Welcome back! Now that we have gone over the most important crash courses of gender and sexuality, it’s time that we take apart and define what the “LGBTQIA+” stands for and how we as a queer community name ourselves.

If you haven’t figured it out yet:

L: Lesbian

G: Gay

B: Bisexual

T: Transgender

Q: Queer

I: In-questioning/intersex (I have heard debates on this)

A: Asexual or Ally (this has also been debated about. I personally believe it is asexual)

+: Everything else that wasn’t included. The world of the non-heteronormative/binary identities spreads far and wide.

Now this is the over-encompassing, full-length term. You will usually hear or read “LGBT” or “LGBTQ” when someone is referring to the community. Now most people don’t care or don’t have the patience to remember all the letters and the order of the letters. I get this, I do.

One idea that I recently read about, prompted by Orange is the New Black star Lea DeLaria, is that we just forget the letters and name the call ourselves the ‘Queer Community’. DeLaria stated that “Part of me believes that this inclusivity of calling us the LGBTQQTY-whatever-LMNOP [community] tends to stress our differences. And that’s why I refuse to do it—I say ’queer.’ Queer is everybody.”

While some people feel the previous baggage of the once-derogatory term, others feel the same way was DeLaria. What do you think? Should we just be “queer” or the “queer community”?

Join me next week as we dive into the wonderful and spectacular world of drag queens.