Regarding some of the terminology posts people have been reblogging, I want to share my experience growing up as an older millenial.
My entire school career, from K-12, saying the word "gay" was formally banned.
As a younger kid, this was because homosexuality was considered a completely inappropriate subject for children in any form, even just acknowledging its existence in a neutral or negative way, let alone a positive one. By the time I was in high school, it was also because people were using "gay" to refer to anything they didn't like. "Ew, we have a pop quiz? That's so gay!" "Parking costs $30? That's gay!" There were absolutely still some homophobic people who wanted to ban all mentions of gay people for homophobic reasons, but by this stage there were plenty of more liberal teachers and administrators behind the ban to curtail the rampant casual homophobia.
So, did it work? Of course not. Queer kids were still bullied for being queer. But notably, it also didn't prevent people from using slurs. Kids couldn't say gay, so they used other words. The classic ones, like twink and fairy, were available, but just to cut back on pushback from adults even further, kids innovated. "Bundle of twigs" instead of "faggot." "Dam" instead of "dyke." "Happy" instead of gay.
And I stress that these euphemisms were frequently used unironically. People would be in dead serious, heated arguments, up to and including physical altercations, screaming insults like "twigs" and "happy" at each other. It was the equivalent of many modern teens automatically defaulting to "unalive" even in serious offline conversations about death. "Happy" was a slur.
Declaring certain words off limits accomplishes nothing. Ceding labels to the homophobes does nothing. All of our labels are slurs, and even if we stop using them, they'll just make more slurs. You don't have to like or use any particular label for yourself, but you accomplish nothing but censoring other members of the community and perpetuating in-fighting by trying to be the language police.
