Bonus! My Queer Encounter with the Delightful Barry Bostwick

I like the idea that your answer to Barry Bostwick was five minutes long and included references to Greek mythology

Personally, I've always felt that Queer is the word that describes me best, and is a word that I think is better suited for describing people in general. People are complicated, and I think there are precious few of us who are 100% attracted to only one kind of other person for 100% of our lives. So, I think that many (maybe all of us?) are at least a little bit Queer in one degree or another, which makes it a unifying term in every sense of the word. Gay, in my opinion works better when describing a specific relationship, given that it's doesn't assume the specific identification of the person. So that could be a Queer guy, or a Bi gay, or a Questioning guy who is a gay relationship. The biggest controversy that I'm seeing around "Queer" right now doesn't come from outside the community though, but from within in, with the increasingly noisy and often conservative-tinged "I'm Gay, I'm not Queer, it matters" brigade. These are the people who reject the word Queer for the same reasons that I tend to embrace it: That it's too associated with radical social change. That it's become an easy pseudonym for "woke" and thus can be attacked with the same regard, and in a reflection of what I wrote above, that it's so elastic that it becomes meaningless. I've heard some advocates of that argument even say that straight people could be under the Queer umbrella as long as they practice a different form of relationship, such as polyamory or being involved in S&M. Paradoxically, I see all of that as a hallmark of its strength. Queer should cover anyone who wants to be under its umbrella. Yes, the more of us who are under it will naturally lead to more targets, but each person who embraces that term also leads to increased power within its solidarity. Gay men and trans women relied on this for their very lives during AIDS, when the straight world largely left them to die. Who stood up and cared for them? Other Queer people, and especially Lesbians, who were arguably at the least personal risk to the virus. AIDS was a crucible, and one thing it burned away were the walls that kept so many Queer people apart. Today, it's trans people who find themselves within the proverbial fire, and it's up to all of us to unite again. That's why it's so disheartening to see this "I'm Gay, I'm not Queer" taking root. I'm a firm believe that people should be able to freely choose the label they want to use for themselves, but if people in our community choose to wield it to pointedly cut off a whole segment of our cousins who need our support now more than ever, that's just plain cruelty on their part, and makes them no better in my eyes than those who are on the vanguards of the current anti-trans crusades.

As someone born in the mid-1950s, I heard my share of "queer" used as a slur. I finally got used to the new usage--as an adjective anyway, but it took some time. As a noun ("that famous queer, Tennessee Williams'), I still have a problem with that. It always sounds a little slur-ish.

Interesting topic, but was this supposed to be an edited video and you uploaded the unedited one, or is this a treat of your work process? I like it, but not sure about the intention haha.