Queer vs Gay


The sexual orientation lexicon

This past Tuesday the Toronto Star published a story about the word "queer" losing its curse and becoming non-pejorative. Many people, mostly young, are using the word to mean any kind of sexual orientation outside of hard core heterosexual. It's a neat thing to be queer these days, something to admire.

I read this and realized that I too have come around to endorsing a word I used to hate not that long ago. At gay rights marches in the 70s I used to cringe when everyone else would chant "we're here, we're queer, get used to it!" Later, when the term became a politically correct label for "lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered/etc./etc." I appreciated its brevity but it still felt like an obscenity. Now, as I eagerly wait for the next episode of "Queer as Folk", it has been years since I've heard someone use the word in the context of condemnation.

There is an irony though, in the parallel evolution of the once friendly term "gay."

At the beginning of the twentieth century gay was used in trendy circles much the way queer is today. It could simply imply that someone enjoyed smoking dope, listening to jazz or getting a spanking. Then the word fell out of the mainstream and was more specifically adopted by the homosexual subcultures in big cities. When the gay movement went public the word still included lesbians and bisexuals but that ended when identity politics started carving up increasingly more narrow definitions of victimhood. The Coalition for Gay Rights in Ontario was one of the last hold outs in trying to include all kinds of sexual diversity in three letters. Eventually we gave in and became the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Ontario and acknowledged the wider spectrum of sexual minorities in the constitution if not the name.

Homosexuals now use gay almost always in reference to gay men alone. Meanwhile school children have stopped calling each other queer and use gay instead. It's become a nasty word with broad connotations ranging from perverted to lame. My youngest niece often uses the pejorative gay in my presence not realizing at all, I hope, how disappointed this makes me feel. It just means she's describing something or someone she doesn't like. I've even heard one of her cousins call a computer game gay because it wasn't all that great a thrill to play. I was expecting him to say that it sucked, which is of course another term rooted in fear of non procreative sex.

So while queer no longer makes me wince, it sucks that being gay isn't what it used to be. Oh well, they're only words.

Posted: Fri - November 7, 2003 at 03:43 PM          

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