A private members bill aiming to erase the criminal records of gay men convicted of now-defunct sexual offences was talked out by Tories in the House of Commons this afternoon.
If passed, it would have cleared the way for a pardon of nearly 50,000 men living with convictions for consensual homosexual activity.This is honestly so important. The people that paved the way for us queer young people are still stuck with criminal records for having queer sex or ‘wearing the wrong clothes’ in just about every country and we need to fucking organize and support them and realize these political games for what they are: an attack on our queer elders.
Maybe you could not add insult to their injury by using a slur that has harmed many of them as a blanket term for them.
You cannot reclaim slurs on behalf of other people, and I can guarantee you that a goodly portion of older TLBG folks would prefer not to reclaim that one.
Ya know, I hang out with a lot of elderly LGBT/queer folks and none of them have ever had a problem with my use of the word queer. They organized in the 60s and 70s by calling themselves proud dykes and faggots and trannies, holding Faggot Film Festivals and Dyke nights and they 100% understand how queer holds the same ‘fuck you all, we are what we are’ meaning for a lot of people today.
It’s mostly a crowd of youngs professional LGBT liberals online (most of whom have heard ‘gay’ used as a slur more often than ‘queer’) that seem to passionately oppose the use of the word queer because it messes with their image of LGBT as a civil integrated non-sexual love=marriage idea of the lGb(t) rights movement. Those people can fuck off.
Tories filibuster ‘Turing Bill’ – denying pardons to 50,000 living gay men | Left Foot Forward
QueerAnarchism 