There’s a narrative force contained within the words we choose to use for ourselves, a shaping power in the stories we tell ourselves about those words, about why we chose them in the first place. The history of the word stands in for the history of the thing it describes, the history of our names becomes the history of our communities, of ourselves. But this also works the other way around. We think we know our own history and project it onto our language. Our language speaks back to us, we think, tells us our story: but sometimes it’s just reflecting what we already believe.
I suspect that most people would tell you the following about the history of the word queer in its use for non-normative sexualities and genders: it started off as an American word; it started off as a homophobic term of abuse; it was reclaimed by the politicised queer movement of the 1970s and 80s; and so became a term of self-identification, whence it was picked up by Queer Theory. The rest is familiar. This tells a particular story about our communities — that we are a phenomenon of a particular place and time, that we were once isolated and disparate, vulnerable to abuse by a vicious majority, defined only in the shame-laden terms of their normative attitudes to sexualities and genders, that it was only very recently that political organising allowed a revisioning of our identities so that we could be proud, call ourselves by our own name, throw off shame and form a community. But — like so many things about queerness — a closer look suggests that none of this is as clear-cut as we might assume.
What is cited as the first written attestation of queer in our sense comes in the 1890s. On October the 18th, 1894, Francis Archibald Douglas, Viscount Drumlanrig, private secretary to the Prime Minister Lord Rosebery, killed himself — probably. At least, he died of a gunshot wound at a shooting party, and those around him believed it was suicide (or possibly murder), although the coroner ruled it an accident. The story seems to have been that Drumlanrig was having an affair with Rosebery, that they were threatened with exposure, and that Drumlanrig killed himself in order to protect his lover’s public face, his career. History is full of such stories. Queer people are revealed only through death, only when homophobia forces tragedy which cannot be concealed. Trans people are revealed only through death, only when their bodies are truly taken from them and transmuted into public property. Queer relationships are revealed only though death, only when a surviving lover grieves too publicly, with too much abandon (Alexander and Hephaestion, Hadrian and Antinous, Achilles and Patroclus).
Drumlanrig’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, had been estranged from his son for a year and a half at this point, and he reacted with all the grief that might be expected — along with a fair dose of vitriol and homophobia. Another of his sons, Alfred Lord Douglas, was having an affair with Oscar Wilde, and shortly after Drumlanrig’s death, Queensberry embarked upon a campaign of persecution against Wilde that would entail three court cases and end in Wilde’s bankruptcy and death. Before all of this, however, in the year that Drumlanrig dies, we find this first attestation of queer in one of his father’s letters:
Now that the first flush of this catastrophe and grief is passed, I write to tell you that it is a judgement on the whole lot of you. Montgomerys, The Snob Queers like Rosebery & certainly the Christian hypocrite Gladstone the whole lot of you/Set my son up against me indeed and make bad blood between us, may it devil on your own heads that he has gone to his rest and the quarrel not made up between him and myself. […] I smell a Tragedy behind all this and have already got Wind of a more startling one. If it was what I am led to believe, I of all people could and would have helped him, had he come to me with a confidence, but that was all stopped by you people — […] I am on the right track to find out what happened. Cherchez la femme, when these things happen.
At first glance this seems consonant with our understanding that queer starts out as a term of abuse — here it is, after all, from the pen of a cruel homophobe, a man who was to appoint himself a crusader against another gay man, ostensibly in defence of his surviving sons. And yet these few lines are rich source. The way the word is used, and the things said and unsaid around it, can tell us a lot. Notice the casual way in which Queensberry writes queer: no gloss or explanation need be offered, no scare-quotes or caveat or aside to support it. This is clearly an everyday word, one that Queensberry could be sure his interlocutor would understand, telling us that this was not an especially new usage. The 1890s, then, are not when this word first arose in this meaning — this is just an accident of the record, the first moment that someone happens to have written it down in a letter that happens to have survived up til the present day, that happens to have received the scrutiny of historians. And it should not be a surprise that the word occurs first in the writing of an aristocrat, nor of a homophobe: history is told by the victors, and that means the forces of normative society; the people who wrote in this era were disproportionately the well-educated, and those whose letters survive are generally only those deemed ‘important’ enough that their papers should be preserved. So all in all, this first attestation tells us little about when and where the word came from — just that it was familiar and unremarkable to a Scottish nobleman writing in the last decade of the 19th century.
Queensberry’s dilemma and reaction here is depressingly familiar in the history of queerness and of its persecutors. The homophobe discovers that a person whom they love, whom they respect, is also a person who is queer. They square this seeming-circle not by considering that perhaps queerness is not deviant, need not be attacked, but instead by putting the blame onto the people around their loved one: you people corrupted him, you are where the deviance really lies. In Queensberry’s letter he goes beyond blaming Rosebery and others for Drumlanrig’s queerness, but also blames them for the estrangement. You took the son I thought was mine away from me, he seems to say, you made him unknowable. This response to coming out is so familiar today as to need no explanation.
