And L, as a subset of G, is redundant.
We all want whatever it is in our underpants to tingle.
There comes a point where everyone has their dirty laundry in each others face, putting folks in headlocks to make them sniff skid marks that makes me wonder why so many individuals who don’t wanna be labeled are fighting hammer and tong style for a label.
I like the term QUILTBAGS because it’s more inclusive. The ‘S’ is for Straights.
All that hassle and embarassment carrying around a quiltbag and you want it to have absolutely no meaning at all?
My daughter’s a QUILTBAG who gives me grief no matter what I say one way or the other about human sexuality.
Why gay AND lesbian? Isn’t that redundant?
No. As the gay pride/rights movement was just getting started, it’s face was almost always a white man. Lesbians felt left out, and that their issues were being ignored by gay men. The whole Gay Community suffers from Sexism & Racism just like everybody else.
This was a disappointment to me, as I thought the LGTBQ Community would have been more understanding.
American culture is particularly obsessed with classifications in all contexts. It’s one of the things foreigners tend to have problems with. Nobody had asked me what was my class ranking until I got there, for example.
I have an ointment that will stop that right away.
Because labels help define us, but we also don’t want to be limited by any one label. It’s a way of saying I’m right here! I exist, but just because I’m with Team Gay, doesn’t mean I do or agree with everything they do or say.
This is one way I describe myself online:
Also this:
A thousand times this^
Not entirely true. Asexual and demisexual people exist and either spend zero time or very little time (relative to the ‘norm’ ) thinking about pantsfeelings. And aromantic people don’t find it desirable to develop romantic pair-bond-style relationships, but do enjoy sexual activity.
As a demi myself, I agree with TrueCelt that pansexual is more person centered and bi is more orientation centered. I would expect someone using ‘pan’ as a self-identifier to be open to relationships with transpeople or intersex or agender or even potentially with asexual or aromantic people (tho that depends more on the person’s needs getting met, and on awareness of those populations), where I don’t have that expectation of someone identifying as bi.
Count another vote for QUILTBAG too- it’s way easier to spell. (There’s no need or desire (that I have ever seen) for an S, and so I hope that was a whoosh.)
I think that the inclusion of the “S” is for straight, cis, etc. people, who aren’t themselves part of the QUILTBAG, but who are nonetheless active in the fight for equal rights for those who are. A school might, for instance, have a club for QUILTBAG advocacy, which a straight person might want to join. I’ve also seen this represented by “F”, for “Friends”, but that doesn’t fit into the acronym as easily.
Hm… it never occurred to me that the “Q” was for “questioning.” I assumed it was for “genderqueer,” that is someone who doesn’t fit at all into the male/female dichotomy.
The acronym is for people outside of the norm. Straight is the norm.
I’ve seen some people claim the A can mean “ally” as well as “asexual.” However, as an asexual person, that annoys me. We’re already invisible enough, we should get our own letter in the patchwork. It lets people know that “none of the above” is also an option. My life would have been much easier if someone had told me that when I was eighteen.
Yes and no. Strictly speaking, yes. But as others have said, sometimes people associate “gay” with men, and not women. Although in Ellen’s famous outing episode, she said “I’m gay” not “I’m a lesbian”.
My sense is that if Lesbians feels like it helps things from their perspective to have their own letter in the alphabet soup, so be it. The string of letters is not exactly self-consistent anyway.
“Gay” in the sense of “homosexual” has always been associated more with men than women. Most dictionaries today define the term as something like “a homosexual, especially a man” and it’s my understanding that before the 1990s it was typically used to mean just homosexual men. The term “LGBT” didn’t really enter the mainstream until the late '90s/early 2000s, but it dates back to the late '80s. (The activist group PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, was also founded in the '80s.)
I’m not old enough to have been paying much attention before the 1990s, but I do remember that in the '90s it was still pretty common to say “gay and lesbian”. Even now there are many contexts in which I don’t think it would be clear whether “gay” on its own was intended to refer to homosexual men *and *women or just men.
I do remember when the “Q” started to pop up at the end of “LGBT” in the late '90s, and at the time it was understood to mean “queer” and/or “questioning”. The term “genderqueer” was not well-known at the time; Merriam-Webster dates it back to 1995, but it was probably a decade later that I first encountered it. I don’t think anyone back then would have taken “queer” to be short for “genderqueer”.
Getting back to the OP, the activist group Queer Nation and their slogan “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” (which has been used beyond that group and is probably better known than Queer Nation itself) did a lot to reclaim the term “queer”. It’s still considered derogatory in some contexts, but since the '90s has been used as a rather flexible blanket term. It’s lack of specificity may seem confusing, but is also part of the appeal. Despite its long history as a slur, “queer” is probably the most inclusive colloquial term for people with minority sexual orientations and/or gender identities.
I agree with AHunter3 that you can think of LGBTQ as meaning basically “LGBT etc.” It’s a sort of “all of the above, plus anything similar not already covered”.
Data point: one of the colleges where I teach has an officially titled Queer Resource Center.
Well then what was understood by “queer” at the time other than gay or lesbian? When I heard the chant “We’re here” etc. in the 1990s, I thought it was just homosexuality they were talking about.
As I said, it’s a flexible term. Around the time Queer Nation was formed (circa 1990) just having a colloquial term that covered both gay men and lesbians was significant. “Gay” often would (and to an extent still is) be taken to mean only men, and “homosexual” is rather clinical and not very catchy.
I’m too young to tell you who else might have been considered to fall under the “queer” umbrella early in the decade, but it’s my recollection that by the late '90s it usually covered bisexual people as well. It was also at least sometimes understood to include transgender people and others who fell outside the mainstream as far as sexuality or gender identity. I do remember femmey straight guys (probably those who’d be called “genderqueer” now) being mentioned in the '90s as an example of people who were not really L, G, B, or T but could fall under “queer”.
Another reason for adding the “Q”, whether it stood for “queer” or “questioning”, to the end of LGBT was that it can cover people who might eventually identify as L, G, B, or T but aren’t yet sure which one is the most accurate. For young people in particular it can all be a bit confusing, especially for those who grew up with limited exposure to other LGBT people or have families with strict “traditional” views about gender and sexuality.
Oh, and what about the “U” in “QUILTBAG”? Is that for “Undecided” or something, or is it just to make the “Q” pronounceable?