I want to wear my rainbow bracelet and paint my nails. I want to wear my Catcher shirt to the bowling alley. I want to dance to remixed disco hits. I don’t do these things to shock or titilate. I do them because they make me happy.
If we have to hide our true selves, to “pass”, in order to be accepted, then we’re not really accepted; but, rather, a false persona has been accepted. What kind of freedom is that? I’ve lived the closet. I tried to be straight - even to the point of getting married. Now that the door is opened and I’ve shed that fake persona, I’m not about to put it back on.
And Homebrew, well put to you, too! This is the reason we wear rainbow ring necklaces and pink triangle pins. It’s the reason I play the cast recording of La Cage aux Folles in my car stereo with the windows down. It’s the reason I get excited when I’m at a straight function and I Will Survive is played.
There’s a thrill that runs through my insides when stuff like this happens. A chill runs down my back, a ripple runs through my stomach, and a smile breaks out on my face. I’m gay, and all of this speaks to me like the voices of angels welcoming me home.
I still consider the March in 1993 to be the single happiest event in my entire life. There is absolutely no way to describe the emotions that ran through me standing on a metro platform, the name of which I can’t remember now, and realizing that probably 95% of the other people on that platform were also there for the March. There’s no way to describe the thrill at standing on the National Mall with other gays and lesbians and bisexuals on all sides as far as the eye could see. We’re gay…there’s music in that. Music that speaks to us, regardless of whether we’re accountants in three-piece suits or punk freaks with orange hair and safety pins coming out of our foreskins or Lesbian Avengers marching topless down Pennsylvania Avenue banging their bass drums.
I agree with Polycarp that the greatest successes of the Civil Rights movement were made by Dr King and the others who urged a patient but inexorable entry into the cultural mainstream. What the Black Panthers did and said may have been satisfying for them as individuals but it also set back their movement by suggesting to the social majority (middle-class, conservative whites) that what the right wingers were warning them about (crazy n*ggers gone wild in the streets) might be true. The Onion article is funny because it could easily have come from any mainstream newspaper in the country.
Tactically, any gain should be followed by a period in which the gain is consolidated, lines of support are secured, and plans are made for the next move. A headlong rush forward is always risky.
Perhaps the loss of much of a generation of gay men to AIDS, the same generation that had learned the tactics of social protest and societietal advance with the rest of us thirty and forty years ago, can explain the ill-advised strategies of some gays today. Not the Stunning or Sparkling or Stupendous or whatever it was Sodomites name, which I ‘got,’ but the more flamboyant Gay Pride Paraders. Sets the movement back thirty years by playing with, but at the same time affirming, the prejudices of the very people you want on your side.
I didn’t take offense to what Airman said. I don’t think that the website was worth a pit thread over however. What I did notice though is that Airman didn’t try to be rude or condescending at all. He strikes me as someone who isn’t especially pleased that he harbors the feelings about homosexuality that he has. He has made an effort to learn more about who we are and seems to treat everyone with respect. I wish there were more people like him who weren’t afraid to question whether or not they should hold onto their beliefs about gays, rather than just blindly agree with their pastor or priest. I see someone making a real effort to confront their ignorance. I can’t help but appreciate that.
Gobear, I was glad to see that you have no intention of letting this affect your friendship with him. It sounds like you two have become good friends and it would be a shame to see that damaged. I would submit that the more that he is exposed to good people like you, the more he will realize that there is nothing wrong with you and your partner showing affection for each other. Just because he isn’t comfortable now doesn’t mean that he can’t change his feelings over time. I think it is always important to remember that change takes time, especially when you are learing things that go against what what was drilled into you at a young age. I wish you guys a long and beautiful friendship.
As usual, everybody is talking past each other here. I, and I assume Polycarp and most of the people in this thread, don’t have negative feelings about your rainbows or pink triangle pins. Hell, Ma and Pa Kettle back on the farm don’t much care these days. You guys have won. All that’s left is the mopping up, though anybody but Donald Rumsfeld will admit that mopping up can be a bitch. The war can still be lost, though, if care is not taken now.
Remember that most people don’t get irony. That’s why it’s fun.
I know it celebrates the individual, and an individual can be flamboyant, though you must remember that, as a stuffy old fart, any flamboyance makes me uncomfortable. But flamboyant can be good, though it tends to confirm those negative preconceptions. My use in this case was in its euphemistic sense, speaking of the sexual themes that make the Kettles uncomfortable, whether it is straight or gay sex. Us stuffy old farts tend to use euphemisms.
Very well said. I have never understood why gay people have not enjoined the LP in their cause. It is the only political party that genuinely gives a damn about it.
(Note: Do not misconstrue this as advocacy of the LP, but merely as an expression that the LP not appealing to gays — and other oppressed minorities — is a mystery to me, given its official platform on the matter.)
