queerbychoice | Interviews from eslington and <user site="livejournal.com" user

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Interviews from eslington and <user site="livejournal.com" user

eslington interviews me:

1: What is Autogamy? Pomosexuality?

Autogamy is self-marriage. See

lalenalefay's wedding pictures for an excellent example.

Pomosexuality is the title of a book, and stands for postmodern sexuality, meaning an approach to sexuality that rejects rigid fixed categories.

2: Is that a face I see in the purple bit of your swirly icon?

A face? Where? I don't see it. The icon was actually made from a photograph of a rainbow in the sky. In addition to the rainbow, the photograph also contained an oil tower; the shadowy lines you can see in the orangey swirl of my icon are what remained of the bars of the oil tower after I swirled the picture around.

3: What political issue is most important to you at this very moment?

Stopping the U.S. government from killing people is probably most important to me right now. Some other political issues that are of extremely major importance to me and that I usually feel better qualified to actually do anything about than the above are promoting nonbiological ideas about sexual preference, promoting egalitarian concepts of what is erotic, and abolishing gendered language and roles.

4: Favourite book?

My favorite books have, at various times, included Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker, Ida: A Novel by Gertrude Stein, and When I Was Five I Killed Myself by Howard Buten, in that order. The last one is the one I most commonly name as my favorite these days, but I'm also extremely fond of books by Kobo Abe, James Baldwin, Amy Bloom, Ralph Ellison, Peter Høeg, John Irving, Milan Kundera, Chang-rae Lee, Li Yu, Audre Lorde, Anchee Min, Haruki Murakami, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Leo Tolstoy, Gore Vidal, Richard Wright, Banana Yoshimoto . . . I could go on, but you would stop paying attention.

5: Would you rather be immortal or have the ability to fly?

Really, how can this even be a question at all? First of all, the only thing I can think of that I would prefer over immortality would be a godlike power to eliminate all the world's problems myself. Second, making use of the ability to fly might require exercise, which I never do, so even if I had the ability to fly I would just drive my car instead and never fly at all.

imperfectmanx interviews me:

1. What would you consider the most important thing to you, besides family and friends?

The most important thing to me - and it outranks even family and friends - is being able to do something or other to improve the general welfare of humanity.

2. What would your perfect meal consist of?

Didn't I already answer this for

axbesm_starr? Pasta-roni. I have boring taste buds.

3. Pet peeves, any?

To be classified as a "pet peeve," does my peeve have to be trivial? Because I have no shortage of issues that infuriate me to the point of explosion, but they tend to be rather major issues, like the entire U.S. government. The only trivial issue that comes to mind that gets on my nerves on a frequent basis is the tendency of many many many many people on my LiveJournal friends list to substitute an incorrect homonym for various words in expressions they frequently use. Examples that come to mind (and no, I don't at all remember who said what, and in most cases I think several dozen people have said them, so nobody needs to feel personally singled out) include:

"once and a while" (should be "once in a while")
"low and behold" (should be "lo and behold")
"it didn't phase me" (should be "it didn't faze me")
"she lead me upstairs" (should be "she led me upstairs")

"it peaked my interest" (should be "it piqued my interest")
"to make due with" (should be "to make do with")
"waiting with baited breath" (should be "waiting with bated breath") (I added this to the list at sankta's suggestion)
"for all intensive purposes" (should be "for all intents and purposes") (I added this to the list at donutgirl's and disi's suggestion)
"could of" (should be "could have" or "could've") (I added this at dzuunmod's suggestion)

Oh, and I don't understand how or when the accepted spelling of whoa suddenly got replaced in the minds of the huge majority of people under 30 with the new spelling of woah, but I'm still clinging old-fashionedly to the old spelling. I'm an editor, okay? Well, an unemployed ex-editor. I like things to be spelled in accordance with the actual dictionary spelling, and my dictionary does not accept woah as a valid alternate spelling of whoa. So there.

(At this point I have managed to annoy 99% of all people reading this, because they all prefer their variant unaccepted spellings.)

4. In your perfect world, what would be the biggest difference one would expect to see, with respect to the world as it is?

Well, the first difference you would probably notice when just walking down on the street in an average city would be that nobody would use gendered pronouns anymore.

5. What do you see yourself doing in 5 years? In 10?

Honestly, I fear to guess because I fear to disappoint myself. I would ideally like at some point to have somebody to live happily ever after with, and to write novels, or at least one novel, and to not have to work at unpleasant jobs anymore. But I'm not really all that sure how realistic any of these hopes are.

