“Queer” was used as a slur for most of the 20th century, and it can still be one, depending on who says it and how. It’s also the word about half of LGBTQ adults in the U.S. now use for themselves. In a January 2025 Pew Research Center survey, 48% of LGBTQ adults said they think of themselves as queer, including 59% of those ages 18 to 29.
Merriam-Webster’s usage note covers both sides. The adjective “today is commonly used as a positive or neutral self-descriptor,” it says, but “some people still find the word offensive in any context.” The rule that GLAAD and PFLAG both give is short: call someone queer if they call themselves queer.
What Queer Means Today
A queer person is someone who isn’t straight, isn’t cisgender, or both, and who uses the word for themselves. Merriam-Webster defines the noun as “a person who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, or otherwise not heterosexual,” or a person whose gender identity “is nonbinary or differs from the sex they had or were identified as having at birth.”
Queer and gay overlap, but they aren’t the same word. GLAAD’s media guide says people who choose queer often find lesbian, gay and bisexual “too limiting and/or fraught with cultural connotations they feel do not apply to them.” When you see the Q in LGBTQ, it usually means queer, and in youth support settings it can also mean questioning, according to GLAAD.
The Word’s History at a Glance
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1513 | The Oxford English Dictionary’s first record of queer meaning strange or odd, per Oxford University Press |
| 1567 | A separate “bad, worthless” queer appears, later used for counterfeit money. The two senses merge by the 1700s |
| 1894 | The Marquess of Queensberry’s letter attacking “The Snob Queers,” the OED’s first use of the noun for a gay man |
| 1914 | The Los Angeles Times describes a club “composed of the ‘queer’ people,” the OED’s first use of the adjective in that sense |
| 1949 | Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary lists only one slang meaning, counterfeit money, according to the Columbia Journalism Review |
| 1965 | Webster’s New World Dictionary lists queer as slang for homosexual |
| 1987 | ACT UP forms in New York in March, per its own history |
| 1990 | Four ACT UP members found Queer Nation in March. Its members hand out “Queers Read This” at New York Pride in June. Teresa de Lauretis holds a conference titled “Queer Theory” at UC Santa Cruz |
| 1991 | The conference essays appear in the journal differences |
| 2015 | NPR journalists start using queer in their own reporting around the end of the year, NPR’s public editor found |
| 2025 | Pew finds 48% of LGBTQ adults think of themselves as queer |
| 2026 | De Lauretis dies in February. In June, a New York Times guest essay titled “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.” restarts the debate |
How Queer Became a Slur
For most of its life, queer meant strange. The Oxford English Dictionary dates that sense to 1513, and a second, unrelated queer meaning “bad” or “worthless” shows up in 1567, according to an excerpt from Keywords for Today published by Oxford University Press. The book’s authors write that the merger of the two meanings “made available a term of abuse and offensive judgment.”
The word was turned on gay men in the 1890s. The OED’s first example of the noun meaning a gay man comes from the Marquess of Queensberry’s 1894 letter to his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, attacking “The Snob Queers.” Queensberry is better known for his role in Oscar Wilde’s downfall.
Gay men used the word too, and not always as an insult. Historian Timothy W. Jones points out in The Conversation that the OED records a neutral use in 1914, an insulting one in 1936 (“fairies, pansies, and queers”), and a self-description in 1952: “young men who call themselves ‘queers.'”
Dictionaries took a while to catch up. Merrill Perlman, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, found that the 1949 Webster’s New Collegiate listed only “counterfeit money” as slang for queer, and the 1965 Webster’s New World listed it as slang for homosexual. Merriam-Webster’s current entry says that when the sexual meanings developed in the early 20th century, “they were strongly pejorative.”
How Activists Took It Back in 1990
The group that NPR’s public editor says “led the charge to reclaim the Q-word” came out of the AIDS crisis in New York. ACT UP formed there in March 1987. In March 1990, four of its members, Tom Blewitt, Alan Klein, Michelangelo Signorile and Karl Soehnlein, founded Queer Nation, according to the group’s own history. Sixty people met on March 20 at the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in the West Village. Their chant, “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!” became a popular rallying cry, and chapters followed in Atlanta, Denver, Houston, Portland and San Francisco.
