{"id":64,"date":"2025-02-14T19:08:05","date_gmt":"2025-02-14T19:08:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.daddyogg.co.uk\/?p=64"},"modified":"2025-02-14T19:08:05","modified_gmt":"2025-02-14T19:08:05","slug":"no-gays-the-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.daddyogg.co.uk\/index.php\/2025\/02\/14\/no-gays-the-word\/","title":{"rendered":"No – GAY\u2019s the word."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Some years ago now, at a fairly large gathering at which my husband was DJ-ing (for \u201cmates\u2019 rates\u201d, I should add, or as you and I would put it, \u201cunpaid\u201d) I was introduced to somebody with the words, \u201cThis is Tony. He\u2019s a queer pagan too!\u201d Being English, and hence cursed from birth with the Not Wishing To Make A Fuss gene, I reigned in my instinctive teeth-on-edge reaction and said only, \u201cYeah, I\u2019d say \u201cgay\u201d pagan. Hey.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m a man attracted exclusively to my own sex, the word for which is \u201chomosexual\u201d, or – in everyday language – \u201cgay\u201d. Accordingly, \u201cgay\u201d is my chosen description of myself. It is not, and indeed never will be, \u201cqueer\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hate the word. I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, and I have an unpleasant history with it. Apart from that, in its present day context there\u2019s an echo of the aggressively sulky teenager about it – \u201cYeah? You gonna make sumfin\u2019 of it?\u201d – when, as all know, aggressively sulky teenagers are only aggressively sulky because they know deep down that they\u2019re safe to act that way. It couldn\u2019t really be otherwise, given that the word has been taken up across the media as one that\u2019s OK to use nowadays. The professional prescribers of public opinion have made it so, and they aren\u2019t concerned with what we who refuse the description might think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It all comes down, largely, to a concept the \u201cqueer-identified\u201d know very well, and will present lectures about at the drop of no hats: \u201cprivilege\u201d. At the risk of sounding ancient – but fuck it, why stop now? – they\u2019re, in the main, simply too young to recognise their own position of privilege where the word \u201cqueer\u201d is concerned. They live in a secure enough position (which is great) that they feel they need neither know nor care what earlier generations of gay men and lesbians had to live through (which isn\u2019t), and have picked a word that makes them feel all edgy and bad-ass, egged on by bubble-dwelling soi-disant \u201cintellectuals\u201d and \u201cacademics\u201d who have an ideology to propagate, money to make out of it and no concern that they\u2019ll have to live with its possible results. For both it\u2019s all surface, because for them, the word is safe; just a word like any other, with no personal negative psychological history attached to it. They never had it sneered at them in angry disgust by family members or people they had thought of as friends. They never heard, \u201cWell, he was a queer, wasn\u2019t he?\u201d when the news announced the death from AIDS-related illness of the latest gay male celebrity to succumb. They never saw it used, almost daily, to describe them in the gutter press, along with other words like \u201cpoof\u201d, \u201cpervert\u201d or \u201cshirt-lifter\u201d. They never knew what it was like to have it shouted at them across the street, or while they were being chased down it on their way to being overpowered and kicked unconscious in the gutter. They talk about \u201creclaiming the slur\u201d. No. Not yours to reclaim, my darlings. You weren\u2019t there, and you don\u2019t get to apply it, without asking permission, to those who were. Stop it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOh, but Tony,\u201d comes the objection, \u201cit\u2019s about inclusion.\u201d Well, no, actually it isn\u2019t, because there\u2019s only one kind of person it includes – the ones who have taken \u201cqueer\u201d ideology on board, along with its assumptions, politics and aims. Because \u201cqueer\u201d is an ideology which people voluntarily buy into and position themselves within. As a description of people it\u2019s broad to the point of meaningless, and – because of its lack of roots in people\u2019s actual experience – shallow as a puddle. There is, for instance, nothing you can point at and say, \u201cThat is queer history\u201d, despite the present popularity of that expression. The histories of the experiences of gay men, lesbians, bisexual people (to the degree that they positioned themselves as part of these) and transsexual people – those, you can define; those, you can describe. But \u201cqueer history\u201d covers none of these things, by attempting to cover – and, indeed, reinterpret and redefine – all of them. It\u2019s, at best, a fudge. If you tell me that you\u2019re \u201cqueer\u201d, that doesn\u2019t convey much; I\u2019m going to need more information before I understand what you\u2019re talking about, in much the same way as there\u2019s no such thing as a language called \u201cForeign\u201d. Diversity isn\u2019t the point, either. Whichever letter in the ever-growing initialism might be \u201cyours\u201d, you\u2019re expected to get in the Q. All hail the happy hivemind, which we\u2019ve decided is a thing now! You don\u2019t want to be a hater, do you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you think I\u2019m exaggerating, try this. Imagine expecting every religious minority – Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, all forms of paganism, the lot – to ignore their cultural differences and often contradictory convictions and motivations in life in favour of defining themselves as simply \u201cseparate from and in opposition to the oppressive religious majority\u201d. Now explain to me why it\u2019s acceptable to use, as shorthand for \u201cseparate from and in opposition to the oppressive religious majority\u201d, the word \u201cKike\u201d, and why it\u2019s in any way surprising that Jews in particular might have a problem with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word \u201cqueer\u201d could and should have been left to die. There are loads of people who, like me, have long experience of seeing and hearing it used as a term of abuse directed pretty much entirely at gay men, or men suspected of being gay. The repurposing of the word as the name of a movement continues that abuse by requiring us to accept it as a term for ourselves, and is thus inherently homophobic, but name-calling is just the start of it. We\u2019re expected to join the merry band, but treated with sneering contempt if we don\u2019t march in lockstep with it, and now and again with the open expression of fantasies of violent punishment for breaking ranks. The evidence for this isn\u2019t that hard to find on-line, if you doubt me. The homophobia, now, is often coming from inside the house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, this is me, saying – and meaning – \u201cNo\u201d. I am not \u201cqueer\u201d. The word is unacceptable, and no wide-eyed attempt at gaslighting from some performatively nail-varnished straight boy who enjoys getting pegged by his girlfriend – now that it\u2019s safe for him to be that – is going to change my mind. Because we all know that if events ever take a sudden nasty turn and it stops being safe, he\u2019ll immediately chuck the word and all its implications far away like the burning paper bag of shit left on the doorstep that for some of us it always was, don\u2019t we?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some years ago now, at a fairly large gathering at which my husband was DJ-ing (for \u201cmates\u2019 rates\u201d, I should add, or as you and I would put it, \u201cunpaid\u201d) I was introduced to somebody with the words, \u201cThis is Tony. He\u2019s a queer pagan too!\u201d Being English, and hence cursed from birth with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daddyogg.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daddyogg.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daddyogg.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daddyogg.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daddyogg.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.daddyogg.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67,"href":"https:\/\/www.daddyogg.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/67"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daddyogg.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daddyogg.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daddyogg.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}