Deepbluesea: sigh.
For some peculiar reason, however, I’ve never heard a gay guy describe another guy as “not really gay” for any reason other than actual heterosexuality. What reasons do you suppose account for this?
No, matt…I think we go the opposite direction, kind of a mirror image of the straight man’s “She just needs to find the right man” attitude toward lesbians. Our version tends to be “He’s not really straight!”
Not universal, of course. But nothing is.
jayjay
(Check it out, folks, I finally noticed we use vB code here. I’m slow but I get there in the end.)
Well, I’m not totally sure if you mean “why do lesbians act this way?” or “why don’t gay men?”. So, since blithering at length is one of my primary skills, I’ll tackle both questions.
Here are some of my hypotheses about the former:
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Some lesbians regard female homosexuality as secondary to a particular array of thoughts, beliefs, and actions espoused by the women who seem to see things this way; lesbianism is, in other words, a political rather than sexual choice. So, when these women say ‘lesbian,’ they don’t mean anything to do with sex at all. So I guess by their terms I’m really not a lesbian, but I’ve got to quibble with their terms; I’m not ready to change the definition of lesbian.
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Some lesbians have what can best be described as peculiar fixations, mostly to do with blaming men for everything that has ever gone wrong (war, famine, pestilence, etc.) and everything they don’t like (Republicans, meat, oil companies, etc.). (I don’t do this for two reasons: first, I like guys, and second, I just hate giving any person or group that much power over me.) They assume that if you subtract men and male influence from any equation, you get whatever notions they think are right. See where I’m going with this? The corollary is “Well, if you don’t agree with me, you must be male-influenced - hence, not a lesbian.” We cannot describe that as a rational thought, and must simply pity anyone who thinks it.
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Since I gather you’re gay, Matt, you’ll be familiar with the way traditions and so forth arise in any minority group - means of identification, rejection of the majority, mutual support, etc. The reasoning here goes: if you won’t behave the way our minority-group culture says you should, you won’t be allowed to benefit from that culture. Hence, you can’t be a lesbian because we won’t let you be. (Not you specifically, of course, Matt - you can’t be a lesbian because the biology’s all wrong.)
And so on. I get the sense there is no single reason, and on occasion each of these theories has been right; some women won’t let me say I’m a lesbian but will let me pick their brains about why not, and this is the distilled essence of what they’ve said to me.
Now, moving on to question two, you’re absolutely right - gay men don’t seem to say this to other men unless they have major symptoms of heterosexuality, such as not wanting to have sex with men and definitely wanting to have sex with women. (In fact, the only stated sexual preference that lots of gay men won’t take at face value is male bisexuality; at least half the gay guys I know say that “bi” simply means “not ready to come out of the closet.”)
So, why don’t gay men do this to other gay men? I think mostly because none of the gay men I know can really get behind any definition of a sexual preference that doesn’t have to do with sex. This renders them able to comprehend, and cope with, men who are gay but don’t necessarily act like it.
It might also be fair to note that men in general seem more suited to this kind of thought; sex and sexual response appear to be much more hard-wired (and clear your mind of all those nasty puns, kiddies) in men than in women. Maybe there are lots of women who really can’t imagine getting sexually aroused in the presence of people who don’t share their political and social convictions; certainly, as a woman, I can confirm that the conditions have to be at least kind of right or no dice. But I’d really have to struggle to believe that there are healthy 16-year-old males in this world who couldn’t get aroused around someone they disagree with; I remember dealing with these boys, and my recollection is that they could get turned on in the middle of a biology class film on fish dissection.
(P.S. I appear to have inadvertently hijacked this thread; re-reading the OP, I note that this is supposed to be ask the gay men, not the gay people. Whoops. Apologies.)
Not a hijack in the least, deepbluesea. From the OP:
This thread series has been all about building an understand among gays, straights, bi-sexuals, and trangender folks. Your post certainly fit the bill. 
deepbluesea, your a lesbian uncle tom. I think that the fact that men have much more rigidly defined social roles and that society does not allow them to do as much as women helps too. The ones that do move so far are a much smaller minority and aren’t really seen. Then you get gay men who have moved so little that they only accept “straight acting” men more often, whereas this isin’t really seen in women.
I assume you are referring to this column: http://www.salon.com/col/pagl/1998/10/28pagl.html written by Camille Paglia for Salon.com in 1998. I further assume that the specific quote that led you to write what you did was this:
Insensitive? Certainly. I cringe to think of any of Mr. Shepard’s friends or family reading this. But is she actually blaming him for his own murder, as you assert?
First, please note in the article that she does not anywhere actually state this; you are taking it as implied.
Second, consider this hypothetical: I go jogging at night, alone, through a particularly blighted section of one of our inner cities, carrying a transparent baggie filled with cash. I am, predictably, beaten and robbed, perhaps killed.
