The History of the Word "Queer"

Before it meant anything about sexuality

"Queer" entered English around the early 16th century meaning strange, odd, off-center — possibly from the Scots, and related to the German quer, "oblique" or "crosswise." For roughly four hundred years that's all it meant. Something "queer" was peculiar; to "queer the pitch" was to spoil a plan; feeling "queer" meant feeling unwell. None of it had anything to do with who anyone loved.

The slur years

By the late 19th century the word had narrowed into an insult aimed at men perceived as effeminate or homosexual. One of its earliest documented uses in this sense comes from 1894, in letters by John Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry — the man whose feud with Oscar Wilde led to Wilde's imprisonment. Through most of the 20th century, "queer" was among the commonest anti-gay slurs in the English-speaking world: the word hurled during street violence, printed in tabloid exposés, and muttered at anyone who stood out.

This is the context the word carried when today's older lesbians, gays, and bisexuals were growing up. For them it was never abstract. It was the soundtrack to real fear — arrests, firings, beatings, estrangement. Any honest history of the word has to hold onto that weight.

Reclamation: Queer Nation and queer theory

The deliberate reclamation came out of the fury and urgency of the AIDS crisis. In 1990, activists from ACT UP founded Queer Nation in New York; their flyer "Queers Read This," distributed at that year's Pride march, made the case explicitly: the word was being taken back precisely because it stung, as a gesture of defiance. "We're here, we're queer, get used to it" dates from this moment.

At almost the same time, the word was adopted by the academy. Scholars — Teresa de Lauretis coined the phrase "queer theory" in 1990; Judith Butler's Gender Trouble appeared the same year, joining the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michel Foucault's legacy — built a field around it. In queer theory, "queer" is not a synonym for "gay": it names a stance that questions the stability of categories like man/woman, gay/straight, and normal/deviant altogether. That intellectual project is exactly what made the word attractive as an umbrella: it was designed to dissolve boundaries, not to describe a specific orientation.

From the 2000s onward, the reclaimed word spread from activism and academia into mainstream institutions — universities renamed programs "queer studies," media style guides softened their cautions, and "queer" increasingly appeared as the default adjective for the whole LGBT coalition and everyone in it.

What the reclamation never was: universal

Here is the part of the story that gets left out. Reclaiming a slur is a personal and generational act, not a rule change that binds everyone the slur was used against. Many people — especially, but not only, those who lived through the decades when "queer" was purely a weapon — never adopted it and never wanted to. Polling of LGBT adults consistently finds that only a minority identify as "queer," while large majorities describe themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Even the Associated Press Stylebook still cautions that the term is not universally accepted and should be handled with care.

A word can be reclaimed by some and still be a wound for others. Both of those things are true at once — and both deserve respect.

The trouble starts when institutions treat the reclamation as finished and mandatory: when "queer" becomes the default label applied to every same-sex-attracted person, including the many who explicitly decline it. At that point, a word chosen as an act of self-definition becomes, for others, a label imposed from outside — which is the very thing the reclamation was supposed to fight.

Where that leaves us

Use "queer" for yourself if it fits — its history of defiant reclamation is real, and for many people the word is home. But the history cuts the other way too: "lesbian," "gay," and "bisexual" are the words under which this community's civil-rights victories were actually won, and the people who prefer them aren't behind the times. They're keeping faith with the same principle the reclaimers invoked: we name ourselves.

Keep reading

For a practical breakdown of how the words differ today, read Gay vs. Queer: What's the Difference? — or see the LGB Glossary for plain-language definitions. Our fuller position is on the home page.