Okay. Let me try to explain gay humor, for that is exactly what the website title is, to the straight folks who are having problems with the use of the word.
Gay humor is a little different from mainstream humor. It tends to be a bit biting, a little sardonic, quite self-deprecating, and sort of twisted, in the sense that things are looked at, like Albin sings in La Cage aux Folles, on an angle. It’s gallows humor, underground humor, sometimes covert humor.
“Stunning Sodomites of the SDMB” was coined by me for its alliterative quality, for the autodepreciative quality of the word “stunning” (hint: the word was not chosen as a literal claim to gorgeousness), for the shock value and social reversal of “sodomites”. And, understand, it was spun off solely as a joke, at the time. When I typed it, I had no idea that anyone would actually use it as a real website title (though after some thought, I like it as such).
In other words, when originally posted, the sense of the phrase wasn’t “Look at the beautiful homosexuals of the boards!”, but a snickered “Hehe…look! I’m calling myself beautiful, and everyone knows we’re dirty sodomites!” But with humor, of course.
Gay humor can be biting, but often as not it’s the humorist who’s (deliberately) on the business end of the fangs.
By all means. I’d be very interested to read such a thread (possibly in IMHO or MPSIMS) and I’d encourage my brothers and sisters to be just as supportive as we can. It’s an important and self-aware thing to be doing.
The trouble is, much too often we get accused of trying to épater les bourgeois when we’re just being ourselves. This happens to me all the time. I am much too old and tired (yes, I’m 21) to worry about how irrelevant details of the way I dress, talk, and behave will affect the possible bigotry of fence-sitters. It’s not about them and I don’t appreciate it being dredged up.
I am a weird faggot. That has nothing to do with anything else; it’s how it pleases me to live. And I worry about whether someone who could “tolerate” a more normal and mainstream me, but not me the way I am, would actually be tolerating me at all.
Yeah, we’re getting married. In a church. By a Catholic priest. We’re going to have flowers and pew bows and a limo and a reception and a receiving line and a photographer and a fabulous dinner and gorgeous centerpieces and toasts and ringing the glasses for a kiss and a DJ and a first dance.
And you’re 100% privileged to be exactly who you want to be, as far as I am concerned. I personally could not give a rat’s patootie whether the two skateboarding kids sporting earrings and baggy pants in front of the Food Lion took off to neck with their girlfriends or with each other. And the two businessmen at the next table from me may have gone home to their wives, or together – it’s their business, not mine.
What I was addressing – or at least hoping to address – is how to win the hearts and minds of the majority that you need behind you for any lasting social impact – in what you do corporately as statements to the media, Marches like the Millenium March on Washington, etc. Let’s face it: nothing you can say or do will change the mind of WorldNetDaily and Jerry Fouwell, and the press covering a Pride celebration is going to picture the guys in buttless chaps and the topless lesbians before they show the League of Gay Accountants in their three piece suits. But the image that gay groups project – confrontational or irenic, angry or firmly and courteously saying that we expect our rights, etc. – is going to have a big impact on the Des Moines Register, the United Presbyterian Church, the United Way Board of Directors, and all the other elements that go to make up whether something is a part of our cultural fabric or marginalized as weirdos not worth defending.
That, and only that, is what I intended to convey in my comments above. The Airman Doorses of the world are potentially on your side. It’s up to you to win them – or alienate them – by how you corporately project who you are. And AFAIAC that in no way means backing down from the fight or changing who you are – it’s a matter of image perception, and little different from wearing a suit to an interview, capitalizing and punctuating properly on this board, etc. – using the most effective means of communicating.
You can do anything your little heart desires. I doubt there’d be a gay male poster who’d squawk even if you called it the Sanctified Slitlickers of the Straight Dope (not to be too offensive).
But it’s not supposed to be a corporatist movement. It’s supposed to be an individual rights movement. And I fail to see how intentional, politicized conformity (as opposed to people who are normal because that’s how it is) is supposed to further the cause of diversity.
“All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives.” - John Ralston Saul, Reflections of a Siamese Twin
On rereading my posts and thinking about them, I feel that I have not made clear the distinction I’m drawing:
Neither I nor anybody else has any business telling any gay man or woman what he should or should not do.
I wish to offer considered advice on what I feel is the most effective way of accomplishing what I think we are in agreement is A Good Thing: widespread public acceptance of gay people as human beings no different than anybody else, and the achievemnt of a near-universal public attitude that can be expressed as point 1.
When even an innocuous “get to know each other” Web site draws this kind of appalled reaction, I despair of any kind of rapprochement between the hetero and homo populations.
