Living Well prefers to be mildly hated.
I prefer to be politely ignored. I don’t want to be exotified either positively or negatively.
pdts
Quick, honey - get a picture of me with this gay!
It’s pretty self-indulgent to complain about people enthusing about counting you as a human being. Plenty of people around the world, gay and otherwise, would like to have this problem.
If you* happen to find yourself in a cultural time and place where you are exotic, and you don’t want to hoist your own defiantly exotic banner (as liberation movements often have to), the other choices are to assimilate (sincerely or deceptively), or to just deal. The exotic becomes mundane soon enough in historical terms, though not necessarily for those who inhabit the transitional generations.
- That’s the informal indefinite “you.”
ETA: Responding to pdts here. Gyrate is funny.
Oh I know, and the bigots are far, far worse than the overweeningly “I just love the gays” types. It’s a firstworldproblem, as we say on reddit.
It’s not people counting me as a human being that gets me. To count me as a human being would be to refrain from projecting their (positive or negative) issues on me, or from using me to make a point about how ‘tolerant’ they are. To count someone as a human being is not to see them as a representative of some group, or not only as that.
For example, I’m sure that Donald Trump is not racist. But there’s still something odd about him saying that he ‘gets on well with the blacks’ - black people are individual human beings, and it’s odd to project one’s own issues onto a group like that.
But still, let me make an analogy. As I’ve droned on about in the past, I’m a foreigner in the USA. The “get lost foreign scum!” crowd are far, far worse (and rarer) than the “oh I just love your accent! I have lots of foreign friends, I’m a world traveller dontchaknow. None of my American friends wants to hear my stories about how cosmopolitan I am, but I know you will, and I’ll quiz you about your life” types. But they’re both worse than the people who see me as just another person - as pdts, not pdts the gay/European.
As I said, a firstworldproblem.
pdts
I never said I was gay first of all. All I meant was everyone should just be treated as individuals. There’s nothing all that interesting about being gay or straight. It’s the other qualities a person has that make them unique.
Wow, thanks for the update! Those are places I used to go to when living in WeHo - nice to see they all still exist. (It’s been 12 years since I last lived there.)
I agree with everything you said about each place.
As a Gay man, the best example I can give is the Palms Bar - a lesbian bar in West Hollywood. If I went in with another guy and they realized we were not there to cruise chicks, there was never a problem. Going there alone as a guy, well - you might wait quite awhile until you were served and you wouldn’t exactly be welcomed with open arms. They didn’t appreciate straight guys coming in to get his jollies by watching. However, once I took two German Lesbians who were visiting me at the time - and I had a great time and nobody had a problem with me being there. The point is, I wasn’t trying to change up the mix, I wasn’t trying to sort out the herd, and I wasn’t acting like some macho asshole.
I once took my crazy aunt to Gold Coast in WeHo and she embarrassed the hell out of me. Within an hour, she knew the first name of almost everyone in the bar and was trying to pair guys off. Most found it funny, but I couldn’t wait to get her out of there.
I also took my straight brother to a Gay bar and he wanted to know why the bar wasn’t 50/50 Gay and Lesbian - seemed logical to him, and I think he was hoping to watch some hot ladies in action. I explained that Gays and Lesbians really had little in common, especially when out cruising for potential sexual partners, and this kind of bar only works in small towns where there isn’t any other option. In larger cities, somewhat rare to see that mix. He was bummed out about that, but he was more amazed at the various types of guys who were in the bar - he realized his stereotypes of Gay guys was way off. He saw the drag queens and the leather guys, but also saw lots of other guys who looked like anybody he would see in his Arizona sports bar. However, being in West Hollywood, he also noted that about half the guys looked like they could be models for covers of magazines.
Ouch. I don’t need your approval, nor was I looking for a “friend of gay” badge. Little touchy are we?
BTW, I only shared my anecdotal story to show that yes… sometime us ignorant straight folks, who are trying oh so hard to be cool (which is almost impossible for me to begin with and certainly at 19 years old), will absolutely “gawk” at gay folks on occassion.
On re-read, I suppose my post could be viewed as sneak bragging. I will just add this on to the long list of shit I shouldn’t talk about on the dope, along with adoption, rape, cats, christians, republicans, the gold standard…
No worries. Just steer clear of Christians raping adopted cats to bring gay Republicans around to the gold standard, and we’ll be fine.
pdts
The last time I went to a gay club I got hit on… by a very butch lesbian. She must have thought I was a really ugly woman. 
Dude, that’s an Abe bar. Totally different.
FFS, people. It’s only a slur in the UK. Everywhere else, it’s like saying “Aussie”. Can we please get over this hypersensitivity?
“You get your way in every other situation. Can’t we oppress you just this once?!”
Is that right? I’ve never heard anyone use it in actual conversation.
“Paki” is incredibly loaded for us Brits, because it is not like saying “Aussie” - it’s not just about people from Pakistan.
It applies historically in a derogatory manner to anyone from South Asia and even beyond the subcontinent. Because of the term’s abuse for decades by British racists and fascists, it is usually accompanied by other unpleasantries implying dirty, uncultured, smelly, uncivilised, primitive, barbaric.
It’s one of the most offensive words in the British lexicon. For me, it is as harsh and shitty as “nigger”, “chink”, etc. Knowing that, and the substantial minority of Brits on the board, it would be cool if you didn’t use it casually - in the same way that Irish people rarely use “Jap” on the SDMB because it’s offensive in the US, even though “Jap” is used in a non-derogatory way in Ireland as shorthand for “Japanese”.
If AK48 says it, well he’s from Pakistan and it’s his self identification.
Awwwww - poor jjimm. I’d totally hit on you if I were a lesbian too. 
Here’s a thread I started about that a few years ago.
I’ve gone to gay bars with my gay friends. A bar called Splash in Chelsea had “Musical Mondays”. They played clips from musicals on their video screens. I knew more musicals than them.
I only got hit on once.
But some bartenders did give me a free beer every now and then. 
Perception from a heterosexual male, for what it’s worth:
Been to a number of gay bars with gay friends for no other reason than they were looking for someone and I wasn’t , so no need to go to a nondescript bar/club.
All I know is that the common theme all my life is that gay men like to ‘test’ heterosexual men into how uncomfortable they might or might not get. That’s my perception anyway. I find most of it good natured and not actually a test as much as just a way to get some insight.
One time, a gay friend of my was teaching a cross-training class at my Y (on the basketball courts), and it looked to be a very good bootcamp/calorie burn type workout. Sure enough, there were a few guys from the gay bar there that I had met a few times. I had signed up, but when they got to this part where you do the bunny hop thing and follow that up with some half squat kind of thing, I graciously excused myself and went to the fitness room, and they all had a good laugh and didn’t mind a bit. Various jokes ensued. That is about the same mood I get in the gay bars.
I don’t get hit on, per se, but I get compliments.
Amen sister. We live in a medium sized town that has one gay bar, it’s been invaded by the local college kids because it’s the only decent dance bar around. My partner and I have no place in our community where we can be “us”, we save that for vacations to places where that can happen. I miss our bar.
Well look at it this way - I go to gay bars and don’t get hit on at all and I don’t even get free drinks, so I think you’re doing better than I am. 
And at least at Splash, the beer was much colder than straight bars.