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you forgot "for all intensive purposes"!

Yes, I did. Thank you, fellow unemployed ex-editor.

"Waiting with baited breath."

It hurts just to type it.

YES! Yes, yes, thank you. I definitely need to add that one to the list.

I'm suppose to go to the store.

And one more: could've = could of

I never actually type either word, but I honestly did not know that "faze" was correct until I took a grammer quiz a few months ago. Unlike all the things I read but never say (and thus mispronounce horribly), "it didn't faze me" is something I'd always heard and never read, so I was very embarrassed to find out that "faze" was valid outside of reference to "fazers" by people who think that this is a funny way to differentiate themselves from Star Trek.

Also, what are your feelings on "whoah"? Not as a proposed compromise, but as a spelling in its own right.

I don't remember ever seeing "whoah" before. My dictionary doesn't accept it as an alternate spelling, though. I looked it up.

And the word "grammar" should be spelled with an A, not an E. ;-)

I may be the only person who actually uses "whoah". It just seems more drawn-out than whoa, and thus more appropriate for cases where I would type "whoa[h]".

Crap. I even meant to spellcheck this comment, but I was lazy. *dies of shame*

mine is "definately" *shudder*

define
finite

two words people NEVER misspell so systematically. ugh.
just stick the two together, and you get definite.

although, to be fair, i spell it woah. i don't know why, but nobody has ever told me it was wrong until now. i guess of all the things they teach us to spell, "whoa" isn't high up on the list. i blame The Man.

no, no, no, no, no, not offended here. that shit drives me up a fucking wall as well.

except when i can't figure out what something should be. for instance, is the phrase "for all intents and purposes" as i suspect that it is, or is it instead, "for all intensive purposes"?
no one ever says it slowly enough for me to figure out.

It's "intents and purposes." I should add that one to my list.

thanks!

"...Some other political issues that are of extremely major importance to me and that I usually feel better qualified to actually do anything about than the above are promoting nonbiological ideas about sexual preference, promoting egalitarian concepts of what is erotic, and abolishing gendered language and roles."

I'm not even going to touch the question of whether these are desirable social goals, or even compatible within the common threads of human culture and psychology. But I would ask a cautionary question: are these properly political issues? That is, are you sure that the promotion or abolition of ideas and linguistic mores is a proper area for public policy?

Obviously, by asking this, I'm implying that I think the answer is no. Attempts to dictate public ideas or common language have historically been the mark of ideologically repressive regimes. And I haven't yet heard of governments attempting to influence public ideas about eroticism, except to repress them. In any case, I would argue that it is a (theoretical - we're still working towards this) principle of democratic governance that public policy is value-neutral on the use of language, the perception of the erotic, and the marketplace of ideas. This is not just because governments tend to be conservative (it's the job of governments to be at least a little conservative; else, how is the State to fulfill its primary purpose of maintaining public order?) - but because a free society needs to give equal treatment to all ideas, without the state advocating one above another. Or, rather, let's say that our societies are free to the extent that the state does not involve itself in the marketplace, not of goods, but of ideas. It's a theory, anyway.
*ahem* /poliscimajor

Perhaps I'm misusing the word "political" here, but I don't interpret it to inherently mean "legislated by law." I'm attempting to use it as a word broadly encompassing the power relations between any groups of people, including:

the power of governments over their subjects
the power of governments over other governments, as when declaring war
the power of any demographic groups over other demographic groups

In other words, I was not thinking of gendered language as being "political" in the sense of "a problem resolvable through law"; rather, I was thinking of gendered language as being "political" in the sense of "a problem created by the history of patriarchal government and a long-standing war waged upon women and non-gender-conforming humans by gender-conforming men." Governments and wars and the problems created by them are, to my mind, always political - regardless of how those problems can best be resolved.

That said, I certainly do think that governments attempt to influence public ideas about eroticism in ways other than repressing them (despite the fact that they claim their censorship is designed to repress all eroticism equally, I think that censorship efforts are very very frequently unevenly applied to unconventional, queer, feminist, pro-reproductive-freedom, etc., types of resources); and, within limits, I think that the government could and should promote genderfree pronouns. By "within limits" I mean that if the government were to go around telling individuals what pronouns to use, or prohibiting book companies from publishing books with certain pronouns, that would be a bad thing. However, the government itself produces vast numbers of documents, and it produces them with gendered pronouns on them. This is, in itself, a political act, a governmental promotion of gendered pronouns. If the government is going to continue producing documents that use pronouns, I think it would be more proper for the government to issue its documents using a pronoun system that does not promote the notion that its people belong so firmly divided into two separate castes that gender is the one and only indicator of caste that gets referenced in pronouns.

