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I had grandparents. I understand that words that were once considered perfectly acceptable (by certain people) can come to be seen as completely inappropriate.  Because the larger society comes to understand that the framework in which those words were used was discriminatory and bigoted.

But it seems like two words from my teens in the San Francisco Bay Area – queer and dyke – are now being contested within the LGBTQ community.  When I was a pup, these were words that, like faggot and the pink triangle, were being reclaimed in the name of activism and community building.  Like the then new coinage, transgender, they were meant to be umbrella terms that could encompass a range of experiences.  Though I realize now that groups like ACT-UP and QUEER NATION were dominated by white college educated folks, and that a lot of people were excluded and spoken-over.  Though it was also true that these groups were more diverse than people seem to remember, and that in the intervening years a lot of people (IV drug users, sex workers, people of color) have been written out of the official story.

But dyke was a word that turned two uses of the slur – angry dyke and ugly dyke – on their head.  We had Dyke Marches, and Dykes on Bikes and Dykes to Watch Out For.  A lot of women were angry and dyke was a way to focus that anger into activism.  And, I know there’s this view of third wave feminism as being about college girls who wanted permission to shave their legs, but I came out in an era when public lesbians had a very ambivalent relationship to sex and sexiness.  But AIDS made people think about the ways that not owning your desire was dangerous.  How could you be safe about things that you couldn’t admit doing? And so people were starting to say, it’s OK to be feminine, it’s OK to like getting fucked, it’s OK to have sexual fantasies, it’s OK to be bisexual, it’s OK to look at other women and think they are sexy.  You could assemble your sexual desires out of things that were considered ugly in the straight world, things that were specifically queer, and the fetishes of the larger culture. So we watched the Dykes on Bikes open the Pride Parade, and they were hot as fuck, and a couple of my friends rode along because there wasn’t some kind of lesbian test, you just needed to be fucking one of the eponymous dykes.

But I don’t really use the word dyke anymore.  Unlike queer, it’s still not OK in mixed company, and I’m married to a man, so that’s pretty much the only kind of company I find myself in any more.  I never considered myself a dyke – I wasn’t politically active or in-your-face enough.  And it’s not a word that was ever really thrown at me as a slur - when men threatened me on the street, they called me a faggot.  (And it didn’t matter how off the mark that word was; it was still terrifying.)  I was at the periphery of dyke-hood, but not completely outside, because it was a community-building word.

And as I got older, it seemed less and less OK to be bisexual.  And I think I let my own hang-ups about being judged and excluded isolate me from the queer community.  And I’ve been working recently on seeing myself as part of that community again.  That being married to a man doesn’t make me any less bisexual.

So, I hope I can be forgiven if I didn’t realize it was a word I needed permission to use, because I thought I was already included.