When I was growing up, society assigned a term to me that I had no say in and as part of that acceptance, I also had to abide the attitudes and the treatment that came from those attitudes. Regardless who I really was, I would be treated a certain way, because the term assigned me and to avoid the term being applied, be carefully not to do something I naturally would but did not fit the mold into which Baby Boomers were put in order to be the Ameticans who could win wars.

One of the most difficult things about self acceptance, realizing who you really are, that form of intuition of being, was that, regardless who you knew you were, you were held to be what the assigned term decided.

Too often to be ourselves, the closest we could get would be to the point at which those things in which we showed interest fit in well enough with those around you while you tamped down showing interest in those things that were not decidedly what you were supposed to.

Hating baseball but placed in right field on my Little League, my getting distracted by a butterfly, the following of which allowed for a single because I was at least fast enough to get the ball to second base to stop the runner’s progress when the butterfly got blown away by a gust of wind, but Twinkle was the name that struck until, after being hit squarely in the face with a line drive without much of a physical reaction like I was unaware it was supposed to hurt, was changed by the coach to Jasper for some reason.

Housing, employment, social interactions were controlled by a word assigned to you, a word with a definition that came totally from those who knew the least about those to whom the term was applied while making sure people understood they themselves knew no one, nor would want to, to whom they applied the term. There was no guilt by association.

Like many, my problem in self-acceptance was that I was not what people assumed me to be or expected me to be, yet I was not what I was told that difference meant.

I was me, yet my life was navigating around a term someone else assigned and defined.

In retrospect, things might have gone a lot smoother had I been able to accept signs, and there were many, so many, that were whisked away for not being in concert with who I was supposed to be, and had the resources to go to to ask questions without getting accusatory or biased answers and not just have a term applied to me rightly or wrongly which would influence the rest of my life.

I have been cautioned by too many DJs who have had to silence the music to tell patron who had just been dancing not to leave a club alone, or at all, until those out for a night of Bashing Queers left the area.

For over 40 years I worked with people all over the country trying to ensure that ours was the last generation to have to deal with the assigned term and its power, during which time there was a conscious effort  by religion and government to allow as many of us to die as possible.

Eventually, we got to choose our own term, a term that describes us as we are, not as people want to portray us, and it was under our term that a surprising amount of liberation and equality were accomplished.

In spite of history, the trauma of the treatment and struggle, dealing with assigned death while fighting for equality, the raids, the arrests, the personal physical, verbal, and mental attacks, the beatings, the killings, we made progress under the term for ourselves that we chose ourselves not the loaded one that had been assigned.

I am now a 73 year-old, cis-gender, White, Gay male with activist cred that has been recognized and found I had actually accomplished more that I had been aware I had, and I am proud to have been someone among so many who got us away from the assigned terms and canceling what it was used to justify and perpetuate.

Sadly, however, I have been informed that I stand in the way of progress because I ask young members of the Rainbow Community to not refer to me as “Queer”.

I am Gay and fought as a Gay man. The rights the Youth have were gotten by Gays, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender people, and all those in the past who were themselves though specific terms would come later and worked as a single united community who escaped the world of queer,.

Respect that.

There is no taking back of the word as, in order to do that, you would have had to have had the word in your possession in the first place. We did not at any time choose that assigned word. It was never our word, it was always theirs. In essence all that is being done is our accepting the term that had been used against us after being assigned to us and had been rejected by those subjected to it who got the rights the young have.

At least wait for us to die.

After all the progress and struggle which seems to be taken for granted now, we agree with the use of the derogatory term assigned to us and not those who fought against the word and all connected to it. 

Too many proudly announce they accept the term and would prefer those who used it in the past do so again without ascertaining if this is actually progress or capitulation. Are people educated enough to know that the old meaning is dead and there is a new one now?

Or, is that growth merely assumed without study, opening us to unintended consequences.

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