Queer

As writer and activist Shon Faye puts it, “Queer is about removing labels and replacing them with a question. It is a side eye and a challenge back to mainstream society and politics. It says, ‘I don’t know the answer, but why are you asking the question?’”

Whereas gays may just want to be accepted like everyone else, queers want to be recognized as fundamentally different to everyone else and to use that difference to tear down the kind of order that gays are working to get into. It is an almost never acknowledged but completely central divide that has existed as long as ‘gay’ has been recognized as

“A gay man loves and desires other men, and a lesbian desires and loves other women,” explains Sky Gilbert, a drag queen. “This defines the existential state of being gay. If there is no such thing as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ the entire self-definition of gay identity, which we have spent generations seeking to validate and protect from bigots, collapse

They insist that without an explicit historical record of their sexual encounters—diagrams, detailed descriptions of their conquests—to serve as undeniable proof, there’s no need to invent a queer history for them. Perhaps they had watched the same episode of Sex and the City that I had—“If you’re not going to eat pussy, you’re not a dyke”—to come

autism’s queerity is often storied by means of disorientation:

even the "straight" women are doing something that can arguably be seen as pretty "queer"

Queerness, I maintain in this book, has a temporal dimension—as anyone knows whose desire has been branded as “arrested development” or dismissed as “just a phase”—and, concomitantly and crucially, as I hope to show, temporal experiences can render you queer.

Queer ecology as an interpretive framework seeks to disrupt how heteronormative projections onto nature produce bad science. Queerness, it turns out, isn’t a rarity inside ecosystems. It is ubiquitous, from flowers to insects to fungi.

The scholar Kathryn Bond Stockton writes about how the queer child “grows sideways,” because queer life often defies the linear chronology of marriage and children. Stockton also describes children of color as growing sideways, since their youth is likewise outside the model of the enshrined white child. But for myself, it is more accurate to say t