I didn’t fullow the article or understand what Mr. Carmen was talking about until he got to the nigger reference. Bing! It all became clear. He was equating the use of queer with that other word. And saying that by using Queer, Rudy was a bigot.
Now I haven’t seen much of survivior. Maybe rudy is a bigot, maybe not. However, I fail to see how using the word Queer is in ANY, ANY, way compatible with using Nigger. You could equate faggot to it.
If Rudy had sai “I used the word faggot so all my navy buddies wold know what I’m talking about”. That would be offensive. As it is I fail to see it.
So the debate is as follows. Does using the word queer make someone a bigot? Did he use it in a particular manner. Can the way you throw out a word make you seem as a bigot? Which words carry this ambiguity? Is Rudy actually a bigot? Can queer and nigger be equated? What about queer and negro?
Well, for one thing, the gay community has more or less embranced the word as a catch-all phrase to encompass the tounge-twister “gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered/transvestite/questioning/straight allies” (e.g., Queer Nation).
To me, it’s all in the delivery. “What a queer” by me means something entirely different from a stranger on the street saying “What a queer” about a friend of mine. Until I have context, I might not take it all friendly-like.
Well for one. If I had posted a thread topic “victory for Nigger Rights”. I would have had my brain eaten and spit out by a number of posters.
Queer is a word that I, and many in the GLBT community feel more accurately describes them. It has one of the following definitions. differing in some odd way from what is usual or normal. I wear that title with a sense of pride. Who wants to be normal? For anyone who is outside of the norm, but doesn’t fit into the GLBT catagories, it describes them quite well.
Nigger has nothing but negative definitions and conotations.
I’m a white guy, so I can only address this as pure speculation. It seems to me that the word “nigger” has a legacy of historical injustice, the pain of slavery and Jim Crow and a dehumanizing aspect that makes it a deadly word.
Some black people use the word, generally as one member of the group insulting another, like Chris Rock saying, “I love black people, but I hate niggers.” It’s a word loaded with so many levels of cruelty, pain, and suffering that nobody who is not African American should ever try to use it. That goes double for young, white, hip-hop fans who use the word to show they’re “down.” It is the worst word in the English language.
As a gay man, I dislike the words “queer” and “faggot.” The radical gay folks, like matt_mcl, like to use the word as a way of co-opting it from the heterosexist oppressor. It, like “nigger”, may only be used by a member of the tribe. An outsider using those words is claiming an intimacy or membership he has not earned. If Matt or Esprix said, “Goboy, stop acting like such a fag.”(not that that would ever happen) I’d take it in a friendly way. If a straight guy said it, depending on the tone of voice, I’d take a swing at the SOB.
so, long story short, 1) “queer”, especially the way Rudy said it, is an insult, and 2) no word can approach “nigger” as being foul and offensive. Any white person using the N word puts himself outside the pale of civilization.
There was a half-hearted beginning to this debate in this thread.
My take on the word “queer” is not the same as on the word “faggot”, mostly because of context I suppose. As I stated, I’ve never heard the word “faggot” used in any other than a derogatory manner. Not so with the word “queer”. In fact I have many gay friends who refer to themselves as “queer”, as in “Queer Nation”, etc.
I think the point that it was left at was - it’s not the word, but how it is used. But I certainly see Lissener’s point. Again, as I said, words themselves are not bad, it’s how one uses them, but many words have a predisposition to being used derogatorily.
Exactly. Also, since I didn’t see him use the word, I’m wondering how it was used.
I seriously didn’t understand the pentagon reference. Can anyone think that comment reflects badly on the pentagon? I mean really. And even though I see faggot used in good and bad ways, it’s different from queer.
The only way I could see queer being derogatory is if someone said “You fucking queer”. But at the same time if someone said “You fucking jew”, that would be offensive. The word jew itself is not.
Well, I personally wouldn’t use the word “queer” in reading or writing when referring to a homosexual. I note that the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines the adjective queer as “usually disparaging” when queer is used to mean homosexual.
I think the only answer would be to ask a representative sample of the gay community in the USA (or english-speaking countries for the worldwide view) to see if they consider the term insulting.
The topic was slightly different, but the thread includes a discussion as to whether calling someone a faggot is funny or not. (Posters differed on the issue.)
Huck Finn used “nigger” but he clearly wan’t prejudiced.
Rich and Rudy seemed to overcome their mutual differences and become friends and allies, with a great deal of respect and affection between the two.
Some famous football coach once said “If a black guy doesn’t want to be a nigger he better not fumble.”
My grandfather used the word frequently, but I personally witnessed him dive into a rip-tide in an attempt to save a young black man who was drowning while lots of other people just watched. He failed to save him and wept openly, and blamed himself.
If the people that watched never said “nigger,” did that matter?
A black guy I play golf with missed a 4 foot putt and called himself a “nigger.” I suppose if he had made the putt he would of been an afro-american, but what do I know?
Later, when he shanked a drive I thought about saying “If you’d just stop being a nigger and loosen up your swing, you might hit the fairway,” but saw the look on his face and thought better of it.
I get overly pissed off at this prevalent belief that these words somehow matter, that the social niceties and proper vocabularly are some kind of substitute for equality and prove a lack of prejudice.
That’s very true, but many times what you say is a good indication of what you are.
If I met a white person nowadays that always referred to black people as “niggers” I would assume that the person is a racist, since most people consider that term (when used by a white person) to be an insult.
I think that the word Queer is one of those words which is not really easy to quantify. Firstly it does have another meaning rather than the one which has been colloquially assigned to it over the years, that meaning being anything which is strange or unusual in any way. The same cannot be said of Nigger, no other connotations can be assumed of that word. Therefore I think that they are incompatible.
