The Simpson literally made a joke about this in 1997 this is a settled issue, stop giving power back to straight people
calling yourself homophobic slurs is just doing homophobic people’s job for them, you’re proving them right by identifying within it.
cry about it to some other faggot then please
they deleted… my impact
I need you young people to understand…
Every word we call ourselves….
gay, lesbian, faggot, dyke, queer…
are ALL words they’ve flung at us in hatred.
There is no non-homophobic term. There is just reclaiming them
There’s also the fact that very often historically either
1) straight people would discover our words for ourselves and yoink them and/or
2) a word would be used both positively and negatively IN THE SAME TIME PERIOD.
For example: take “fairy.” In the 1930s, this was three things: a derogatory term for gay men, a cheeky self-identifier for what we’d now call femme gay men, AND A GENDER IDENTITY. That last group considered that fairies were men, but a different kind of men. They engaged differently with their gender presentation and sexuality than heterosexual men.
So while they were cheerfully calling themselves fairies and hopefully getting railed by the dudes of their choice, gossip rags were also going OH NO THE FAIRIES THE DEGENERATES OH NO OH NO.
Same thing at Stonewall. “Nelly boy” was an insult for a femme gay man, but it was also an identifier for a gay man who did gender differently (sort of the same concept as how we use “butch” for women who present their gender in a certain different way). And you wanna know what drag queens and gay men were yelling in a Rockettes kickline at the Stonewall riots? “We wear our dungarees above our nelly knees.” Here’s one that was both, as recently as the mid-2000s, and it’s why I’m so uncomfortable with the “limp-wrist at each other to identify other queers” thing: a “swish gay.” What was a swish gay? The kind of limpwristed, effeminate stereotype gay man, although if it was being used in a derogatory way there was also the implication the man in question would push himself onto straight men. It died out as both an identifier and a derogatory term pretty quickly, but the fact remains, “swish gay” wouldn’t even be old enough for a discount on its car insurance if it was a person, and it was both positive and negative at the same time.
The idea that we shouldn’t cheerfully and viciously take the words of our oppressors and make them ours—or that we should cede our words if they’re used against us—is NEW. As in, last-five-years-and-it-started-with-TERFs new. Hell, there’s some evidence “queer” was a word originally used for gay men bygaymen, and then it escaped containment and has been in a tug of war for about 140 years. (I say “some evidence” because we don’t have anything entirely conclusive, but there’s not a complete absence of evidence, either. Unfortunately most of the queer culture of the 1870s is, you know. Lost.)
