It definitely throws people off, especially the cisgendered queers. Saying queer instead of lgbt or gay helps people who are not in the gender binary and if I'm being completely honest a word like bisexual is trans-exclusionary, just from my personal experience bisexuals do not want to have sex with trans people, the ones that do are called pansexuals. Don't even get me started on how much of the lesbian community is terf reactionary because they don't want to associate with trans people. The gay community same deal. And why does the l at the start of the acronym? Why not TPGNBL or something else? The whole acronym order is the main reason why I'm using queer. How can we be equal if we put specific sexual groups in front of each other? Queer is all encompassing and we should use that instead. If we could change the pride flag we could phase out lgbt.
To go along with what AcidSmiley is saying, I've also noticed there being a generational gap between who finds it offensive and who doesn't. Older people seem to have been more likely to have had queer thrown at them as a slur, whereas millenials and gen z tend to get other slurs and therefore queer has a lot less of a negative meaning to us. Interestingly, this debate is over a hundred years old at least. I've been reading Gay Berlin and there's a mention of this exact debate in the queer community, except over the German word schwul, in the fucking 1910's. Nothing is ever new, just cycles upon cycles.
yeah i know a couple of olds that really hated the connotation. i used to get called a queer and a sissy a lot as a kid so i kinda get it but i actually really like calling myself queer :shrug-outta-hecks: its nothing like trying to reclaim the f slur to me. i kinda dig that the word queer feels kinda whimsical