Queer Spaces: Queer Names, by Nick Aranda

         I can recall, with a clear memory (though slightly discolored, as if my hippocampus is wearing sunglasses), the first time I was on the receiving end of a slur about sexuality.  I had been familiar with a number of other derogatory things that were occasionally hurled in my direction: beaner, wetback, mexi; the litany of crude pronouns that would be plastered to me like a name badge continues.  Small brown boys are often sat down by their mothers and told that they will be called things, many things, that did not always make sense.  I learned slowly in grade school that my back was—ostensibly—still saturated with water from a river that I had never swum through, a river I had never truly known.  Despite all of this familiarity with mislabeling and aggression, I was not fully prepared for being called “a queer.”  I did not know how to deal with a term that I had never really known by a boy I had always known.

         I came out—though at the time I was not aware that this was the ritual I was participating in—first when I was in 7^th grade.  7^th grade is cutthroat.  No one prepared me for the reality of kickball frenzy, lunchroom drama, or Mrs. Schumaker’s explosive ballads of Nickelback.  To contribute to the corrosive nature of 7th grade, Dylan McGinty decided to stop being my best friend. Why? Cause I was “a queer.”  I decided early on that Daniel Radcliffe was hot and that Danny Phantom was cute.  My puberty was complicated not by the girls in my class, but by the baseball coach of the Junior High (god that man was sexy)!   So, I surmised that while the other boys in fifth grade were exchanging comments on girls they found attractive (namely the girl’s high school volleyball team) it might make sense for me to mention that I found the baseball coach and Daniel Radcliffe to also be “cute.”  This comment exploded into a loud silence.  Dylan McGinty—my childhood best friend—decided to break the silence.

         The term queer was my first heartbreak.

         If we fast forward several years into the future, I actively identify as queer. I, like many others, even people actively in the public sphere, am actively reclaiming the title.

         Reclamation is the primary reason why I use the term queer.  Reclaiming spaces and words is of paramount importance.  There are few things that are made, created, and constructed for the queer community.  This is the reality of the situation for the queer community.  Given the reality, coupled with the fact that members of the queer community not only desire for a place to be but also require the same, it seems natural that the need to claim space would arise.  Space is not only physical.  What is in a name?  A name is a space; A space to exist with identification, with an ease of recognition, with a reality tied to a sound.  Here is the truth of the sublime: without a name, one can hardly do anything of importance or temporal worth; additionally, one has a difficult time doing much of spiritual significance or those things that deal with transcendence without a name.  Along the same note, groups cannot navigate without a name.  It is functionally important for groups of some precarity to possess the ability to navigate and mobilize, central to this effort is a name.  Why is this the case?  This is precisely the case because a name affords one or some group the capacity to exist fully in relation to other subjects.  The fact of the matter here, as I wish to identify it, is that in the most radical sense, names do not exist for other people, they exist for us and our ability to exist with other people.  Names exist not so that others know what to call us, but rather so that we know how to be called by others.  Why do we ask pronouns? What is the great fear and danger is misgendering someone?  The disservice is done because one has a profound claim to self-identification and self-determination.  The queer community cannot be nameless, for then the community is largely powerless.  We can, however, claim a name, claim a space.  Not so that others know who and what we are, but so that we know—for our relation to others—who and what we are.  When we cannot create a space, or claim one, we must reclaim one. 

         What is it to reclaim a space, reclaim a name?  Was it ever truly the case that queer as a term belonged to us in the championed sense and then was taken from us?  No. This is not the case, surely.  However, it was the case that the ability for recognition of the truest kind, the access to dignity was taken from us.  This is in a name.  It is this that we reclaim. 

         Dylan McGinty did not steal the word queer from me.  He stole from me a sense of true recognition and the ability to be who I decide that I am.  I reconquer that space, the sense of recognition of who I am, this is in a name.