What the fuck? Dude, read your post again. You contradict yourself completely twice in one sentence. That’s got to be a record, even for you.
Sure, and there’s a difference in my behavior when I’m at Safeway then when I’m out at a club. You seem to be arguing that, if gays aren’t using “Safeway” behavior under all circumstances, then they’re never going to get their rights, and you’re using examples of gays acting “outrageously” in contexts that are meant only for the consumption of other gays to prove your point. If we are never, under any circumstances, allowed to do anything that would upset straight people, why the fuck are we fighting for our rights in the first place? We might as well give up and climb back into our closets.
Quoted for truth. For heaven’s sake, people, afaict this wasn’t even meant as out-and-out provocation, just the campy union of two traditions (drag and nativity scenes).
All right, to set the record straight: I am not accusing Dutchman of homophobia. When I said “He doesn’t approve of it” I was referring specifically to the Nativity scene and not the gay rights movement as a whole. The following quotes are the ones on which I base my assertion of passing the buck:
Now to a separate point:
The same people who, to one degree or another, harbor backwards, uninformed, or bigoted ideas about the segment of the population in question? Why should the gay rights movement take advice from someone like Jesse Helms, or Pat Robertson, or Bill O’Reilly?
No, I’m saying that it would behoove gays to engage in ‘club’ behavior when they’re in a club, and ‘Safeway’ behavior when out in public.
This is just basic stuff. There are millions of people in this country, teenagers and adults, doing things in the back seat of their cars or in the privacy of their bedrooms, that they would never dream of doing in public. Are they being deprived of their right to be who they are?
I’m using the context of public marches and demonstrations that have been deliberately contrived to be as offensive and in-your-face as possible to the public at large.
I know that I certainly would not be allowed to pick up a woman at a bar, strip both of us naked, and go to work on her with Astroglide, a butt plug and an 18" penile extension on a public sidewalk or city park, and then when the cops come, claim “Hey, I do this in sex clubs, why can’t I do it here? You’re depriving me of my right to be what I am!”
Furthermore, anyone put off by and/or made angry by my flaunting what they consider to be obscene behavior, would be perfectly within their rights to do so. They have a right to their own values just like I do, and I invaded their (the public’s) space; they didn’t invade mine.
Well, I don’t know.
I also don’t know why you’re asking me because that’s not what I’ve suggested.
Look, let’s face it. Some people are gonna be upset merely because you and another guy are a couple out in public. That’s their problem. It’s also a problem that is lessening more and more as time goes by.
But if you want to behave outrageously in a public venue and make a spectacle of yourself and publically rub peoples’ noses in behavior that you already know they are gonna find disgusting, you are only gonna create determined enemies who have become energized to fight you tooth and nail.
You may choose to believe that these people were assholes already or they wouldn’t think that way, but you would be wrong. People need time to come to terms with changes in societal behavior that they’ve always viewed for whatever reason to be wrong. There’s a sort of sliding scale in terms of peoples’ progression on issues such as this, with zero equating to total and complete opposition that will never change and ten equals complete and wholehearted acceptance, and people move back and for depending on a varity of factors, but mostly with time and societal support, they more away from zero and toward ten. What you are gonna do by engaging in outrageous public behavior, even if it’s intended only for the gay community, is to piss off and alienate many of the threes, fours, fives, sixes and sevens, and either delay their progress up the scale or send them back the other way.
And so you’ve alienated or pissed off a good many people who weren’t assholes to begin with and who may very well have been moving the way you wanted them to on gay rights, but now they either aren’t so sure or they have become totally turned off to the idea and become a strident, determined opponent.
Now, this helps you how?
Not me.
But then, there was no reason to because they’re not the same thing. You guys are struggling for certain rights, in terms both legal and societal, and basically, whether you want to admit it or not, you want acceptance. It’s the key to everything else you want and frankly, without it you are very unlikely to get where you’re wanting to go.
The Muslim cartoons on the other hand, were intended to lampoon and satirize certain aspects of the Muslim faith. And they were most certainly not intended to further the cause of Islam in the Netherlands.
And you saw the reaction they created among those who were offended by them.
So why doesn’t this tell you that getting in someone’s face and deliberately offending them is not the way to get them to vote for your rights?
You, uh… did read the article, right? Especially the part where they said the Nativity scene was enacted
Or was that still too out in the open for you? Should they just be right… oh, back there, in the dark corner? Still too out in the open? Maybe we could just close that door there - ooh, we can’t risk anyone wandering in by accident! Let’s just lock that up tight then… maybe hang up this sign on the door so people won’t think it’s open.
My eyesight’s a little bad, though… could you tell me if that last letter is a ‘d’ or a ‘t’? There’s a good fellow.
I read the OP, wihch stated the event was held by the city of Amsterdam, in Amsterdam, with the intent of promoting Amsterdam as a haven of gay rights and acceptance.
Sounds like a public forum to me.
No, I couldn’t. I see lots of last letters. Do you mean one at the end of a word, the end of a sentence, or the end of a paragraph…and if so, which letter, word or paragraph?
Sure. What you have yet to do is provide an example of gays exhibiting club behavior in a Safeway environment.
Except that that’s not the motivation behind gay pride parades. Gay pride parades are not about the straight community. They are not created with the motivation of provoking any particular reaction from the straight community at all. They are created by gay people, for other gay people. How the straight community feels about it is, 99% of the time, not a consideration.
