A Group By Any Other Name: The Name Change from BGLTSA to QSA and Why It Matters
By Christian Garland
As a gay man, it isn’t difficult for me to conjure experiences in which my marginalization has been made more apparent than usual. It can be something as simple as a feeling of discomfort or something so profoundly incapacitating as a feeling of Otherness. To be honest, in a society in which the dominant culture routinely exercises its power over the different/non-normative/subordinate minority populations, the interpellation of difference is not out of the ordinary. And often, that interpellation – that calling out – takes the form of a pejorative insult. Last summer, as I walked through the Tercentenary Theater, two (tall and white) undergraduates approached me and with the simple shout of “Queer!”, I was named as an Other.
While the experience was shocking (Overt homophobia at Harvard post-1990? How unreal!), it wasn’t the word that got me. A word is merely a combination of sounds that produces an understanding of the speaker’s intention. When the undergraduate in Tercentenary Theater spoke, “queer” became the vehicle for his assertion of my difference. The flaw in his attack, however, was his assumption that difference represents, to me and everyone like me, a regression from the norm. To the contrary, I experience my difference, my “queerness,” as liberating: a full-throated acceptance of divergence and a rejection of normative principles. I experience and use “queer” as the perfect vehicle for that declaration of difference, that freedom from compulsory socialization.
To be sure, not everyone feels or thinks the same way. In some parts of the country, I’m sure that I would constitute a minority within the minority: a “radical homosexual” intent upon destroying our purported sameness with heterosexuals. I understand that the word “queer” retains much of its negative impact. However antiquated and unfashionable, and no matter its origins within the urban gay communities of the early 20th century, it retains its punch as an assertion of subordination and of strangeness.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that the proposal to change the name of the Harvard-Radcliffe Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgendered, and Supporters’ Alliance (more commonly, the BGLTSA) to the Harvard College Queer Students and Allies (more commonly, the QSA) created a visible and vocal controversy within the LGBT(Q) community at Harvard.
The rationale for the name change was simple: “BGLTSA” was too long, too confusing, and too exclusive. By limiting and naming identities in the name of the organization, the BGLTSA risked excluding students for whom those named identities didn’t apply. The Board’s decision to support the name “Queer Students and Allies” rested upon the now common re-appropriation of the word “queer” as a lexical umbrella that, through its ambiguity, creates a theoretical and practical space for non-normative identities across a spectrum of practices and desires. By employing “queer,” the organization hoped that it could include members of the community who had so far felt excluded.
While the resistance to the name change shouldn’t have been surprising, it caught much of the Board off guard. Few members of the community submitted suggestions during the two-week submission period, and most of those submissions utilized “queer” in their names. However, the past (and, while diminished, present) usage of the word in pejorative and hateful contexts catalyzed a vocal protest on the BGLTSA’s open list. The inclusion of the word in the proposed name, some protestors claimed, effectively enshrined the “strangeness” of non-normative sexualities; it would recapitulate the culture wars of the 1960s, ignite a conflagration of confused and debased identities, and muddy the ever-clearer waters of LGBT rights groups. More than anything, it would provide justification and credence for the epithets written in the normative histories of a dominant culture.
While understandable, such concerns elide the full history of the word, its current usage, and its theoretical and practical applications in an ever-fluid space. As George Chauncey documented in his landmark study of early modern gay subcultures in New York City, men who engaged in sex with other men (though not always exclusively) called themselves “queer” to indicate the non-normative structure of their desires. It was an appealing and ambiguous alternative to more resolute and precise admissions of strict homosexuality. The word began to pick up pejorative connotations in the 1930s, which thereafter intensified in the pink scare of the 1950s. Simply put, at its inception, “queer” was used not as a derogatory term, but as a vehicle of liberation, a means of suggesting self-identified difference without engaging in the thoroughly modern practice of totalizing identifications via sexual orientations.
Moreover, the word’s presence in multiple academic disciplines – and its growing acceptance among LGBT(Q) organizations on college campuses worldwide – reclaims “queer” by de-naturing it from its pejorative context and applying it to more progressive ends. “Queer Theory,” for instance, refers not to strangeness or subordination, but rather infuses the notions of non-normative sexualities with academic inquiries into their natures, causes, effects, marginalizations, oppressions, and histories. It also expands the scope of that which is studied. By claiming “queer” as its descriptive mechanism, the intellectual pursuit of theorizing human desire extends that pursuit to cover more than homo-, bi-, or hetero-sexualities to encompass a range of practices and orientations that cannot be so precisely named. In short, by “queering” all sexualities, heterosexuality comes to exist on the same plane as non-heteronormative sexualities and subject to the same locus of study. As “queerness” is studied, the queerness of compulsory heterosexuality is illuminated and, thus, its normative status undermined.
But ultimately, the organization’s name was changed to the Queer Students and Allies because a majority of poll respondents approved. Students who had never vocalized their “queerness” began to do so and those who had earlier felt excluded began to see themselves as part of a community that had respect enough for them to name them. To name something is to invest legitimacy in it. If we don’t name a certain identity, but purportedly welcome it into our organization, we necessarily undermine the agency of the unnamed identity by juxtaposing the privilege of named identities with it. In other words, unwillingly or not, “BGLTSA” created a hierarchy of identity. By saying, “you’re included, just not named,” we invested the named with a privileged importance that unnamed identities didn’t receive. And, as a self-identified gay man, I understand that “queer” doesn’t necessarily apply to me, but if it allows us to create a space in which students can identity themselves as they see fit, I’m willing to rescind my named-ness so others can have the chance to name themselves.