OutCasting Overtime; "Queer" vs. "gay"

[Lucas] This is OutCasting Overtime, a special feature from OutCasting, public radio's LGBTQ youth program. Hi, I'm Lucas, a youth participant in OutCasting's main studio in Westchester County, New York. On this edition, OutCaster Alex talks about the gay rights movement's reclamation of certain slurs and how he feels that "queer" is a more fitting label for him than just "gay". [Alex] An effective civil rights movement has to do more than just sway public opinion in order to instill long lasting change. Specifically one task that most modern rights movements have faced is trying to change the public's vocabulary surrounding the topic. Both the feminist and black civil rights movements challenged the American people's views on certain words. In particular, the gay rights movement has battled to reclaim words that had been traditionally used as slurs against us. In a little more than half a century, the United States went from using the word queer as a slur, to using it as a word of inclusion for any non-cisgender and non-heterosexual self identification. As I've got older I've come to respect the word queer more and more, particularly because I've come to

doubt the prevalence of the word gay. Since coming out a couple of years ago, I have identified with the word gay. It was the word that I was most familiar with, and it made sense. Largely I haven't had any problems with using the word. I find that it actually describes my sexuality as I'm someone who's attracted to people of the same gender as myself. But my issues with the word have grown since my first coming out. It started with hearing "gay" filling the place that the word "queer" used to occupy. Lots of teenagers my age throw around the word gay as a descriptor for anything effeminate. Even when I looked up the word effeminate while writing this piece to make sure that my definition of the word was correct, Google suggested pictures of gay actors and rainbow flags to me. Even beyond this, kids call plenty of random things gay just as a general insult. Trying hard in school is gay, apparently, as I overheard recently. The use of the word gay to describe effeminacy in men supports a false stereotype that all gay men are feminine, as well as an incorrect interpretation of what the word gay means. "Gay" describe sexuality, not gender. I'm not ready to use any word other than

male is describing my gender, and I find that the word "gay" to describe myself only supports the stereotype. How can I be effeminate, gay, and cisgender without fueling this? Is that conscionable? I don't want to have to grapple with this problem whenever I think about my identity, which is something that I should resonate with, of course. Using the word queer solved some of these issues. Ironically, queer is no longer used as commonly as a slur as gay is, but beyond that, the word queer puts power back in our hands. The word queer was reclaimed as a unification of gay men and lesbian women during a wave of angry radical protest in the late eighties and early nineties. Now "queer" unifies more than just those two groups. We tore it out of the dictionary and put it back as something entirely new. I like that queer implies some deviation from both the gender and sexuality binaries, unlike the word gay, which only describes sexuality, and I'm not sure I can say that I fall into the strict categories of cisgender and gay anymore. I've only just started to consider this change, but this thinking brings me back to the inexplicable first question that

starts everyone's coming-out process. I'm beginning to think that for me the word queer might be a better answer than gay. [Lucas] Thanks for listening to OutCasting Overtime, a special feature from OutCasting, public radio's LGBTQ youth program. OutCasting Overtime is a production of Media for the Public Good, a nonprofit organization. Our assistant producer is Josh ?Bally? and our executive producer is Marc Sophos. Visit us at outcastingmedia.org to get information about OutCasting, access our social media links, and listen to OutCasting and OutCasting Overtime. Thanks, and thanks for listening.