PSA: Queer

[rm]

(This is an outgrowth of a comment thread I'm having with someone in their journal. If that someone is you, no worries, we're cool).

Queer (as an adjective, we will not be using the noun here) is not inherently synonymous with gay and lesbian or LGBT.¹

Many LGBT people do not like or choose to use queer and/or feel it to represent something additional or instead of gay and lesbian or LGBT.

Because queer was originally a slur and not all LGBT people like to use it,² it's generally best that straight people don't use the word unless talking about people and groups that self-identify as queer.

Queer can be considered a non-assimilationist word. Some LGBT people who are not interested in getting equal rights by proving we're just like straight people prefer the term. (This is like when I rant about how "I'm queer and you can tell and I like it that way.")

Some non-trans people who are gender non-conforming use the term or variations there of (i.e., genderqueer).

Some trans people who are additionally not straight use the term as a shorthand way of encompassing multiple identities.

Some people who would traditionally be called "bisexual" use the term to avoid the reinforcement of a binary gender dichotomy.

Some people prefer queer because it removes the separation between men and women in the LGBT community, breaks down barriers between bisexual and other orientation identities, and can be more inclusive of the T part of the LGBT (which often gets pushed aside, because oppressed groups can be crappy to each other too).

Others like it because it's only one syllable.

Additionally queer is sometimes used to encompass kink, polyamorous and other non-traditional relationship styles in a way that may or may not be related to LGBT individuals depending on the community.³

As usual, I don't speak for all LGBT or queer people, just myself and my experience of our communities. If you have questions or more to add, consider the comments a free for all. I'm particularly interested in other people's sense and connotations for the word as ongoing discussion in the original thread is revealing that they are highly varied.

---

¹ A commenter reminds me that LGBT is just not enough these days, nor is LGBTQ, which you'll also often see. The full acronym these days often includes not just LGBT, but Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual and more.
² It's also just been brought to my attention that age may be a factor in how one reacts to queer so this PSA might seem more or less peculiar to you depending on your age.
³ Please see comments for additional discussion of this as there is disagreement on this one. It is problematic for many, and I tend to agree, although the arguments for its inclusion in queer also make a lot of sense.

ETA: Please read the comments. This is such an awesome display of diverse identities, respectful discussion about fraught issues and random people making friends I can't quite get over it. I am loving the LJ today.

Comments

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I'd given this issue a lot of thought before, and come to the same conclusion as apparently many have-- "bi" is far too strongly appropriated by the sorts of girls who make out with other girls to titillate guys, and as others have said, has this strong connotation that you're interested in both at once. Never in my life have I really ever felt that "bisexual" described me. I have loved both men and women, but am very strongly monogamous-- the bit of my brain that looks for sex partners just switches off and I can't help it-- and for the last 8 years it's been a man, the same man. I don't like people assuming that I'm another straight person, but if I say I'm bi they assume I want to sleep with them/their boyfriend, like, right now.
I do feel a little odd appropriating "queer", like I don't deserve it-- I haven't been threatened seriously in a good decade, though about seven years ago on the Jersey City Light Rail a drunk teenager, put up to it by her posse and probably prompted by my nervous eyeing of them as they got onto the car, swaggered up and accosted me and my partner, asking if we were lesbians, and when my ponytailed boyfriend turned around, quite innocently (he'd dozed off on my shoulder and didn't hear her) and said, beardedly, hoarsely, malely, "What?" she ran screaming. He had no idea what he'd just avoided by virtue of being in apparent possession of male genitals; I had my hands clenched around my bag and was frantically cataloguing the possibilities of exits vs my chances at toughing them all out-- but i feel even odder just letting people assume that I'm totally onboard with their heteronormative assumptions.

[nicoli-dominn.livejournal.com]

I don't like people assuming that I'm another straight person, but if I say I'm bi they assume I want to sleep with them/their boyfriend, like, right now.

I'm all too familiar with that one, myself. And if it's not an invitation to join the party, it's "So, do you, like, have threesomes or something? Does your boyfriend know you're bi? Is he a bisexual too?"

And so on, and so forth. Sometimes it's amusing and sometimes I just want to bash my head into the wall or smack someone.

