I'm a middle-aged lesbian and I use it. As I posted before some older gay men have told me they can't use it or even bear to read it, but it's a very common parlance, both popular and academic, and has been for 15-20 years. The list of queer theoreticians is too long to mention, so I'd suggest you try putting 'queer theory' in google scholar. You'll find some famous names there. And queer bashing hasn't gone away. M-H Dominic Pinto wrote:
I hadn't seen (or more accurately I guess heard) it
used for many years. It had, I suppose, become politically uncorrect (incorrect?) to talk about queers in the early '70s. Very not PC, but people used to talk about queer bashing.
Seeing it used came as a bit of a shock - but a quick search revealed quite a lot of current usage (a few URLs follow), so presumably it's a term happily/conciously used by the gay young folk themselves. Are there not gay old or middle aged folk as well? Or is it solely used by the young queers?
Language usage and meanings do change, and well may go in cycles of change in meaning if not acceptability