I’m fairly certain that there are no mainstream gay rights organizations that are demanding the freedom to perform explicit sex acts in public as part of the gay rights platform. If you have evidence to the contrary, I’d be happy to see it.
But what, in your view, is the cutoff for what sort of “outrageous” public behavior is acceptable? You’ve used the example of explicit sex acts - but no one is arguing that that should be acceptable behavior. The example in the OP didn’t include any sort of sex acts at all - it was merely irreverent towards religion, in a country that is already overwhelmingly secular, so the potential for offense is already reduced before you factor in the fact that the performance took place on the property of a gay nightclub, in an area of a town well known as being a gay neighborhood. So far, your argument is that gays shouldn’t be supporting things that gays are already not supporting. Which is to say, your argument is non-existent.
No, I’m not trying to upset straight people. What I’m saying is that expecting me to live my life while avoiding anything that might upset straight people under any circumstance is an unfair standard. I mean, Jesus, people keep saying, “Don’t do that, you’ll just alienate straight people.” “If you want your rights, don’t act weird.” If the only goal of the gay rights movement was avoiding any sort of oppression, the easiest way to do that would be to stop being openly gay. If gays were invisible again, there would be no anti-gay prejudice, because nobody could see us to oppress us, right?
Except that’s not what we want. What we want is to get people to accept that what we are is okay. The point of the gay rights movement is not to change ourselves until we’re acceptable to mainstream America. The point is to change mainstream American until it accepts us. If the sight of a dude in gold lame biker shorts and feather boa is so traumatic to heterosexual sensibilities that it sets the gay rights movement back twenty years, then we’re just going to have to work on this for another two decades.
Given that you accept the venue is pertinent , You should realize that Safeway is off the street and like Safeway, The Pink Market sells goods to the public .
This was no in house event. This particular event even got a 15,000 euro grant from the city for the benefit of all Amsterdamers.
Which has me thinking.
What would the ACLU have to say if this nativity scene was paid for and shown in a town hall square in America.
I’m rejecting the automatic assumption that the intent of the Amsterdam nativity was to insult Christianity. It’s certainly a possibility, but there’s nothing in the linked article to make it a certainty.
So does any gay nightclub. The point of the venue argument is not public versus private, it’s simply what someone should expect from a given context. A performance (even one outside) at a gay nightclub in a gay neighborhood is going to be seen almost exclusively by gay or gay-friendly people. The odds of someone who would be grossly offended by the scene actually seeing it are astronomically remote, because such a person would already know to avoid that particular neighborhood.
Not all of them. But beyond that I would say the reactions of the people you mention would actually be pretty helpful, since they are, to one extent or another, representative. I wouldn’t be willing to be that the first two could be convinced at all, and i’m not personally aware of any particular unpleasant opinions uttered by O’Reilly on the subjects of gay people, but, nevertheless, their advice matters because they too are a part of the “audience”, and more than that to an extent they’re among the most vocal critics. This is not to say their advice will necessarily be useful and worthy of respect. A person with such views may simply declare that gays should be willing to admit their pedophiliac tendencies in order to get any respect, entirely unhelpful advice bsed upon a ratehr scurrilous falsehood. But, by the same token, it is not not necessarily the case that their advice and views will be entirely worthless and tainted by their conception of gay people.
To add to that, the world isn’t made up of gay people on one side and Pat Robertsons (or Fred Phelps’) on the other. There’s a vast horde of the public that’s undecided, or leans for or against due to a couple of points, who could be convinced either way. It’s those in the middle who are the richest source of potential agreers.
Well, I gotta tell ya, this comes as a revelation to me (and drives home the points you’ve been making upthread). I thought the gay rights movement was about wanting to live in pretty much the same way heterosexual couples do now, and to gain societal acceptance of homosexuality so that you don’t have to hide it, be ashamed of it, or feel any differently than anyone else. I didn’t realize that what you were championing was the normalizing of the outrageous type of behavior that characterizes the kinds of gay rights marches I’ve been talking about in this thread.
You know my feelings regarding today’s crass and classless society vs. the society that existed in the fifties and sixties, and if your goal is to fill the streets with Bobby Trendys flouncing around behaving outrageously, goosing each other and making lewd/lascivious in-jokes/comments to each other (which is typical of every gay of that type I’ve ever seen) in front of everyday men, women and children going about their business out in public, or behaving in the outrageous way gays do in gay rights parades, I’m seriously gonna have to rethink my postion on gay rights.
No one else in society is allowed to behave outrageously and in a way that annoys everyone else just because “that’s who they really are”, so why should you?
I would also point out that I have just as much right to feel that way as you do to loathe a society in which Ricky Nelson could have a music career (as you just said in the other thread), because now you’re no longer talking about basic human rights, you’re talking about societal mores and modes of behavior, and I have just as much right to find them objectionable as you do the mores and modes of behavior of the fifties and sixties.
What does “typical of every gay of that types i’ve ever seen” mean? It seems to me like you’re saying “people who act like that are people who act like that”, which seems somewhat redundant. I’m unsure which “type” you mean.
I think they try. You can’t fault them for not giving it a good effort.
From the article:
bold added
Even if it may not have been the original intent of the event to be mocking, once the religious group asked the city council to cancel the event because they were feeling mocked, the event organizers were on notice that the event mocked at least a portion of society.
Gays own Christianity?