With one word, group takes aim at hate.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Q: Who's queer?

A: Define your terms.

When local activists made plans to open a new community center for sexual minorities, "about 80 percent of our conversation was about trying to come up with a name," said Stephanie Carnahan.

"We didn't want to be alphabet soup," added Jer Megowan, referring to the GLBTQ acronym often used to describe those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or queer or questioning their sexual status.

In naming their gathering place the Q Center, volunteers said they are aware they're embracing a word - queer - that many people, including some sexual minorities, find offensive. But in a way, that's the point.

"It's a word that's been used in the past to be very derogatory to many populations," said Megowan, a state welfare worker and also a member of the Eugene Human Rights Commission. "In our attempt to get rid of the badness of that word, we want to turn it around and make it acceptable. We want to own the word to take away the hate associated with it."

Controversy over the Q word is mostly a generational thing, Megowan said. Younger people typically embrace it as "a better word" because it doesn't pigeonhole them into a narrower label such as gay or bisexual or transgendered, he said.

Twenty-three-year-old Brian Peterson, the Q Center's marketing director, agrees. `Most of my friends, the term `queer' does not bother us at all,' he said. "People in my generation, it takes a lot to offend us."

Debby Martin, 54 and a member of the lesbian comedy troupe Wymprov!, said she was exposed to the word "queer" in the early 1990s when, in her role as Cultural Forum director at the University of Oregon, she helped bring the first Queer Film Festival to campus.

`I think `queer' is becoming more accepted, but who knows what it will be in five years,' she said. "That's the dynamic of any movement; naming things are important."

- Jeff Wright