azukar said:
I think 6th and Silver makes a good point. Adding more and more letters to the initialism just makes it unwieldy. Nobody in the LG community, or the LGBT commmunity, or the GLBTIQSDFBDDR community, is likely to be excluding others. That would be terrible hypocrisy.
You'd be surprised. While on the whole, the community tends to be more inclusionary and accepting than the general population, there's still plenty of infighting and certain degree of bigotry on the part of some individuals/factions.
Bi erasure/biphobia is a thing, for instance. Negative stereotypes such as infidelity, promiscuity, and insincerity still exist, and some members of the gay community see bisexuals as either straight people experimenting or gay people who are unwilling to come "fully" out of the closet.
There's also a certain level of hostility toward trans* people within some circles and/or (more commonly) a reluctance to advocate trans* issues with the same fervor as gay issues (not just transsexual people, but any non-gender-conforming individuals.) The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is a good example of this. It's a bill that's reintroduced in pretty much every Congress, and a huge source of contention is whether it should cover sexual orientation/preference and gender identity/expression, or just the former. This came to a head a few years back when a "both" version of ENDA died in committee (as they are wont to do), but then a "just orientation" version was reintroduced and passed the House. Some in the LGBT supported it, seeing it as incremental progress that could be built upon ("gotta take what we can get"), while others saw it as a betrayal of ideals and the worst sort of "compromise" (it would only protect those least likely to need protection.) In the end, it became political dynamite even on the liberal side of the aisle and ended up dying in the Senate. Since then, five more ENDA versions have been introduced, all covered both, and all have died in committee.
But yeah there's a lot more. Some radical queer elements oppose pride parades for being coopted by corporate interests and mainstream culture, while some conservative gay elements oppose them for too large a focus on "deviant" sexuality. When Bash Back! decided to confront neo-Nazi protesters at a pride march (carrying a banner that read "These Faggots Kill Fascists"), the pride organizers publicly denounced Bash Back!, who replied, "Neo-Nazis are not a group of passive Christians who want only to condemn our abstract souls to hell. These people want us dead. If given the chance, they will kill us. [...] The ?leaders? of this community have shown they will never stand with those they claim to serve. They would rather see well protected neo-nazis than a well-defended queer and trans community. Nobody will protect us if not ourselves." Any time practices/lifestyles like BDSM, barebacking, polyamory, etc crop up, there's always fights between those who want to hide/erase it because they see it as an image problem vs. those who want to embrace and announce it as a political statement. Etc etc etc.
To put on my class warfare hat for a second, it's essentially a conflict between bourgeois elements who are doing relatively well within the existing social structures and want to assimilate vs. poorer and/or more radical elements who are not, see those structures as oppressive, and want to change/defy/destroy them. To be sure, there's a spectrum of opinion. But the problem many of us in the "queer" camp see is that
the "homonormative" camp is winning. That is, the folks who only want a nice job and a house in the suburbs with a two-car garage and the right to marry their partner and raise children. If that's what you want, go for it, I say. But the threat is that for them to achieve the level of acceptance they desire, they're increasingly willing to marginalize, exclude, or shun anyone who does not conform to a "model" lifestyle and set of political beliefs that mimics heteronormativity and that the general public finds palatable and non-threatening. (Specifically, embracing a gay culture that values the gender binary, monogamy, procreation, and neoliberal economics, while diminishing bi, trans, queer, intersex, and other individuals as outsiders.)
azukar said:
Maybe if people want something to rally around, there needs to be a word that just means something to the effect of "not cis-gender cis-sexuality". Maybe the community should reclaim the word "queer"?
I dunno. But this increasingly long initialism just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I'd say "queer" has been reclaimed, but it still carries the connotation of difference. It'll prolly never catch on in general use for the reasons I talked about above: the friction between "we're here, we're queer" and "we just want to be seen as normal."
OT: I generally use LGBT or queer in conversation depending on the context. I think GSM or quiltbag (I really want that acronym to get the SCUBA or LASER treatment) would be preferable to LGBT, but neither really has the popular knowledge yet to really be effective for communication. Queer is a word I place a lot of value in for its political connotations though.
