There's been twitter discourse erupting about LGBTQ+ community, who is allowed to reclaim slurs, who is allowed to use charged/treacherous words, and who is targeted by what types of homophobic violence.

And I just want to say: queer was reclaimed, powerfully, thirty years ago.

Reclaiming is always a complicated, prolonged, messy process. But for "queer," more than any other word I can think of, there was a decisive turning point in its reclamation.

And it was the pamphleting of the 1990 NYC Pride Parade.

https://actupny.org/documents/QueersReadThis.pdf

That pamphlet contained An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose, a text that I hold to be sacred, words that I consider some of the most important in queer liberation history.

I think it's also really important to note who An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose is fighting for: every one of us.

If there is any debate about who a reclaimed "queer" belongs to, I would submit these texts as canon to draw our answers from. And their answer is extremely clear: it is every lesbian, every gay, every trans person, everyone against the heterosexual order that stifles freedom.

(There's a valid critique to be made that these texts create no space for asexuals in their queer utopia or their vision of queer insurrection. Valid critique! It's a historical artifact that, thankfully, belongs to an evolving discourse.)

The push to re-stigmatize "queer" and queerness is one that has been amplified significantly in the last five years, and it is primarily a TERF campaign (as is the goal of border-patrolling lesbianism) that preys on young minds trying to figure out how to Do Identity Right.

1990 was a long time ago. I was still in diapers. The word has been reclaimed for longer than I have been able to pronounce it.

And for other words, still grotesque: reclaiming is not a tidily delineated and virtuously categorized process. It is a playful, dangerous, hot mess.

A response thread worth weaving in: https://twitter.com/katbamkapow/status/1278100707564871680