“Queer history doesn’t exist in high school textbooks. It’s hidden in fading library books, dusty archives, and oral histories forgotten with time.
But one Instagram account is bringing important LGBTQ moments out of the shadows.
@lgbt_history meticulously documents the queer community’s past, bringing stories of queer people to light through historical photos and incredibly in-depth captions.
As a queer kid growing up in the nineties, I would never in a million years have imagined that I’d be using “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!” as an argument towards other members of the LBGTQA+ community.
…Basically, TERFs ruin everything.
TERFs only ruin everything if we let them. We have stared down homophobia, hate crimes, HIV/AIDs, Prop 8, the ‘gay panic’ defense, don’t ask don’t tell, exorcism, unnecessary surgery, denial of necessary surgery, electroshock, conversion/aversive ‘therapy’, and hundreds of other brutalities, indignities and degredations.
We just keep living loud, shouting loud, and being ourselves. The madder they get, the louder we sing.
Here is a little more story for people interested! Yes, all my models are what they’re showing. It was important for me to represent not only the flag, but the varied people who want to show their pride. 🙂 They’re also friends from various groups, and one is my cousin! I don’t often have an occasion to include my family in these projects, so I’m glad I could this time! Also I want to give a big, special thanks to Bahamut Night Photography for snapping us so perfectly!
For every hoodie sold, I will give 2$ to Fondation Émergence! They’re the founders of the International Day against homophobia and transphobia (May 17th) and are very active locally. I may also give more to Amnesty International or All Out when they need to answer some urgent situation around the world. I want these hoodies to do some good, and not just be a cool piece of clothing.
I will try to make more flags to add to this collection ASAP! So far on the list is Aromantic, Poly-sexual and Demi-ace. Don’t hesitate to ask me for a new flag, if I get asked a few times I will add it to the shop, and if it’s very rare/unique, I can make it as a custom order. 😉
I LOVE THESE
yall. yall if you got money buy these. support this business
[…] he and she were creek beds, quiet when they were full and quiet
when they were dry. but when they were half-full, wearing a coat of
shallow water, the current bumped over the rocks and valleys in the
creek beds, wearing down the earth. giving someone else a little of who
they were hurt more than giving up none or all of it.
A good thread on whether “queer” is a slur and if it should be used or not.
“If I am unashamed of being queer, you do not get to give that word BACK to the fuckwits who made it a slur.”
you do not get to give that word BACK to the fuckwits who made it a slur
EVERYBODY WHO CAME OUT BEFORE YOU HAS TAKEN THE ROCKS AND BOTTLES AND MADE THEM INTO SHIELDS AND WINDCHIMES
Holy motherfucking shit. Don’t fucking come at me about Queer is a slur. I FUCKING KNOW IT IS. It was hurled at me like a fucking spear all through my youth. I know it’s a god damn slur. And it’s mine. You don’t get to take it away from me because you can’t take also away the scars it gave me while I was standing in front of my younger queer siblings in this community.
always, always reblog this one.
If my enemy swings a sword at me and I take that sword away from them, it’s my sword now. And the person telling me I can’t use it because it belongs to my enemy and I have to give it back to them sounds quite a bit like an enemy themselves.
Lmfao what the fuck are you on?? Q*eer was originally used to refer to trans and sga people BY CISHETS to refer to us as abnormal and wrong. It’s a fucking slur. If you choose to use a slur as your only personal identifier then yes, your identity is a God damn slur. This is so disrespectful to every lgbt person with trauma surrounding that word, and you’re the one who’s being ahistorical. Asshole.
I’m on education that came from somewhere other than tumblr, my dude.
We’ve been calling ourselves queer since before WWII. It was not originally used “by cishets”. It was used by us. To describe us. Interchangeably with gay, which was used by all genders.
Ten years before you were born, Queer Nation was fighting for rights you now enjoy, marching in the streets. Queer Nation was founded by members of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an organization for AIDS advocacy, because we were literally dying in the streets. Which is where die-ins came from, by the way – during the AIDS crisis when hospitals wouldn’t touch us with a ten foot pole, people protested by literally dying in a place inconvenient for the powers that be.
Whoever “taught” you that queer is a slur and always has been lied to you.
We’re still here, we’re still queer, go educate yourself.
