It used to be a slur, then the community adopted the word as their own. That historical negative connotation still lingers for those who remember it that way, though.
In the case of "queer", it seems that even straight people somehow got to reclaim it, everybody is throwing it around, and that a large number of gay people don't like it at all.
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[*] Between black people it's usually more about telling somebody they're full of themselves. From white people to black people, empirically, it has almost always been followed with a murder threat.