Pinned
Know your history:
Gay:
- Used to mean carefree
- Then sexually deviant
- Then prostitute
- Then slut
- Then sodomite
- And THEN as we know it today but only as a slur
- Reclaimed in the seventies
LGBT:
- Invented in the nineties
- Has faced constant backlash (from both straight, queer, and LGBT folks from being not inclusive enough or too inclusive)
- Every year there are pushes to change to acronym
- LGBTQ
- LGBTQ+
- LGBTQ*
- LGBTQIA
- Mogai
- Alphabet soup
Queer:
- Used to mean “other”
- Became a slang term for “not straight” in the 1400s
- Became a slur in the early 1900s
- Reclaimed in the 80s.
- Sudden push back from within the queer community to have it seen only as a slur in the 2010s, a push that can be traced back to terf ideology.
- Is the only term that includes all non cishet people
Homosexual
- A medical diagnosis
- Used for decades to make queerness into a mental illness
- Used as a slur for the latter half of the 20th century
- Rejected by the queer community as an acceptable term for a brief period of time in the early 2000s before coming back into fashion.
- Only describes the experience of cis gay men and cis lesbians
Think what you want, believe what you will, but every word we have ever used to describe ourselves is coated in blood.
Op ur so brave to assume people on this site can read well enough to get this
I actually talked to an older queer guy who said he was amazed to see how many young people call themselves gay. When he hears it, he just hears a slur…but he also said he was glad that people are able to reclaim it, and he’s happy to see a generation of lgbt+ people comfortable with it.
People on this site could learn from him
“… every word we have ever used to describe ourselves is coated in blood.”
And for some of us that’s a point of pride.
“How can you hurt me by calling me strange if my response is ‘Yes, and happier than you?’”