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Why Queer?
Things Change,
Sometimes for the Better
Why Queer?
by Joel Nichols
Queer is an all-inclusive term to present a united group of people who are not straight. Queer can mean gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and any other people who participate in sexual practices that are not cultural sexual norms, which can include transvestites and fetishists, asexuals and pansexuals, or people who are “sexually” straight, but politically aligned with the queer movement.
It is used widely among younger non-straights, especially ones who are politically active. At my university, it is omnipresent as the catch-all term. Our Queer Alliance was created in 1993 after the Wesleyan Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Alliance was discontinued. It was a reorganization of GLBT life and an updating of the terminology and the activism that was taking place there. Queer Alliance was formed to deal with political issues. In an informal poll of some Wesleyan students, queer was defined as, “not-straight”, “non-conformist gender identity.” The word incorporates politics and culture as well as sexual attraction.
Another gay man said to me, “when I was young, we were protesting in the streets against being called queer.” Linguist William Leap notes a contrast in that being called queer as an insult separates the queer person from what is accepted and “normal”, but that calling oneself queer reverses the feeling by locating the speaker who calls him- or herself queer at the center of a “normal” area. The preference for queer is not entirely generational, as the older gay man’s comment suggested to me. A man at least a generation older than me defended queer as label for us to a group made up a mix of his generation to mine. It is more common in younger and more academic circles. The man agrees with Leap that the best way to diffuse the pain of a word is to use it yourself.
The history of the word endears it to me. First of all, its morphology is beautiful. Variously appearing in English between 1508 and the present as queir, queyr, que(e)re, quer, and queer, its origin is unknown. It appears to be a Germanic cognate, evolving from a word in Middle High German that is related to the English word “thwart.” The development is plausibly geographical. In German quer (whose old form is twer) means oblique, cross, perverse, or diagonal. It is easy to see how one could have “thwarted” an attack by moving “diagonally across” a battleground. I like that the German cognate literally means “not straight.” The modern English form of queer is beautiful to me because it starts with q, which is comparatively rare in English. Not even 10% of English words start with q, making queer a member of a unique set of words. Secondly, its two e’s remind me of a gay pair because they look the same and are right next to each other. The r at the end gives the word a little growl, which a rough political edge to the smooth “e”-sounds.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, queer first appeared in 1922 with its gay meaning, namely a homosexual man. The journal of American English American Speech lists it as referring to women first in 1971. There is some entertaining linguistic curiosity surrounding the word, due to a more obscure nautical meaning. The Dictionary of Sailor’s Slang defines the term queer fella as a sailor who is eccentric. It is not clear if there is a sexual implication, but to those of us with sailor fetishes, there is always hope.
Of course, the problem is that all of these early references to queer are pejorative. The first one is in a definition of juvenile delinquents and the second is from the American Tramp and Underworld Slang. It continues to be a word of attack against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transpeople, asexuals, tomboys, sissies, and anyone else who does not fit the norm of straight, married-sex behavior. For me, because attackers group all the “queers” together, Queers should band together under the word and fight back. If someone throws a rock at me, it hurts. If I’m already holding the rock they want to throw, I’m safe. Queer joins all the people who do not identify as straight together and does not enforce rigid gender roles and expectations. Bisexual does not cut it for me. To me, bisexual covers some of the gray area between gay and straight, but does not include the man who is primarily attracted to men but sometimes is attracted to women, for example. Queer allows the fluidity of sexuality to be expressed; boys can be faggots and still get screwed by girls.
There is a continuum of degree of reclamation. Dyke is far more accepted by lesbians than faggot is by gay men, for example. Queer is not an exception and is problematic. It can unfortunately be an academic and elitist term that is used by white people who have the economic and social advantage of being able to cut across the norm. It is problematic that many people of color do not identify with queer. There also will be people who cannot reconcile the memory of childhood taunts with the freedom of adult sexual expression, after all, there are still people who prefer to be categorized like a disease with the medical and psychiatric designation of the 1950’s, homosexual. There are, though, many of us who demand to be included as queer in the alphabet soup of sexual identity.
Joel Nichols studies German at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He grew up in Brandon, VT and is an intern at Out in the Mountains for the summer.