Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

Take the case most often held up as a reclamation success story: “queer,” which was reclaimed by the AIDS activist group Queer Nation in the 1990s. Through the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, “queer” came to be used as a tongue-in-cheek synonym for “gay,” even appearing in the titles of TV shows like Queer as Folk and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It was adopted as a label within the gay community first to describe gayness in all its manifestations, then to describe those who didn’t want to identify within the traditional binaries: gay/straight, man/woman, male/female. It is just one identity available to those who find their home in the LGBTQIA movement.*7 And yet, its reclamation was not as universally successful as portrayed. John Kichi, a gay man in his sixties, was horrified in 2013 to find “queer” listed as a gender on a job application. “I think queer harkens back to a time when being gay was a documented medical abnormality,” he told a local news station. “Every one of my gay friends is appalled by this.”

The word clearly has an interesting history