That June, members of Queer Nation handed out an unsigned leaflet called “Queers Read This” at the New York Pride parade, according to Verso, which publishes an excerpt. The full text answers the objection to the word before anyone could raise it: “Ah, do we really have to use that word? It’s trouble.” Then it explains the choice: “Yeah, QUEER can be a rough word but it is also a sly and ironic weapon we can steal from the homophobe’s hands and use against him.” It also says, “Queer, unlike GAY, doesn’t mean MALE.”
“By co-opting the word ‘queer,’ QN claims, they have disarmed homophobes,” Newsweek wrote in 1991, as quoted by the Columbia Journalism Review.
Universities took up the word the same year. Teresa de Lauretis organized a 1990 working conference at UC Santa Cruz titled “Queer Theory,” and its essays came out in the journal differences in 1991, according to UC Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness department, which notes her death on February 3, 2026, at 87. The OED dates “queer theory” to 1990. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble came out that year too.
Some writers place the reclaiming at Stonewall in 1969. Gay liberation activists of the 1960s and 1970s did sing “we’re here because we’re queer,” Jones writes, but the OED, as reported by the Columbia Journalism Review, dates the broader shift to the late 1980s, and the Dictionary of American Slang to the early 1990s.
How Often Queer Shows Up in Print
Use of queer in English books fell from the 1930s on and bottomed out in 1982 at about 0.63 uses per million words, according to Google Books Ngram Viewer. After 1990 it climbed, and by 2022, the last year in the data, it reached 9.7 per million, about 15 times the 1982 low and higher than any year since 1800.
The Ngram count includes every sense of the word, so the long decline also reflects “strange” going out of style. In news, NPR’s transcripts include queer as far back as 1972, first in quotes of insults, then in interviews with Queer Nation members, and NPR journalists’ own use started around the end of 2015, according to NPR’s public editor.
Who Calls Themselves Queer Now
Younger LGBTQ adults are the most likely to use the word. In Pew’s 2025 survey of 3,959 LGBTQ adults, 59% of those 18 to 29 said they think of themselves as queer, compared with 49% in their 30s, 39% in their 40s, 32% in their 50s and 34% at 60 and older. Pew also found that 82% of transgender adults think of themselves as queer.
Other surveys report much smaller numbers. Most of the gap comes from how each one asked.
| Survey | How it asked, and what it found |
|---|---|
| Pew Research Center, 2025 | A separate yes or no question, so people could also say gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans. 48% of LGBTQ adults said yes |
| Trevor Project, 2024 | 18,663 LGBTQ+ people ages 13 to 24, recruited online, each picking one orientation. 12% picked queer |
| Generations study, published 2020 | A national sample of sexual minority adults in three age groups, one label each. 6% chose queer, and 76% of them were 18 to 25 |
| Gallup, 2025 data | Queer isn’t an option. About 6% of LGBTQ+ adults gave some other identity, “such as queer or pansexual” |
| England and Wales census, 2021 | A write-in box. 15,000 people wrote queer, about 1% of the 1.5 million who gave an LGB+ orientation |
Pew’s question let people say yes to queer and also say they’re gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans, and Pew notes that these identities “often overlap.” Surveys that ask for one label, or make people write queer in, count only those who put it first. Sociologist Meredith Worthen’s 2023 review puts the range at 5% to 20% of non-heterosexual people across studies, and says about 1 in 3 “like to see the ‘Q’ in ‘LGBTQ’ and view ‘queer’ as an empowering identity.”
Gallup’s February 2026 release shows the same age pattern for LGBTQ+ identity overall. It estimates that 23% of adults under 30 identify as LGBTQ+, compared with 10.4% of those 30 to 49 and 3% or less at 50 and older.
Why Some LGBTQ+ People Still Reject It
Not everyone accepts the reclaiming. In Pew’s survey, 44% of LGBTQ adults said they don’t think of themselves as queer, and 8% weren’t sure.
