To those who don't feel that "queer" describes them like "gay" does -- welcome to how most of the LGBT+ community feels. There is no perfect term for all of us (we are too wonderfully diverse for that) but "gay" is about as far from inclusive as you can get and I'm glad Huffington Post Queer Voices made the change like so many other organizations have done.
Most LGBT+ people aren't gay. The majority are actually bisexual. So how would you feel to write for Bisexual Voices when you are gay? That's how bi bloggers have felt writing for Gay Voices.
But who wants to go by the majority? All of together as LGBTs are a minority. That's no reason to say one identity counts as more important than another. The point is respecting all members of the community and not choosing one above the other for any reason. We shouldn't be Bi Voices or Trans Voices any more than we should be Gay Voices.
Lots of organizations have had to change their names with the times. Forty years ago most of the groups that were named "Gay and Lesbian ____" now go by "LGBT _____" like the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Los Angeles that is now the Los Angeles LGBT Center or the National LGBTQ Task Force that was founded as the National Gay Task Force and then was the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force for a few decades. Are these organizations also wrong to change to a term they think is more inclusive?
As you know, the LGBT or LGBTQ quickly turns into alphabet soup when you start remembering to include asexual, intersex, pansexual, and Two-Spirit people among others who rightly belong in the camp of all of us who are not heterosexual and/or cisgender. "Gay" doesn't begin to describe that diversity.
We've come a long way from "pervert" and "sodomite" being our only terminology. We've had names for over a century in the Western English-speaking world - homosexual, homophile, transvestite, hermaphrodite. Notice how in the span of one generation the favored word can turn into an outdated slur?
But let's get to the real issue. It isn't as much that there is a change or that the change is away from the word "gay" as it is that the change is to the controversial word "queer." For people like James Peron it is a painful and offensive term. I'd never say that experience isn't real and valid. How can a word that many don't feel comfortable be seen as a move towards more inclusion? Let me ask you to consider this with an open mind:
Reclaiming violent words is a tradition in the LGBTQ community, as I mentioned in Dearest Queer Person. We now have the Dyke March. People call themselves fags. Harvey Milk took Anita Bryant's accusation that we were recruiting children and turned it into his opening line of his Hope Speech: "My name is Harvey Milk and I want to recruit you!" The pink triangle symbol is a pride symbol that started as a way to brand homosexuals in concentration camps (the black triangle too is a lesbian pride symbol with similar history). How about when we protested homosexuality being classified as an illness by calling in gay to work? It's what we do. Try to keep us down? We'll flip it on its head and take away your words' power.
Queer, too, is part of this tradition. Some word had to emerge as the umbrella term. We can't keep going from "Gay" to "Gay and Lesbian" to "Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual" to "Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender" to "LGBT" to "LGBTQ" to "LGBTQIA..." Sexual and gender identity language is changing every day and we can't keep adding every single one to a dozens-long list so "LGBT Voices" doesn't work either. We need a word and queer has become that word for the next generation.
And why not "Rainbow Voices?" Because no one identifies as rainbow. Rainbow isn't as explicitly clear as LGBT. Rainbow shies away from proudly staying at the cutting edge of our linguistic progression.
We shouldn't keep defaulting to what makes gay cis men comfortable. Language is fluid and no single word is going to work for everybody, but this word seems to work for more people than gay does, especially those who have been told to wait their turn because gay issues are going to be put above other LGBT+ issues. Noah Michelson and the HuffPost team made the right call on this one.