If you can’t give me sources on q*eer being used by lgbt people BEFORE they reclaimed it from cishets using it as a slur i really don’t care what you have to say
Wow sorry about your inability to use google. If the internet is too hard, you could try picking up a book at your local library!!!! Like, how about My Queer War by James Lord or
Kids, learn your own queer history. Our identity was our word first.
must be nice to be 17 and know absolutely everything about queer history ever
@kinasty As a seventeen queer-questioning kid I was mad at the world and society and ready to burn shit down out of ignorance, too. We can’t blame children for parroting the ignorance and bigotry of people they should be able to look up to as elders of our community but who are instead are crafting a TERF agenda and deliberately using children as mouthpieces and soldiers to keep their hands clean. We CAN choose to educate. The moment we resort to ‘kids today’ bullshit we sound like every other adult that we despised when we were that age. Yes, cite sources for our history and correct assumptions, but don’t act like a tool about it just because age and education have given you that wisdom. Look back in twenty years and you’re going to be thinking, ‘shit, I was such a smug little asshole at thirty, smacking down actual children looking for meaning and culture and identity on that hellhole website’. Be a guide, not a gatekeeper.
Honestly “queer” is so useful for people like me w/ a “complicated orientation” b/c instead of having to say I’m “asexual panromantic” and explain what that means, I can just say “I’m queer” and it tells you all you need to know (that I’m not straight).
yeah sure good for you but don’t ever ever use that word for someone who doesn’t identify as it themselves, it’s not an umbrella term for everyone. also “pan/ace” would definitely work, even if you don’t want to use it, other people could. i use ace lesbian and definitely not the q slur.
Wow its almost like they were just talking about using it on themselves for individual reasons and you butted in to be an ass and be condescending because you think you’re superior for not using queer, then you called their identity a slur right to them. But that can’t possibly be what you were trying to do, right?
Anyone is allowed to use it for themselves, I never said no one should do that if that’s what they want. Queer is a slur though. I just want people to be aware of that, I have no idea if OP is aware of that or not but some people using that word aren’t. I’m tired of people including me and other people who don’t want to be included in that word, and before anyone asks, I never meant that OP did that, because I literally have no idea if they do.
Queer is a slur as much as any other LGBT+ word, I just want you to be aware of that.
“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella – gay rights, gay marriage, gay community – when discussing the entire community.
Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.
Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.
Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.
So if you’re not going to come onto gay people’s posts for the same behavior, maybe critically analyze why exactly you feel the need to be so condescending to Queer people, specifically on posts that ONLY have to do with personal identity. Why you feel the need to insist to Queer people that their identities are slurs, to directly slap away the power of reclaiming a word from them by demanding it remain in the hands of the Straights as a perpetual slur.
I think an important difference between gay and queer is however, that queer started out as a slur used against members of the community and continues to be used as a slur in many places. Whereas gay began as a word the community chose itself to describe itself and was then later used by homophobes and heterosexuals in general in a negative way, meaning however, that gay doesn’t hold the same negative connotations as queer for many people simply because it was our word that they took, and not a word that they forced on us to make us “strange” or “other” like queer means.
That’s…. Not true. People think so because the history before gay was reclaimed is way older (older than any love community member’s lifetimes, probably,) but gay had the exact same origins.
It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.
The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”
There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.
The more recent history of the mid to late 20th century more prevalently favored queer as a slur, as is represented in our media. However its clearly undeniable that the switch back to gay as the popular community slur (along with the ever present f slur,) happened in the 2000s. Which is trying to be denied and rewritten by the anti queer crowd, who completely ignore the words popularity with community members who actually lived through when it was a popular slur.
Yes to all of this. When it comes to words for “not straight” there are hardly any choices that didn’t originate as ways to stigmatize or pathologize us. We are all using reclaimed slurs to describe ourselves.
Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet.
Somebody else pointed this out earlier to me, and of course I’ve lost the post, but it’s really suspicious that of all the reclaimed slurs, the one that gets the most pushback is the one that is most radically accepting of all identities
“hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it.
Queer is an ideology and an identity, historically and now. It is an umbrella for that ideology and an umbrella for those identities, historically and now. They can’t be conflated (with LGBT) and it’s super fucking disingenuous to pretend one is just the tarnished besmirched dirty slur version of the other. They’re different. In my particular work for example, Queer bioethics is different from LGBT bioethics and conflating the two will muddle any discussion you try to have about them because they lead to literally opposite conclusions in some cases.
Yeah I freaking love pancakes
Wait wrong post
By far the best addition to this post
This is one of those things where I feel like an old.
