From: CTR9899@whitewater.wcslc.edu (Chris Ryan) Subj: USE OF THE WORD QUEER Date: 95-02-26 03:47:20 EST From: KathyWUT For Immediate Release February 26, 1995 Salt Lake City A Suggestion: Use the word GAY by Kathy Worthington For four years now this editor has been exchanging subscriptions with or subscribing to a wide variety of gay publications from across the country. I've purchased every issue of Network Q, the monthly video magazine. (Network Q, the Q is for queer, is currently on hiatus, i.e. not being produced) My partner Sara and I have had plenty of time and plenty of reasons to get used to the popular use of the word queer . . . a word that a certain percentage of homosexual/bisexual/trandgender/drag people in the U.S. have taken to using as an all-inclusive term that means all of us. One word to include gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered people, drag queens . . . anyone who wants to consider themselves a part of our "family," our community. In our travels, in our work, in all those publications and on Network Q, we've heard the word queer used again and again and again and again. We've been to women's festivals, the March on Washington, Stonewall 25 and the Gay Games. Most of the time Queer is used by people who sound and seem to be quite comfortable with the word. You'd think that by now Sara and I would be comfortable with the term, and we are, sort of. Queer is shorter and easier to write or say than gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender. But we never use it ourselves, depite four years of editing a Utah publication for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people, and we really have no desire to. It just isn't a term we care for that much and we just haven't wanted to start using it. We think there are many, many homosexual/bisexual and transgendered Americans who feel the same way. Yet proponents of the word Queer have a point. This gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered/drag stuff can get pretty long, wieldy and tiresome. Queer is so short. Gay is shorter. And sweeter. Nicer. And more comfortable. Most lesbians get comfortable with the word gay before they get comfortable with the word lesbian. "I'm gay." It's easy to say, easy to hear. Even many straight people can hear it and not flinch, which is not something you can say about the word queer. And a huge percentage of gays and lesbians are quite comfortable saying they're gay. Some of us are even proud to say it, happy to say it. GAY. I think it sounds, and feels, comfortable and free. Out and proud. Not angry and defiant like the word queer seems to say. For my first forty years queer was a bad, nasty, insulting word. Four years haven't managed to erase all of that. People have compared the word queer to the word "nigger." So, have you heard of a Nigger Nation? Nigger TV? Network N? No, No, and No. GAY. We've taken a word that originally meant happy and used it in place of homosexual until everyone accepts it as meaning that. Surely we can take that same happy word and make it include bisexuals, transgendered people and anyone else who wants to be included. This is written by a woman, a lesbian, . . . and my partner, also a lesbian, agrees. We're activists, feminists and lesbians yet we think it's just fine for us and other people to say the word gay and mean homosexual men and women, bisexuals and transgendered people. If we, two womyn, two lesbians in our forties, think it's OK for publications, speakers, and writers to simply say gay to mean all of us, then perhaps there are other women out there who agree. GAY IS OK. We know there are people out there who can come up with some clever chants and slogans. "We're Gay! OK! We're not going Away!" Sara and I suggest that gays stop trying to change the meaning of the word queer, a word so many of us still don't care for much (and some of us loathe). We suggest that instead our community, our writers, our speech makers, leaders and others start using Gay inclusively. Say it to mean homosexual/bisexual/transgendered people. If we can take a word and make it ours, change it's meaning, affect the way it's used, why not the word GAY? That's our/my suggestion. For it to work, of course, other people need to agree and help get the word out. Please treat this like a press release and publish all or any part of it that you care to, either with or without my byline. Use it as a guest editorial, send it out in a mailing. Copy it, distribute it in any way you please. Especially if you agree. I am a forty-four year old Salt Lake lesbian, mother of two daughters 18 and 20, one of whom is currently in a relationship with a young woman. A part-time postal worker, I'm the founder, publisher and editor of a four-year-old publication for Utah gays, the Womyn's Communty News. Sara (Hamblin, my partner of two and a half years) and I are high profile Utah gay activists. We can be reached by phone in Salt Lake at (801) 288-9294, by mail at P.O. Box 65102 SLC UT 84165, or by email at KathyWUT@AOL.com.