"Reclaiming the "Q" Word" Transcript
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May 23, 2021
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Sep 19, 2022
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May 8, 2024Channel deleted
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The Q word is a very contentious one these days. But gay words have always been contentious. Let's have a look at their history, and what we can do to take the "hate" out of "hate speech".
00:00 Intro
01:28 Part One
06:50 Part Two
12:51 Part Three
18:25 Part Four
24:10 Part Five
28:18 Part Six
34:36 Part Seven
foreign [Music] so I've noticed that a lot of people in the comments take issue with my use of the word queer in respect to the whole Squad of CIS hetero hegemony resistance some people have told me to just use LGBT others have said to Simply say gay for the whole crew because that's not exclusionary at all so seeing as how I apparently love nothing more than poking Bears on the internet I wanted to explain my rationale behind this which ended up going a lot deeper than I expected shocker [Music] [Music] okay so LGBT this as a term started being used in 1988 by some small groups in the United States but didn't gain mainstream use until the late 1990s though it started out as G LBT because gay men were running most of the organizations and of course we had to come first and then LGB because what the hell is a trans person but eventually LGBT became the accepted acronym mainly because it could refer to the community without any words that might trigger The Straits like lesbian okay or bisexual or transgender you know not people just letters but as you can see from the initial evolution of the term it has its problems mainly that it in any use is naturally exclusionary the only widely agreed upon abbreviation is LGBT though many people will use lgbtq or lgbtqia or lgbtqia Plus or what's common here in Canada lgbtqia 2s Plus however when it comes to branding any word longer than four syllables is an absolute no-go and there's years of market research to back this up so mostly you wouldn't normally hear anyone outside the community using anything more than LGBT even though I've seen some people use lgbtq i p d o g s a a plus lesbian gay bisexual transgender transsexual queer questioning intersex pansexual demisexual omnisexual genderqueer straight asexual Ally Plus JFC right now this is all in the name of being as inclusive as possible which is good we people of the alphabet soup are excluded from enough spaces we don't need to be [ __ ] and exclude each other that goes there to the people with just LGB listed in their Twitter profiles but the thing is our community has so many small niches of self-identification that no matter what version of alphabet soup you're using in casual language you will likely be excluding someone and then you get to situations where people at Pride festivals have to use some version of the full thing seven or eight times in a speech that's neither practical nor does it accomplish the desired effect of inclusion because you've either left a letter out or someone has stopped listening and thinks that you've left a letter out because you've been reciting a more complicated version of the ABCs for the last forever furthermore it opens up a door for Selective and deliberate exclusion as I mentioned with the LGB people on Twitter or the G's and the L's who don't want to acknowledge anyone else or a society of allies that will Swoon at the progress of lgbtqia plus representation when there's actually just gay people being represented or one lesbian and half a scene and as an anxious person who makes videos for and about this community I can say that I fully understand the amount of energy put into overthinking if a given script is leaving out a letter after spending weeks writing and shooting a video just to start editing and realizing I forgot a letter because someone will get angry at me for not including gender non-conforming demisexual straight allies this complaint is based on a true YouTube comment and not to play the gatekeeper but I'm not entirely comfortable with having an a for allies for a few reasons I've never heard an ally refer to themselves as part of the community I haven't heard a straight person say I'm lgbtqia or check that off on a survey as an identity option it's like when expecting parents say we are pregnant no if a cisman is involved in this process that is literally impossible girls I know you want to make a complete family and you want him to be involved but he's not pregnant he's not up at 4 30 a.m puking his guts up he doesn't have to stretch his dick hole out the size of a coconut he doesn't have the back problems the food cravings the lifelong stretch marks unless he's trans or non-binary and you've both hit the baby batter at the same time then yes you could both be pregnant but not usually anyway allies I am grateful for straight people who support us and I'm grateful that straight people recognize how amazing this community can be at its best so much so that they steal our culture any chance they get and I am so grateful straight guys in my life who have been perfectly comfortable with me staring at their asses thing is you can go back to your straight lives anytime you like you can be with us while we come out be there to support us but you don't experience it you don't internalize the emotions or the circumstances surrounding it maybe straight CIS women have a better understanding of what it's like because they too come from a culture which historically likes to Badger them into certain expectations but even then they've never had to sit their family down and reveal that they've actually been a woman this whole time at the end of the day being an ally is a choice regardless if it's a choice that you've made because you just can't stand Injustice it's still an action that you chose this doesn't necessarily fit the whole branding image that we queers are as mother monster once sang Born This Way But consistency is a whole other problem with the lgbtqip so LG not the TV sexualities you like people who have the same gender appearance I mean there's problems with that but we'll get into that a bit then you have bisexual which used