[brilliant-snark.livejournal.com]

THIS. "Does your boyfriend know?", "Is your partner also bi", "does that mean you want to sleep with me and my boyfriend as our mutual living sex toy".

I often want to bash my head or smack someone. It's like...please, ask questions, but PLEASE, also use your brain to do so and don't make assumptions. Maybe "Oh, you're _____? Can you help me understand what that means for you?" :)

[ladyaelfwynn.livejournal.com]

I don't like people assuming that I'm another straight person, but if I say I'm bi they assume I want to sleep with them/their boyfriend, like, right now.

THIS. So very much. And the monogamy bit.

I really hate how for women bi seems synonymous with "will do anyone, anytime". In my case it means, "finds lots of people interesting and if we were both/all single I might pursue something more physical". Since I'm married, I'm not doing anything with anyone who isn't my spouse, even when I find others attractive.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Well, exactly.
And on some level I totally sympathize that for so many single men, and men in heterosexual couples, and bisexual men*, and women in heterosexual couples, having a woman who would sleep with two women and a man at the same time is such a prevalent fantasy. (Though I think that it's got far more currency in pop culture than actual prevalence in actual minds, and similarly I worry that many of the heterosexual women who profess to be interested are simply more interested in pleasing their partners since they find it a non-threatening sort of kink-- but that's a very tangled issue, and perhaps given my extremely high first-person observation of women like me, it really is the case that an awful lot of "heterosexual" women are genuinely bisexual and also genuinely would get off on that like nothing else, so maybe I'm just as guilty of denying women sexual agency as everyone else in this one.)

But on another level, dude it's totally creepy that I wind up involved in this kind of assumed shit every time I try to identify myself, and it's doubly stupid that pretty much every self-identified sharing-my-particular-apparently-not-uncommon-sexual-identity* woman I know has the identical experience to the point of hesitance over using the label.

That said, in fantasy, I find it totally hot to think about doing a dude and a chick at the same time. I just know quite viscerally that it's not something I could actually figure out how to even participate in. And it annoys the shit out of me that I can't really discuss how hot, in theory, such a thing would be, because if I admit it, I'm totally fueling the fire of all these other people's assumptions. Kind of like how ashamed I am every time I realize I'm being a bad driver, as a woman, and giving all these assholes currency to continue their stereotypes about women drivers. It just makes already-complicated shit even more complicated, and yet, resenting it makes it even more even more complicated.

Except when I admit that I'd kind of like to be the dude in the two-chicks scenario. I like that kind of complicated.


Oh, an aside: as a teenager I knew many lesbians who referred to themselves as gay, adjective.
______________________
*Bisexual men: Does "bisexual" have the same connotations for men, nowadays? When I was last with a woman, and thus really personally aware of the gay scene, a bi dude was considered to be lacking in commitment, so kind of similar to the bi chick scenario only with fewer creepers drooling over them.

** Aside: I have a theory that there are an enormous number of bisexual women, a large fragment of whom know it and understand that their preferred partners happen to be male because of statistical availability (there are a lot less lesbians out there than straight men, which means that of potential partners for me, there are overwhelmingly more men-- and I mean, like twenty to one, and that's pre-screened for eligibility and potential compatibility and the like-- AND I'm a roller derby girl and liberal girls'-school alum living in a city!), and a substantial number, perhaps even a majority, of whom don't really understand it and simply date men exclusively because of overwhelming societal pressure. But of course, it's probably because I *am* one that I think this is so common. And good luck collecting anything approaching unbiased stats on that one.

[ladyaelfwynn.livejournal.com]

When I look back over what's excited me the most, I've always been bi. I've only recently begun to understand that there's more to desire than whatever one chooses to do physically.

You know how some people seem to just know about their sexuality, well, it took me a while to figure out what was going on with me. I first had to realize that it really was more than seriously imaginative fantasies. And then it took me a bit more time to tease apart the reality of my attractions from the general perception that women are hot and to be the object of sexual desire. (Our advertising for everything, relies on getting women to sell things, often scantily clad women. I had to figure out how much of my attraction to women was the societal conditioning and how much was really me.)

