01-20-2009: Gay, Homosexual, or Queer? (Past Post)

So in my Gay and Lesbian Literature class today, one of the girls spoke about how she was unsure of the sense of using the word "queer" to describe a person, a piece of work, or part or all of the queer sociopolitical movement, as for many people both in and out of the community, it has extreme negative connotations and is sometimes used as an insult.
I use the word all the time, and describe myself, my gender, my sexuality, and my gender representation as "queer." But it got me to thinking, particularly as she made an important connection between "queer" in the gay community and "n*gger" in the African-American community.
I can understand that for many people, "queer" is a negative word, and one to be avoided. But for myself, it seems to be the best label to put on a person (myself) and a movement that contains a varied and diverse group of people.
Towards myself, I use the word "queer" as it's the only label out there that I feel really fits. I've been attracted to and been in relationships with males, females, transgendered persons, and people who do not fit into the binary or tertiary gender construct that our society currently tends to use. Therefore, I'm neither gay, nor straight, nor bi, nor tri. As well, I don't think of myself as female. Nor do I think of myself as male. I am certainly not transgendered, either; I think I was born into the right body and gender, just that there isn't a word for the gender I was born to. For myself and I think for many others, gender and gender representation is far more fluid than people are willing to admit. So the terms female, male, trans, or even androgyne do not fit me as well as I would like, and therefore I don't use them as labels.
Humans use labels all the time. It's how our brains connect things, and make sense of things. I've spent far too long letting others assign my identity and label. So I choose the label "queer," because it's the best one I've found that fits. I would much rather have a label that means diverse, confused, or ambiguous rather than one that simply does not fit me. A nondescriptive label fits quite well, seeing as I refuse or am unable to describe myself.
For the queer community, I think queer is the best term as well. We are more than gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people. We are more than homosexuals. But we are less than the full sum of all humanity. We can't be the "gay" movement and we can't be the "human" movement. We are neither one nor the other. We are a varied and diverse group with as many sexualities and genders as the amount of individuals in the community. We, as a group, can not be defined with one or two terms. And yet if we attempt to define ourselves by all the labels of all the people in our community, we end up with an unwieldy phrase that would never fit on a placard or poster: The "Gay-Lesbian-Bi-Trans-Quee

r-Questioning-Allied-Homo-Hetero-Tri-Pan-Omni..." Movement. The acronyms that we've used and have been used in politics and media also suffer from this same problem. GLBT, the one most often used, only accounts for a fraction of our community; only the gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transexuals are represented. If we attempted to represent everyone through an acronym, we'd end up with something beyond "GLBTQQAHHTPO..." Which no one would ever remember or be able to make sense of. So a small word that is (currently) able to encompass all of us, such as "queer", makes the most sense to me.