I also think, however, that such language changes are far more likely to get incorporated into government documents by simply raising the general cultural awareness than by passing laws specifically requiring it.

I know I said I wasn't going to touch the issue of whether these were actually laudible goals, but it looks like I'm going to come close here...

Obviously sexism in government and society remains a big problem. Women earn significantly less than men doing the same jobs in many industries, and many other jobs are closed to women altogether. These problems aren't necessarily the direct result of social policy; there is no law prohibiting women from becoming President or earning equal wages - the problem is in people's attitudes - the powerful people who promote and set wages, but also the 'normal' people who would not, at this point in history, elect a woman to such a high office. Prejudices in common society are not just a result of insidious conspiracy among the power-elites or patriarchy, they stem from commonly-held views as well; and in order to improve equality, both sources of prejudice need to be worked on. (Remember, in the 1970s battle over the ERA, some of the strongest activism against a political expression of women's equality came from women.)

That said, with so much important progress left to be made in the field of sexual and other equality, I have to wonder: Is "gendered language" really the most important problem we have to work on? It seems like there are many more important barriers to equality left than which pronouns we use - and if we could overcome those, the pronouns wouldn't matter so much. If a woman could become President, would it matter if we called her "she"?

"These problems aren't necessarily the direct result of social policy; there is no law prohibiting women from becoming President or earning equal wages - the problem is in people's attitudes - the powerful people who promote and set wages, but also the 'normal' people who would not, at this point in history, elect a woman to such a high office."

Governmental policies can, however, help compensate for people's attitudes and even change them, as when affirmative action laws compensate for hiring discrimination and, by getting more women and nonwhite people into high-ranking jobs, help prove that women and nonwhite people can in fact perform those jobs.

"I have to wonder: Is 'gendered language' really the most important problem we have to work on?"

Who said we should only work on the very most important problems? I believe in working on all problems.

"If a woman could become President, would it matter if we called her 'she'?"

Yes, because it implies that the type of genitalia she possesses are somehow a highly relevant piece of information to know about her in casual conversations about her which have nothing whatsoever to do with her genitalia. In cultures in which some other caste system has been for a long time period a bigger determining factor than gender of a person's esteem in society, those other castes are referenced in the culture's pronoun system instead of or in addition to gender. We could have pronouns designating people as "that handicapped person" or "that fat person" or "that rape victim" every time we refer to them, and maybe then because of the unfamiliarity of such a system you would have an easier time understanding why it is problematic to be constantly throwing this particular piece of information about these people in their faces every other second when that information is not relevant to the conversation (except, of course, that it is relevant to people who judge people's social status and esteem them differently on the basis of this information, which is why they do continue bringing it up). For as long as people's genders are continually brought to the forefront of every conversation about them via our pronoun system, the clear implication that all of us will not-necessarily-consciously absorb will be that we are being reminded of the type of genitalia of the person we are speaking of because that person's type of genitalia must be, somehow or other, relevant to the discussion we are having about them - whether that discussion is about what kind of a president they would make, or anything else about them.

Allow me to make a case for "gendered" language:

If you're a police officer investigating a crime, the first question you're likely to ask of witnesses about the perpetrator is "male or female?" The first cut, by which 50% of the population can be instantly eliminated - and which, notwithstanding exceptions like transgendered persons, drag queens, and other outliers (which do exist, but are rare), is truly binary, with no ambiguity (unlike, for example, race, which admits infinite gradations). Learning someone's gender at first cut may not tell you anything about their personality, abilities, or attribures, but it does at least tell you something about their body, and makes it easier to identify them. (If you're meeting a stranger at the airport, it's a lot easier if you hear "A man in a black suit" than "a person... &c.") This is why these words exist in the first place. The human brain works on inference from categorization - in other words, on generalizations. It's imperfect, but it makes better sense of the world than permitting no generalizations at all.