When NPR started using the word, a listener wrote: “I am a gay man and I did not spend my entire life being called queer as a slur for journalists to accept it as reclaimed. It isn’t.” NPR arts critic Bob Mondello, then 70, told the public editor he’d grown more comfortable with it but was still careful: “When I was growing up, it was an insult.”
In 2023, after the census count, Karl Lockwood, a 66-year-old gay man in Brighton, wrote to The Guardian: “You wouldn’t use the N-word, so don’t use the Q-word.”
Mark Segal, a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and publisher of Philadelphia Gay News, gave a different reason in a 2023 News Is Out report: “I don’t use the word queer, although I respect those who wish to use it, because it does erase gay men and lesbian women.” In the same piece, Dick Peeples, a 75-year-old retired attorney, said he accepts the word “as being proudly owned by younger generations” but chooses not to use it himself. Others in the same report disagree, including Jay Allison, a former communication studies chair at the University of North Texas: “I use it.”
The argument picked up again in June 2026, when writer Matthew Vines published a New York Times guest essay titled “I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.” He argued that “because the word ‘queer’ can describe any departure from social norms, it becomes an open door through which almost anyone can walk,” as quoted by Philadelphia Gay News, which published a reply. Psychiatrist Chase T. M. Anderson answered in The Advocate that “the terms ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ are not synonymous,” and explained why they chose queer.
The slur also hasn’t gone away. Worthen’s review found that 3 in 4 queer women and men report discrimination, harassment or violence based on sexuality, and concludes that queer “should be understood as both reclaimed and stigmatized.”
What Style Guides and Dictionaries Say
| Source | What it says |
|---|---|
| Merriam-Webster | The noun is “likely to be considered offensive when used by someone who does not identify as queer” |
| AP Stylebook | “Queer is acceptable for people and organizations that use the term to identify themselves. Do not use it when intended as a slur,” as quoted by CJR |
| New York Times Manual of Style | Queer “should be treated as an offensive slur, but with a limited exception” for people who use it as “an ironic badge of pride,” as quoted by CJR in 2019 |
| GLAAD | “Not a universally accepted term even within the LGBTQ community,” so use it to describe how someone self-identifies or in a direct quote |
| PFLAG | Use it “only when self-identifying or quoting someone who self-identifies as queer” |
How to Use the Word Without Hurting Anyone
- Mirror the person. If someone calls themselves queer, you can too. If they say gay, lesbian or bi, use that. GLAAD’s advice is to ask people how they describe themselves.
- Use it as an adjective. “A queer artist” or “queer community” is how people use it for themselves. “A queer” as a noun reads as the old insult, a point the Safe Zone Project makes too.
- Use the specific word when the specific group is the point. A story about a gay bar or a lesbian book club can say so. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s education team, which uses queer as an umbrella term, still says “it’s important to be specific.”
- Expect older people to answer differently. In Pew’s survey, 59% of LGBTQ adults under 30 call themselves queer and about a third of those over 50 do, so a word that’s ordinary to a 25-year-old may sting for a 65-year-old.
- If you’re straight and cisgender. The AP and PFLAG guidance above covers quoting someone or naming a group that uses the word. Calling a specific person queer when they don’t use it is the case Merriam-Webster calls “likely to be considered offensive.”
Queer in Austin
In Austin the word shows up in event names as well as on people. QueerBomb, a free June celebration, was started by “a group of queer, trans, and nonbinary folks” looking to offer “a queerer, more inclusive alternative to Pride,” the Austin Chronicle reported in 2019. Our Austin Pride guide has QueerBomb and the other June and August events.
The research is local too. Stephen T. Russell, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, co-wrote the Generations study paper on who identifies as queer, according to the Williams Institute. For older Austin history, including the city’s 1975 ordinance and the first Pride week in 1976, see our timeline of LGBTQ+ history in Austin.
What We Changed
The older version of this page quoted three young people by first name with no source, and we couldn’t find one, so they’re gone. We also cut a section on federal politics and two Larry Kramer quotes we couldn’t confirm from a transcript. The old page also said “queer theory” was coined in 1991. The conference was in 1990, and the journal issue in 1991.
Last checked: October 14, 2026. Sources are linked where each fact appears, and all were read that day. See a mistake? Use our contact page.
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