Can I just clarify something here? I think my little post about the fabulousness of my Big Fat Gay Wedding® has been misinterpreted - even though no one has said as much - as a declaration that Jer and I belong to the “we’re just like you!” camp.
We do not.
I have both pity and disdain for those within the gay community who would push back into the closet drag queens and leather men and anyone that’s not “straight-acting, just happens to be gay.”
Just because we want to have a big ole’ wedding with all the trappings doesn’t make us any less queer. We’re not trying to assimilate into the straight world, or “prove” that we’re “just like them.” We just want to have a big, fabulous party. It will be very, very gay. A gay wedding doesn’t have to be held in a non-mainstream place of worship.
And believe me, our sex life is very sick, very twisted, and extremely aberrant.
scott, I never got that impression at all, and I definitely wasn’t trying to make it sound like that was the case. I’m happy for you two, and if you want to drive yourselves insane (imagine, TWO Bridezillas!! :eek: ) on a traditional-type fluffy, ruffled wedding, knock yourselves out!
Libertarian, might it be because the LP opposes antidiscrimination law? The LP would be happy to leave gays (and all other minorities) huddled in whatever dark corners they can cajole out of an uncaring majority, which under the LP’s vision of the “minimal state” would not be required to refrain from discriminating against them.
To all my gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered friends (and I very much hope that this thread did not lose me any), my sinderest and humblest apologies. I am most happy with knowing you as the out, flamboyant, rowdy and boisterous (or not) folks that you are, and I would not change a thing about you if I could.
It was my intent to address what PR efforts I in my ignorance thought would be most effective in winning over the hearts and minds of those whose views have not yet been cast in concrete, and who will “put you over the top” in achieving the sort of public acceptance you seek.
If I had followed my own analogy, I would have recognized that it was the exposure of bigoted oppression as what it was, the deaths of Dr. King and Medgar Evers, the outcries that we have had all we can stand, and we will take no more, that finally made an impact on whitebread America.
Kelly sumnmed your responses up in saying that for the sake of acceptance, I was asking you to change who you were. I did not intend that, I would never do that, and for the implication that I was, I most sincerely ask your forgiveness, one and all.
While I will defer to the judgement of my spiritual advisor, I still think parading in bare-assed chaps is bad for The Cause. But when the discussion gets political–and EVERYTHING is political when I get like this–I tend to think and speak in phrases like “The Cause,” and the capitalization is a part of it.
(I disagree that Dr King had to die so whitebread America would understand the need for The Struggle. His point had been made and the ship of state had begun to turn.)
This may be deserving of its own thread, and if so I’m sorry for hijacking this one.
I’m sure that someone will educate me in my ignorance, but I’ve never really understood what fetishes (not talking about drag queens, but ‘leather men,’ unless that means something other than the obvious) have to do with homosexuality.
I admit that what sexual experiences I’ve had have all been pretty white bread, but there are members of all sexual preferences that participate in all sorts of fetishes, and plenty who don’t. And, it also seems to me that straight folk as well as gay folk (or perhaps even more so) need to keep those behaviors ‘in the closet,’ as mainstream America looks at it as different and oogy.
So, my question is, is the battle for gay rights the same as the battle for fetish acceptance, should they be, or am I totally off base, which is a distinct posibility.
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.
Or, to put it another way,
Fuck 'em if they can’t take a joke.
As so many others have said so eloquently before me, this “don’t scare the horses” strategy does not work. Need proof it doesn’t work? Three words: Log Cabin Republicans. There is always going to be a significant portion of the population who, absent divine intervention, are going to disapprove of gay people no matter how assimilationist we become. I have no intention of living my life to try to please people who are incapable of being pleased.
I used to feel guilty because really flamboyent gay men made me uncomfortable.
Then I realized that I was equally uncomfortable in the presence of straight men that defined themselves by their macho dress and “huba huba come to big daddy” attitude and straight women that looked and acted like barbie dolls and cooed helplessly every time an attractive member of the opposite sex appeared.
I guess I think that people are more than who they boink or how they boink.
I’ve never defined myself as just a heterosexual woman.
I like to think that’s more to the essence of who I am than the fact that I periodically have a penis inserted into my vagina.
I do understand jayjay’s thrill at being surrounded by “likeness of kind”, however.
It can be a lonely world out there if you find yourself out of step with the “get married, climb the corporate ladder, have kids, move to the burbs, retire and play golf” mentality.
And while the hamsters danced I see this appeared:
I have been to more than a dozen pride parades in five different cities and I don’t recall ever seeing anyone parading in bare-ass chaps. If, out of the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who watch and participate in pride events, a handful parade in bare-ass chaps and the media and/or the homophobes focus on them to the exclusion of all others, then that says a lot more about the media and the homophobes than it does about the bare-ass chaps in their bare-ass chaps.
