Reposted by t h e a
they told me i was too full of unrepressed desire to be part of the professional managerial class :c
t h e a
@cybercultu.re
675 followers 200 following 980 posts
adjunct professor looking for tenure in all the wrong places. anti-future futurist. imbued with everlasting grace media art, history of technology, cybernetics
![“While such men spoke of “gay bars” more than of “gay people” in the 1920s and 1930s, the late 1930s and especially World War II marked a turning point in its usage and in their culture. Before the war, many men had been content to call themselves “queer” because they regarded themselves as self-evidently different from the men they usually called “normal.” Some of them were unhappy with this state of affairs, but others saw themselves as “special”—more sophisticated, more knowing—and took pleasure in being different from the mass. The term gay began to catch on in the 1930s, and its primacy was consolidated during the war. By the late 1940s, younger gay men were chastising older men who still used queer, which the younger men now regarded as demeaning. As Will Finch, who came out into the gay world of Times Square in the 1930s, noted in his diary in 1951, “The word ‘queer’ is becoming [or coming to be regarded as] more and more derogatory and [is] less and less used by hustlers and trade and the homosexual, especially the younger ones, and the term ‘gay’ [is] taking its place. I loathe the word, and stick to 'queer', but am constantly being reproved, especially in so denominating myself”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:zaxgil4vxolsvtsixaxoe4xc/bafkreidkn6fj62w7gvh5qohroxelusccd3gkifsxgw3gljfwfb5ot3ck5i)
