‘Tis the season of giving once again, and most of us have gotten our shopping done thanks to AI target marketing that has gotten so sophisticated you can literally think of what you want, and Facebook, Youtube, or Instagram will advertise it to you within mere moments. Even better, after you buy the thing, they will continue to advertise it to you because who doesn’t need another convection oven or second set of gently used steak knives?
Of course, shopping for your queer relative, friend, loved one, or legislator can be even more challenging because no one is quite sure what queer is, including the queers.
A Brief History of Queers
The history, or herstory if you don’t want to be a misogynistic word bigot, dates back to the 1600s when the term “there nowt so queer as folk” became popularized by the Northern English who took issue with Scotsmen wearing man-skirts with no underpants. The Scots, equally befuddled at the English aristocracy whose powdered faces, rouge cheeks, and lips ensconced under ornate and gilded head dressings, borrowed the term as they would often joke to one another while gathering sticks into bundles known as faggots, which then became a term intermingled with queer, as did nonce as a response to “where did that queer come from?” answered with “he’s nonce from ‘round here”.
The mid-1700s saw queer exported to the Mediterranean, where they were in great need of faggots for firewood after the timber blight of the early 1700s on the Isle of Lesbos (Lesbos means “wooded” ironically). Also, at that time, Lesbos was subject to seasonal flooding, so the influx of faggots was also found useful for creating the first man-made dikes, which, as any dike specialist knows, is how all dikes are made. The dikes, now called levees thanks to Don Mclean’s song “American Pie” about Marxist political correctness, remain in Lesbos with the other Lesbians to this day.
Today’s queers are like vegetables or your grandpa’s memory, they exist on a spectrum. As with the complexity of most spectrums, choosing the right Christmas gift for your queer whatever can be very challenging. Even the most sophisticated A.I. target marketing attempts fall woefully short because queers, well, they just refuse to fit into norms of any kind. This is part of the appeal of being queer, by definition:
| Queer (kwir) adjective Deviating from what is expected or normal; strange. Odd or unconventional, as in behavior; eccentric. Of a questionable nature or character; suspicious.“thought there was something queer about his explanation.” |
The terms queer and Christmas couldn’t seem to be farther apart, but upon reflection, many of the tales around the holiday are filled with queerness. Take the story of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, for example. Rudolph wasn’t invited to play in any reindeer games, just like the kid with the face tattoo and fourteen nose rings in middle school. Or the Grinch, who lived alone beyond the hillside away from the happy villagers because he and his pathologically small heart couldn’t handle the stress of normal life.
However, as with both Rudolph and Myron T. Grinch, they were able to assimilate despite their queerness, thanks largely to fate and opportunity that comes once every so often at Christmas. Queerness, despite its insistence on not being normal, demands to be included by normal people doing normal things, like passing laws and celebrating Christmas. This is known, in modern parlance, as inclusivity. Do you feel that ironic tension building? Of course, you do.
This past year Vermont elected more than one queer legislator tasked with participating in the normal day-to-day process of representing normal Vermonters in order to pass laws that create new norms for everyone to follow. To be truly queer, they would refuse to run, refuse to participate, and refuse to obey the laws once passed as an act of solidarity with abnormal and counter-cultural queerness.
No wonder it’s so hard to shop for these people!
So in the spirit of queerness in keeping with not adhering to the norms, Banana’s Queer Gift Giving Co. offers the following suggestions for your queer representative:
- Do they normally vote in favor of climate change initiatives? Queer their point of view by getting them a Dodge Ram Hennessey Mammoth 1000 TRX with a 1012 hp Hemi engine. Once they feel the horses running under their little queer legs, they won’t be able to thank you enough!
- Are they ardent gun control advocates? Queer their personal safety with a Sig Sauer – P320 M17 9mm 17+1 Coyote NS with Thumb Safe, available in an environmentally friendly Café latte brown platform.
- Have they voted in favor of legalizing sex work? No better way to queer their perversion than with a copy of Laura B. Gallier’s “Choosing To Wait: A Guide to Inspiring Abstinence.” Patience isn’t just for the doctor’s office as you wait for your STD test to come back negative; it can also be a queer virtue.
- Are they a queer Swifty? Queer up their musical tastes with some tickets to next year’s Jason Aldean or Morgan Wallen concert tours – yeehaw!
- Do they like reading books to small children while dressed up as overtly sexualized women? Queer their library with a copy of The King James Lindsay Queer Bible “The Queering of the American Child: How a New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids”
These are just a few of the ways you can affirm their queerness by responding queerly to their queeriosity.
From everyone at Banana’s Queer Gift Giving Co., we wish you Happy Holidays and a very Merry Queerstmas!