Another interesting thread to be unpicked here is how queerness runs in families. The two brothers both being queer is clear to see, but might there be a subtle hint that their father, too, understood this more than he let on? I of all people could and would have helped him, had he come to me with a confidence, Queensberry writes — what should we make of ‘I of all people’? Is this perhaps the perspective of a man whose own queer desire he believes he has successfully repressed and hidden, who could have guided his sons in quashing their identities and fitting themselves into the straightjacket of normative heterosexuality, if only they’d allowed him to control them too? It is a huge speculation to draw from the subtlest of hints — but if so, it too is a familiar story.
Like any word, queer did not pop spontaneously into existence some time in the 19th century, but was transmuted from something else — in this case, an older noun and adjective queer, whose history is suitably multifaceted and oblique. Historical linguists have suggested that there were in fact two words, both popping up in the record for the first time in the 16th century, whose forms and meanings were later intermixed. In 1567, we find evidence for a word spelt variously quyre, quiere or quire and meaning untrustworthy, evil or disreputable. The first examples are in Thomas Harman’s A Caueat or Warening for Commen Cursetors, Vulgarely Called Vagabones, the earliest dictionary of English thieves’ cant — language used by criminals to conceal the topics of their conversations from listeners. Here we find quyer whyddes (evil words), the quyerkyn (prison), the quier cuffyn (the justicer of the peace), quyer bowse (small and naughty drinks). At a similar time, in another book about the lives and language of those living outside the bounds of law, we find quire bird (one that came lately out of prison). This word quire develops to refer specifically to forged money, and from there is extended to any false or forged thing.
A little earlier, and apparently with a different vowel, we find another word spelt quere, or queire, or quer, and meaning strange, eccentric, peculiar. The first example is in Dunbar’s flyting in around 1513:
Off Edinburgh, the boyis as beis owt thrawis,
And cryis owt ay, Heir cumis owr awin queir Clerk!
Than fleis thow, lyk ane howlat chest with crawis,
Quhill all the bichis at thy botingis dois bark:[1]
It’s wonderfully fitting that this word is found first in a flyting — a flamboyant practice in which two poets performed (perhaps spontaneous?) insulting poetry at one another in a battle that was then judged by their audience. The word flyting is Anglo-Saxon, but the custom is known best from the Norse and Celtic traditions. One important source of our information about the Norse god Loki, who flirts with queerness in much of Norse myth, is the poem Lokasenna, a flyting in which Loki insults the rest of the gods by implying that they are queer or promiscuous — an argument which eventually brings about Ragnarǫk, the end of the world. Here as everywhere in the eyes of normative culture, queerness lives alongside queerphobia and both can have catastrophic results.
From this early use of queir to mean odd, a host of other meanings develop — unwell, giddy, drunk, dubious, suspicious. In Irish and Scottish English it even develops into a general intensifier (“I’m up to a queer lot of moves, and mother says I mayn’t do bad.” [1865 Wynne Overton’s Question]). If there really ever were two separate words, quire and quere, their usages come to overlap, they merge in form and become indistinguishable. Perhaps there was only ever one word, with slight variations in pronunciation and usage in different dialects. This word queer, with its meanings centred around ideas of eccentricity and strangeness, with its connotations of untrustworthiness and dishonesty, with a strong thread of bodily otherness, is the ground from which our word queer grows, some time before the end of the 19th century.
We could go back further still. Whether one word or two, quire/quere must have come from somewhere before they first appear in English/Scots writing in the 1500s. There are least two theories about their etymology — in one, the original source is Gaelic and in the other German, but there is a striking parallel in the original meaning the two theories ascribe. In Gaelic we have words meaning curve, turn, twist — we find Old Irish cúar ‘bent, curved’, giving Irish Gaelic cuar ‘curve’, Scottish Gaelic *cuar ‘crooked, bent’, itself now obsolete but fossilised in other words like cuairt [kuəɾʲsʲtʲ] ‘circuit’ and cuairsg [kuəɾʲsʲkʲ] ‘role up, twist’. This could have entered English via Scots — fitting the first observation of quire in Scots sources, although the vowel isn’t quite right for this. In Middle Low German we find queer ‘crosswise, at an angle’, originally descended (with odd and unexplained shift of pronunciation of the initial consonant) from older twerh. Old High German twerh has its equivalent in Old English þweorh ‘crosswise, opposed, crooked, bent, perverse’ which gives modern English athwart, so if this theory is correct it has the pleasingly strange result that English queer is a doublet of athwart. Whichever theory is correct, we seem to have an earlier spatial meaning, of something turning, being at an angle to what is expected, changing direction — the physical is metaphorically extended onto the human, onto the social, at-an-unexpected-angle becomes behaving-unexpectedly, which is a very ordinary path along which language shifts.
