I am so used to politically self define myself as queer, without really giving too much thought to the concept itself. Coming out in NYC during the 80’s, right in the mists of the AIDS epidemic, the word gay had very little relevance. I was not a priviledge white male, with a business nor a condo in the village and a share in Fire Island. I was not interested in muscle guys with their fitted jeans and their polo shirts, in other words the poster transcripts that monopolized the archetypical gay male construct after stone wall; the “American normalized opposition to heterosexual ideals.” I was a latino, working class, City college student, with a C average, who fancied the working drag queens in the early hours by the piers, with lots of anger against my Roman Catholic hostage days, and with an incredible mistrust for anything branded “home made.” I was a Pyramid Club regular that wore combat boots and black tube skirts with white t-shirts to dinner parties to disrupt, displeased, and amuse my self out of boredom. I was not interested in the passive aggressive fluid transmission of lust, but more into the aggressive to aggressive dynamics of power play and danger. So in recently looking for queer conversation about contemporary politics I came a cross an article at the Independent Gay Forum that caught my attention. The article Young, Out, and Gay-Not Queer by James Kirchick proclaims that with the usage of queer, gays are at the loosing end.
While Kirchick does not object to the term as used by “Oxford English Dictionary”, referencing queer as to that which is “strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric, in appearance or character, (interesting enough, Oxford had to be introduced somewhere in there to make it more credible) he has “a problem when gay activists and certain academics use the word in an affirming sense to describe gay people.” To him there is nothing “strange, odd or peculiar” about homosexuality, which has existed, arguably, for nearly as long as human history itself. The word “gay” to him is save enough to self identify yourself.
Totally missing the point that within queer politics, the concept of homosexuality is always mapped in opposition to the heterosexual established one. Thus configuring “homos” as only fucking same sex, while “heteros” as the norm that only fucks the opposite sex. Missing the point that heterosexuals, and homosexuals are also promoted diagnosis, and that those terms relinquish all kinds of affections into a male female, good evil, right wrong trap. So to be ok with gay, and homosexual and not with queer, is basically to say that he wants to be passing as only an American male, that beds other American males but that does not want anyone invading his bed game. Therefore by rejecting the term "queer", he wants to be seen as controversially disengaged from any political narrative. To him the term queer disrupts his sense of normalcy.
In one sentence, to Kirchick, gay = Ok, Queer = evil + dangerous. It is to say fuck all of you that happen to be transgender, transsexual, bisexual, or anything out of the normative fixation. Your lives should be the ones interrogated, searched, and objected too, not his. The next thing on this dude agenda is a run in a campaign trail with republicans that equates homosexuals to bestiality. Just a warning, the "norm" that he is so much siding with, is also monopolizing the term "gay" that he is so comfortable prescribing to. But I guess he is OK with the trap.
