Queer

The modern denotation of “homosexual” is virtually the last stage in the complex and unstable semantic history of this word of uncertain origin, which first appeared in Scots about five hundred years ago. It then had two basic senses, namely “strange, odd, peculiar in appearance or character,” and “questionable, suspicious, dubious.” Both of these semantic cores were applied to criminals. Francis Audelay included in his early vocabulary of thieves’ cant in 1561 quire bird for “one that is come lately out of prison,” and by the late eighteenth century queer clearly had a thriving underground currency, illustrated by no less than twenty-one entries in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1796). From the base sense of the adjective, defined as “base, roguish, bad, naught or worthless,” Grose has queer bitch , “an odd out-of-the way fellow,” a seeming anticipation of modern usage, and queer street “wrong; improper; contrary to one’s wish.” The association with criminality and prison (also known as queer ken ) appears repeatedly, in queer birds , defined as “rogues relieved from prison and returning to their old trade,” and queer bit-makers for “coiners.” Most of the references are to males, notably a queer fellow , but a queer mort is “a diseased strumpet,” linked to the modern colloquial phrase “to feel queer,” that is, “ill” or “out of sorts.”

Although queer included the senses of “odd,” “abnormal,” and “improper,” the specific meaning of “homosexual” is apparently American in its early currency. The first instance in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Scientific Study of Juvenile Delinquents (1922), referring to a young man who is “probably ‘queer’ in sex tendency” (8). The Journal of Social History (vol. xix, 1985) retails a quotation from 1919 referring to “Queers … fairies … cocksuckers” (192). Godfrey Irwin’s study American Tramp and Underworld Slang (1931) gives both the old senses of “crooked, criminal,” adding: “also applied to effeminate or degenerate men or boys,” as was punk . (All of these are, of course, secondary sources.) However, in Cockney rhyming slang, ginger beer was the code for queer , often reduced to plain ginger and recorded from the 1920s, according to Julian Franklyn (1961). This indicates that the term was familiar in the London speech community, but not used openly. The first recorded noun sense is attributed to W.H. Auden in 1932 in a reference to “an underground cottage frequented by the queer.” This is also the first recorded use of cottage in the sense of “a haunt for homosexuals,” long before the term became generally current. An ominous “witness word” for the persecution of homosexuals is queer-bashing , recorded in legal proceedings in 1970.

Most of the dictionary citations express criticism, hostility, or embarrassment. However, from about 1960 the process of “reclamation” started, with some newspapers using the term in a neutral way, such as the comment on a play dealing with “simple non-tragic aspects of queerness” (London Observer , May 4, 1958). Subsequently the homosexual community and gay pressure groups began to use the word openly in public discourse and to give it respectability in academic contexts. Thus university programs and articles started to appear under titles like “Queer Theory” (ed. Teresa de Lauretis, 1991), “Queer Culture,” “Queer Studies,” and more recently The Queer God (Marcella Althaus-Reid 2003), which includes topics like “Queering the Bible and queering the patriarchs,” showing increasing grammatical flexibility. A usage note in the Collins Concise Dictionary (2000) explains the new complexities: “Although the term queer is still considered derogatory when used by nonhomosexuals, it is now used by homosexuals of themselves as a positive term.” The growth of political correctness has obviously reduced the currency of the hostile homosexual senses, while the popular American reality television program “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” (2003) has publicized the term.

In terms of global usage, queer in the sense under discussion is not especially current outside the United Kingdom and the United States, but is found in colloquial Australian and South African English.