You seem to be arguing that if we did away with gender-specific pronouns, we could reduce gender-specific stereotypes and prejudices. I would argue exactly the obverse - that, as we gradually wear away at long-standing sexist institutions, the gender of pronouns will become less important. Knowing that someone is female need not automatically inform all one's assumptions about them - and to deny interlocutors that information in the name of egalitarianism insults their intelligence, by suggesting that we can only objectively assess people if we are ignorant of their gender, lest our subtle prejudices instantly cloud our judgment.

And while I agree that it's important to work on the small problems as well as the big ones, I think there are some battles that are either unimportant and/or unwinnable - and which, if fought, may actually set your cause back, in the court of public opinion - which, after all, is what you're fighting for. Extremist positions - by which I mean, those which propose to fundamentally overthrow long-standing social institutions - run a high risk of falling into this category.

When I was canvassing for the Democratic Party, I met one gentleman who swore he would never vote Democrat, because in his mind, the concept of 'Liberal' was inextricably intertwined with the image of Tre Arrow shitting in a bucket on the side of the Federal Building (where Mr. Arrow perched for days in protest of logging). This gentleman expressed plenty of sentiments which coincided more with Democratic than Republican policy views, but that impression forever informed his impression of the debate. One extremist's distasteful arguments for an unobjectionable policy goal had pushed him to the other side forever, regardless of the facts.

I think the gendered language debate may well fall into this category. Plenty of moderate, well-meaning people are likely to see it as proof that Feminism, as an institution, is extremist and out of touch with their own values and needs. Let me invoke realpolitik again: This is a fight you're not going to win. Not in our lifetimes anyway. And persisting to fighting it may actually set you back in other fights in which you have a better chance. So what is more important: Fighting for your principles, or accomplishing your policy goals?

"The first cut, by which 50% of the population can be instantly eliminated - and which, notwithstanding exceptions like transgendered persons, drag queens, and other outliers (which do exist, but are rare), is truly binary, with no ambiguity (unlike, for example, race, which admits infinite gradations)."

That's like saying that race, notwithstanding exceptions like Asians, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Asian Indians, and mixed race people, is truly binary, with no ambiguity and everyone fitting neatly into categories of either white or black.

"(If you're meeting a stranger at the airport, it's a lot easier if you hear 'A man in a black suit' than 'a person... &c.')"

If I hear "A person in a black suit" versus "a man," I'm far more likely to be able to spot the person by looking for big splotches of black glimpsed through the crowd than by looking for broad shoulders, narrow hips and facial stubble, which (even if we suppose there was only one man in the entire crowd and only one person wearing black in the entire crowd) would require me to get a fairly unblocked view the person to see both their shoulders and both their hips, as opposed to just glimpsing a flash of black while the person is still standing behind ten other people. Why then do we not use pronouns that specify what color clothes a person is wearing instead of their gender, and an "undetermined" pronoun for situations in which we don't know what they're wearing?

"When I was canvassing for the Democratic Party, I met one gentleman who swore he would never vote Democrat, because in his mind, the concept of 'Liberal' was inextricably intertwined with the image of Tre Arrow shitting in a bucket on the side of the Federal Building (where Mr. Arrow perched for days in protest of logging)."

That is this gentleman's problem, not mine. It is not my responsibility to worry about crazy people who cannot tell the difference between my positions and the positions of the entire Democratic Party (which I'm not even a member of anyway; I'm a member of the Peace & Freedom Party). If I spent all my time shutting up for fear that people would confuse my opinions with the voice of entire groups much larger than I am and hold that against those groups, I wouldn't get to call myself by my LJ username either. I wouldn't get to speak many of my opinions at all, and being allowed to speak my opinions is absolutely necessary to make my life even be worth living at all.

"That's like saying that race, notwithstanding exceptions like Asians, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Asian Indians, and mixed race people, is truly binary, with no ambiguity and everyone fitting neatly into categories of either white or black."

That's unfair. There are, as you point out, a great many variations on race, commonly distributed throughout the world. There are primarily two sexes - of course there are shades of grey between them, but these are fairly rare, and most people identify to themselves and others as male or female (whether or not, by some abstract conception, they should do so). This matters, as I said, because the function of categories in cognition is inference - which is, by definition, based on stereotypes, and therefore is flawed, but without which it would be impossible for our brains to make sense of the world. It makes sense for our brains to instinctively divide people into two sexes, even if in some exceptional cases we have to overcome that impulse. Human life is full of these tensions between our instinctive impulses and the demands of complexity in moral or social reasoning.

