Annoying Queer People Are Not Why We’re Oppressed

An apology to the closeted, questioning, newly out, and cringe.

This Tweeting child is not doing anything to hurt you.

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.)

In order to fortify ourselves against Annoying Queers, we mock all their signifiers and regard them as massive social red flags: straight husbands, bolo ties, sexual inexperience, ukuleles, rainbow pins from Target, misconceptions about what hormones do, and Picrew avatars all somehow get treated with equal venom, no matter where they are coming from and why.

The problem is, none of these traits tell us anything about how safe a person actually is to be around. Only observing their patterns of behavior can do that. The seasoned and effortlessly cool gay person can be an abuser just as easily as the unfamiliar and awkward one; the person with the most social awareness, cultural cachet, and knowledge of on-trend talking points in the room can still be a self-centered, sexist, racist, transphobic bore. And by demonizing “cringey” and irritating attributes, we ignore the fact they tend to cluster among the closeted, questioning, or newly-out for a…