Who Put the “Q” In?
“What is the ‘Q’ in ‘LGBTQ’?” my sister asked.
“Queer.” I replied.
“When did that become okay?”
“February?”
To many people it must feel like the LGBT community is always moving the finish line. Just when the LGBT acronym becomes the go-to for allies on-the-go we give them a new letter. A new letter when many of them are still trying to wrap their minds around the “T”. For those that are not in the know, here is a break down of the standard alphabet:
L = Lesbian G = Gay B = Bisexual T = Transgender
I don’t know when exactly we smooshed these four together. I just know it happened for me in the 2000s. I also know that it is irrelevant which order you put them in, but to many people that order is a political statement in and of itself. For many years I would come across “LGBt”. The lower-case “t” was a way of making clear that the transgender community felt forgotten or marginalized within their own community. This is not an invalid perception on their part. I have also seen “LG-T”. This is a creative way of saying that the bisexual community is invisible or doesn’t exist. Trust me when I say that bisexual people exist. There are probably more bisexuals than any of us, if we are being totally honest.
In Houston, when the oldest political caucus in the gay south was renamed, there was much debate about the order of the letters. Ultimately it was settled on GLBT Political Caucus (incidentally this is how I came to learn the order), but then at some point someone in California, I suppose, switched up the “L” and the “G”. The order is still irrelevant.
Anyway, you get the point. LGBT, in whatever order means the community of folks that have a big parade with rainbow flags sometime around June in most places. However, I understood my sister’s question. When she was growing up (she’s much, much older than me) to call someone queer was considered a bad thing. It was like a Diet Coke version of calling someone the ultimate insult of “GAY” — less calories but it got the point across. Both were words used as weapons rather than objective identifiers. You can only imagine her surprise to see the Q being hoisted up onto the LGBT sign in her ally brain. Who authorized this new signage? What did it mean?
Marginalized communities often participate in a reclaiming of terms that are both offensive or misconstrued as being offensive. Anthropologically, it makes sense. In a sword fight you would win by disarming your opponent. It stands to reason that by taking the terms or words that oppressors use to harm, we take away their ability to inflict the harm — with words at least.
I am not sure when we all took a vote and added the Q collectively. For me, it officially happened when I wrote an article about my transgender friend visiting the doctor and he told me about why he identifies as queer rather than gay. For him it was about honoring the 38 years of his life that he was a woman. It allowed him an umbrella term to describe his sexual orientation, without forcing him to choose gay or straight. This made sense to me, just before I realized that how he identified was none of my business and if it made him happy then how difficult was it for me to just say LGBTQ rather than simply LGBT?
Buckle up, though. It gets more complicated. There are many more letters. There is actually a LGBTQIA+ acronym that has been floating around for a long time but not taken off. The “I” stands for Intersex and the “A” stands for Asexual. I don’t really understand why Asexual is there. I don’t know how many people are being discriminated against for not being sexually attracted to anyone, but it’s there. The “+” stands for all other identifications, sort of like “etc.” For example there is also a P, and that is Pansexual. Pansexual means you can be attracted to any letter of the alphabet. It is not, in fact, a fetishized obsession with the J.M. Barrie children’s novel.
It apparently takes at least a decade to get a new letter added to the standard acronym, as well as a 2/3 vote from all of the states. We send our ballots courtesy of the Castro Theater in San Francisco. They are counted by unicorns. The results are read annually at the finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
The thing about the LGBTQ+ community is that we are diverse. We aren’t identified by external characteristics (well not totally). We are identified based on who we are inside. It can be more difficult to point us out, at times, but there is a pretty good rule of thumb on how to avoid stepping on the wrong alphabet. When it comes to LGBTQ+ politics, especially naming, you need not resist any insistence by others to identify them as X, Y, or Z. Just focus on being a person who believes in full equality for everyone and you will come out on top. And by top I mean you’ll be okay. I don’t mean a top as in Tops/Bottoms. That’s another article all together.
