The Wagging Tongue: Queer Vernacular
Before the word was the sound, and from within it’s utterance came terror.
A long time ago before your brain could process vital information in any logical fashion? It was the sounds that scared you most. Horrifying, loud sounds that appeared from nowhere. It’s sibling-the calm, soothing sounds-brought you peace within your crib. These polar opposites were your anchor points, but it was the varying degrees within that you learned meaning.
Words. Words were so damn confusing, and little has changed has it? Coupled with all those notes of noise-inflection, intent, the trace of a laugh-and the difference between malicious mockery and jovial joking ceases to have true distinction. Words and noise. Your entire life is centered around them. They made you who you are. They’re the button to press that sends you into furious anger or ecstasy.
Today, we’re going to discuss how a few phrases (and how they’re discussed) can radically alter who we are, who we associate with and how we perceive ourselves at large.
Words: Ritual Work In Mainstream Form
Every utterance from your lips is magick.
I want you to think of the last time you got good (and bad) news. The gravity of those words being delivered. The pitch and timbre. The resulting emotional reaction was the synapses of your brain firing almost simultaneously to a trained response. A tongue wagged, and suddenly you were sobbing. You jumped for joy and hugged the messenger. Maybe you kissed them, maybe you got aroused. Maybe you started beating the ever loving fuck out of them.
I’ve experienced all of these. I’ve no doubt you have as well. Syllables, the most base components of words, are the ingredients of radical spellwork. Words can make or break you in an instant despite the old adage.
I still remember the sound my fist made against someone’s nose the last time anyone was bold enough to call me “kike” (my great grandmother was jewish) or “faggot”. One punch, that’s all it took. I didn’t hear a crunch, but they staggered back as they clutched their face. Blood pooled between the spaces of their fingers and dripped.
“My fucking nose! You broke my fucking nose, man!” they said. It was a wet and ragged noise, the mewls of a wounded animal. The adrenaline that had flooded my veins in the moments that lead to that punch turned to the cold grip of panic. You broke my nose, in that pitch and timbre, it was enough to flash consequences that should have kept my anger in check. Cops. Court. Maybe jail, a fine at least.
So I replied with “And I’ll break the fucking rest of you while I’m at it. Get to stepping, yeah?”
The voice I spat it out with wasn’t mine. It was all teeth and fur and anger, just inches from their neck. It was enough. There wasn’t any jail time, any cops. Nothing happened and I never heard from them again.
I’d used the right words.
But so had they.
A two part banishment ritual that permanently expelled both of us from each other’s lives. It started with words and ended in blood.
I mention this incident from my violent wilderness years not to paint myself as a badass, but to illustrate the drastic effects simple language choices can have on our identity. What’s more, the lengths we’ll go to protect it. In the modern, more connected (and post-COVID less physical) era, language serves as a divisive signal for who we instinctively trust and socialize with online. Maybe it’s some phrase you picked up from a game, or your relative social circle. Regardless, every time you use contextually social language you further box yourself from the whole of a platform. Your social group tightens and tightens and you’re totally unaware it’s happening.
It’s a banishment perpetuated ad nauseum every day.
Snip Snip: Language As A Form Of Reductionism.
Twitter grants you a paltry 280 characters per tweet. That’s a recent implementation. Before, it was 140. Twitter threads happened organically. Information could easily get lost or broken in a sea of tweets. As such, using Twitter is a crash course in reductionist writing and logical processing. Can you get that clout and point across in a single tweet?
Overwhelmingly not. If the success of some viral tweets are any proof, it’s when we hit the wall of reductionist logic and craft that things truly go off the rails. It’s why we’ve crafted words like “simp” and “cuck” and more. Monosyllabic means of displaying complex ideas to meet a character limit. Words that, out of context, are the non-sense babble we first familiarize ourselves with as infants. They don’t mean anything at all and exist purely to meet medium limitations. If you’ve ever had to use Urbandictionary to look something up, that’s why.
