portraitoftheoddity:

portraitoftheoddity:

If the word ‘queer’ offends you more than ‘fuck,’ don’t fucking reblog my fucking queer-ass art and tag my identity as goddamn #q-slur. 

So I came at this from a place of anger earlier today because I was already on the edge from a lot of nonsense at work, and this was the spark that lit off the powder keg, so to speak. I’m calmer now, and feel it’ll be more helpful to talk about this a little more eloquently:

For anyone who is perplexed or who didn’t mean to be unkind – I get that for some people, ‘queer’ was used as a slur against them. And I respect wanting to accommodate those people with your tagging, to help them avoid things they find triggering or upsetting.

However, it’s easy enough to accommodate those blacklists for people who are upset by the word ‘queer’ by just typing #queer. It’s more likely to be blacklisted by someone who is genuinely upset by it than #qslur, #q-slur or some other variation. And by tagging a post about queerness with #queer, you are not invalidating the queer identity of the OP or undermining the queer-positivity of a post by reducing that identity to a slur, and handing a word rich with history of self-advocacy and self-determination back over to people who use it for hate. 

Just tag #queer if you feel it needs to be tagged for folks. (If you find writing it out too much to handle, I can’t fathom why you’d be reblogging a queer-positive post in the first place). Nobody who doesn’t like to be called queer should be stuck with the label, but please be respectful of the identities of those who embrace it and use it. 

We are not slurs. We are here, we’re queer, and we are proud of who we are and would like to not have our artwork celebrating queerness labeled as an offense.

Thanks for reading.