Queer

Queer’s a queer word.The entry of the word ‘queer’ into the English language is itself a study in the queer ways of words. Chambers Dictionary defines the adjective as follows: ‘odd, singular, quaint: open to suspicion: counterfeit: slightly mad: having a sensation of coming sickness: sick, ill (dialect): homosexual (slang)’. What’s queer about this synonymatic definition is the way in which it includes three apparently unrelated senses for the ‘same’ word – clustering around ideas of strangeness, sickness and homosexuality. One question immediately arises: how do you get from ‘queer’ as ‘singular’ or ‘quaint’ or ‘slightly mad’ or ‘ill’ to ‘queer’ as ‘homosexual’? While the answer may to some seem to be self-evident, the process is worth examining in greater detail. The Oxford English Dictionary shows the slippage from one sense to the other in action: its extensive historical account of the word reveals that in fact there was a delay of more than four hundred years between the introduction of the ‘odd’ or ‘singular’ sense of the word into English and the introduction of its ‘homosexual’ sense. The first entry for ‘queer’ in the online OED comes from the early sixteenth century (Dunbar’s ‘Heir cumis our awin queir clerk’, from 1513 (adj.1, 1a)), while the first entry for the word in its homosexual sense is from a famous letter to Oscar Wilde from the Marquess of Queensbury, outraged at his son’s queer relationship with the queer writer, in 1894 (‘queer’, n.2, 2). The second print edition of the OED (1989) has a slightly later date for the word’s first use in this sense: the straight (but also rather queer) language of a 1922 report by the Children’s Bureau of the US Department of Labor (The Practical Value of the Scientific Study of Juvenile Delinquents), refers to the idea that a ‘young man, easily ascertainable to be unusually fine in other characteristics, is probably “queer” in sex tendency’ (OED (1989)

‘queer’ a.1, b). This early use of the word in an official document is intriguing for a number of reasons. It makes stereotypical assumptions about certain ‘characteristics’, it expresses the idea that queerness is written on the body and implicitly identifies it with delinquency or illness. But it also holds the word at arm’s length – with so-called ‘scare-quotes’ – as if the term is not fully accepted or acceptable, or as if the word is still in process, moving from a sense of oddness to a (related) sense of homosexuality. Homosexuality is ‘queer’, then, because of the perceived queerness of queers, their difference from ‘us’ (scientists, US Department of Labor officials, sociologists, and so on): queers are a category apart, a self-defining and identifiable group determined precisely by the queer difference of its members from the regime of the normal – from what Adrienne Rich, the contemporary lesbian poet and critic, calls ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (Rich 1986).