I feel like it’s only tasteful to start this off by saying I do not, in fact, know everything.
I’ve grown up in a world that already uses this term. I don’t own it. I didn’t invent it. I wasn’t there for its history and I haven’t felt the majority of the brunt it bore upon those who came before me.
But I know how it feels to love someone so much it hurts, and I know what it feels like to be hated for it. Just because I look the way I do. Just because they decide I can’t.
I know how it feels to let go of her hand every time I hear footsteps.
I know how it feels to be literally chased out of the girls’ bathroom.
The first use of the word ‘queer’ in reference to homosexuals was in 1894, by none other than the Marquess of Queensbury (who, somehow with that name, is a man — and a homophobic one at that), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. His name was John Douglas, and he was the father of Oscar Wilde’s partner at the time, Alfred Douglas. He didn’t like his potential son-in-law very much. He’s who got Wilde imprisoned for ‘gross indecency’ — or, more simply, for being a gay man (plot of Wilde, 1997).
It’s evident that the ways in which we (both the straight and gay worlds) use this term has evolved quite a bit since then.
Growing up, “queer” was simply another stone of a phrase we hurled at each other on the playground, aiming to knock down whoever we could just to climb the social ladder a little bit more.
It was like a dodgeball.
That stone would later chip away to form a new shape: the word “gay” was itself an insult now. Another stone the outcasts bore the brunt of. We watched it whip past our cheeks, graze our thighs. People would touch my face in one breath and laugh in the next, whispering to one another. This is childhood as a queer kid.
Being queer in 2022 is to know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, somehow. We are, albeit very slowly, creeping toward a more accepting future in some parts of the world. This kind of freedom is something queer people really only foresaw in art back in the 20th century.
Queer used to mean hiding away. In bars, in parks, in bathhouses, in whatever we could so straight people would stop dragging us out, one by one. It used to mean only wearing fewer than three pieces of the “opposite gender’s” clothing at a time. It used to mean ripped binders, bloody knuckles and bricks thrown back at cops. They themselves are just kids who I assume grew up thinking queer was a baton with which to beat their peers.
Queer used to mean that whatever this is, it can’t really last forever. Queer used to mean beards, hiding from coworkers, hiding from family. It meant moving away from your shitty hometown the second you had the chance.
But now, queer is not so intricately connected to trauma. I do believe it’s still present within the experience of a queer person, but its metaphorical fingers are not so tightly interlocked with that of pain. This is a good thing. A beautiful thing, even.
Queer means art, now. It always has. But I think it speaks to a larger presentation, one where we express our gender and our sexuality, whatever that is, through art. We detach our genders from the clutches of your binary and we paint them all the colours of the rainbow. We bedazzle them with gems handed to us by Black trans women and we twirl in the mirror. It’s men with skirts and top surgery scars. It’s women working in steel-toes and calloused hands. It’s people so far removed from this ridiculous notion that you can either be this or that they’re flying.
You sleep. We spend our nights rewriting our design.
The design you have the nerve to call intricate, then limit like we are a highway. Baby, who said I couldn’t shoot straight up with this vessel? I want to see the sunset on the rainiest of days. I want to sit on clouds and wait for those sweet orange and pink hues to tinge the edge of the horizon. I want to skateboard across oceans. I don’t need Moses to part the sea for me. I’ll do it myself.
Queer is the courage to do it yourself because this world just can’t do it for you.
