People Who Don't Suck™ • Popingay

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People Who Don’t Suck™

One primary struggle of our queer community has nothing to do with rights, violence, or society: it’s what in the hell we’re going to call ourselves. The community runs the gamut of sexual and gender expressions and orientations, and it seems like every day there’s a new label to toss on that pile, and quite frankly I’m tired of eating alphabet soup. Right now, we’re looking down the barrel of LGBTTTTQQAAKPGGO in all its permutations depending on whom you ask:

L - Lesbian
G - Gay
B - Bisexual
T - Transgender
T - Transsexual
T - Transvestite
T - Two-Spirited
Q - Queer
Q - Questioning
A - Ally
A - Asexual
K - Kinky
P - Polyamorous
G - Gender non-conforming
G - Genderqueer
O - Omnisexual

And like a bad infomercial, just wait: there’s more! Everyone has some newfangled label to add to the mix, and I can barely remember just the basics.

As a community, we’ve tried going the route of queer as an umbrella term: something that I linguistically and socio-culturally defend, but not everyone is comfortable with the term, and it’s a source of controversy itself, even with the Popingay Stamp of Approval™.

I, personally, still advocate the use of FABGLITTER as the term we use to refer to our community. It hasn’t really taken off, but you try saying FABGLITTER out loud without clapping your hands in child-like glee.

The problem is that our community encompasses the veritable rainbow of sexual and gender expressions, and everyone wants a bite. And I am a huge proponent that we include allies in our community’s descriptor as a key part of our rainbow. And no matter what you label yourself as, there’s really only one group left when we umbrella-ize our community: heterosexual people who suck.

Being that our community word is a kind of negative definition (defined by what it’s not) in this case, then I propose a new, all-inclusive rainbow word to encompass our community in its entirety:

People Who Don’t Suck™

What better descriptor do we have for our group? When the only people not in the group are heterosexual people who suck, I think it’s only fair to refer to ourselves as the Community of People Who Don’t Suck™.

The end-game of our fight for rights and inclusion is that we will not have to define ourselves as a community of outsiders any longer, and everyone will just be People Who Don’t Suck™, but the next time someone asks you, “what do you think about XYZ in the queer/LGBT(etc.)/FABGLITTER community?”, I suggest you tell them you much prefer being referred to under the umbrella of People Who Don’t Suck™, and let the inevitable satisfaction wash over you.

So, who’s with me on the long, winding road to not sucking?