to mean that you liked everyone but then as we started to include gender non-conformists into the larger awareness of gender identity it meant that you only liked people who binarily identified as men or women and now it seems that you can like everyone again or not it depends on who you ask so right after B comes T which being trans has nothing to do with who you want to have sex with a big problem I've seen in the past among the sishats is that a lot of people seem to be under the impression that transgender is actually a sexuality are they willfully ignorant or simply misinformed debatable after that tea we have another T this one stands for transsexual which some say is different from transgender While others say it's just an older term meaning the same thing I'm sis so I'll leave that argument up to other people so after the t's we have q which itself is ambiguous Q stands for queer or sometimes questioning but usually queer which is used as a placeholder and a catch-all for everything that isn't already described which then is kind of redundant because the letters after it go on to be more specific then you get I I stands for intersex which is neither a sexuality and not necessarily an identity more specifically it's a physiological phenomenon as the phenotypical result of chromosome combinations beyond the simple x x and XY binary which Jesus Christ biology so in genetics a phenotype is the set of observable characteristics or traits of an organism the term covers the organism's morphology or physical form and structure its developmental processes it's biochemical and physiological properties Its Behavior and the products of said Behavior among humans in this context it basically means are you visually identifiable as male or female but intersex means that you're not technically male or female on a biological level though you likely present as one or the other which really gets under the skin of the gender critical types who are married to the idea that male and female are etched in stone you'd think that given that this has been a documented component of biology and almost all species that gender critical folks would piss off because it is proof positive that human beings do not exist exclusively on a male female binary but they're dumb and don't understand biology despite their propensity to pretend that they're biologists and I'm greatly simplifying here for the sake of time anyway a as I mentioned this means allies or at least it did now there's two ways because it could also mean asexual which is a far more valid a to have on the list but a lot of people are reluctant to let asexuals into the inner Circles of lgbtism the thought process goes well if you're asexual then your sexuality has no influence on your daily life so GTFO it doesn't help that the asexual or Ace Community itself is splintered where the vast majority of non-asexual people think they're completely sexless and the vast majority of media depicts them as emotionless robots who are usually autistic when in reality yes you do have the no sex folks but also the very specific circumstances folks and the only people I'm emotionally attracted to folks and the people I have no emotional attraction to folks the phone sex only the cyber sex only the I just like to watch and the high libido asexual folks who have a barrel of Ky next to their bed and several terabytes of porn and within the community itself there is gatekeeping going on that's trying to say who on the aforementioned list is a real asexual then there's 2s or two-spirited which I gotta say I love that North American Pride organizations are acting like their next level woke for their minimal amount of effort to include First Nations people because you know actually going out of your way to help First Nations people economically and or socially would simply be absurd oh you'd like help getting out of the giant economic hole that we've put you in or maybe help stopping native women being murdered every other night how about a new stripe on the pride flag instead anyway throwing 2s into the mix is an ice gesture if nothing else though it does project an idea of pre-colonial pan-americanism where the whole of Native American people represent a single monolithic culture when in fact it was composed of hundreds of tribes and languages North America had more disparate native cultures than Europe had white ones but it's hard to acknowledge that now because the English Dutch and French genocided entire nations without a second thought white people which cue the I'm not like other white people speeches from the ones who read a book about First Nations beliefs in spiritualism and then hang a dreamcatcher on the wall you want to be spiritual white people there are other religions you know pray to Jupiter or Odin there's all kinds of gods and deities to pray to from Europe instead of appropriating the beliefs of victims of genocide we could give sermons to pan speaking of pan Which can also be short for pansexual which is the p in the LGBT mess essentially pansexual means that you're attracted to anyone no matter how they present on the gender Spectrum bottom line is that the whole abbreviation which it stopped being an abbreviation about eight letters ago it's a big long jumbled confusing mess of this isn't really straight which caps off with some cultural appropriation especially when you attack on the plus at the end of it what's the Plus for some people say it's for HIV positive folks which is good but a lot of people in the community don't want to include positive people so it's taken to be read as just Plus like plus whoever else comes along which isn't that what the queue is for it seems to me the more we as the people of the alphabet soup continue to identify as things other than simply LGBT and or t the more messy the acronym becomes but cleaning it up isn't so simple [Music] foreign another big reason why I dislike the LGBT label is that it is a very fragmented collection of identities we're adding new letters to the mix all the time as we carry on the old ones which more research we do the more we're indicating that our initial assumptions about gender and sexuality were false all right history lesson so homosexuality was a term coined in the late 