Queer
Queer is often used as an umbrella term for people who are non-heterosexual, non-cisgender, non-allosexual or alloromantic, or intersex. It is alternately used to refer to all people who reject sexual and gender norms and share radical politics characterized by solidarity across lines of identity. Queer is also a self-identity term for many people, characterized by rejection or disruption of binary categories of sexual orientation and gender.
Originally meaning or, queer came to be used pejoratively against LGBTQ people in the late 19th century. From the late 1980s, queer activists began to reclaim the word as a neutral or positive self-description.
In the 21st century, queer became increasingly used to describe a broad spectrum of non-heteronormative sexual or gender identities and politics. Academic disciplines such as queer theory and queer studies have emerged to examine a wide variety of issues, either informed by this type of perspective, or to examine the lives of LGBTQ people. These share a general opposition to binarism, normativity, and a perceived lack of intersectionality, some of them connected only tangentially to the LGBTQ movement. Queer arts, queer cultural groups, and queer political groups are examples of modern expressions of queer identities.
Critics include LGBTQ community members who associate the term more with its colloquial, derogatory usage; those who wish to dissociate themselves from queer radicalism; and those who see it as too amorphous or trendy. Supporters of the term include those who use it to contrast with a more assimilationist part of the gay rights movement, and to signify greater willingness to defy societal norms in pursuit of gender and sexual identity liberation. They may associate it with the advancement of radical perspectives that were also present within past gay liberation movements, such as anti-consumerism or anti-imperialism, or with events such as the Stonewall rebellion.
Queer is sometimes expanded to include any non-normative sexuality expression, including cisgender queer heterosexuality, although some LGBTQ people view this use of the term as appropriation. Some non-heterosexual and/or non-cisgender individuals self-describe themselves as queer for the relative ambiguity and rejection of explicit categorization this provides compared to labels such as lesbian and gay. PFLAG states that as such a personal identity, queer is "valued by some for its defiance, by some because it can be inclusive of the entire community, and by others who find it to be an appropriate term to describe their more fluid identities." Recent studies have found that 5–20% of non-heterosexuals and 21–36% of trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people identify as queer.
Origins and early use
Entering the English language in the century, queer originally meant,,, or. It might refer to something suspicious or "not quite right", or to a person with mild derangement or who exhibits socially inappropriate behaviour. The Northern English expression "there's nowt so queer as folk", meaning "there is nothing as strange as people", employs this meaning. Related meanings of queer include a feeling of unwellness or something that is questionable or suspicious. In the 1922 comic monologue "My Word, You Do Look Queer", the word is taken to mean "unwell". The expression "in Queer street" is used in the United Kingdom for someone in financial trouble. Over time, queer acquired a number of meanings related to sexuality and gender, from narrowly meaning "gay or lesbian" to referring to those who are "not heterosexual" to referring to those who are either not heterosexual or not cisgender. The term is still widely used in Hiberno-English with its original meaning as well as to provide adverbial emphasis.Early pejorative use
By the late 19th century, queer was beginning to gain a connotation of sexual deviance, used to refer to feminine men or men who were thought to have engaged in same-sex relationships. An early recorded usage of the word in this sense was in an 1894 letter by John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, as read aloud at the trial of Oscar Wilde.Queer was used in mainstream society by the early 20th century, along with fairy and faggot, as a pejorative term to refer to men who were perceived as flamboyant. This was, as historian George Chauncey notes, "the predominant image of all queers within the straight mind".
Starting in the underground gay bar scene in the 1950s, then moving more into the open in the 1960s and 1970s, the homophile identity was gradually displaced by a more radicalized gay identity. At that time gay was generally an umbrella term including lesbians, as well as gay-identified bisexuals and transsexuals; gender nonconformity, which had always been an indicator of gayness, also became more open during this time. During the endonymic shifts from invert to homophile to gay, queer was usually pejoratively applied to men who were believed to engage in receptive or passive anal or oral sex with other men as well as those who exhibited non-normative gender expressions.
Early 20th-century queer identity
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, queer, fairy, trade, and gay signified distinct social categories within the gay male subculture. In his book Gay New York, Chauncey noted that queer was used as a within-community identity term by men who were stereotypically masculine. Many queer-identified men at the time were, according to Chauncey, "repelled by the style of the fairy and his loss of manly status, and almost all were careful to distinguish themselves from such men", especially because the dominant straight culture did not acknowledge such distinctions. Trade referred to straight men who would engage in same-sex activity; Chauncey describes trade as "the 'normal men' claimed to be."In contrast to the terms used within the subculture, medical practitioners and police officers tended to use medicalized or pathological terms like "invert", "pervert", "degenerate", and "homosexual".