That is this gentleman's problem, not mine. It is not my responsibility to worry about crazy people who cannot tell the difference between my positions and the positions of the entire Democratic Party...

Forgive me, but if you propose to enact political change, whether it be though the 'formal' sphere of public policy, or 'informal' spheres of education and activism - it rather is your problem. That's what we were talking about in the first place, wasn't it - changing how people think about these issues?

It is not fair, perhaps. It's unfair that the public takes one individual's words or actions as representative of an entire group to which that individual belongs. It's unfair that we have to censor our deepest opinions in order to appear moderate to a "crazy" body politic, even if they be the majority. But when we undertake activism work, I believe these are the duties we assume. We do speak for our movements when we espouse their doctrines, and we do have to take into consideration the views of our audience when we do it. In order to influence someone's mind, after all, you have to respect and understand their mind.

Establishing oases of idealism is, of course, a fine compromise. You can speak your uncensored opinion to your heart's content in these forums, and the world is richer for it. But when speaking to people with a greater diversity of opinions, you'll make no progress if you don't realistically consider where they are coming from, what they assume and believe and value, and what you can realistically hope to accomplish. Again, what is more important: living by your principles, or accomplishing needed policy goals?

"It makes sense for our brains to instinctively divide people into two sexes, even if in some exceptional cases we have to overcome that impulse."

That is like saying, "It makes sense for our brains to instinctively define 'human' as a being necessarily possessing four unparalyzed limbs with five digits on each, even if in some cases we have to overcome that impulse." Are there understandable reasons that this image would often tend to come to many people's minds when they're asked to think of "a human"? Yes. But does that mean it's okay to write that definition into the dictionary as the meaning of the word "human"? No. Neither is it okay to enshrine into our grammatical structure the idea that everyone should be classified into one or the other of two genders.

"Forgive me, but if you propose to enact political change, whether it be though the 'formal' sphere of public policy, or 'informal' spheres of education and activism - it rather is your problem."

No, it is not my problem and the reason it is not my problem is that it is an INSANE way for that guy to think and if people are going to be that insane then there is no sense in even trying to provide for every possible insane conclusion they can randomly nonsensically draw from the fact that I, personally hold a particular opinion. Now, if I were going around claiming to be speaking for the entire feminist movement or the entire queer movement or the entire anything at all, then hell yes that would be my responsibility to stop doing that and stop giving people this false impression that could seriously damage their opinions of those movements. But if the people are simply so insane that they persist in believing that every opinion I hold is necessarily the opinion of some entire movement even when it is perfectly obvious that it is no such thing and I have clearly stated so many many times, then those people are insane and I am not going to attempt in any way to worry about what they think because they could just as easily hallucinate that the entire movement thinks something whether or not I personally speak out about personally thinking so.

"Establishing oases of idealism is, of course, a fine compromise."

You misunderstand my meaning in speaking of oases. I am making no compromises. I am not going to silence myself in front of anybody. I will speak all of my opinions to anybody and everybody who will listen: the oases are simply the small groups of people who do listen and choose to agree with me and join me in building communities that work toward these goals.

"This is a fight you're not going to win. Not in our lifetimes anyway."

Nor am I at all likely to win, in my lifetime anyway, the abolition of war, pollution, racism, sexism, the belief in "gay genes" and "straight genes," or the eroticization of violence. But I can create small oases in society where it is possible for my friends and I to experience brief respites from warmongering conversations, some limited aspects of local pollution that we can clean up ourselves or successfully petition to get cleaned up, racism, sexism, the belief in "gay genes" and "straight genes," and the eroticization of violence. Likewise, I can create small oases in society where it is possible for me and

chisparoja (whose PTSD induces panic attacks when ey is particularly emphatically gender-categorized, and induces discomfort whenever ey is unemphatically gender-categorized) and others like em or others like me (i.e., who do not have PTSD-type reactions but still find the words problematic) can live the way we feel happiest living. Furthermore, there are quite enough people out there in the world who want this (witness The Gender-Neutral Pronoun FAQ, The GenderFree WebRing, Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time which is written entirely with gender-neutral pronouns, Kate Bornstein's books which are written with an entirely different set of gender-neutral pronouns, and the

antigender,

abolishgender,

genderfuck,

genderqueer,

polygender_ppl and

genderoutlaws communities) that even if you somehow persuaded me to stop caring, plenty of other people would continue working to oppose gendered language. Why? Because it matters to their sense of well-being. And that's reason enough for me to care about it too.