19th century but didn't actually achieve widespread use until the mid-1900s this is a distinct sort of switch in the way people thought about sex acts between those of the same physiological sex homosexual is a term which refers to an individual and thus paints same-sex attraction as an intrinsic element of one's personality but earlier phrases tell a different story through most of christianized Europe the descriptor was sodomites in reference to the act of sodomy or also tributism when referring to two women later would come sexual inversion or sexual deviants I like that second one and yes queer was a term used but more so to describe someone of a certain set of behaviors in the same language as dandeism in England though queer was a bit more of a negative term it wasn't explicitly derogatory though until the late 1800s in the American Northwest whereas Dandy was more of an endearment queer in English just means weird strange or outside the ordinary the key difference was that before the budding field of psychology sprung up around the turn of the 20th century gay sex was an action which led to engaging in gay sex as a lifestyle Freud Kinsey and other psychologists and sexologists sought not only to draw people into categories but also ascribe actions of an individual's daily life to an inner fixed state of personhood basically queer had been something you did but now queer was something that you were for whatever good intention these researchers may have had the public interpreted this knowledge as there was now a category of people for whom God-fearing heteronormativity he was something they were completely incapable of due to their fixed psychological condition as a homosexual I try to explain this to people sometimes and they don't quite realize just how much of a fundamental shift in understanding this was consider that criminal persecution was focused on the specific Act of sodomy and fellatio and that a sense of justice among the public was rooted in punishing the person who committed the act the antagonism was directed at the act of sex but following psychological qualifications the antagonism was now directed at the individual the individual was homosexual it was intrinsic to one's sense of being in fact Freud's writings on the topic stated that homosexuality was not something someone was born with but the result of a snag in early age psychological development and while he did believe that was no fault of the individual it was still considered to be a kind of defect or malformity basically he thought we were the sexual version of the Elephant Man but Freud was office rocker and we don't have to take what he said seriously but he was pivotal in shifting a societal understanding of queerness where anybody could be homosexual if it was an element of Developmental personhood or genetic determinism then there might be no apparent indication of this person's queerness they could be hiding anywhere suddenly the crime of being gay was not the actual Act of sex but a matter of being your actions were not illegal you were illegal which correct me if I'm off base here but that seems a whole lot worse to me at least from an internally psychological level think of the way that changed how we think of ourselves for instance in Europe up until around the early 1900s male male sex was seen as something that every man was capable of doing this is obvious in early English writings about Italy where wealthy parents were informed not to let their sons travel there because the much more sexually fluid Italian Catholic boys would corrupt Englishmen into same-sex engagements because the gays could spread it though even this was subject to vast variants across Europe in terms of attitudes towards sexuality the prevailing concept of homosexuality was taken for granted some guys like to point other guys whether that was okay or not dependent upon where you lived and What social class you were in though the thought process about sexuality as being part of identity didn't really factor into the question in fact sexuality as a term and a concept wasn't even used to describe what gender or sex you were attracted to the subject of someone's sexuality was a description of their sexual habits which yes could be same-sex attraction but more likely we're going to be talking about what Kinks they were into and if you're wondering why this section is so man-centric this is because the vast majority of legal persecution of early queers was focused on men firstly there was just much less legal effort when it came to documenting women in general we're missing information on that front so we can't really speak to it secondly information about early lesbians kind of results in men not really being willing to talk about it in the legal case of Radcliffe Hall she in her book The Well of Loneliness depicted World War
[TODO] A good article on why English laws do not ban lesbianism on the book. I think this fits in debunking the Radclyffe Hall remark. TLDR the legislators really didn't want their wives and daughter to find out about lesbianism, but still punish it under different legal offenses. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/society-politics-law/law/lesbianism-and-the-criminal-law-england-and-wales
One ambulance drivers as being primarily lesbians English courts were really not pleased with this depiction but women who love women with such an uncomfortable topic for them they threw her case out of the courts and just let her carry on in her happy life which is mostly me trying to apologize for not having as much fem on Femme content in this video here have some Sarah ponsby and Lady Eleanor Butler and their dog sappho [Music] so the term homosexual was developed as a term to reclassify an element of culture that had existed since the dawn of time in many pre-christian cultures men boinking other men was simply an element of the culture itself it was seen as a deterministic inevitability yeah we knew that Spartans were going to Spartan but the more research is done into ancient cultures the more we learned that it was perfectly acceptable to be in an openly male male relationship we're also learning that these ancient cultures did not in fact place any stigma on bottoming Achilles was a power