The Australian singer and TV personality, Dannii Minogue, was in the news recently for coming out (‘tearfully’ according to one newspaper) as queer. A few days later she was in the news again for coming out as straight. The 52-year-old mother of a teenage son, who has been with her current boyfriend for over a decade, said her original statement – ‘I’m queer in a weird way’ – had been taken out of context. Nothing to do, of course, with the fact that she is the host of the TV show about lesbians – I Kissed A Girl.
Queer can mean a number of things: odd/strange; suspicious/dubious; giddy/queasy; eccentric/mad; worthless/counterfeit; to spoil/thwart; to put in a dangerous position. It is also a word associated with homosexuality and has regularly been a term of abuse used about homosexuals; to be the victim of abuse and ‘queer bashing’ was (still is) a real fear for both lesbians and gay men.
The etymological origins of queer are uncertain, but it is thought to be from the Old High German twerh, and recorded in sixteenth century German as quer – oblique.
Attempts have been made recently to ‘gentrify’ the term, to the horror of many older gay men. The actor James Dreyfus, and the barrister, Dennis Kavanagh KC, get particularly annoyed on Twitter/X about it, as both remember the fear and abuse the word was associated with in their (relatively recent) youth. The same goes for many lesbian friends of mine.
According to Queer Theory (in which, the contention is, there is no set normal, only changing norms that people may or may not fit into, so we should disrupt binaries in the hope that this will destroy difference as well as inequality) a new, positive, use of the word is just fine. The theory can, though, lead to what may seem some rather odd alliances. For example, the campaign group, Queers for Palestine, has been marching in protest at what is happening in Gaza, despite an openly lesbian or gay lifestyle in that area of the world being likely to end in torture and death.
And, as the Dannii Minogue episode suggests, declaring oneself to be queer is also being appropriated by straight people who want to seem a bit more edgy than their humdrum heterosexual life-style suggests. Dannii, after all, was promoting a TV show about lesbians – she had to say she thought the girls on it were ‘hot,’ didn’t she?
A word that doesn’t exist in older dictionaries, but is part of the new gender-queer lexicon is non- binary. Non-binary people are said to identify as both male and female or neither male nor female. They may feel their gender is fluid, can change and fluctuate, or perhaps they permanently don’t identify with one particular gender.
Emma Corrin, who played Princess Diana in The Crown, now describes herself as non-binary, despite being in a relationship with the American actor Rami Malek, son of Egyptian immigrants. Perhaps getting the title role in Orlando (Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid creation in the book of the same name) is just a coincidence. Or perhaps the new self-descriptor helped with the audition process as she would be identified more closely with the hoped-for role.
Non-binary as a concept is difficult to get across in gendered languages. So, for instance, in Spanish you have to choose between non binario (M) and non binaria (F). And some on-line merchants don’t seem to have properly understood the concept either. Hence, you are offered T-shirts in the non-binary colours (yellow, white and purple, since you ask) from a seller on Amazon in either male or female sizes.
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