Now of course I am not to blame for what happened to me. I have a perfect right to go jogging at night carrying bags of cash, and the people who assaulted me had no right to do so, and they ought to be punished. However, all of that not withstanding, I find it hard to imagine that no one would comment about the circumstances under which the crime against me took place, even though it would be insensitive, especially to my friends and family.
Or consider a slight revision of the hypothetical: Suppose that, instead of being beaten and robbed, when confronted by my assailants I whip out a gun that I had conveniently concealed about my person, and shot them dead. It was an awful long time ago, but I seem to recall that there were suggestions that Bernie Goetz(sp?) may have been seeking a confrontation when he shot those teenagers. Insensitive? Certainly. But it was a point that arguably needed to be raised.
Mind you, I don’t mean to suggest that Mr. Shepard’s behavior in the bar that night was directly comparable to running through downtown with a baggie full of cash. I am simply trying to illustrate a principle.
Or perhaps you based your assertion on the fact that Ms. Paglia did not provide a rote disclaimer along the lines of: “Of course, it goes without saying that we should not blame Mr. Shepard, the victim, for this horrible crime, but…” If that is the case, please read this quote, taken from the very same article:
Do you seriously suggest that Ms. Paglia is blaming Mr. Shepard for his own death while simultaneously demanding that the ultimate penalty of execution be imposed on someone else for having done it?
I await the favor of your reply.
Doesn’t she realize that her argument is exactly comparable to those who claim that a woman wearing tight clothing is asking to be raped? Nobody asks to be gay-bashed and murdered. She’s extrapolating his responsibility for his death from a particularly sanctimonious and bloody-minded portion of her personal morality, one that bears no relation to reality or any reasonable version of ethics or compassion.
Exactly comparable?? As I stated in my first post, at no point in the article does she actually say flat out that shepard “asked for it”. You took it as implied.
I have read this sentence a number of times, and I still don’t understand it. Could you please elucidate?
I took it as implied because it IS implied. What other conclusion am I to draw from her opinions as stated?
I have read this sentence a number of times, and I still don’t understand it. Could you please elucidate?
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sigh Let’s try this again: she is making no attempt to treat his murder with anything close to the compassion it deserves. Instead she is using it to score points for a particularly holier-than-thou portion of her personal beliefs. Does that make it any clearer?
I already more or less conceded this in the first post, agreeing that it was insensitive, even though she did demand the death penalty for the killers.
No. To what “holier-than-thou portion of her personal beliefs” are you referring?
After working in a comic book store I started keeping tabs on what was going on in the comic book world. Well Wonder Woman had turned 60 and there were a few articles floating around about the history of the character. Even though I’m not a fan it was interesting to find out stuff I didn’t know. It was nice to know that Batman isn’t the only character that had some cheesy plots back in the day.
What I don’t get is why Wonder Woman is suppose to have a high percentage of gay males in her fan base. Well first off is it true? And if so why?
Well that’s all,
Marc
Funny, Wonder Woman was accused of turning little girls into lesbians, back when the government was cracking down on the comic industry. Turns out they were worried about the wrong kids.
Someone made the same accusation about Batman and Robin. Uh, not the lesbian part but some anti-comic guy accused the caped crusaders of being homosexual. I mean what’s so odd about a grown man in tights roaming the city at night with his teenage sidekick looking for some hot action?
Marc
Al: That part that fuses her deconstructionist academic training with the basic desire to wallow in her primal religious guilt, I suppose. How should I know why someone else is being a jerk?
Baker, MGibson:
“No, son! Here, play with big, rippling, muscular He-Man, not with Barbie!”
“Mommy, that’s the best idea you’ve ever had!”
Now why in hell did I write “Baker”? I meant Miller, of course.
Wrong.
Dr. Frederic Wertham wrote Seduction of the Innocent in 1953, which had the accusations that Wonder Woman was a lesbian and Batman and Robin were a homosexual fantasy.
His was the lead testimony of the Senate hearings. The government hearings on comic books were similar to the PMRC hearings in the 80’s. All it did was get the companies to self-impose some censorship. Censorship that has eroded fifty years later to almost nothing
I think it boils down to the dream of a non patriarchal culture which does not discriminate and treats all with kindness. And her fan base has many gay men among them, including myself and her current artist/writer.
Dr. William Moulton Marston, who under the pseudonym Charles Moulton, created and wrote Wonder Woman was a feminist. And a bit of a misandrist. He’s my hero.
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Ok, I asked and someone answered. Thanks. Although I must say for being a character that everyone recognizes not many people know a darn thing about her.
Marc
For more illumination, go to my website: http://www.hastur.com/WonderWoman
Oh my god! I was already there!!
Marc