During an e-mail conversation with one of my gay friends, he included the term GLTBQ. That abbreviation caught me by surprise, so I asked this of another of my gay friends:
Since I’m not a part of the vast left-wing gay agenda conspiracy, I missed the memo where they added the Q (Queer) to GLBT (Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender). What’s queer if not GLBT? Is that a catch-all for straights who may be BDSM, fetishists, and asexuals?
Sorry, Russ, you’re behind the times. The Q doesn’t stand for Queer, it stands for Questioning. And, besides, you have the acronym wrong, anyway. It’s not GLBT, it’s LGBT (well, on the West Coast it is), and that’s incomplete, too. You actually mean LGBTQIHIV+ if you truly want to include everybody, and that means Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Intersex, and HIV-positive. Got it?
How about this one: NPJWBVMOSH (Not Plain-Jane White-Bread Vanilla Missionary-Only Straight Heterosexual)? And strange, I’m on the West Coast and I always see it as GLTB. Though I’d prefer BLTG, which looks like a tasty sandwich with added guacamole.
The more I think about it, the more I like the term “queer” to describe all alternative sexualities. Of course, then I have to think, “alternative to what?” Even straight people have a myriad of subgroups defined by their particular method of enjoying slippery genital friction. When I consider that BDSM’ers, infantilists, and bukkake practitioners may all be thought of as “straight”, I begin to think that the “queer queers” and “queer straights” may be in the majority, and the MOSH’s a strange minority.
“Radical” Russ — P.S. “LGBT” is an abbreviation. Acronyms are spoken aloud as words, like “radar” or “ping”, while abbreviations are read as letters, like “CIA” or “FBI”. If “LGTB” were an acronym, you’d say it “ullguttib”…
