(Warning: This op-ed concerns hate speech, which is impossible to discuss without using it. Reader discretion is advised.)

As America hurtles deeper into July, Pride Month shrinks ever smaller in the rearview mirror. This is the perfect time to wave goodbye to the word “queer.”

That word is at the heart of the identitarian letters that are strung together like a shabby pearl necklace, in all its blinding squalor: LGBTQQIA2s

For the understandably baffled, this stands for (take a deep breath) “Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Questioning Intersex Asexual 2-Spirit .” While it is hotly debated, the might represent a partridge in a pear tree.

As with many gay and bisexual men, my stomach turns at the Left’s hijacking of nearly one third of the alphabet to bulldoze into a giant pile everyone who is not 100% heterosexual—including (amazingly enough) some heterosexuals. The most rebarbative letter is Q, as in “Queer,” a hideous word that previously had sunk between the waves as Americans became more tolerant of homosexuality and less likely to hurl homophobic expressions at others.

These terms varied in their severity, much as “blackie,” “darkie,” “spade,” “spook,” and the N-bomb increased in direct relation with the animus that propelled those slurs from haters’ mouths.

Likewise, “homo,” “fag,” and “faggot” tend to erupt in proportion with a speaker’s anti-gay bias. Worst of all is “queer,” the ugliest anti-gay epithet. This always has been the term that made me think, “Uh-oh! Someone is about to get gay-bashed.” As a gay man, “queer” rubs me the wrong way, just as “n—–” hits me as a black man.

The former I hear far, far too often. The latter I hear almost never, save for fellow black people using “nigga” as a term of endearment that’s verboten to non-blacks. (Sorry! As John F. Kennedy once observed: “Life isn’t fair.”) The inter-black........

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