This took years of thought and reading and chatting with friends to finally coalesce so that I'm comfortable with describing myself as bi, even though my experiences are somewhat limited.

The straight male gaze still dominates our society's thoughts about sexuality, so those things that turn a straight male on is what becomes true. Bi women are seen as sex toys for het couples rather than the way more boring truths of being monogamous partners and/or parents with jobs (in and out of the home) with desires of our own.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Oh yes it took me forever too! I still have incredible trouble relating innermost desires to actual practice. And that male gaze thing is pretty much exactly what I was getting at. I mean, don't get me wrong, I like the thought that I can feel powerful about embodying someone's sexual fantasy, but in practice, even in conversation, it is immediately apparent that whether I truly find this hot or am merely performing that I find it hot is totally irrelevant, and that's pretty much the biggest bonerkiller ever. I probably keep my mouth shut about my sexual identity more because I don't want to deal with unenlightened jerks than because I'm afraid of discrimination or disgust or whatever.

Though as I write that, it sounds very whiny and privileged, like everyone with less mainstream-media-fetishized sexual identities that the theoretical "normals" find icky should feel sorry for me, since I'm getting ogled (if I choose to bring it up, which is another privilege) while they're getting, you know, dragged to death behind cars or torn apart by dogs whatever it is that society chooses to do to them. Oh poor me! I'm annoyed by being propositioned! I'm sure everyone will get around to feeling sorry for me any time now.

There's loads of straight privilege that come along with this lifestyle, and the more I think about it the more I understand that the radical, unexpected act is not whatever I do in the bedroom, but who I am visibly partnered to-- who I ask my community to recognize as my partner. My family doesn't care what I call myself as long as I bring a boy home for Christmas. It doesn't matter what I say and nobody takes me seriously (except to perv over) as long as there's a "normal"-looking heterosexual couple.
But if I made a point of seeking out a woman as my next sexual partner, then I'd be doing exactly the thing I define myself by not doing-- letting the genitalia of my potential partners be the primary selecting factor.

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

Well, I think you also get into the Kinsey scale stuff. There are not just three distinct groups, there's a continuous scale. So some people are very firmly in the middle, some are more towards one side or the other, but aren't at either end. So a woman can be more likely to be attracted to men, but still attracted to some women. So, it really depends on how we're counting 'bi'. Are we counting it as everything not at 0 or 5? I mean, yes, there should be a lot of people in 1-4. (or even 0.1-4.9)

There may still be something to your theory. It may also just be that it is socially acceptable for women to express attraction to other women in the context of a threesome with their boyfriend. It's not so socially acceptable for most guys to express interest in a threesome with another guy and their girlfriend.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

"bi" is far too strongly appropriated by the sorts of girls who make out with other girls to titillate guys

This fascinates me -- it strikes me as a generational thing. I've noticed this phenomenon with bemusement over the last few years. The primary issue I associate with "bi" seems to be an older one of the "You're going thru a phase" variety or (as you said) that you must want both at once. (Got burned by the poly unicorn too.) It's interesting to see new meanings layer on over time.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I went to a girls' boarding school, which was quite liberal and featured a lot of "LUG's"-- Lesbians Until Graduation. My own mother took me aside and explained that it was quite natural for me, at my tender age, to have feelings for other people-- including women-- and that if I was sensible, there was nothing wrong with them, but that I should understand that I would probably feel differently once in a co-ed environment, etc. And so when I started dating a woman, at 19, she was very supportive but I am sure to this day feels it was just a phase; I have, despite my intentions of being a slut, had very few partners overall, and the only ones I've mentioned to her since then have been male.
So in my experience bisexuality isn't so much the thing that gets dismissed as being a phase, so much as pretty much anything besides marrying a dude.
It was actually this past weekend that my mother acknowledged that my relationship with my current partner (male), which has been going on for 8 years, is probably worth as much notice as my baby sister's recent elopement (with male), even though there have been no rings or exchange of vows. (We have a house and a cat together. That's enough for gays, right? ... Well, it doesn't matter, as they have no choice.)

So I don't know that it's really that different a layer, but there's definitely a prevalence of "pseudo-bi" women, who are bisexual only when men are looking. I don't know if that's recent.