5 phrases queer people can’t stand to hear anymore

Straight people who say inappropriate phrases aren’t bad, they’re often just stoned. They live in their world, they fall asleep in a stupor, self-convinced that the universe revolves only around their mirror of reality, only to realize that what they know is only part of a picture a thousand times larger and more nuanced. It is not (entirely) their fault: society and customs have always given ample precedence to that lifestyle, proposing heteronormative as established for everyone, including damage and side effects. But if you are queer, at least once in your life you will have found yourself in front of one of these five sentences, hard to die despite being in 2021. So straight friends, we tell you with great serenity but very honestly: stop telling us!

1. Gays are nicer, I have a thousand gay friends!
An evergreen: The gay friend is an early 2000s classic, but it still stands out from time to time like a little antique that you’re too fond of to throw away. “Gays” seem to have the sympathy gene, perhaps combined with a keen sense of fashion, and a more heated sensibility. That’s what some girls think about as soon as they meet another guy with whom they can’t engage in any flirtation or attraction. I believe that there are gays like this: partly because stereotypes have a basis of reality, partly because adhering to that stereotype is perhaps the easiest way to place oneself in society. There is nothing wrong with that, but universalizing the idea of ​​”nice and sensitive gay” ridicules the gay community making us a series of remote controlled puppets to take for a walk, and not people with their contradictions and complexities.

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2. I present to you a * friend *
For some straight people queer people are poor lost souls constantly searching for love in the world. As in a novel by Jane Austen, as soon as they intercept another gay, lesbian, or bisexual person inside the room, there is an urgent moral obligation within them to create a ship, even before verifying that the subjects in question agree. SPOILER ALERT: Not everyone * has an urgency to mate, get engaged, and more importantly the fact that both * are identified in some letter of the acronym LGBTQ +, does not imply that they are automatically attracted * one * from the other *.

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3. When did you get it?
This seems harmless at the base: “When and how did you realize you were * gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans etc. *?”. It’s a question often asked in good faith, but one that makes us feel a little like laboratory rats. Maybe you are enjoying the evening, thinking about something else, and you don’t always want to talk about your coming out or give an LGBTQ + history lesson. Queer people don’t have to educate you about something you might as well find in books or google.

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4. Come on, sooner or later you will choose one or the other!
Something that the cis-het culture loves to take for granted is that people choose and place themselves in a precise and definable point, if the closest to what they have done to them is even better. If you are bisexual, it is clear to them that you are just experimenting and that sooner or later you will have to choose between male or female. If you are no binary, that is, you do not identify yourself in a gender, same story: sooner or later you will choose whether “you want to be male or female”. Kind basic reminder: bisexual or non-binary people are not confused and there is nothing to choose! The spectrum is wide and varied, how a person could evolve over the course of his life is not something you can predict by guessing, and such comments only invalidate and discredit the identity of others.

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5. Who makes the male and who the female?
Lastly I leave the timeless, a hit from the past that returns on a regular basis for vintage lovers, ours All I Want for Christmas is You, which extends on different levels, from the sexual act to the life of the couple. It is “beautiful” because it is serious in several respects: not only is it a hallucinating question to ask two men and two women, but above all it still implies that within any couple, gay or straight, there are roles to be respected, of the rules to follow and keep in order to be together. It is a mixed question of patriarchy and misogyny. We keep it here for last, as a sign that we have hit the bottom of the barrel. If you have asked this question at least once in your life: do not worry, we are looking forward to redemption. If you still consider it legitimate and you do not see the problem, my deepest condolences.

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