“It’s catering to the people who feel like outcasts.” “We wanted a name that was overtly queer, that people can chuckle about a little bit,” Palmer says. So when they decided to open their bar, they decided to opt for that old moniker: Sissy Bar. While Derek Palmer (Raven & Rose) and Truman Cox (The Benson) were growing up, they were often bullied specifically, they were called sissies. The reclamation of certain words, in general, has been a tradition and survival mechanism within the LGBTQ community, from full-on slurs to words flung by bullies in school. The influential essay “ Queers Read This” and activist group Queer Nation use that descriptor intentionally, as an act of reclamation but also as a unifying term: By identifying as “queer,” non-straight populations could live in solidarity, outside the tenets of heteronormativity.
The reclamation of the term ‘queer’ was a crucial part of the LGBTQ rights movement in the late 20th century.
