![]() However, queer wasn’t just used as a disparaging term for people (usually men) with same-sex desires it was also used as a self-identity term, and it was slipped into novels and other writings by authors such as Gertrude Stein to intentionally carry a double meaning. Given the media coverage of Wilde’s subsequent trial (at which Douglas’s epithet was read aloud), it’s no wonder that queer began taking on this meaning more widely. The first known use of queer to refer to same-sex desire in print was in 1894 when John Douglas, a Scot with the ironic title Marquess of Queensberry, blamed “Snob Queers” for corrupting his sons-one of whom was rumored to have been sexually involved with Britain’s prime minister, and another of whom was Oscar Wilde’s lover. For four hundred years the word was used to mean strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric, disreputable, suspicious, and/or dubious-with no sexual connotation. ![]() Regardless, queer dates back to the early 1500s, first spotted in print in Scotland. Others theorize that it arrived by way of the Middle Irish word cúar (curved, bent, crooked). Some think it made its way into English via the German word quer (oblique, across, perverse). ![]() Etymologists aren’t sure of the roots of the word queer.
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