Queer is an umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities. It is alternately used to refer to people who reject sexual and gender norms and share radical politics characterized by solidarity across lines of identity. In the 21st century, queer became increasingly used to describe a broad spectrum of non-heteronormative sexual or gender identities and politics. Academic disciplines such as queer theory and queer studies have emerged to examine a wide variety of issues, either informed by this type of perspective, or to examine the lives of LGBTQ people. These share a general opposition to binarism, normativity, and a perceived lack of intersectionality, some of them connected only tangentially to the LGBTQ movement. Queer arts, queer cultural groups, and queer political groups are examples of modern expressions of queer identities.
Critics include LGBTQ community members who associate the term more with its colloquial, derogatory usage; It is sometimes expanded to include any non-normative sexuality expression. Some people self-identify as queer due to the relative ambiguity of the term and its rejection of explicit categorization, compared to labels such as “lesbian” and “gay.” PFLAG states that as such a personal identity, queer is "valued by some for its defiance, by some because it can be inclusive of the entire community, and by others who find it to be an appropriate term to describe their more fluid identities." Recent studies have found that 5–20% of non-heterosexuals and 21–36% of trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people identify as queer. Related meanings of queer include a feeling of unwellness or something that is questionable or suspicious. The expression "in Queer street" is used in the United Kingdom for someone in financial trouble. Over time, queer acquired a number of meanings related to sexuality and gender, from narrowly meaning "gay or lesbian" to referring to those who are "not heterosexual" to referring to those who are either not heterosexual or not cisgender (those who are LGBTQ+). The term is still widely used in Hiberno-English with its original meaning as well as to provide adverbial emphasis (very, extremely).
Early pejorative use
By the late 19th century, queer was beginning to gain a connotation of sexual deviance, used to refer to feminine men or men who were thought to have engaged in same-sex relationships. An early recorded usage of the word in this sense was in an 1894 letter by John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, as read aloud at the trial of Oscar Wilde.
Queer was used in mainstream society by the early 20th century, along with fairy and faggot, as a pejorative term to refer to men who were perceived as flamboyant. This was, as historian George Chauncey notes, "the predominant image of all queers within the straight mind".
Starting in the underground gay bar scene in the 1950s, then moving more into the open in the 1960s and 1970s, the homophile identity was gradually displaced by a more radicalized gay identity. At that time gay was generally an umbrella term including lesbians, as well as gay-identified bisexuals and transsexuals; gender nonconformity, which had always been an indicator of gayness, as well as those who exhibited non-normative gender expressions.
Early 20th-century queer identity
thumb|265x265px|[[Drag ball|Drag Ball in Webster Hall, 1920s. Many queer-identifying men distanced themselves from the "flagrant" public image of gay men as effeminate "fairies".]]
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, queer, fairy, trade, and gay signified distinct social categories within the gay male subculture. In his book Gay New York, Chauncey noted that queer was used as a within-community identity term by men who were stereotypically masculine. Many queer-identified men at the time were, according to Chauncey, "repelled by the style of the fairy and his loss of manly status, and almost all were careful to distinguish themselves from such men", especially because the dominant straight culture did not acknowledge such distinctions. Groups of men – such as Henry James and E. M. Forster – also discreetly gave the term queer homoerotic subtext. Trade referred to straight men who would engage in same-sex activity; Chauncey describes trade as "the 'normal men' [queers] claimed to be."</blockquote>
Reclamation
thumb|Queer resistance banner at a march
thumb|The Taiwan Gender Queer Rights Advocacy Alliance (TGQRAA) held a march in [[Kaohsiung City in 2015]]
Beginning in the 1980s, the label queer began to be reclaimed from its pejorative use as a neutral or positive self-identifier by LGBTQ people. The flier included a passage explaining their adoption of the label queer: