Queer identity as political and personal

Queer began as a slur reclaimed — a refusal to apologize for difference that became an affirmative claim of identity not in spite of its non-normativity but because of it. As political identity, it resists the assimilationist impulse to prove that LGBTQ+ people are just like everyone else; as personal identity, it insists on the right to exist outside the categories that were built to contain you. Juana would have recognized the strategy: when the room has no door for you, you build a window.