Returning to the modern day, can confident we be that our word was first something pejorative that needed to be reclaimed by politicised queers in the 1970s and 80s? This is a pretty fundamental part of the queer community’s creation story because it speaks to personal experiences that so many of us carry: we spend our childhoods or teenage years being the subjects of abuse, being called by words that our tormentors understand to be slurs, and yet later, as adults, we turn those words back on ourselves not as self-harm but so that we can become invulnerable. For me the words were not most often queer but bender, battyboy, gaylord, but for many of us it was the word queer, and so having a foundational myth as a community which precisely reflects this personal pattern of abuse and reclamation is both deeply empowering and ties us together. Still, the myth can lead us to make assumptions about history that don’t quite hold — it’s not really totally clear that the word queer starts off as something derogatory that only later is reinvented as a means of self-definition.
In 1952, the Sunday Pictorial (the paper which would later become the Sunday Mirror) ran a three-part series by Douglas Warth entitled Evil Men, attempting to scandalise readers by exposing and denouncing the ‘homosexual problem’. In this diatribe, we find another early example of the word queer:
Most people know that there are such things as ‘pansies’ — mincing, effeminate young men who call themselves ‘queers’.
The content is poisonous, of course, but the language is interesting. Warth seems to think of the word pansy as the pejorative term that most people would be familiar with as a reference to non-straight or non-cis people: queer, on the other hand, must be introduced as the perhaps-unfamiliar word that members of this community use for themselves. Here, seventeen years before Stonewall and longer still before the purported reclaiming of queer as a term of self-identification, we find it made absolutely clear that this was already a word used by us to refer to ourselves.
In a more ambiguous but much earlier example (indeed, the second earliest recorded in the OED), we find another homophobic newspaper article, this time in the Sacramento Bee in 1914. Veteran scandal-monger C.V. McClatchy had hired private detective Eugene Fisher to infiltrate the local police and expose information about fifty men who had been arrested in Long Beach, California, on charges relating to homosexuality. Fisher’s main source is a young man named L.L. Rollins who was among those arrested, and so can be assumed to be a member of the community in question. Rollins describes “a homosexual community with robust, complex sexual experiences that saw itself as quintessentially modern and progressive,” and “Fisher related that “fourteen young men were invited […] with the premise that they would have the opportunity of meeting some of the prominent ‘queers’”” (Ullman 1995:592–3). It’s hard to be totally confident of whose voice this is, Rollins’ or Fisher’s, but the context and the scare-quotes seem suggestive of Rollins. This, then, would be a use of queer as a term of community self-description more than sixty years before its reputed rehabilitation.
We find ourselves with a different story to that we had assumed. We imagined that queer was a term of abuse, an Americanism, and something that was not reclaimed for our own use until as late as the 1970s or 80s, whose reclamation was a calculated, political act. The story we’ve seen in the archives is more nebulous, much more of it lost or uncertain, but it does seem to be different. The earliest attestation is not from a North American source but in the pen of a Scottish aristocrat — the next examples are indeed from the US, but given that we should assume this word existed for a long time underground, on people’s tongues for decades before it found its way to paper, this doesn’t add up to any evidence either way. It is impossible to work out where queer arose first — by the time we have evidence, it seems to be used on both sides of the Atlantic. And regardless of whether queer was primarily a word used by queer people about themselves or a word used by mainstream society to attack us, it should not surprise us that most early sources which use it are rabidly homophobic. It is simply the case that it is queerphobes whose writings — expressing as they did the widely accepted view at the time — are likely to have survived. Indeed, they are more likely to have written down their views in the first place, since they were not risking their own lives and livelihoods by raising dissenting voices, or expressing impermissible desires. But we shouldn’t imply from that that the word itself belonged to them, and actually the evidence seems pretty consistent with the opposite conclusion — that queer was a community-internal word, a word for self-definition, and that when we find it being used outside it is by people who have had some view into the community, who are quoting something slightly foreign to them, something unfamiliar. Its origin and other meanings also make this seem possible. We find an idea of eccentricity, of being at an oblique angle to social expectations and norms, of being hidden, of bodily difference — there are pejorative strands in the history of the word, but they are not its whole history or its whole meaning.
This then is an echo of so many stories of queer history. We live with the assumption that we are a ‘modern phenomenon’, a set of identities invented by sexologists and political radicals in the 20th century and a community formed belatedly, in response — this is the more-or-less explicit underpinning of most attacks from social conservatives, but for many of us it is also embedded in our own self-beliefs. But it is wrong. Our communities have always been there, below the waterlevel, largely unmentioned in the historical record — in some periods we have been disdained but unremarkable whilst in others we have been vilified and persecuted, but neither state lends itself to writing down our own stories. Nevertheless, we have always had the power of speech, the power to self-define: we have used our own words, told our own stories, chosen to see ourselves on our own terms. The details have largely been erased from history, yet we can, still, choose to remember us as whole people, and people together. Words like queer need not represent the way we are cut off from our history, but can be the threads that still connect us to it.
[This piece was originally delivered as a talk at the Cambridge Junction in January 2020]
[1]Roughly:
The boys of Edinburgh like bees throw out
and cry out: “Oi, here comes our own queer clerk!”
then you flee like an owl chased by crows
while all the bitches bark at your boots.