None of the terms, whether inside or outside of the subculture, equated to the general concept of a homosexual identity, which emerged only with the ascension of a binary understanding of sexual orientation in the 1930s and 1940s. As this binary became embedded into the social fabric, queer began to decline as an acceptable identity in the subculture.
Similar to the earlier use of queer, gay was adopted by many U.S. assimilationist men in the mid-20th century as a means of asserting their normative status and rejecting any associations with effeminacy. The idea that queer was a pejorative term became more prevalent among younger gay men following World War II. As the gay identity became more widely adopted in the community, some men who preferred to identify as gay began chastising older men who still referred to themselves as queer by the late 1940s:
In calling themselves gay, a new generation of men insisted on the right to name themselves, to claim their status as men, and to reject the "effeminate" styles of the older generation. Younger men found it easier to forget the origins of gay in the campy banter of the very queens whom they wished to reject.In other parts of the world, particularly England, queer continued to be the dominant term used by the community well into the mid-twentieth century, as noted by historical sociologist Jeffrey Weeks:
By the 1950s and 1960s to say "I am queer" was to tell of who and what you were, and how you positioned yourself in relation to the dominant, "normal" society. … It signaled the general perception of same-sex desire as something eccentric, strange, abnormal, and perverse.
Reclamation
General
Beginning in the 1980s, the label queer began to be reclaimed from its pejorative use as a neutral or positive self-identifier by LGBTQ people. An early example of this usage was by an LGBTQ organisation called Queer Nation, which was formed in March 1990 and circulated an anonymous flier at the New York Gay Pride Parade in June 1990 titled "Queers Read This". The flier included a passage explaining their adoption of the label queer:Queer people, particularly queer Black and Brown people, also began to reclaim queer in response to a perceived shift in the gay community toward liberal conservatism, catalyzed by Andrew Sullivan's 1989 piece in The New Republic, titled Here Comes the Groom: The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage. By identifying themselves as queer rather than gay, LGBTQ activists sought to reject causes they viewed as assimilationist, such as marriage, military inclusion and adoption. This radical stance, including the rejection of U.S. imperialism, continued the tradition of earlier lesbian and gay anti-war activism, and solidarity with a variety of leftist movements, as seen in the positions taken at the first two National Marches on Washington in 1979 and 1987, the radical direct action of groups like ACT UP, and the historical importance of events like the Stonewall riots. The radical queer groups following in this tradition of LGBTQ activism contrasted firmly with "the holy trinity of marriage, military service and adoption become the central preoccupation of a gay movement centered more on obtaining straight privilege than challenging power." Commentators such as Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore have argued that it was exactly these "revolting queers" who had made it safe for the assimilationists to now have the option of assimilation.
This radical political stance has remained embedded in the reclaimed use of the word queer. Ever since the early 1990s, queer has been used as both an umbrella term and as a distinct self-identity term by people for whom no other label better describes their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.
As an umbrella term, queer is often used to describe all people who are non-heterosexual and non-cisgender, but it is alternately used to describe all people who defy or deviate from sexual and gender norms and share radical anti-assimilationist politics. For many people, the word queer is a political identity—one that is characterized by solidarity across sexual, gender, racial, class, and disabled identity lines. The Trans Language Primer notes:
While it has gained relatively wide usage in the present, there are still many that maintain that in order to be queer, one must be invested in liberation beyond respectability and assimilation. “We’re here! We’re queer! Get over it!” and “Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you,” are popular in the queer community precisely because they capture this spirit of radical liberation.As a distinct self-identity term, queer is defined by a rejection and disruption of binary categories, particularly man/woman and gay/straight, and for many people it is an intentionally politicized identity that exists in opposition to identities such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual. Recent studies have found that 5–20% of non-heterosexuals identify as queer. Trans and nonbinary people are more likely to identify as queer than cisgender people, with recent studies finding that 21–36% of trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people identify as queer. As a self-identity label, queer can encompass sexuality and/or gender; in a 2025 international survey of more than 40,000 nonbinary people, more than half reported that they use the word queer as a self-identity term in relation to gender.