Or, they did. Then the words escaped the platform and went out into the world. It’s that scene from 1984, only it’s really fucking lame. It’s affecting discourse and inherent meaning in symbolism (meaning words) by expanding the reductionist processing of social media to fit how we interpret existing. If you’ve ever questioned why people are dismissive of a cause, a group or something else look first to the language in how they refer to them. Notice anything?
Their phrasing is often reductionist as a means of de-humanizing and confining the capabilities of that group or cause. It happens to every civil rights group. It happens to every humanist political group. Chances are overwhelming before the end of this article, it’ll happen to you individually too.
We’re no longer in control of our craft. Like some misguided and curious adept, our spells have gone horribly and are mucking up the lab. The very forces we saw ourselves master of have shackled us to a minimal style of thinking. Our irons are cast in egotism and nepotism, our reality an echo chamber of ever similar noises. It starts with the reduction of words and phrasing. It ends with a complete re-drafting of terminology to suit the needs of often momentary discourse, pitting all involved in a constant war of “us-they”. We’re at the point of summarizing entire existences off due to a single word.
Combatting this takes being verbose, the cardinal sin of Twitter and other platforms. It takes entering discourse with the open understanding that symbology and language are permeable things. As such, so too should our perception of reality be fluid. We need to speak more, not less, as in being verbose we not only sharpen our own discourse capabilities but sufficiently prove if our points are valid. Snap judgements are made in single tweets. Entire movements rise on articles.
Which makes writing this next section extremely difficult as I’ve something to confess:
I fucked up.
The New Batch
I couldn’t believe my fucking eyes.
Teeth and saliva and growling and bare necks became me. That old wolf had risen from his decades slumber, ready to eviscerate the whelp on my screen. Some nineteen year old punk masquerading as an adult. Daring, of all things, to say “queer” was a slur. As someone who openly refers to themselves as such, I had something of a knee jerk reaction.
“You miserable little fuck,” left my lips like a hex. I turned my phone over, and went to my laptop. If I was going to end them, it was going to be without auto-correct getting in the way. The speed at which I opened my browser dared to match my pulse. I could feel my heart against my ribs. I was absolutely ready to destroy this unlearned adept without an ounce of guilt. By the gods, hadn’t they heard of Stonewall? The history of ANY queer movement? What puritanical bullshit was this?
Then. Fingers poised, I refrained. I took a breath, and waited for my heart to stop sending a call to war. Of all the gifts age and regret has given me, keeping myself in check is best among them.
I didn’t know this boy, and he didn’t know me. Our terminology was the same, but our understanding was not. Why? Understanding that took being introspective and turning over what “queer” means to me personally and my social circle. What shift in our respective realities had occurred for this term to cause him so much anger and myself joy? Being “queer” lead to me being comfortable “being out”.
“Queer”, as far as my personal vernacular goes, is one of the only phrases I personally feel comfortable with in regards to my sexuality. Words can only ever be an approximation of our true meaning, simply a method of relaying the tangible elements of an idea. “Queer” fits me personally as a non-binary pansexual, because it’s far easier than saying “I’m non-binary because I reject the idealologies of the gender binary and my sexual attraction is rooted in emotional, spiritual and psychological connections between me and other parties with body types/genitals/gender identity never being a determining factor for attraction”. For a long time before I used “queer”, I used to joke that “so long as you consent and are of age, lets boogie” until it dawned on me how incredibly creepy that can sound. “Queer” and my usage of it is a summation of myself, my worldview and how I personally socialize.
I find it far preferable to the terms so often used in the rural south. “Faggot”, “Sissy,” and “one of THEM” had assailed my ears for years. Even when “queer” was hurled as a slur, it was something I was proud to own. Yes. I am queer, I’m here, deal with it. While those other terms no longer bother me even in the slightest, “queer” is preferable in polite company. It accomplished what “gay”, “bi” and others couldn’t for my personal needs.
