QLTBG: The Quiltbag

I first saw the reference to Queer Lesbian Trans Bisexual Gay (QUILTBG, pronounced, like, well quilt bag) in an essay by two SF writers, Nicola Griffith & Kelley Eskridge, "War Machine, Time Machine" published in 2009, but written, so Nicola Griffith says, in 2007. In the piece, Griffith is talking about the reception of her first SF novel, Ammonite. She writes:

Reviews in the sf columns of major news journals—The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, New Stateman—praised the book. The LGBTQI (known, in our house, as the quiltbag) press did not deign to notice. After all, it wasn't a book about being a lesbian. No one had to actively choose to be a dyke and then agonise over that choice, and suffer the slings and arrows of homophobic fortune, because everyone on the planet was a girl. Besides, it had a spaceship on the cover. It was sci-fi rubbish.

(I note that Ammonite won the Tiptree award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Premio Italia, and was a finalist for the British Science Fiction Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award .)

I've been annoyed by the various acronyms for queer folk for more than twenty years. I've been particularly annoyed by the various waves of identity politics (do we include Q for Queer? Or U for Unisex and I for Inter-sex? What about B for bisexual? What about T for transgendered and transexual?) and, believe it or not, the order of the letters ("it's an issue of precedence you know, who gets listed first"). I'm still less than patient about identity politics, especially those that subject English to linguistic abuse. Several years ago, I decided to adopt (and adapt) Nicola Griffith's QLTBG. I note that Griffith says she doesn't know where she first saw the use, or claim to have invented it, but hers is the earliest use I've been able to find. I've decided to use QUILTBAG  here, in order to include Queer Unisex/gender I Intersex/gender Lesbian Allied and Gay folk.