bottom archaeological anthropology as a whole is giving us a version of history in which pre-christianized societies had no specific language for making a distinction between same-sex and heterosexual relationships as well being very comfortable with members of society who did not conform to gender binaries to a much greater degree than we've ever been willing to admit or aware of Vikings and Celts and Goths didn't see any reason to develop a descriptive language for queerness because they didn't see queer people as being incompatible with how these societies functioned being queer didn't mean you couldn't build boats raise livestock fight Wars or command fleets in many cases gender non-conformity also had positions within Society across multiple societies homosexuality was actually a term coined and pushed by non-queer academics and regardless of their intentions and regardless of how it has shaped the progression toward queer rights it itself is an invented term but we keep celebrating this concept of homosexuality as an inherent truth when even our ancestors who were queer friendly would have looked at it as such a strange rigid qualification and especially because it was used by others to describe the group of us rather than us opting to Define ourselves the creation of the word gave homosexual men and women something to call ourselves an identity not just a descriptor but we didn't come up with it and now just look at the writing on the wall every passing generation has a growing number of people who identify as bi or pansexual every year psychological research tells us that sexuality and gender are getting more and more fluid and that outside of social conditioning a lot of people don't really have strict rules about gender attraction at all which is going to end up adding a lot more letters the alternative is what we have now I see a major cultural push to funnel people into a limited finite number of acceptable identities which have been pre-approved by The Straits you'll notice a pattern that queer folks who the straights are still comfortable bullying are those who choose not to fit into one of the very reasonable selections that they've been offered it's an expected compromise yes the Straits will let us get married but only if we exist as the kind of gaze that they're okay with which should be a bit off-putting to the alphabet soup people around us who don't like the word queer the straights control what is okay what we can call ourselves do you realize how many other things they've called us which were in objective sense probably way more dehumanizing and sometimes just stupid like yeah they've called us but I can't in my right mind imagine being upset at being called a cream puff like if someone calls me a cream puff there's just gonna be a big old okay Boomer eye roll and whenever someone tries to insult me with queer then I just feel bad that they're so disconnected from the modern world that they resort to an outdated insult there's a point where someone is so disconnected from reality that they don't matter anymore let's take a moment to remember the archaic and forgotten insults to queer people [Music] and this is the wonderful part about language things change do you think it matters that the original definition of ultimate meant that it was just something at the end of a list no people don't give a [ __ ] they're gonna say ultimate because it means awesome best biggest incredible amazing show-stopping spectacular words don't have any inherent value they mean what we think they mean so if everyone thinks that queer is an insult that's what it becomes and besides if you've got a younger group of gabies growing up with a positive take on the word queer why do you want to tell them that it's a bad word why do you want people to feel more oppressed than they already do like I get that you don't like the word probably for some very valid reasons that we'll get into but it was never the word that was attacking you it was the homophobe the religious zealot the bigot words themselves don't mean anything but they carry meaning and if you choose to see this word as carrying hatred and bigotry especially when this is a word that is largely outside of the realm of common use you are choosing to carry the pain and suffering from your past into the present and given shifting attitudes toward queer folk in many places in the world that is pain and suffering that does not need to be here which we can certainly do without though we're going to face some difficulties from the older generations of people who have grown up in a world where you were meant to shape your entire identity around your sexuality either in Conformity to stereotypes or in spite of them and to them I don't really have anything reassuring to say we're not living in the same world that we were and the younger generations of gay and trans babies have every right to Define themselves as you fought for the right to Define yourselves it would be a bit hypocritical of us to turn around and say um no actually we defined ourselves this way so you have to Define yourself the same way especially as the way we defined ourselves as insufficient to describe developments and how we are coming to discover and ReDiscover gender and sexual expression foreign [Music] the word queer is already being widely adopted despite resistance by the old guard in academic circles queer theory is the term used by many within social and literary criticism because you know a bunch of literate queers wanted to qualify the interactive and reactive elements within the many factions of queer culture and their relation to the hetero world and if a room full of pig-headed academics can agree the queer is a term that can apply to the room as a whole maybe it's something we should think about have you ever been in a room with an academic you can't even agree with themselves but regardless of this not only is queer useful as a description of the overarching collection of often Misfit identities it's entirely appropriate to repurpose an archaic insult into something that can be interpreted by many as a positive so my big question to everyone who doesn't like the idea is why do you want to make a world with more negativity in it if queer is an insult