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USA Today
28-05-2025
- General
- USA Today
What does the 'Q' stand for in LGBTQ+? How the community reclaimed the word.
What does the 'Q' stand for in LGBTQ+? How the community reclaimed the word. Show Caption Hide Caption San Francisco Pride faces shortfall as corporate sponsors pull out Several major companies have opted out of donating to San Francisco Pride this year, such as Anheuser-Busch, Diageo, Nissan, and Comcast. Pride Month is almost here, so it's important to refresh your knowledge on the flags, terms, identities and history encompassed in the LGBTQ+ community. Asking your LGBTQ+ friends and family is an option but be mindful of placing the burden of your education on others when there are many free resources at your disposal. Here's what you need to know about the letter "Q" in the acronym. What does the 'Q' in LGBTQ+ stand for? The Q in LGBTQ+ stands for queer in most settings, but it can also mean questioning. LGBTQ+ is an acronym of identities related to sexual orientation and gender identity. What each letter in LGBTQ+ means: In recent years, many have added I and A (intersex and asexual) to the lineup. The plus sign is another addition to the acronym to represent identities in the community that perhaps don't fit into the other letters like pansexual, polyamorous, Two-Spirit or others who don't want to label their sexuality. What does queer mean? Queer is an adjective used by those who are not exclusively heterosexual. The term is often used as a self-identifier for those who don't feel their sexuality fits into other terms like lesbian, gay or bisexual. Many LGBTQ+ individuals feel some labels are "too limiting and/or fraught with cultural connotations they feel do not apply to them," GLAAD writes. Learn them all: History and meaning of each letter in LGBTQ+ Reclaiming the word For many, reclaiming words that were once used as offensive or controversial is an empowering practice. For others, using that word is a painful reminder of the past. The first documented use of queer as a slur was in 1894 when John Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, discovered his son was in a relationship with Oscar Wilde. "Snob Queers" was used as a derogatory term to describe gay men in a lengthy court case brought on by Douglas. Flipping the term on its head, protesters in the midst of the AIDS epidemic began using the word queer in chants: "We're here, we're queer, we're not going shopping!" and "We're here, we're queer, get used to it!" In 1990, activist organization Queer Nation was founded with a mission to increase visibility and decrease LGBTQ+ violence. Queer Nation mobilized protests, hung banners and distributed pamphlets that read "We're here, we're queer and we'd like to say hello!" Widespread use grew from there. GLAAD officially added the Q to the acronym in its resource guide in 2016. Younger LGBTQ+ Americans in particular are reclaiming the word as they embrace a shift toward fluidity in identity. But it's still important to keep in mind that some members of the LGBTQ+ community, particularly older ones who grew up hearing it as a slur, might be uncomfortable with it. The bottom line? Let your friends self-identify; Don't try to use a label for them. Is it OK to use the word queer?: LGBTQ folks share perspectives, history of language What does 'questioning' mean? According to GLAAD, questioning is an adjective used to describe the process of exploring sexual orientation and gender identity. It's sometimes used as the Q in LGBTQ+ in youth support settings. Advocacy organization PFLAG puts it this way: "They have a feeling they might be different but are still in a process of exploration. Using the term allows them to identify themselves as part of the community, while avoiding labels and still honoring that they are in a process of self-identification." Self-identification is an important part of any LGBTQ+ person's journey. It's important to remember when talking to friends who are questioning that they do not owe an explanation of their sexuality to anyone, and should feel comfortable to explore it in their own time and way.
