Wednesday, May 23, 2012

On Feeling Queer.

Tomorrow is Ascension Day in the Eastern Christian traditions - we wish our Orthodox readers a good feast. This Sunday is Pentecost in the Western Christian traditions - good feast to all of you, too. Sunday/Monday also marks the Jewish festival of Shavuot, a good feast to our Jewish readers. Monday also marks the Ascension of Baha'u'llah a good day to any readers we have who follow the Baha'i faith.

Author K G MacGregor post a question on her Facebook page and also a blog post on her website about the word queer. I'm one of those people who is uncomfortable with using that word to describe LGBT folk, mainly because when I was growing up it was the insult of choice. I've been called it with hate, derision, anger. It's been used to show me how much the speaker despised me, sometimes with the addition of spitting. It's been accompanied by violence. It's not a word I associate with anything positive. However, I do know there's a whole generation who are more than happy to use it, who have reclaimed it from the bigots, who are comfortable with it. Some of them find that any single one of letters in the alphabet soup of LGBT is too narrow to define them. More power to their elbows.

Today though I was reminded that there's also a large chuck of British society, (mostly rural), for whom that word has never meant LGBT, has never been used as an insult.

One of our roofers - a local boy (or biy as the local dialect has it) with a thick Devon accent - informed us all at tea-break, "Oi feels praper queer 'smorning. Us 'ad a bit o' biled bacon for us tea and Oi thinks t'were off." Which roughly translates as, "I feel proper queer this morning. We had a bit of boiled bacon for our dinner and I think it had gone off."

There you go - locally queer means unwell or nauseated. He did look a bit green about the gills I have to admit.

See you next week. Goodnight and may your God/s go with you.

Ze

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