In short, as long as they are not heterosexual, they are all our people!
Look, isn't it super cool? There is an illusion that we are the boss! Besides, don't forget our names. We are Cool-Ye Er! Sounds cool, right?
However, although we are so cool in the context of China, the image of queer in the English world is completely different. To put it bluntly, it is completely a history of blood and tears of a sexual minority family.
Although queer is now a proud label of our sexual minority, it was actually a derogatory term when it was first used.
/kloc-At the beginning of the 6th century (about 1500), "queer" was absorbed by English from Scotland and officially entered the English-speaking world. It was also during this period that the word "queer" was formally associated with the meanings of "strange" and "weird", which laid the foundation for later extension to "non-mainstream" in sexual orientation.
In modern times, when19th century meets 20th century, the original meaning of queer is still widely used, for example, in Conan Doyle's works:
Holmes raised his eyebrows.
"But you sent for me?"
"Ah, yes, that's another thing-a trivial thing, but it's something you're interested in-weird, you know, you can call it deformity. This has nothing to do with the main fact-it is impossible, on the surface. "
"What's that?"
The word "queer" appears as an anomaly in The Second Blood published by 1904, which is one of Conan Doyle's 56 short stories about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
But with the passage of time, the original meaning of queer "strangeness" began to be replaced by the so-called "abnormal sexual behavior" and "sexual deviance".
When time officially entered the 20th century, according to the Oxford Dictionary, the meaning of queer gradually evolved into an insulting word for non-heterosexuals.
In the civil rights movement in 1950s and 1960s, "queer" was used to attack LGBT people together with words such as "lesbian" and "gay".
If we travel through that time in a time machine and then introduce ourselves as queer, it is estimated that the scene will be very embarrassing ... It is really shameful to introduce ourselves as "breaking X" in the current context.
But with the development of the gay movement, we finally gradually recovered our confidence in ourselves and began to have our own "pride". For us, people who shout "queer" are as ridiculous as the children who curse in kindergarten!
Such strong self-confidence finally makes us embrace the word "queer" and turn this word, once our "enemy", into our own label.
Queer country poster:
"Homophobia is a social disease"
"Homophobia is a threat to your health."
A famous example of this strong self-confidence is Queer Nation, a sexual minority rights organization founded in new york, 1990. It took the lead in using the word "queer" as its own name, and used homophobic speech itself to make propaganda posters to fight back: they copied the sentence patterns of homophobic speech intact, only replacing "homosexuality" with "homophobia" in all the original sentences (see above).
Under the background at that time, these measures had great irony to the mainstream society and fully reflected the confidence of sexual minorities in their own groups.
Gay parade 1985
The self-confidence of sexual minorities largely benefits from the LGBT research developed in the 1980s. In the 1980s, queer was originally an insulting word in the United States, but it was revived by radical supporters of sexual minorities as a summary of their theories.
This is the queer theory.