Being a gay man who has known friends who were savagely beaten by assailants yelling that word, I will thank you not to use "queer" as anything but the slur that it always has been. I understand that this is a generational division but the point of this blog is the polite exchange of ideas and there is nothing remotely polite in referring to people by what has for most of my life been one of the two ugliest slurs in the American lexicon.

There is nothing proud and nothing liberating about donning the mantle of defectiveness.