A few weeks ago Adam Nagourney of the New York Times explained on the front page of the paper that "Even as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases ... the politics of gay rights remains full of crosscurrents."
I read this sentence in a coffee shop and it took everything inside of me not to stand up and yell, "Amen brother!" At the heart of Nagourney's words is an understanding of the fact that while stigma and outright hatred of homosexuality has decreased, and rights and freedoms have increased, the reality for people of diverse sexual and gender orientations is much more complex. There are more inroads to make, and it is at these inroads that paths begin to diverge and the crosscurrents begin. We see this clearly in Edmonton in the dynamic that exists between the queers and the gays.
To start with, gay can be implied to mean homosexual, while queer suggests a more fluid and/or complex notion of sexual orientation. Someone who describes themselves as gay can be assumed to engage in same-sex activities whereas the same thing cannot be assumed of someone who describes themselves as queer.
Queer was historically used to describe things that were abnormal, and gay to describe someone who was happy. It is funny how queer and gay—that is to say abnormal and happy—can now lend themselves to be identifying political labels. It's possible that a gay person may not see their sexual orientation as being political, while someone who is queer would most likely understand that inherent in their declared orientation is the political.
A politically active gay person can be understood as someone who is looking for happiness in the full acceptance by the mainstream of their sexual orientation, whereas a queer person can often be categorized as one which is comfortable challenging notions of normal and finds strength in abnormality. Marriage, equal opportunity at work and in the marketplace are the main concerns of many gay people's activism, while for many queer people the notion of marriage is troubling and systems of capitalism and the like must be questioned.
While I believe gay and queer can exist on the same spectrum, increasingly gay and queer are coming to ideological loggerheads. For an example, one need look no further than this year's Pride parade celebrations in Edmonton. For many gays the news that TD Bank was sponsoring Edmonton's Pride parade heralded a new era of support. Gays saw TD Bank's sponsorship as increased legitimacy of homosexuality and the accompanying lifestyle. As one person wrote on the Edmonton Pride Festival facebook wall, "It's awesome to see that large companies such as TD are able to open up and be progressive enough to support such an event as Edmonton Pride."
For Edmonton queers, however, the TD Bank sponsorship pointed to the growing commercialization of Pride and the gay lifestyle. Many queers in Edmonton were specifically disturbed by the renaming of the Pride Parade to the TD Bank Pride Parade. Members of the Queer Recruitment Army, a new activist group in the city, carried signs during the parade that read things such as "Stonewall was not sponsored by TD" and "My Pride is not for sale."
Cliché would dictate that what potentially divides queers and gays is nothing compared to what unites them, but that is only true in the same way it is true of all human diversity. In practice the differences in queer and gay identities are substantive. They speak to different ways of seeing and being seen in the world. They reflect different values and, ultimately, very different goals.
It was not that long ago that queer was rarely used. During the first year of Exposure I was invited to speak about our upcoming festival on a local radio show. The announcer, a homosexual himself, refused to use the event's full title, Exposure: Edmonton's Queer Arts and Culture Festival, saying that he did not feel comfortable using the word queer. That same year our board chair was the recipient of a very nasty email from a former resident of Edmonton who violently objected to the use of the word queer. For some the word queer still stings from back in the day when it was used to disparage people, not used by people for empowerment.
Fast forward to present day, when people's use of the word gay is being policed to ensure that they are not being homophobic, while queer rolls off people's tongues without a second thought. It is used to sell beer, describe youth events and increasingly as a label to describe one's self.
If things continue to progress the way I think they will in the future gay will remain for the most part a word used to describe a man's same-sex orientation whereas queer will become less associated with sexual identity and more about political ideas and alternative ways of being. In the meantime, pay attention. V
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