I read The Secret Garden as a kid and loved it so much that when I got to the end I immediately flipped back to the beginning. I readily identified with Mary, a queer child with big eyes and a melancholy face, who kept to herself and had trouble making connections with other people. She was angry until she found purpose in the garden. Even then, she was full of strange notions and dreams. She was still queer.
Of course, I didn't live in a bubble. I'd overheard the names that other kids called each other on the playground. I also held their coats when they played. Many times, I was jolted by the end-of-recess bell from my reading only to find a large group of kids swarming toward me to retrieve coats that I not only didn't remember taking but didn't realize I was holding. These kids used the word queer as an insult so I asked my mother about it. She explained that sometimes the word could mean both people who were gay and those were in their own worlds and seemed strange to other people. I was definitely in my own world and I knew I was strange to other people.
But I was confused. I knew about the word gay from Christmas carols and I just couldn't put the two together. My mom explained that gay didn't just mean jolly but could also mean homosexual. Gay and queer both meant homosexual???? This explanation threw me for a loop. My third grade mind juxtaposed the introverted and strange queer with the extroverted and jolly gay and decided they were as opposite as laugh and sigh. Since people were clearly just using the word wrong, I decided to use it as the dictionary intended. According to our 1940's dictionary, queer meant me. I was delighted to have a label for myself. I was glad there were enough people like me to justify a dictionary entry.
Of course, being a queer child who was full of unarticulated ideas, no one knew about my beloved word and so no one reshaped my idea that I was queer. I had time to grow quite an attachment to being queer before I realized that my advocating the word's dictionary use would not in any way change the course of its common usage. I became so attached to the word that when I went to a very liberal art school and heard a flamboyantly gay man identifying as queer, I was insulted. How could this over-the-top extrovert think he had anything in common with someone who was queer like me. He was clearly deluded.
I know better now. I sadly admit that common usage has robbed the word queer of its peculiar quirks and ironically enough, homogenized it to the point where it can be used interchangably with gay. Now I embrace the INTJ label instead. But the third grader in me still feels strangely let down when I hear phrases like Queer Nation.
Queer Nation??? Yeah, right.
I wish.
PP
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