Fifteen people in their 20s and 30s describe what 'queer' means to them.
“Queer is what you make it.”
“I know many people use ‘queer’ as an umbrella term, and I understand why they do, but I think it’s really reductive to forget that while it may be an umbrella term for some, it’s very specific for others. Queer is what you make of it — and, for me, being queer means that my sexuality is not fixed, that it can evolve over years and that I can be sexually and romantically attracted to various degrees to the spectrum of gender identities that exist. When people ask me what my sexuality is, I say queer, and if they don’t know what that means, I’ll say that I don’t label my sexuality at all — I have a very complicated relationship with the term ‘bisexual’ because of the associations of promiscuity that my LGBT-phobic straight peers attached to it. In that instance, bisexual felt like a word that I could not control in my own social circles. Queer feels like a term that I can make my own.” —Andrea Garcìa-Vargas, 23