Like, *the* slogan I associate with pride is, “We’re here, we’re queer – get used to it!”
There was a TV show called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” that was total mainstream pap. (Not that the show wasn’t riddles problematic elements from the concept out, but ‘queer’ in the title was clearly meant as a positive.)
I just have a hard time processing queer as anything but reclaimed.
They actually shot “Queer As Folk” in my city!
TERFs and radical gender/sexuality bianarists are flooding social media and blogging sites with propaganda smearing the word queer in the hopes of silencing all of us who don’t identify with their hate politics. I fought hard to reclaim the word queer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it’s the one word that doesn’t worship exclusion. Which is why these people are trying to convince you not to use it. fuck that noise. there is literally no word i could use to identify my sexuality that hasn’t been thrown at me in hatred, fear, and violence. No way am I giving up the one of those that allows me to talk about all of my community without trying to put people in boxes they don’t fit in.
I will never not reblog this post. Queer, queer, queer here.
“Queer” has been claimed by queer people as a self-descriptor since at least 1910. It’s an insult to those historical people (and all the generations of queer historical people who have identified as queer since then) to pretend that the people using it as a slur owned it more than the queer people who used it as a self-descriptor.
Source: George Chauncey, “Gay New York,” page 101
They don’t want us to use queer because they don’t want to be lumped in with anyone who’s not cis gay or cis lesbian. So fine. You don’t like the word queer? You don’t want to be in the “queer” community? Get the fuck out, then. Y’all don’t welcome us in your community anyway, so we’ll just have our own.
And it’ll be queer as fuck.
I fucking love the word queer ❤
The pushback against queer is RECENT.
Look, kids. I’m officially Old. And when my little queer (bisexual, grey-asexual) arse was realising this, I was in HIGH SCHOOL. And you know when that was? This was before AZT use was widespread. HIV was a death sentence. You know who nursed those guys, ran their errands and sat with them as they were dying from AIDS? Well, me, for one (mostly I was just doing grocery shopping but I sat my fair share of deathbed vigils as a young teen) but it was the queer community. That was how we identified. And lesbian women and trans folk and people from ALL KINDS of orientations got together and cared for these people (mostly gay men and trans women, and a lot of sex workers in there).
We were queer. And we were, and still are, fucking angry. Betrayed by our governments, in lots of cases disowned by our families, all we had was each other. And we were queer.
And then later, we had queer studies and queer theory at uni. This is over 20-30 years ago. They do not name university courses after slurs. They named it after OUR IDENTITY.
So you children, who never nursed your dying friends want to come along and declare MY IDENTITY A SLUR?
FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU.
YOU ARE WRONG. YOU ARE AHISTORICAL AND YOU. ARE. WRONG.
Fuck you. Fuck your exclusionary politics. Gay has been used as a slur far more recently than queer. As has lesbian.
You want to police the queer community. You want to gate-keep. You want to exclude people like me, you want to define what a woman is, what genders people can be.
WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER. Get used to it.
Honestly, the way some people act it’s like. . You can’t reclaim slurs, but you can’t create new words without being branded the butt of a joke, so people who don’t feel like outlet labels fit them are supposed to just sit and suffer in silence.
If you don’t want to be called queer then fine, but don’t erase the history of those who used it, who fought for it TO be used as an umbrella term. If you don’t want it applied to you then fine, but don’t say what it should and shouldn’t be used for. I know that many people hear it as a slur and don’t want it applied, but to say it can’t be an umbrella term based on that doesn’t make sense. “Gay” is one of the absolutely most common slurs I have ever heard used in my life and it still gets used and applied to umbrella situations. If we went off of if things have been used against us as slurs then we wouldn’t have anything to call ourselves.
I’m here, I’m queer, and it took me a damn long time to get used to it and I’m not going back now.
This post has helped me. I am asexual, autistic, i have issues due to sexual trauma, i am agender… I thought i couldnt use the word queer. Thanks to you guys i feel welcome.
I am queer, thanks.
if you get no thing else out of this post (because i know its long) i suggest you at least try to get this:
It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.”
because it is fantastic
you can get a phd in Queer Literature.
enough of this terf shit. learn your history and stop being the private army of anyone who sounds offended.
@alienatedaugmenter Here’s a continuation of that conversation from before – said way better than I ever could, regarding the word queer and its history.
The most beautiful thing about this is the many good points with a short pancake interlude and then seguing back to more good points
knitting in the dark 