Why be unkind?

[OrphanPip]

Are you saying I shouldn't be reading acedemic materials on the subject of sexual/gender non-conformity because my experiences leave me so hurt by the word I can't abide it? What if I find it so distracting and unecessarily hostile that I am left leaving the text aside and going elsewhere for my information? Shouldn't I be allowed to study the subject to? Why do I have to be excluded by the oficial academic language? Because I am not a queer; I am gay, perhaps or a member of The Community if you please. But I can't be included in the word queer because I am so hurt by it. It is a visceral reflex. I get ill.

In the academic context, queer and gay are not synonymous, queer is used precisely to get away from the problems of words like gay, lesbian and bisexual, which to some extent are professed identities. How do we talk about those who don't feel they fit into those strict categories? How do we address certain sexual behaviors in a historical context, where concepts of gay or lesbian identity didn't exist?

David Halperan's definition makes the distinction clearer: "Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. 'Queer' then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative."

In this sense, gay people may be defined as queer (some might begin to argue that gays have moved out of the deviant category into the normative, but I think that would be difficult to defend), but they are not all that queerness is. The S&M community is queer, the fetishist is queer, the pedophile is queer. To discuss the nature of queerness is not really to discuss LGBT people, but to discuss how society as a whole speaks of and understands difference.