00queer:

hollowedskin:

iamshadow21:

asynca:

Ugh. Reading a whole lot of ‘queer history’ posts on Tumblr that are exclusively North American. Elsewhere in the world, we have a different history, a different lexicon and different experiences. I have a different experience of coming out 21 years ago than someone in the USA would. Our politics were slightly different here, and still are.

For example ‘queer’ is just a mainstream word here in Australia. Perhaps some very old people (I’m thinking my late grandma) may have used it to mean ‘strange’, but I only ever heard the word referring to people who weren’t of mainstream sexes, sexualities or genders. The first time I heard that it was a slur was when a teenager demanded that I stop using ‘a slur’ to identify myself on my own Tumblr.  

I know Tumblr has a lot of US folks on it, but I think it’s important to remember that the USA is just one country, there are nearly 200 others. Your history is not everyone’s history. Your experience is not everyone’s experience. I will be respectful of your experiences where appropriate, but you also need to be respectful of mine. And that includes not trying to make me ashamed of the word that I use as my identity for any reason. 

Also Australian, also identify as queer. Worked for the AIDS council of NSW as a volunteer in the mid noughties, and queer was the generally accepted and used blanket term for the non-cis-het community and things associated with it. Queer spaces, queer music, queer club, queer lit, queer films, etc. Our branch office was small, hundreds of kilometres from a capital city. We had one bar. One. And everyone would meet there – gay, lesbian, bi, trans, WHATEVER, because our community wasn’t big enough to segregate much, and queer was the term that united us under one beautiful rainbow banner.

You don’t like a term, or don’t identify with it? Fine, don’t use it. But you don’t get to tell anyone else that their identity is wrong.

another aussie here, yeah its really not a slur here. it literally had to be explained to us when we were studying classic literature in high school that they didn’t mean proper queer in the books.

swedish, not australian. but we use the word queer in sweden too – for sexes, orientations and gender alignments that don’t fit into “the norm”. our common version of “lgbt” is “hbtq” (homosexuell, bisexuell, trans, queer).

(also definitely making “proper queer“ my blog title now)