In the Sac City college newspaper there's an ad for Washington Mutual, written up like an article, in which one of the students strikes up a romantic relationship with himself because the fees for his checking account are so high he can't afford to date another person.

I'd rather be able to fly.

Is it that being able to fly has great appeal to you, or are you just not very interested in avoiding death?

The trouble with immortality is that it so frequently comes with drawbacks - whether the living on past health, strength, sense, and memory (the Struldbrug problem), or the people-trying-to-cut-your-head-off problem, or simply living on and on and on into an endless future that changes though you do not (the futureshock problem), or living on and changing and finding that everyone around you has become intolerably young (the Back to Methuselah problem).

Whereas flying...

. . . simply entails crashing from great heights and splattering your skull all over the ground two hundred feet below?

You're probably less clumsy than I am. I'm terrified to ever ride a bicycle again because they endangered my life too much. I suspect I'd have the same problem with flying.

simply entails crashing from great heights and splattering your skull all over the ground two hundred feet below?

Well, at least that would be quick...

Seriously, though, the above is generally called falling, not flying. ;-)

Thanks. That was pretty interesting.

(At this point I have managed to annoy 99% of all people reading this, because they all prefer their variant unaccepted spellings.)

Part of the one percent here, I guess. I was pleased to see those. It needed to be said!

I hate those spelling mistakes, man. I try to avoid them at all costs.

I've seen more than one person in my friends list getting this sort of interview. Who is doing all this interviewing? Is this a new LJ meme? "Interview your friends?" Just curious. Fascinating responses. :)

Oh and what about: "I could not care less." Most people I've heard use the phrase nonsensically leave out the "not".

Yes, it is a meme - not really a new one, because it first surfaced in June 2003, but it subsided for a while and has lately been resurrected. The rules are: leave a comment saying if you want to be interviewed; I'll reply and give you five questions to answer; you update your LJ with the five questions answered; you offer to ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

Unfortunately I only offered once, and neglected to post the offer again this time around, but the offer is still open.

Holy shit! I never realized that "for all intensive purposes" was actually "for all intents and purposes"! I remember pondering what an intensive purpose might be for years. Wow I'm glad you included that.

Me llama mucho la atención la 'autogamia', me llama la atención que piense Gayle de eso. Y a pesar de que he leído mucho su livejournal, siempre me he quedado con cierta duda acerca del concepto 'queer', desde que en español no es una palabra o concepto que se use, mi empiezo va mal. Recuerdo haberla oido en una película acerca de Oscar Wilde, el padre de su pareja le nombraba 'you're a queer person', y arrojaba verduras podridas al suelo.

No estoy seguro de qué es tu duda específicamente, pero trataré a explicarla. En el pasado, la palabra era un insulto que las personas heterosexuales utilizaron para decir que personas homosexuales o bisexuales eran diferentes y por eso, malas, porque las personas heterosexuales creían que todas personas por supuesto preferían ser heterosexual y conformista y nunca diferente de la mayoría en ningunas maneras. Pero unas personas homosexuales y bisexuales no tienen ningún interés en ser heterosexuales ni normales en ningunas maneras, y estas personas quieren decir esto a los heterosexuales. Entonces, les dicen, "Sí, somos queer y nos gusta ser queer. No tenemos miedo de oírnos llamados esta palabra."

A otras personas homosexuales y bisexuales no les gusta creerse diferentes ni disidentes, sólo quieren creerse conformistas aún si no son heterosexuales. Entonces, a esas personas homosexuales y bisexuales, oírse describido con la palabra "queer" les enoja y se sienten insultadas por estar llamado diferentes y disidentes sólo por no ser heterosexuales.

Ya más o menos entiendo, es como cuando antes en España (creo que así lo leí) a los homosexuales les molestaba sobremanera oir que los llamaran 'maricones' (creo que esa es la palabra), y ahora prefieren o preferían ser llamados así, es como redesignar el significado de una palabra, igual es otra actitud. Ya capto más, un gay conformista sería un simplemente 'gay', conformista y hasta acomplejado y uno más combativo, y conciente sería 'queer'.

I love your list, it made me think of another incorrect phrase. People so often say, "another thing coming," when in fact the correct phrase is, "another think coming." ie. "If she thinks I'm wearing that, she's got another think coming."

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Interviews from eslington and <user site="livejournal.com" user

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pet peeves are great

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realpolitik

Re: realpolitik

Against extremes

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another one