Songfacts®:

• In the term "queer" can mean gay, but in this context it means odd or different. According to Garbage drummer Butch Vig, the song is about a boy who is "queer" in this sense of the word, and his father sends him a prostitute to "make him a man." It turns out that the father also uses the prostitute and has some of the same issues, as we learn in the lyrics, "Like father, like son." The prostitute has a unique insight on their family dysfunction.
• "Queer" was one of the first songs Garbage completed. Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson formed the band in Wisconsin in 1993 but didn't bring Shirley Manson on board as lead singer until the following year. They spotted her on MTV in a video for her band Angelfish that aired only once on the network. Impressed by her delivery (she didn't oversing), they tracked her down and brought her in to audition. A few months later she joined, moving from Scotland to work on their debut album.
  
  Manson had no prior songwriting experience but became an adept lyricist, writing songs about outliers and obsessives that put compelling storylines to the tracks created by her bandmembers, who are each about a decade older.
• The drums use a sample from the Australian group Single Gun Theory's 1991 song "Man Of Straw."
• Drummer Butch Vig said that the lyrics were inspired by "this novel about this woman who was hired to go and make this guy's son a 'man.' The kid is missing a few marbles. But then he realizes that the women who came to his room is also f--king his father."
• Most of the video, directed by Stéphane Sednaoui, is in black and white and shot from the perspective of a guy being abducted by the band. The video was nominated for Best Breakthrough Video at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Bertrand - Paris, France