The reclamation of the term (and it’s subsequent reversion to puritanical ideals) is a fairly recent development. As in, it’s something that’s largely happened with what I refer to as “the new batch”, people whose LGBT experiences have occurred in the post-social media age. I find this especially important to point out, as it’s a generation where the fluctuation of symbology is rooted deeply within their daily lives. Their existence and what they bring to discourse cannot and should not be ignored as they are a litmus test for the times. What’s more, it’s a generation that has grown up with LGBT lives being something done in the open and often celebrated. In the western world at least, this isn’t necessarily a first-but it is finally something that can be done with safety and support.
The LGBT existence has been under constant political and media scrutiny and exploitation since before Stonewall itself in America. For every quality, hopeful queer work there’s a thousand episodes of tragedy porn and parodies that make a mockery of us. For every “Call Me by Your Name”, an entire legion of hellfire ministers with a politician on speed dial. The reclamation of terminology used against us is a natural response of being pushed and punished for simply existing.
However, in doing so we cannot-nor should we ever-ignore the ongoing discourse of our own community regarding vernacular. Words are magick, but no ritual is complete without meaning. They’re just empty syllables, the goo-gah bable of children without that. If someone finds the terminology we’re using problematic or offensive, our considerations should not be towards hardline defense of our world view but asking why this is happening. What, if anything, has lead to a section of the community finding “queer” to be a slur again?
Is it yet another fiend in a pulpit hurling it at us as they “cast our homo-demons out”? Were our rights denied somewhere? Was one of us assaulted? Was our existence turned into a garish puppet show for mainstream America? Why is one phrase, one word being given the same dismissive attitude that we give those we see parroting utterances we’ve unanimously agreed are counterintuitive to our existence?
Is it the medium itself, or is it us?
The truth is, it’s all of this. No one word, as illustrated, can ever hope to contain the complex array of ideas, thoughts, feelings and existences within our community. None of us can ever attain true and total intimate knowledge of our sibling members lives, much more what goes on in their mind. Their reality isn’t ours, it can merely overlap. To reduce all of that to single words-by any party-is the oroboros of discourse and will undoubtedly lead to our destruction.
After all, “they’re eating themselves” is the phrase of those that would do us harm. Isn’t it?
The Endless Perpetual Cycle
We cannot possibly engage in this discussion without likewise pointing out the obvious: As symbology inherently has no meaning and likewise is in constant flux, so too is the discourse surrounding discourse. Words, meanings and phrases are born every single day, die and reincarnate at a rate that would make Bhudda pause. The terminology of today won’t be that of those that come tomorrow. Our words and phrases will be spoken in the same jeering cynicism used against us when they’re considered “outdated slang”.
“Queer” is a slur except when it isn’t, and that may be today, tomorrow, the next day. With myself, with new people, with strangers. By the time I’m dead and this page goes offline, maybe “queer” will have an entirely new meaning. Perhaps it’s original phrasing will be used. So it goes.
What dictates the norms of phrasing and words isn’t a dictionary but rather social use and acceptance. Adoption by a majority leads to normalization and thus teaching, reclamation and more. Words are magick in that by meaning nothing, they’re fluid enough to fit the needs of any number of magicians.
Being people gifted with words and noises, I find it paramount then that we use them not to dismiss our peers but rather engage them in better discourse. The same people that write queer and other phrasing off as a slur in our community and myself have the same purpose and drive: To live openly, to live freely, to live a life of acceptance and love. If single word/phrase dismissals summon our destruction, open and widespread discourse is our salvation. For I, nor any other person, can ever know you totally. Yet to be courageous enough to speak your mind, heart and soul freely and at length?
It’s a start.
I encourage all of you to avoid the mistakes I’ve made and the logical pitfalls of discourse mediums. Don’t write off members of the community simply because they’re “not you” or “your people”. Rather, keep the conversation going at great length-regardless of if someone’s an old fuck like me, or from the new batch. The survival of any community or people is dependent on all feeling welcome and their voice being heard, something any of you reading this can do over on my Curious Cat or on Twitter (links below). I would be overjoyed to keep this discussion going.
-j