It’s already been established by Scylla and others that no matter how much lawmakers seek to constrict and circumscribe our lives, we must react to their venom with nothing but polite smiles. Gay people must never be angry or even vent on a meessage board for fear of alienating people who despise us anyway. Scylla is certainly no friend to gay people.
Pardon me, Poly, but your posts reek of the exact same “be patient, don’t push, this far should be good enough for the likes of you” excuses that white folks were handing black folks back in the 1960s. A quotation from MLK seems apt:
If it will help the stright population feel more comfortable, I guess the burden is 100 percent on gay people to accommodate them. If it will make you happy, I can cease to identify myself as gay in public–too confrontational. I can keep my partner’s existence under wraps–straight folks are just not ready to know that two men can live together as a couple. I shall take down the rainbow flags and stow them in the closet, then I guess I’ll pull the door shut after me, so that I will cease to, you know, cause any straight people to feel “oogy.”
To continue a little bit, suppose we decided tomorrow that we were all going to act normal in order to win the hearts and minds of this supposed plethora of fence-sitters. And, seeing the hordes of everyday average gay and lesbian Joes and Josephines next door, decide that okay, we’ll put up with them.
Would we be able to relax then and let our hair down? Or would we continue having to act in this way, obnoxious to a large number of us, lest we lose everything we’ve gained once again?
Furthermore, even if we tried to stamp out abnormality that was somehow judged socially unpalatable (by whom, and how would we go about it, anyway?), there will always be a part of the community that would not change. This would fragment the community, and it would leave those who are naturally more mainstream ahead of those who are naturally less so. Considering that the whole reason for this movement is that our sexuality puts us out of the mainstream to begin with, I would find such a tactic not only counterproductive but dishonest and delusional.
Attitudes are changing now, without our having to go to the trouble of shoehorning the entire community into an enforced, public-relations conformity.
I personally would rather spare myself the trouble. I’d rather be hated for being what I am than loved for being what I’m not. It’s less tiring. And soon I won’t even have to make that choice.
I think it’s more efficient to have a happy life, as opposed to an acceptable one; work to shepherd our youth through the valley of the shadow of bigotry; and wait for the homophobes to die.
gobear, ease up. You’re responding to Polycarp here, for gosh sakes! If there’s something offensive to gays in any of his posts, I can almost guarantee it’s there either through a misreading, a misunderstanding, or a drop of ignorance (in the sea of compassion that is the man’s heart) that he wasn’t aware of.
If it’s either of the first two, that’s a matter for the reader to deal with in himself. If it’s the third, again, we’re talking about Poly. Try to educate, or to clarify, and he’ll come around if the point is reasonable (which I think this one is).
Poly, my understanding of the whole “We’re just like you!” movement is that it’s in the nature of throwing those who are different within the gay community to the wolves so the mainstreamed gays can get away. My personal philosophy is that if the gay rights movement is only about gay rights for gay people who act like good little middle-class straight folks, I want no part of it. If we have to leave people behind, I’d just as rather stay behind with them (despite being well within the public perception of those good little middle-class straight-acting gay people).
I don’t wish to be hard on **Polycarp[/b[, but I am growing increasingly weary of being told that I have to conform to other people’s standards to achieve the recognition of rights that everyone else enjoys as a matter of course.
Frankly, we shouldn’t have to be molded into some middle class white bread setting in order to be accpeted. We should be accepted for who we are, as we are and not to have to tone down, butch up or masquerade as something many of us are not.
I should point out that Gay Pride week celebrates the Stonewall riots. We remember and celebrate the “in your face” attitude of those New York City drag queens who would no longer stand by and wait meekly for our politicians to get around to recognizing that just maybe gay people have rights too. If they hadn’t rioted in June of '69, we wouldn’t have the rights we do today. They had to get into the face of the New York Police Department to get anywhere.
Our goal isn’t to convince straights that we’re “just like them”. We’re not. Some of us are a lot like them in many ways, but that’s not the point. The point is that, we are people too regardless of our differences, and we’re entitled to be who we are whether you like it or not, whether you understand us or not, whether we make you oogy or not.
During my early transition, I frequently made people uncomfortable because of my ambiguous gender. (Even now this still occasionally happens.) Should I have concealed myself at home, for the sake of “the cause”, because the “ooginess” my appearance inspired in others might harm our Quest for General Acceptance? I must sincerely hope not. Yet this is what you are asking of all those GLBT persons who are not vanilla enough to “pass for straight” in public. It’s equal rights for all gays, not just vanilla gays, that we want.
I cannot agree with your advice, Polycarp. We cannot get what we want by surrendering who we are. And that’s what you’re asking us to do.