then that's just one more negative word in the world straight people took an otherwise unremarkable word removed it from word neutrality and made it into something malignant and by us allowing that word to continue to be a negative not only are we perpetuating that hatred but we are giving straight people an insane amount of power over how we the queers identify ourselves why should the Straits influence us so much we should be influencing them by shifting queer into the category of exclusive language like many of you constantly harass me about you are letting a negative toxic hetero hegemony limit your language if you want to limit your own language that's fine because it's a result of the self making an assertion of what one is comfortable with but I have strong ethical concerns about living in an apparently politically correct Society where the class of reformed oppressors are still dictating our existence hold on a minute really let that sink in this time they are not limiting our actions but rather and this is worse shaping the way we think about ourselves and that isn't to dismiss the pain and suffering that people have gone through queer has been used as an insult within lived history yes and your trauma matters but there is a problem when you are telling others that they should have your trauma why do you want more people to have trauma isn't that the entire point of gay queer whatever rights remember when that's gay was an insult basically someone saying that something that they didn't like was gay that's what I grew up with gay was the worst word in the world now when someone says that's gay they mean yeah that's pretty gay gay pride and then out comes the I don't understand why we need new gay representation we have plenty of gay movies from the 90s and they helped me so these damn kids complaining about not having any gay movies just need to watch in and out yes in and out Pinnacle of filmmaking and remains relevant to Modern queer audiences around the world culture defined and then emerges this kind of toxicity within the queer Community where all you'll ever need has already been done which is a very inspiring message by the way to automatically snap back in history to more homophobic and transphobic decades identify with queers facing 20 year old problems and if you're a creator you're just [ __ ] out of luck might as well give up everything we need has already been done feed the machine of dredging up suffering from the past and twisting it into something that can fit in today all the while ignoring members of our community who today suffer and are underrepresented and who suffer because they are not represented we lost an entire generation of queer artists because of AIDS we don't need to stifle the Next Generation [Music] I realize that there's a few contradictions developing here at the same time that I'm advocating replacing one overarching umbrella term LGBT for another queer I'm also pushing for a stronger presence in self-identification how does changing the overarching descriptive term accomplish that and furthermore how does it help bolster the voices of internal communities in a way that LGBT doesn't already do well for starters someone will have to make a conscious decision am I referring to the whole Community or am I just referring to a singular group because as a single word queer refers to a specific idea whereas LGBT refers to many things however in practice there is an encouragement to default to LGBT when even just one of the given identity criteria are met speaking to the most publicly accepted and privileged of us does not facilitate a presence for the entire community and especially in idle conversations when people gloss over the letters and CIS people are especially guilty of this it's like they aren't really aware of what the letters actually stand for instead they just vomit out the jumble of sounds because this is what they've been told they're supposed to say and they're going to stick to the script God damn it but these aren't words they're letters and letters don't carry the history of the words that they represent but if people start using queer maybe they'll take half a second to acknowledge to themselves The Suffering that has been inflicted on the queer community that is still inflicted on this community and will continue to be inflicted for as long as we keep declaring every narcissistic twink on YouTube and Wall Street gay to be a champion of lgbtqia plus rights maybe they'll think maybe I shouldn't call this queer representation because this does not represent all queers it only represents the gays or the lesbians or the bias or the trans people or the envies because it's not like being queer means that lesbian and trans and non-binary will just vanish in fact I hope that having a singular term will help these communities have the ability to describe their own presence in the world suddenly Hollywood journalists will maybe stop saying that a movie has lgbtqia plus representation when really there's just a cyclops monster lady like as far as visible clearly stated representation goes that's just L representation and that's fine that's that's more than fine that's great lesbian representation but having a cyclops lesbian in a movie does not qualify for representing trans people and saying that a movie has lgbtqia plus representation when it's only representing one letter is bad I want media to be clear and distinct about what identities are being presented don't give a Studio lgbtqia Plus Credit points for having a lesbian sister character or a gay best friend and that's it not all lgbtqia plus people get equal time in the spotlight let's talk about media actually since that's kind of my wheelhouse two TV shows that both are described as having lgbtqia plus representation Queer as Folk and Shameless Queer as Folk is a show about a group of gay and lesbian friends in turn of the Millennium Pittsburgh and focuses mainly on a whole host of queer issues including gay bashing same-sex marriage monogamy drugs and addiction relationships between HIV positive and negative people coming out porn surrogacy family Dynamics and dealing with anti-gay politicians Shameless on the other hand is a show about an impoverished family in Chicago trying