CBC
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
The fight for 2SLGBTQ+ rights in Canada is a story of love and resistance
Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2025 edition by director Noam Gonick focuses on his film Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance. We wanted Parade to be a call to arms: powerful, emboldening testimonies from dozens of radical queers combined with unearthed activist films, video art, NFB stock shots, news clips, personal archives and audio interviews — all interwoven into a kind of history of Canada's 2SLGBTQ+ movement. How do legacy films like this get made? It took a gutsy producer like Justine Pimlott — herself a queer filmmaker — to get us green-lit with enough time and space for editor Ricardo Acosta to craft the story. This was a deeply collaborative project. (During the process, there were a few experiences — you won't find them in the film — that I conjured to help me tackle the task.) While the title, Parade, speaks to Gay Pride in all its political and apolitical manifestations, for me, Parade is a subtle nod to the mystifying gay multi-hyphenate Jean Cocteau, whose ballet Parade inspired the first written use of the word "surrealism." Cocteau was addicted to opium, and his influence, sometimes scandalous, on the subsequent generation of French writers is the stuff of legend. So perhaps it's appropriate that Parade delves into problematic corners of the Canadian queer journey. One of the darkest was the 1977 murder of 12-year-old shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques — a crime which was used to tarnish the gay community. This was one of the trickiest chapters in our film to get right. My family spent that summer of 1977 in Toronto. As a kid, I'd spend my days wandering the Egyptian collection of the ROM, unaware of the killing on Yonge Street's "Sin Strip." In the Annex's Jean Sibelius Square, down the street from where we were staying, I was briefly kidnapped by a woman in a wide-brimmed hat. She took me to her apartment and asked me if I knew what love was. I surprisingly encountered Lilith years later while in film school. She immediately remembered the incident. She thought I said my name was "Name." Several chapters in Parade could easily be entire films on their own. One of these was "SILENCE = DEATH." When Queer Nation fought back during the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, my boyfriend at the time, Mark Turrell, and I found ourselves in an angry mob that threw peanuts at then-federal health minister Perrin Beatty in the Hotel Vancouver. I remember feeling sorry for Perrin — he looked so dejected, his shiny head shaped like a peanut. Mark would later die, surrounded by his parents and friends as we read passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He was a young artist who wanted to be the next Aubrey Beardsley. Pondering which milestones to include in Parade wasn't easy. Some stories didn't have enough archival visuals to support them, others had full films about them that Ricardo had already edited. One such story was that of Jim Egan (the subject of Jack & Jim), whose letters to the editor of various publications in the early 1960s and late-in-life Supreme Court challenge were groundbreaking. Shortly before he died, I found myself on the edge of Vancouver Island waltzing with Jim at a party alongside his partner, Jack; also present were a closeted lumberjack and a flamboyant hairdresser. The music was big-band swing, and I was a rave promoter, so our dancing was awkward. I held on to his thick polyester suit, trying to follow his back-and-forth steps while Jack looked on, laughing. Some of Jim's energy might have rubbed off on me that night. They lived in a house full of teacup chihuahuas. I regret not immortalizing those dogs on film. After film school, I returned to the city of Winnipeg (Treaty 1), where I was born — not sure where one went to apply for a job as a filmmaker. I fell in with a crowd who were organizing a gathering of gay and lesbian Indigenous people in Beausejour, Man. They were about to change the world's lexicon with the introduction of the term "two-spirit." These were the people I played pinball with at Giovanni's Room, the local gay bar in Winnipeg: Connie Merasty, with the inimitable voice and extra-wide-rimmed glasses; Francis, who was born on the same day in the same year as me; Dave, who smiled all the time; and Dorlon (RIP), a Cher impersonator who scared me but looks great dancing in Parade in a vintage clip from David Adkin's Out: Stories of Lesbian and Gay Youth. I have a lesbian comic cousin named Robin Tyler. We met while researching Parade. She organized the March on Washington in 1987, was a friend of Harvey Milk and was one half of one of the first same-sex couples to get married (then divorced) in California. She tells great jokes in Parade. Some of the visual material in the film came from my own archives. Elle Flanders commissioned me to make a Jumbotron video for Toronto Pride in 2008. No Safe Words was supposed to be about Abu Ghraib and the hazing homoerotics of conquest, torture and war. But the piece transitioned into an exposé of police in Pride. When I filmed documentation of the installation from the vantage point of Alexander Chapman's apartment overlooking Yonge Street, we were gobsmacked by the presence of squad cars and men in uniform. Alexander is also in Parade. Some of the interviews in the film feel like you're eavesdropping on conversations we've been having for years. Others, like the one with Rodney Diverlus from Black Lives Matter Toronto, were with people I met two seconds before the interview began, walking through the studio door. While conducting interviews, it's your fevered memories that enable you to sit across from formidable world-changers and ask them to share their own incandescence.
