The complicated history – and ambiguous future – of the word "queer"

What do you think when you hear the word "queer"? For some members of the LGBTQ+ community, it's a term of empowerment with a political edge: "We're here, we're queer, get used to it!" For others, it's a cruel homophobic slur that hasn't lost its sting since it was hurled in the playground several decades earlier.

For many of us, it carries both connotations, albeit in shifting quantities. One minute we're talking positively about "protecting queer spaces"; the next we're wincing at the memory of being called "a fucking queer" while waiting for a bus. "Queer" is a little word that wields a lot of power. Professor Paul Baker, author of Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language, says that "the more you get into thinking about 'queer', the more complicated things can get."

To understand why "queer" feels so loaded today, we need to step back in time. According to Dr Justin Bengry, director of Goldsmiths' Centre for Queer History, it has been "used as a term of derision since at least the late 19th century". He notes that the first recorded use of "queer" in a pejorative homophobic sense came during Oscar Wilde's infamous 1895 trial for gross indecency.

During proceedings a letter from the Marquess of Queensbury – the father of Wilde's lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, and therefore his nemesis – was read out. It referred to Wilde and other gay men, sneeringly, as "snob queers". The letter was written in 1984, but the slur almost certainly emerged earlier. "We know that in order for the word to have this [homophobic] meaning in 1894 it would have already been circulating and meaningful to those who used it, or against whom it was used,” Bengry says.

The word "queer" first seeped into the English language in the 16th century as a synonym for "peculiar" or "eccentric". It still carries echoes of this original meaning, notably in the Northern English expression "there's nowt so queer as folk", which Russell T Davies cleverly used as a double entendre in the title of his seminal 1990s drama series Queer as Folk.

Pride flags - Teddy O, Unsplash

But by the mid-20th century, Bengry says, "the word 'queer' was so entrenched as a homophobic slur that it even appeared… in the 1961 film Victim". Widely credited as the first British film to portray homosexuality with a degree of empathy, Victim follows a closeted barrister called Malcolm Farr who tries to expose the criminals blackmailing a young gay man with whom he had a brief fling. At one point, the criminals send him a warning by painting "FARR IS QUEER" on his garage door.

Around a quarter of a century later, in the late 1980s, the word "queer" began to be reclaimed by some members of the LGBTQ+ community. "It was taken up by some people who had felt its violence precisely to deny the term its power to do harm and be used against them," Bengry says.

Baker points out that during the same period, "there were efforts by activists and academics to change [the word's] meaning" as part of the Queer Theory movement. "It was an attempt to question the way that societies have created identities around binary labels like gay/straight, man/woman, normal/weird, etc that put people into categories where usually one is [seen] as 'better' than the other," Baker explains. "This new generation of activists and academics called themselves 'queer' because it was confusing – why would anyone want to give themselves a 'bad' label?"

Fast forward to 2024 and it can look as though "queer" has been widely embraced. The fact this publication is called Material Queer speaks to its growing popularity among young LGBTQ+ people in particular. "When I hear 'queer' being used now, it's hardly ever as the old slur," Baker says. However, he also believes that "all people aren't necessarily using it to mean exactly the same thing" and suggests that "some of those older [pejorative] meanings of 'queer', from 30 or so years ago, aren't perhaps known about by everyone".

For Bengry, reclaiming this word is always going to be "inconsistent and uneven" because the LGBTQ+ community isn't a monolith: we have different priorities and lived experiences. "There are those for whom it can't be reclaimed – people whose experience of the word 'queer' is so enmeshed with violence and trauma that it can only ever be a term of abuse," he says. "Others have no need to reclaim a word that was never used against them, and which has always been a term of self-description, political position or intellectual or activist commitment."

But at the same time, as the word "queer" becomes more commonplace, it risks losing its radical edge. "I remember having a conversation with a publisher a few years ago about using the word 'queer' in a book title, and she thought it was simply a synonym for gay – albeit a gay person who might wear a T-shirt with a political slogan and go on a demonstration with a loudspeaker," Baker recalls. "And for me that sort of shouty meaning of 'queer' is quite a limiting one."

There is also a troubling tendency, especially in the mainstream media, to use "queer" almost interchangeably with the all-encompassing but slightly cumbersome acronym LGBTQ+. Baker believes this isn't just lazy, but also nonsensical, and not just because the "Q" in LGBTQ+ already stands for "queer" or "questioning".

"For me, LGBTQ+ is about saying: 'Look, there are all these different identities and they're all oppressed, so we're going to look out for one another and try not to leave any of them out," he says. "Then on the other hand, you have queer, which is saying: 'I'm a label that isn't a label, because guess what, identity categories aren't really fixed in stone. They're just a way society gets to control, punish and reward people, and get them to hate each other.'"

None of this leads to an easy takeaway. The word "queer" feels inspiring to some LGBTQ+ people and deeply painful to others. Perhaps the key is to use it as consciously as possible: to know that when we say "queer rights!", not everyone will feel the same swell of pride.