QUEER-DOM, THE CATCH-ALL CLOSET

"Queer" was an insult directed at homosoexuals in my childhood of the 1950s and 1960s. Like "faggot" or "dyke", it was meant to demean and target those considered unclean and non-conforming to heterosexual normalcy. Our Gay Liberation of the 1970s took back those words. Subsequently, Black Americans took back derogatory racist words in mainstream media through rap and hip-hop music. Black Americana had long used those words in their own communities to neutralize their toxicity.

Words and the human mind have a profound relationship. Many effective uses of words to influence mass behavior for good or evil have been well documented. Propaganda is a real thing with real efficacy. Capitalism thrives on the use of words in advertising. Politics, the source of organized mass-media propaganda in the 20th century, are now ruled more by propaganda than actual evidence of real events accomplished by elected officials. The loudest and more adept at propaganda wins, or so it seems.

Accepting the label of "gay" as a homosexual man and using it as a self-description was a profound developmental step. I took that step in 1969 while a senior in college. I attended the first publicly advertised meeting of gay/lesbian college students here in Boston. Two of us showed up in an empty classroom at the student union complex of Boston University. The brave organizer, who had placed the ad in a hippy tabloid without any clearance from college officials, was the other one. We did not meet a second time due to our youthful discouragement at the lack of turnout, but my life was changed by the experience.

Identifying myself as "gay" means I identify as a homosexual man who joyfully and exclusively prefers the wide array of physical, sexual and affectionate expression with another consenting adult man. It means I am not at all heterosexual, bisexual or gender-confused. Period.

Queer Nation appeared during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in 1990. Its organizers were reacting to "heterosexism" in their own press, however, to this veteran of the Gay Liberation and HIV-positive identity groups, Queer Nation, an amalgam of homosexual men and lesbians acting together to do public performance in straight venues, smacked of an attempt to dissociate being queer from being associated with HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS was definitely viewed as a gay male disease in the media.

My own experience of men and women who described themselves to me as queer has been rather homogenous. Every person I have known who has preferred the "queer" label has been sexually conflicted or admittedly bisexual, not homosexual, when asked to be specific. All have seen themselves dissociated on a personal level from AIDS.

The resurgence of "queer" as an inclusive label on The Political Left seems to me to be a trojan horse to seduce gay and lesbian activists (and funding) into Marxist, anarchist and new-wave feminist causes. It strikes me as an intentional blurring of lines in an attempt to continue the appropriation of the Gay Rights Movement by dishonest actors. The vicious insistence of substituting LGBTQI for the simple label of Gay-Lesbian in social media and news media supports my notion. 

Homosexuals have emerged from thousands of years of torture and execution in Western Civilization through the courage and hard work of outspoken homosexual men and women, not by the work of  bisexuals and transgender persons, who have largely remained underground until now, when the homosexuals have made great progress in legal and social protections.

As a gay man, I have no trouble defending the human right of anyone to express their natural sexuality. That is not my issue with the "queer" label. "Queer" to me, as a veteran of gay rights activism, denotes a shying away from identifying openly as gay, lesbian and/or homosexual. It does not speak of inclusion as much as speaks of individual deception, manipulation and/or equivocation in order to appropriate the hard-won gains of homosexual males and lesbian females who have lived out lives at great sacrifice to make things better.

I see the acceptance of LGBTQI as a substitute for Gay and Lesbian in the banners of gay rights causes to be demeaning to those of us who made being homosexual a potentially equal and joyful life in America and beyond. "Queer Pride" to me belies an appropriation of a sacred loyalty among gay men and their lesbian friends which carried us through the dark decades of the AIDS epidemic when other groups stood back in the shadows of their safe closets.