Here's the definition of the word queer as we gave it on the original next » website:
Strange, different, weird, special, sick, faggot, dyke, fucker, trav, etc… queer describes in one word a range of people who act "marginal".
The use of this word by a part of the homosexual movement, first in the States then in Europe, is using an insult for its own. Insult stolen to the homophobics and transformed as a positive "identification tool". Using the word queer is reminding ourself how the rest of the world sees us. It's a way to say that we're not "oh so charming and sensitive people" who will live in a closet, so that we won't shock anyone. And queer, as opposed to gay is not necessarily masculin.
Someone queer is someone who has a different style of life, it's someone who has an out of norm sexuality.
The queers are people who "love to define themselves (amongst a lot of possibilities) as feminists and agressifs lesbians, mystical faggots, people with fantasies, drag queens & drag kings, clones, leather addicts, bears, women in tuxedos, feminist women or feminist men, wankers, sissies, divas, snap!, bottom machos, mythomaniacs, transexuals, wannabees, queens, butchs, men who define themselves as women, lesbians who have sex with men... and also all the ones able to love them, to learn from them and identified themselves to them" (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Construire des significations Queers", Les études Gay et Lesbiennes, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1998).
Queer is a word above all divisions: it unifies, under One word, lesbians, gays, bis, transexuals. It's above all "stiff" categories about sexualities speeches and allows to get rid of their divisions (locations more opened to THE otherS: queen, lesbian, bear, butch,...). It's also admitting that someone's sexuality is flexible, that the orientation of the sexual desire is not a definitive fact: nor for gays or lesbians, nor for heterosexuals.
Queer is being different, out of norm, unusual, it's the social anti-thesis of the word "straight" which leads to the systematic categorization of the human behaviors in preconceived, fixed and institutionalized categories (heterosexuals, gays, lesbians and bis). Mix of genders, opposition to (too much) strict categories, the Queer movement was created to react to evolution of the gay movement and particularly of the American gay movement, at the end of the 80's. When the gay movement became the gay march, self derision and self critics disappeared completely into the gay merchandising.
At that time, the Queer movement began to associate people who where disgusted by the "pink money", the gay conservatives, gay credit cards, official gay pride ties, diams red ribbons, gay pride becoming huge commercial fairs.
People who were tired of the gay movement (beginning more and more selfish and concentrated on specific gay problematics, refusing sometimes to take position against intolerance or discrimination that doesn't specifically touch the gay community) joined also the Queer movement.
To be short, queer means refusing barriers between lesbians, gays, bis, travs, bears, leathers addicts, queens, refusing to be categorized because of a social or a sexual behavior, being critical to a certain gay movement that doesn't care about exclusions (if it's not in the community) and is obsessed by the pink money.
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