Queer is an umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities. It is alternately used to refer to people who reject sexual and gender norms and share radical politics characterized by solidarity across lines of identity. Queer is also a self-identity term for many people (similar to but distinct from gay, lesbian, and bisexual), characterized by rejection or disruption of binary categories of sexual orientation and gender.
Originally meaning or , queer came to be used pejoratively against LGBTQ people in the late 19th century. From the late 1980s, queer activists began to reclaim the word as a neutral or positive self-description. In the 21st century, queer became increasingly used to describe a broad spectrum of non-heteronormative sexual or gender identities and politics. Academic disciplines such as queer theory and queer studies have emerged to examine a wide variety of issues, either informed by this type of perspective, or to examine the lives of LGBTQ people. These share a general opposition to binarism, normativity, and a perceived lack of intersectionality, some of them connected only tangentially to the LGBTQ movement. Queer arts, queer cultural groups, and queer political groups are examples of modern expressions of queer identities.
Critics include LGBTQ community members who associate the term more with its colloquial, derogatory usage; those who wish to dissociate themselves from queer radicalism; and those who see it as too amorphous or trendy. Supporters of the term include those who use it to contrast with a more assimilationist part of the gay rights movement, and to signify greater willingness to defy societal norms in pursuit of gender and sexual identity liberation. They may associate it with the advancement of radical perspectives that were also present within past gay liberation movements, such as anti-consumerism or anti-imperialism, or with events such as the Stonewall rebellion.
Queer is used in a number of ways that overlap and sometimes conflict—it is used as an umbrella term, as a political identity, and as a personal identity or "anti-identity". It is sometimes expanded to include any non-normative sexuality expression. Some people self-identify as queer due to the relative ambiguity of the term and its rejection of explicit categorization, compared to labels such as lesbian and gay. PFLAG states that as such a personal identity, queer is "valued by some for its defiance, by some because it can be inclusive of the entire community, and by others who find it to be an appropriate term to describe their more fluid identities". Recent studies have found that 5–20% of non-heterosexuals and 21–36% of transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people identify as queer.
Origins and early use Entering the English language in the century, queer originally meant , , , or . It might refer to something suspicious or "not quite right", or to a person with mild derangement or who exhibits socially inappropriate behaviour. The Northern English expression "there's nowt so queer as folk", meaning "there is nothing as strange as people", employs this meaning. Related meanings of queer include a feeling of unwellness or something that is questionable or suspicious. In the 1922 comic monologue "My Word, You Do Look Queer", the word is taken to mean "unwell". The expression "in Queer street" is used in the United Kingdom for someone in financial trouble. Over time, queer acquired a number of meanings related to sexuality and gender, from narrowly meaning "gay or lesbian" to referring to those who are "not heterosexual" to referring to those who are either not heterosexual or not cisgender (those who are LGBTQ+).Jodi O'Brien, Encyclopedia of Gender and Society (2009), volume 1. The term is still widely used in Hiberno-English with its original meaning as well as to provide adverbial emphasis (very, extremely).
Early pejorative use By the late 19th century, queer was beginning to gain a connotation of sexual deviance, used to refer to feminine men or men who were thought to have engaged in same-sex relationships. An early recorded usage of the word in this sense was in an 1894 letter by John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, as read aloud at the trial of Oscar Wilde.
Queer was used in mainstream society by the early 20th century, along with fairy and faggot, as a pejorative term to refer to men who were perceived as flamboyant. This was, as historian George Chauncey notes, "the predominant image of all queers within the straight mind".
Starting in the underground gay bar scene in the 1950s, then moving more into the open in the 1960s and 1970s, the homophile identity was gradually displaced by a more radicalized gay identity. At that time gay was generally an umbrella term including lesbians, as well as gay-identified bisexuals and transsexuals; gender nonconformity, which had always been an indicator of gayness, also became more open during this time. During the endonymic shifts from invert to homophile to gay, queer was usually pejoratively applied to men who were believed to engage in receptive or passive anal or oral sex with other men as well as those who exhibited non-normative gender expressions.
Early 20th-century queer identity
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, queer, fairy, trade, and gay signified distinct social categories within the gay male subculture. In his book Gay New York, Chauncey noted that queer was used as a within-community identity term by men who were stereotypically masculine.: "In the early 20th century in the United States, the term queer was used as a term of self-reference (or identity category) for homosexual men who adopted masculine behavior (Chauncey, 1994: 16-18)." Many queer-identified men at the time were, according to Chauncey, "repelled by the style of the fairy and his loss of manly status, and almost all were careful to distinguish themselves from such men", especially because the dominant straight culture did not acknowledge such distinctions. Groups of men – such as Henry James and E. M. Forster – also discreetly gave the term queer homoerotic subtext. Trade referred to straight men who would engage in same-sex activity; Chauncey describes trade as "the 'normal men' [queers] claimed to be".