to get by as the city gentrifies and their flawed upbringings lead them down paths that destroy opportunities for Education career advancement and emotional stability which one sounds more lgbtqia plus inclusive if you haven't watched them you might be surprised to find out that it's not the one about gay people queers folk focuses almost entirely on gays and lesbians with a hint of bisexuality around the edges and that's it one of my favorite shows of all time but it's very LGB focused which isn't a bad thing but we can't really say it's an lgbtqia Plus show while Shameless which is ostensibly a straight show about poverty actually is far more inclusive of the lgbtqia spectrum we've got queer characters like Monica the never around mom of the family who's pansexual Ian her gay son who actually had his own vomiting scene after being forced to have sex with a woman a nice Twist on a very tired trope Mickey Ian's OTP who is also gay in a bossy bottom but who gets married to a woman at one point in the series The Woman being Svetlana a bisexual Russian who ends up in a three-way relationship with another by character V and her husband Kev Ian's sister Debbie is eventually bisexual with multiple girlfriends and Ian dates trans man Trevor for a while who was probably the most down-to-earth and stable character to appear on the show and they're just the characters with major story arcs there's a lot more so the straight show actually has far more lgbtqia plus representation than the show with queer in the title and yet the objective of Queer as Folk is to discuss issues and elements of the queer Community as a whole perhaps not as inclusive as it could have or should have been but it speaks more to a queer state of being even as Shameless has it beat for quantifiable representation check boxes which is what my hope for the word queer would be LGBT is a term which basically functions as a checklist a head count but it's really hard to qualify an overarching culture of shared values it's hard to talk about lgbtqia plus culture because it refers to the political and sociological status of the group of people it represents queer has greater flexibility in describing not only the collection of these people but also referring to the collective and shared culture between them at the same time the syntax itself makes it less appropriate to refer to queer representation when speaking to representation of individual internal communities would be more proper plus making it a word that has been formerly used as a slur may make the straight second guess just using it by default so when there's lesbian representation without trans representation they'll say lesbian representation instead of giving a studio or network a pat on the back for diversity they didn't earn [Music] [Applause] [Music] but at the end of the day we really need to start to unify and recognize the individual needs within various groups in the community and while that may seem to be contradictory I don't think we specifically the more privileged elements within the community can really address those needs without coming together yes we are divided in our identities but that doesn't mean we need to be divided in our common objectives the whole I've got mine it's up to you to get yours has never been in season and frankly it's a bad look on anyone let's be honest anything and everything can be used or misused as an insult against us you think it's a mental slip that Boomer politicians say transgender to people why do we condemn words so deeply while ignoring the intention laid behind them if you say fact while talking about how much you love your tragically gay best friend group you're homophobic but if you pass harmful or dismissive legislation while describing these people as the LGBT community you're doing great focusing on language and politically correct language makes it so easy for people to persecute us and Escape consequences because technically they're saying the right things if that's all we care about using the right language then we're just gonna let the rest of society walk all over us we already let ourselves get tone policed every time one of us gets angry at something that we should be angry about the sish head folks cross their arms and say well that's not how you make friends you need to focus on getting people on your side which sure but at the same time we would rather just be treated like human beings without having to jump through hoops while our allies hold our rights hostage for our good behavior if we take every word that has ever been used against us and tell ourselves that we can't say it we're going to become very illiterate very quickly but we also possess the transformative power of looking at something hateful and taking it away from our haters by removing their language of hate we remove their power over us at least some of it it doesn't stop there granted they still have legal protections to hate us but we can take away their ability to force us to react to their hate we're here we're queer and by slinging insults at us they're only demonstrating that they're choosing not to ignore us which a bunch of grown ass Christian men obsessing over half-naked muscle Queens grinding on each other on a pride float that's kind of gay the straighter option would just be to not think about it try it I know it's hard and if you don't want to identify as queer that's fine I can't make you do anything unless you're into that but I can say that the future does not belong to us we can only push it in the direction that we like and see what sticks with young people but what's the point in having Pride if we're not proud to be different to be outside the normal to be queer if we're ashamed of being queer of being different then isn't this a fundamental failure of Pride on a basic level I mean why would you want to be proud of being like everyone else congratulations you can function on a base level of boringness established by generations of restrictive social conditioning hooray assimilation successful so in closing as the emotional music swells I'm not here to make you cry today just don't be basic be clear [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you
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