"She asserts that the word “queer” was primarily academic until “activists unleashed it with the help of social media in the past decade or so.” I am not sure that history is correct."
This is the place where I paused reading her column and laughed out loud, asking myself how it got into the New York Times.
I was out in NYC streets in 1990 as an activist chanting, "We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it." I was part of Queer Nation, a group of outraged activists who could be described as anything but academics, led by a rabble-rousing gay journalist (Michelangelo Signorili) who certainly understood the difference between group identity and personal identity.
Mike and I both, to this day, identity as gay while considering ourselves part of LGBTQ and/or queer communities. It’s really not that complicated. Owen Jones of The Guardian, more than a generation younger than Mike and I, also identifies as a gay man and activist while being part of queer and LGBTQ communities.
None of us will hesitate to identify as queer in the proper context, just as we will be quick to identify as gay. Not hard at all.
We recognize that members of gender and sexual minorities face opposition to equity and inclusion based on public resistance rooted in common issues. We need an umbrella term for a REASON, something Paul seems to fundamentally misunderstand or not even know about.
She might have written an interesting article if she wanted to discuss the difference between the personal identity label of queer and the community label of queer. But then, she seems unqualified to write that article, since she obviously doesn’t understand the distinction herself.
She might also have discussed generational reluctance to use the label queer in a much more nuanced way than she did. I think she used the reluctance of some older GL people to call themselves queer as a blunt instrument to make a point these older folks themselves don’t agree with.
In my experience, most opposition among gay and lesbian people (in rates that are actually pretty low) to the word queer stems from youthful trauma, from memories of the word used as a weapon against them.
I still involuntarily shudder when I hear the word queer used as a noun rather than an adjective. That’s an emotional bridge that’s a bit too far for me to cross.
But young people are using it as a noun now in a positive way, and I’ll be fine.
But you know what? The musings of a straight white woman in the subject are of precisely zero interest to me. I’m astonished that the New York Times would think this is something Pamela Paul is remotely qualified to comment on. I’m astonished her vapid, often factually wrong column got published at all.
Anti-trans sentiment is so high, though, that attempts to divide and conquer are evidently not going to die down anytime soon.
