mulling queer

Last August I wrote a piece for Book Riot about football. Well, football books. Not being a sporty person, this was a bit of a stretch for me. But I’d happened across a photograph of myself as a toddler, holding the 1960’s bestseller Paper Lion, by George Plimpton, and that got me to thinking about a possible essay. And I had an excellent folksy anecdote to introduce the topic:

I managed to avoid everything to do with sportsing generally, and football particularly, until 2013, when the hometown team, the Seahawks, won the Super Bowl.

On the day of the big game, we had a matinee concert scheduled in the little venue I manage. This gig had been on the calendar ages before the football season even began. Ten minutes before the recital, there was not one person in the audience. Thankfully, at the last minute, a couple dozen brave souls show up.

After the show—solo cello, delightful and delightfully brief—my son and I bicycled over to a friend’s house for my first ever Super Bowl party. It was a dark, overcast day, and the streets were utterly abandoned. Riding along, I remembered that eerie scene in On the Beach where whatshisname returns to his hometown after the nuclear holocaust, and everything is still and silent. Every few minutes we would hear shouts and cheers or loud moans erupting from nearby houses. In unison.

It was so unsettling. The thought crossed my mind that perhaps sports, not religion, might be the opiate of the masses.

But that last bit was edited—the original post read, “It was so queer and unsettling that the thought crossed my mind that perhaps sports, not religion, is the opiate of the masses.”

A reader responded, “I don't love the use of 'queer' in this article, especially from a site that typically tries so hard to be diverse and welcoming.”

The editor apologized and changed the wording.

I was initially upset because the idea that I might have inadvertently hurt someone is, well, just upsetting. I’m not a monster.

I was also befuddled. When I was a child, whenever any of us would say, “Well, that’s funny,” my grandmother’s stock response was, “Funny queer, or funny ha-ha?” (She died before The Giver came out, but she would have chuckled over the “precision of language” imperative.)

So, despite having a sibling who identifies as queer, and several friends as well, my first understanding of the word is the original sense, as in strange, odd, peculiar.

Naturally I wondered if we had completely lost that association, if the word, in common parlance, exclusively meant “not straight.” Several mainstream dictionaries still list it as an “offensive” or “disparaging” term for homosexual.

I immediately consulted my friend who is a trans man and also crazy brilliant with the languages to see if I had been utterly misguided in my use of the word. He replied, “So they're apologizing for a reader's inability to parse English? Geez.” Another professor friend responded with “What a stupid, stupid clutching-of-pearls, the ‘queer’ business.”

You know you’ve picked your friends well when they skip right past your etymology questions and leap to your defence. Both friends were reminded of the niggardly imbroglio a while back.

Funnily enough, (as it were), the whole incident caused me to wonder whether I had any business writing for Book Riot at all. I’m much older than most of the other contributors. Perhaps this is just not the venue for me, and I should be hangin’ with the old farts.

That’s what we call at this house, “dying in advance.” I’ve taken a hiatus, but eventually I'll get back to it.

I won’t be striking “queer” from my vocabulary, although, I will be more careful about where I use it. Context matters. Sensitivity and kindness, too, perhaps now more than ever.