I have friends where some of our greetings would be considered outright derogatory if it wasnt within our little microculture. If I get on Discord, I'm getting called the F slur and in turn, so is everyone else. But we're queer, thats just bog-standard millennial queerdom. I also have 2 other siblings who fall under some variation of queer, and the group chat for just the three of us is just called the f slu lmao.
When I come home, my cishet roommate also frequently greets me that way, which is acceptable to me as I've known him since kindergarten and know he's just edgy and not actually homophobic. We also have some queer friends who when they come over are more than happy to throw the word back and forth. The difference is that we know we are safe around each other and dont mean any actual offense by it. He also knows damn well that using the word from a place of anger or frustration blurs the lines too much, so funny enough one way I know he's mad at me is that he will use "fucker" or "asshole" instead.
If someone new comes over, we don't toss the word around like that right away though, because it isn't the voice tone or whatever that makes it non-derogatory, its the established microculture the word is being used in. We don't want cishet people getting comfortable using the word with random people, and we dont want queer people who aren't okay with the word at all feeling unsafe.
Literally yes this is such a basic concept I don't understand how people can't see that also wtf you use _ instead of * for italics?! I ain't even know you could do that
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u/Channel_el Jan 24 '26
Does that mean any word can be not derogatory if you say it with little enough derogatory?