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Queer Nation was a gay group founded in March 1990 in New York City, USA by activists from ACT-UP. The founders were four victims of anti-gay violence. Queer Nation's slogan was "We're here. We're queer. Get used to it". It was most effective and powerful in the early 1990s in the USA, and used direct action to fight for gay rights. Even though they never officially disbanded, most sources agree that Queer Nation no longer exists.Queer Nation is credited with starting the process of reclaiming the word queer, which, previously, was only used in a pejorative sense and Queer Nation's use of it in their name and slogan was at first considered shocking. Ten years later, queer is almost an ordinary word, used casually in the name of gay-supportive and relatively mainstream television programs such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Queer as Folk.
Queer Nation is also linked to several controversial incidents in which closeted public figures were outedComing out of the closet (very often shortened to coming out) describes voluntarily making public one's sexual attractions or orientation (gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, rarely straight), "being out to not concealing one's sexual attractions or orientatio as gay or lesbian. Queer Nation's reasoning was that ending this 'hypocrisy' benefitted gays as a group because it let them know there actually were gay people in influential places and promoted gay rights by forcing the outed and the organizations they belonged to to take a stance on issues concerning gays. Many in the gay communityLGBT As a direct social reaction to long-established homophobic violence, hatred and persecution, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people formed a sub-culture commonly called the gay community (or the GLBT or Queer community). Because of th did not agree with Queer Nation's radical tactics and favored a more assimilationist course of action.
External links
Queer Nation also refers to:
- A web comic
- A TV show from New ZealandFor alternative meanings, see New Zealand (disambiguation). New Zealand is a country formed of two major islands and a number of smaller islands in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. A common Mori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa popularly translated as Land
- A club in LondonLondon is the capital of the United Kingdom and of England, and with over seven million inhabitants in the Greater London area, is the second-most populous conurbation in Europe (after Moscow). From being Londinium the capital of the Roman province of Bri
- Chaucer's Queer Nation is the title of a book by Glenn Burger
LGBT rights organizations
