not-freyja

Know your history:

Gay:

  • Used to mean carefree
  • Then sexually deviant
  • Then prostitute
  • Then slut
  • Then sodomite
  • And THEN as we know it today but only as a slur
  • Reclaimed in the seventies

LGBT:

  • Invented in the nineties
  • Has faced constant backlash (from both straight, queer, and LGBT folks from being not inclusive enough or too inclusive)
  • Every year there are pushes to change to acronym
  • LGBTQ
  • LGBTQ+
  • LGBTQ*
  • LGBTQIA
  • Mogai
  • Alphabet soup

Queer:

  • Used to mean “other”
  • Became a slang term for “not straight” in the 1400s
  • Became a slur in the early 1900s
  • Reclaimed in the 80s.
  • Sudden push back from within the queer community to have it seen only as a slur in the 2010s, a push that can be traced back to terf ideology.
  • Is the only term that includes all non cishet people

Homosexual

  • A medical diagnosis
  • Used for decades to make queerness into a mental illness
  • Used as a slur for the latter half of the 20th century
  • Rejected by the queer community as an acceptable term for a brief period of time in the early 2000s before coming back into fashion.
  • Only describes the experience of binary gendered, monosexual gay people.

Think what you want, believe what you will, but every word we have ever used to describe ourselves is coated in blood.

Source: not-freyja