With the state and the LSU System in severe financial trouble, a movement to protect students’ interests will have to quickly establish an identity and voice to have any positive effect. The gay and lesbian rights movement offers some interesting lessons in organization.Terminology is a perennial problem here. “Gay rights” implies the movement only exists for homosexual men. “Gay and lesbian rights” at least includes women, but leaves out anyone who isn’t strictly gay or lesbian and ignores transgender people.The standard political solution is to pile on as many labels as possible and create increasingly complicated acronyms.The White House Web site talks about “LGBT” civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, two major lobbying organizations, both use LGBT in their mailings and resources.There will always be people who find themselves absent from any finite list of adjectives — or worse, people who find all the provided adjectives demeaning.In Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America,” a fictionalized version of infamous                  conservative attorney Roy Cohn muses, “A homosexual is someone who, in 15 years of trying, can’t get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows.”Cohn was obsessed with keeping his sexual relationships with men hidden to maintain his prestige in conservative political circles. For him, as for many others, the old labels — homosexual, gay, sodomite — still connote personal weakness and political irrelevance.In the early 1990s, activist groups hit upon a solution to the problem. Rather than continue to add to the alphabet soup, they would claim one word, one identity.Queer.The militant group Queer Nation popularized this blanket term with the famous slogan, “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.” In a widely distributed manifesto, the group elaborated on their rationale for this bizarre choice.”Using ‘queer’ is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world. It’s a way of telling ourselves we don’t have to be witty and charming people who keep our lives discreet and marginalized in the straight world.”Many first experience “queer” as an insult, but in fact this derogatory nature gives the concept its power.Heterosexual society has to feel pretty strongly about this perceived “deviance” to have invented a special epithet for it.If a sexual identity shocks mainstream society enough that it must be shoved “out of bounds,” this transgressiveness becomes a potent defining force against a heteronormative majority.”Queer” also has a wonderful flexibility. These LGBTQRSTUV acronyms can often be confining — for example, only men who have sex with men are really “gay.”But anyone can be queer.The Queer Nation manifesto insists on the universality of the word, saying, “Being queer is ‘grass roots’ because we know that everyone [sic] of us, every body, every cunt, every heart and ass and dick is a world of pleasure waiting to be explored.”Far from reinforcing divisions, “queer” unites many disparate groups, celebrating every single identity that falls “outside the margins” of normal society. A queer identity gives any so-called “deviant” a space beyond society’s boundaries in which to grow and prosper.This concept of strength in deviance doesn’t just apply to sex.Consider again those infamous budget cuts.As Chancellor Michael Martin warned in a Jan. 16 broadcast e-mail, the LSU System is preparing for funding reductions between $44 million and $71 million for the fiscal year beginning July 1. This comes after an already severe mid-year $29 million cut announced on Jan. 6.Because the state constitution protects the budgets of most other programs, higher education and health care are always the first against the wall when an economic crisis hits. The political will to fix this problem doesn’t yet exist.This isn’t surprising. Barely 20 percent of Louisiana adults age 25 or older have earned bachelor’s degrees or higher, according to a 2007 report by the Census Bureau.People with University educations therefore constitute a vastly outnumbered minority in Louisiana, and the state government continually exercises its budgetary power to make life harder for us.Instead of bemoaning our fate, we celebrate our deviance from the norm, knowing our advanced degrees will bring us economic successes not enjoyed by the majority of the population.Many of us plan to leave the state after graduation, some to deliberately widen our horizons, others because the careers and opportunities we long for simply aren’t available within these borders.The conclusion is inescapable.All of us, straight or otherwise, have become Louisiana queers.–Contact Matthew Patterson at [email protected]