The Q-word: My Personal Relationship with a Complex Term
I’ve spent my life taking care of kids, not just in my professional role as a pediatrician, but often as the older brother of three younger siblings. Kids, of course, are amazing. They are bright and wonderful and joyous, and to paraphrase Cindy Lauper, kids just wanna have fun.
Kids can also be complete jerks.
For the most part, kids strive to be accepted into their peer group, to figure out how they fit in, to attain status on the playground and in class, and if they occasionally have to throw that “different” kid under the bus to achieve that, many of them will have no qualms about doing it. And it’s scary weird how kids will figure out what the different kid’s difference is before that kid does themself.
For a lot of my childhood, I was that “different” kid.
I was smart, and I was awkward, and I was often uncomfortable in my own skin. But above all, I was “sensitive.” And I really liked watching Little Joe (Michael Landon) on “Bonanza” and Tim O’Hara (Bill Bixby) on “My Favorite Martian,” and in the summer whenever our family would go to Jones Beach on the south shore of Long Island, if the person on the blanket next to us ended up being an Italian or Greek guy in a skimpy black bathing suit, I spent a lot more time looking at him than at the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, growing up with an Irish Catholic mom and a German Lutheran dad, relationships and love were rarely if ever talked about or were certainly not demonstrated, and sex was quite simply NEVER discussed. Nevertheless, I somehow picked up From The Ether that the way I felt was Wrong and that on some existential level, I was Wrong.
Of course, as a kid in the 1960s, there was simply no one I could talk to about this. And having already figured out what I had by then about my “condition,” I would have been very much afraid to talk to someone and hear the damnable verdict anyway.
But here is the genius of kids: They figured it out. And those other kids did not hesitate to use that knowledge against me when they needed a power boost in the schoolyard.
“PANSY! SISSY! FAIRY! NELLY! FAG!…” The list goes on. But the biggest, worstest was:
“DAMN LITTLE QUEER!”
As I hope you can imagine, that word still gets to me on a gut level, and so for the rest of this post, I’m going to call it the Q-word.
About five decades have passed since those times I was shoved, insulted, assaulted, shunned, extorted, robbed, damned, and/or demeaned by people who spit out the Q-word while they were doing it, and I had no one to talk to about it.
So yes, the Q-word is still a trigger for me. That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand how important it is for communities, especially ours, to appropriate painful words for their own uses to take away their power. I recognize and applaud the rise of Q-word Studies at universities and the fact that there are now those in our communities who use the Q-word as their primary identifier because none of the words that came before adequately expressed the fullness of their personhood. I don’t personally have to understand what Q-ness is to understand that this person does. After all, after my very long road to self-acceptance and self-love as a gay man, I have for decades been explaining to straight men especially that you don’t have to personally “get” finding other men sexually attractive, you just have to “get” that I do.
So when do I actually say or spell out the Q-word? Well, when I’m quoting someone who used it in speech or in writing or when I’m explaining the letters in LGBTQIA2+ to someone who is not a member of these communities. What’s fascinating is that when I am explaining as best I can these letters and identities to — to use an overly broad term — “straight people,” the Q-word is the one where I get the most concern.
“I thought that was a bad word?”
“It was.”
“Am I allowed to use it?”
“Only if invited and only if spoken with generosity.”
And I will then explain my own ambivalence about the word.
For those of you who identify as Q, I affirm and applaud your journey. And while the word itself is a trigger for me, I recognize that you use it out of self-affirmation, generosity, and love. I would also request that you recognize and respect that for me — and for many people of my generation and before — this word was, and is, a particularly heinous insult that brings back a lot of painful memories. I am, however, so gratified that what we went through all those years ago has cleared some paths that now allow you to explore areas of identity that would have been inconceivable to us.
So please know that if I wince a little when you use the Q-word, I know that it is my stuff. Please feel free to be fully yourself when I’m around. Please don’t feel the need to censor yourself around me.
And please… don’t tell me to get over it.
