the word “queer” being used by someone who uses that word to describe their own experience of love and their cherished community should not ever sound the same to you as it does coming out of the mouth of a homophobe. acting like these two types of people are the same is unbelievably cruel
^^^
Adding on once again: there is no word for our experiences that has not been used as a slur and isn't *still* used as a slur.
My mother never said fag but she sure could say "gay" in a way that made it clear that was what she meant 🙃
“Homosexual” in the mouth of a Southern Republican US Senator is more vile than “faggot” in the mouth of a 50-year-old gay man from Seattle, where they made an attempt at one point to reclaim the word. (Unlike queer, it didn’t really work.)
Hell. “Those people” in the mouth of a homophobic mom to a closeted gay teen is probably fouler than either of those.
Just chiming in here from over on the disability side of things, where we can testify that it doesn’t matter what you call yourself, your terminology will get used as a slur by people who don’t want you to exist because you fuck up their ideas of how the world should be. So, call yourself whatever you want, and don’t yield to the people who don’t care what you’re called, because your greatest crime is existing in the first place. They’re never going to have a polite word for you anyway.
