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.
A lot of lgbt people would rather you didn't, just because a lot of us have had queer thrown at us as a slur whereas fucking nobody uses lgbt that way. I don't even like being called a queer by other lgbt people because it reminds me too much of school and family experiences, but with them at least i'll know that the intention is chill, even if it kind of makes me flinch still. With cishet people, you really don't know that.
i think its being redefined or something to not be considered insensitive in some parts of the community (from what i've seen, largely the younger USamerican crowd), but i wouldn't say its a safe bet.