Queer: Adjective: strange, odd, unnatural. Verb: to spoil or ruin something.
The word’s definition explains why qu**r is a slur against the gay community. The history of its use in the propagation of violence and hate is extensive, and yet over the last five years, it has become commonplace again for people to use it to describe us.
This is supposedly in the name of diversity.
This is supposedly due to its reclamation.
But the truth is, it is not the gay community that has okayed this.
It is the TQ+, a movement that we are constantly force-teamed with despite having no connection. A movement that encourages the use of qu**r to describe us and that is emblematic of the homophobic underpinning of what they fight for.
The TQ+ fights for gay eradication.
Every time they tell a gay person that same-sex attraction isn’t real, it’s trans bigotry; they are fighting for gay erasure.
Every time they trans wash our history, lying about what the fight was and who fought it, they fight for gay erasure.
Every time they cry bigotry when we say there is nothing wrong with us having our own same-sex rights community, they fight for gay erasure.
The TQ+ demands the word qu**r be used because the word gay fails to include them in our community, but that’s just it. The gay community is our community, to focus on and fight for same-sex people and same-sex rights. We are a community that, in 2023, still has no guaranteed codified civil rights. Every right we have is dependent upon three supreme court cases being upheld. If two got overturned tomorrow, the gay community in 35 states would be banned from obtaining a marriage license, and in 16 states, we would also be criminals. The TQ+ community would feel no impact because their rights are guaranteed, just as they have been for 200 years.
Yet when we, as the LGB, say, “don’t call us qu**r” or tell the TQ+, “you can have your own community, it just is not ours. Your issues have nothing to do with our fight,” we are silenced by the TQ+, by Gen Z, and by major news outlets. We are ignored and told we are bigots as our existence and culture continue to be erased.
Every time the TQ+ pushes for the use of the term “the qu**r community” instead of “the gay community,” they are fighting for our erasure by erasing the reality of who we are.
The TQ+ uses the word qu**r every day to fight for the erasure of the gay community, and in doing so, they are spewing a slur just as hateful as it was during the qu**r bashing era of the late 90s and early aughts.
The gay community is again fighting for the right to exist, and the increasingly common use of the word qu**r encouraged by a homophobic movement force teamed with the LGB community is our most aggressive opponent.
The TQ+ silences our voices with extreme violence and hatred, and their success is dependent upon people blindly seeking woke points and the willingness of the public to ignore gay voices.
Unfortunately, they are winning.
The LGB community has once again been driven underground, using pseudonyms, closed meetings, and hiding in the shadows out of fear of what will happen if we speak up.
Those who encourage the use of qu**r do so because they refuse even to allow the gay community its own community. Yet, the fact that within the so-called “LGBTQ+,” there is a gay community and a trans community shows that LGBTQ+ doesn’t exist.
There’s an LGB community and a TQ+ community, and that is how it should be; dysphoric identity, quirky dress, and heterosexual kinks and fetishes have nothing to do with same-sex attraction or rights. You are forcing the connection as a means of my erasure.
They force this connection as a means of making a mockery of what we’ve built, who we are, and what it means to be gay. The fact that heterosexuals with obscure kinks and people who identify as having multiple spirits living inside them are among those in the Q+ is emblematic of that effort. They are lumping us with everything we spent sixty years promising we aren’t, and they are doing it against our will at the risk of our rights, not theirs. And every time you say LGBTQ+ instead of LGB and TQ+ or replace gay with the word qu**r, you support that mission.
The gay community is the only marginalized group told that we are not allowed to have our own community. We are being used for an anti-gay and male entitlement movement to reach its ends under our name and our flag against our will.
They tell you the word has been reclaimed, but when a community reclaims a word, it is for us to use, not to be called, and not for others to authorize the use of on our account. No different than the word N*gg*r, some black people are okay with it, and some are not. Some rappers use it in media, and some don’t. Does that give anyone the right to refer to the black community as the n*gg*r community? Absolutely not.
The word qu**r for the gay community is no different, yet for some reason, the general public chooses to believe it is when the TQ+ community says so without the consent of the gay community.
We are not one.
The Q used to stand for questioning, an essential, safe space for gay youth. Now the Q stands for the TQ+ telling gay youth that everything is a spectrum and who they are is wrong because same-sex attraction is bigotry. Now gay youth’s option for figuring out who they are is to identify as a hateful slur that tells them they are non-binary, fluid, non-conforming, or anything other than homosexual because that does not exist. The impact of this shows in LGB youth to a terrifying degree.
The irony of this belief that TQ+ stands for diversity is that the neutrality of “non-binary” only exists if you believe stereotypes of women and men are valid. It only exists if you think you need a new box to be allowed to live outside those expression stereotypes because the only way you are a man or woman is if you fit them.
The very essence of this has been rejected by the gay community for decades. Yet, validating this misogynistic, homophobic view is now being celebrated as progress and propagated under the gay flag while our community is erased, attacked, and silenced.
The attacks on the LGB by the TQ+ are incessant.
And the verbal weapon being used in these attacks — the slur qu**r, just as it has been for decades.
The difference now is it is being sold as diversity, and when the LGB community speaks up, we are dismissed as a hateful minority. We aren’t.
We are the gay community.
We are fighting for our history, culture, community, and existence
— and don’t you dare call us queer.
by Elise