Annoying Queer People Are Not Why We’re Oppressed
An apology to the closeted, questioning, newly out, and cringe.
There’s a type of within-community queer discourse that’s happened quite a lot in the past few years, wherein we determine the importance of attacking another queer person based on how annoying we find them to be.
It is a common pastime for many of us to join together and loudly complain about the Annoying kinds of Queers, how they dress, their affectations, the words they use to describe themselves, the types of sex they have or aren’t having, the insecurities they hold, and the most cringe-inducing opinions they express, typically when they’ve just begun on their queer self-discovery journey. Though going after the Annoying Queers feels sickly satisfying, we tell ourselves we do it for a righteous cause.
We sometimes treat avoiding Annoying Queer People as if it’s essential to the queer community’s self-preservation. We agonize over event descriptions and identity-based admittance policies, wondering how to discourage all the Annoying (and often, it’s implied, fake) Queers from attending without restricting any actual queers. (This always fails, because it turns out that actual queer people are humans, and therefore can be pretty annoying. And being annoying, by the way, is not a crime.)