In contrast to the terms used within the subculture, medical practitioners and police officers tended to use medicalized or pathological terms like "invert", "pervert", "degenerate", and "homosexual".
None of the terms, whether inside or outside of the subculture, equated to the general concept of a homosexual identity, which emerged only with the ascension of a binary (heterosexual/homosexual) understanding of sexual orientation in the 1930s and 1940s. As this binary became embedded into the social fabric, queer began to decline as an acceptable identity in the subculture.
Similar to the earlier use of queer, gay was adopted by many U.S. assimilationist men in the mid-20th century as a means of asserting their normative status and rejecting any associations with effeminacy. The idea that queer was a pejorative term became more prevalent among younger gay men following World War II. As the gay identity became more widely adopted in the community, some men who preferred to identify as gay began chastising older men who still referred to themselves as queer by the late 1940s:
In calling themselves gay, a new generation of men insisted on the right to name themselves, to claim their status as men, and to reject the "effeminate" styles of the older generation. [...] Younger men found it easier to forget the origins of gay in the campy banter of the very queens whom they wished to reject.In other parts of the world, particularly England, queer continued to be the dominant term used by the community well into the mid-twentieth century, as noted by historical sociologist Jeffrey Weeks:By the 1950s and 1960s to say "I am queer" was to tell of who and what you were, and how you positioned yourself in relation to the dominant, "normal" society. … It signaled the general perception of same-sex desire as something eccentric, strange, abnormal, and perverse.
Reclamation
Beginning in the 1980s, the label queer began to be reclaimed from its pejorative use as a neutral or positive self-identifier by LGBTQ people. In the United States, reclamation of queer occurred in the context of the AIDS crisis and conservative politics of the 1980s, and a perception that the approaches of the lesbian and gay organizations of the time were unable to meet those challenges.
An early example of reclamation was by an LGBTQ organisation called Queer Nation, which was formed in March 1990 and circulated an anonymous flier at the New York Gay Pride Parade in June 1990 titled "Queers Read This". The flier included a passage explaining their adoption of the label queer:
By identifying themselves as queer rather than gay, LGBTQ activists sought to reject causes they viewed as assimilationist, such as marriage, military inclusion and adoption. This radical stance, including the rejection of U.S. imperialism, continued the tradition of earlier lesbian and gay anti-war activism, and solidarity with a variety of leftist movements, as seen in the positions taken at the first two National Marches on Washington in 1979 and 1987, the radical direct action of groups like ACT UP, and the historical importance of events like the Stonewall riots. The radical queer groups following in this tradition of LGBTQ activism contrasted firmly with "the holy trinity of marriage, military service and adoption [which had] become the central preoccupation of a gay movement centered more on obtaining straight privilege than challenging power".
Reactions Figures such as Andrew Sullivan criticized the queer radical approach, writing in The New Republic in 1993 that their politics did not reflect most gay people, who "...wish to be integrated into society as it is... a 'queer' identity is precisely what they want to avoid". Lisa Duggan criticizes Sullivan's characterization of queer "as a uniform and compulsory identity", countering it was "used most often precisely to question the uniformity of sexual identities". Responding to Sullivan in his 1999 book The Trouble with Normal, Michael Warner criticizes pathologization versus normalcy as a false choice: "One of the reasons why so many people have started using the word 'queer' is that it is a way of saying: 'We're not pathological, but don't think for that reason we want to be normal.'" Sociologist Joshua Gamson argues that the controversy about queer marks a social and political divide in the LGBTQ community between those (including civil-rights activists) who perceive themselves as "normal" and who wish to be seen as ordinary members of society and those who see themselves as separate, confrontational or not part of the ordinary social order.
Reclamation and use of the term queer is controversial; several people and organizations, both LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ, object to some or all uses of the word for various reasons.For example, see In addition to those LGBTQ people who dislike the use of queer because of its radical political associations, others disapprove of it because they consider it offensive, in part due to its continued use as a pejorative. Some LGBTQ people avoid queer because they perceive it as faddish slang or as academic jargon.
Usage and scope Queer as an identity descriptor is used in several overlapping but distinct ways, including as an umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities and as a personal identity label encompassing a range of personal, political, and theoretically informed approaches to sexuality and gender. Depending on context, queer may be meant as an alternative to LGBTQ, as an individual identity within it (the Q in LGBTQ), or as a rejection of the validity of such identity categories altogether.
Umbrella identity