due to dysphoria and possibly on the ace spectrum”… not so much. You’re lucky to find anyone who understands even half of that, and explaining it requires revealing a ton of personal information. The appeal of “queer” is being able to identify yourself without profiling yourself. It’s welcoming and functional terminology to those who do not have the luxury of simplified language and occupy complicated identities. *That’s* why people use it - there are currently not alternatives to express the same sentiment.
It’s not people “oppressing themselves” or naively and irresponsibly using a word with loaded history. It’s easy to dismiss it as bad or unnecessary if you already have the luxury of language to comfortably describe yourself.
There’s another dimension that always, always gets overlooked in contemporary discussions about the word “queer:” class. The last paragraph here reminds me of a old quote: “rich lesbians are ‘sapphic,’ poor lesbians are ‘dykes’.”
The reclaiming of the slur “queer” was an intensely political process, and people who came up during the 90s, or who came up mostly around people who did so, were divided on class and political lines on questions of assimilation into straight capitalist society.
Bourgeois gays and lesbians already had “the luxury of language” to describe themselves - normalized through struggle, thanks to groups like the Gay Liberation Front.
Everyone else, from poor gays and lesbians to bi and trans people and so on, had no such language. These people were the ones for whom social/economic assimilation was not an option.
The only language left, the only word which united this particular underclass, was “queer.” “Queer” came to mean an opposition to assimilation - to straight culture, capitalism, patriarchy, and to upper class gays and lesbians who wanted to throw the rest of us under the bus for a seat at that table - and a solidarity among those marginalized for their sexuality/gender id/presentation.
(Groups which reclaimed “queer,” like Queer Patrol (armed against homophobic violence), (Queers) Bash Back! (action and theory against fascism, homophobia, and transphobia), and Queerbomb (in response to corporate/state co-optation of mainstream Gay Pride), were “ultraleft,” working-class, anti-capitalist, and functioned around solidarity and direct action.)
The contemporary discourse around “queer” as a reclaimed-or-not slur both ignores and reproduces this history. The most marginalized among us, as OP notes, need this language. The ones who have problems with it are, generally, among those who have language - or “community,” or social/economic/political support - of their own.
Quoiromantic is a romantic orientation on the aromantic spectrum that describes people who cannot differentiate between platonic and romantic attraction, cannot define romantic attraction and therefore are not sure if they experience it, experience attraction somewhere between romantic and platonic, or want to be in a queerplatonic relationship. It’s also known as WTFromantic.
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.
![vaspider:
“ queerlection:
“ [Image description - Image of the purple queer chevrons with the text: QUEER AS IN FUCK YOU. End description.]
”
*SCREAMS IN UNFETTERED JOY*
I love itttt I love it I love ittttt
”](http://68.media.tumblr.com/34050ea715e2452317af8b870887fa66/tumblr_oetkpu4kHM1vc4v9co1_500.png)