As for the actual offensiveness of the word queer under different contexts, that is also hard to quantify because words like Queer or Faggot have become the favourite insults of teenage boys who are a pretty homophobic bunch of people, a stage they usually grow out of by 17-18. However by then, for them the word has lost all meaning because they are so used to throwing it around. It’s like fuck. If you tell someone to fuck off then the implications of what you’re actually saying don’t occur to you because you’re so used to using it without thinking.
I’ve never watched Survivor because it’s not broadcast in the U.K. but the way I see it, if Rudy used the word Queer to people who weren’t gay then he was probably just throwing the first insult that came to mind without really thinking about it. However if he said it to someone who he did know to be gay then I think he was being bigoted.
On the other hand, someone from Rudy’s background might think that ‘Queer’ is the height of enlightened political correctness. It’s hard to keep up with the appropriate word de-jure if you don’t follow the community. I’ve been tripped up when I referred to someone as “black” when I was supposed to use “Person of Color”, or “Afro-American”. In that case, it’s not a matter of being prejudiced, but simply not being educated in the intricacies of politically correct speech.
Back to Rudy - on one of the earlier shows, he said something like “I don’t agree with his lifestyle, but I’m not going to judge him” or something like that. Later, he made the famous, “I like him quite a bit - Not in a homosexual way, of course”.
All this indicates to me that Rudy is actually quite open-minded in the sense that he’s a live-and-let-live kinda guy. He’s not gay, and he doesn’t think being gay is a good idea, and he may even be a bit homophobic (remember his comment about thinking the girls might be lesbians?) but he’s not about to let that stand in the way of friendship or cordiality. And I think that’s just about the perfect way to be (without the homophobia). We don’t have to like the lifestyle choices of the people around us - whether they be fundamentalists, gay, polygamists, whatever. What we must do, however, is treat everyone as an equal and with a common measure of fairness and decency. It seems Rudy did that.
The use of the word “queer” is exactly the same as the use of the word “nigger.”
When used by someone outside of the respective group, it’s meant to diminish and dehumanize them; to reduce them to an easily discarded separateness. The bigot uses these words to claim superiority.
When used by a member of the respective group, it’s used as a badge of solidarity with other victims of the bigot. When I, as a gay man, refer to myself proudly as queer, I ridicule the bigot’s use of such hollow generality and defuse its power against me.
These words are used by bigots to exclude, and by their intended victims to include.
I don’t recall any queers being kidnapped from Africa and raised as slaves for generations. I don’t know how many queers have been lynched.
A black man can’t hide his blackness, but a gay guy’s sexual orientation isn’t worn on his skin. It’s not the same.
“When used by someone outside of the respective group, it’s meant to diminish and dehumanize them; to reduce them to an easily discarded separateness. The bigot uses these words to claim superiority.”
How the hell do you know how it’s meant? That kind of blanket definition is ridiculousness. Double-plus-ungood.
“When used by a member of the respective group, it’s used as a badge of solidarity with other victims of the bigot. When I, as a gay man, refer to myself proudly as queer, I ridicule the bigot’s use of such hollow generality and defuse its power against me.”
Wow! I didn’t know it was a MAGIC word, and could do all that. As a non-gay do you think I might be allowed to borrow the word and speak it the next time the dark forces are allied against me? That way I too can defuse them and fight for justice!
On a seperate note I would prefer not to be referred as a “straight male.” I think that has a lot of negative connotations, since “males” are the most active participants in wars, when used by females it’s clearly a derogatory reference. “Straight,” implies a lack of flexibility, and is clearly of derogatory nature when used by the gay community.
I prefer to be referred to as “externally genitaliaed, femininely exclusive.” You may also call me “Armadillo trousered skirt chaser.”
Now, you’ve lost me. Why do you get to use a word and I can’t? Isn’t that a tad bit elitist or exclusionary or whatever.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - I don’t like the words “nigger” or “faggot”, I don’t care who speaks them. If you can give me a consensus that the word “queer” is always a slur, I’ll never use it again. But if that’s so, why can you?
lissener actually hit the nail on the head, but he seems to be a bit more stringent than most about the usage.
Similarly, a black person can call a friend “my nigger,” but only his white friends can say the same thing. If you don’t believe me, try walking through South Philly sometime and call out, “Yo, nigger!” “Faggot” is basically used the same way in the gay community, whereas “queer” is a bit more mainstream, though still controvertial, as I noted above.
I disagree. When I was in primary school, me and my friends used to call each other queers before we knew what it meant because we had not met any homosexuals and knew nothing about it. We had, however, met black people and knew the offensiveness of the word nigger. By the time we found out about homosexuality and what queer meant we had used it so often that the word had no meaning whatsoever and to be honest it still doesn’t really, at least not to me. Words like Faggot, however do have meaning to me because I only heard them after I knew what homosexuality was and so I had a meaning to ascribe the word to. My point is that with a word like queer that may not happen but with a word like nigger the exact meaning of the word will probably become known to children before they start using it and so they would know how offensive it is.
The point is, it’s up to the referred-to group to determine how it will be addressed. You can have an opinion whether you approve of their decision in the matter, but you don’t really get a vote if you’re outside the group.
Words invented by bigots to brand a group as separate must be relinquished to the labeled group; to refuse to do so makes you a bigot.
You may, for example, roll your eyes at the clumsy sounding phrase “African American,” but unless you’re African American or an insensitive bigot, you should roll your eyes in private: you have no say in the matter.
I expect this view will meet with some disagreement here :eek: but people I know who understand that most gay people find the use of such words by non-gay people offensive do them the honor of discontinuing their use of such words. Refusal to do so, refusal to honor the wishes of the labeled group in such a basic matter as how they are named, makes you in my eyes, as I said, a bigot.
