There was a science-fiction novella by Damon Knight called “Rule Golden”. An alien comes to Earth and spreads a virus that gives everyone a limited form of telepathy: they feel the mental and physical pain of others, especially if they inflict suffering on others it comes back to them. Wonderful, right?
But an obvious flaw in the scheme occurs to me: What about the neurotic? The walking pain-machines who take things as hurts that are unreasonable, and in doing so demand that the entire world accommodate them?
As the child of a deeply neurotic mother, I can assure you that taking hurt isn’t always innocent. Hell, as this thread testifies I suffer from a thin skin and don’t take criticism well; I’m working on it.
Got it, we’re not even ‘woke’. We are just neurotic.
So, Miller you wanting the right to marry, anti gay discrimination laws, sodomy laws off the books, and not to be called a f@ggot- it’s all because you are neurotic.
Since one of the things log cabin Republicans like to say is that they’re gay without being a part of “gay culture”, I’d guess the answer to your question is “not much”, and also that it’s not really relevant to anything.
My opinion on this topic is undoubtedly far closer to yours than to Bump’s, but I don’t understand what our side gains with this kind of gaslighting. Of course “Gay Culture” is a thing; if someone makes untrue claims about what gay culture does or does not include, or argues that gay culture is threatening to children, we can certainly argue those points; but how is it useful to pretend that something we all know about is a fantastical claim to make?
Let me quote someone dear to you,
That’s the point though- who decides and what authority do they have to push that on everyone else?
History is filled with claims of oppression that were evaluated on their merits . . . and, curiously, the oppressors, almost always, found the claims to be meritless.
The LGBT community shares values like acceptance and promotion of LGBT rights, I am sure. That’s kinda what that community is based around, right?
But I think that’s a bit of a red herring - not every community is built around shared values. There’s certainly a culture that surrounds video games, or sports, or craft beers; these are based on common interest, not shared values.
Thank you for assuming I am malicious rather than ignorant or dubious.
Okay-
First, I have a problem with the title." LGBTQ culture" I somehwo doubt all these groups, which have mostly been lumped together and discriminated against by society and allied largely because there is strength in numbers, have a single culture.
Second, the list gives the names of famous gay artists, historical figures, and current important figures. This seems to me like an outline for an article or an article stub. I still don’t see a description of what gay culture actually is.
Let give a presumably imperfect example. Penn and Teller are both atheists. They are very open about this. In interviews, Teller is a nice Jewish boy. He clearly does not believe in or practice Judaism as a religion. It is also very clear, he is shaped by and connected to the Jewish culture. He speaks at least a little Yiddish. His mother almost certainly made him chicken soup with matoh balls. He is fond of the European peasant food that is Ashenazi food. Etc.
What is “gay culture” then? Obviously, I think people shoudl be free to love, marry and live without laws against them. Their should be law protecting people from discrimination. But, that does not a culture make.
There’s definitely books, and movies, and music made by gay artists, based on their experiences living as a gay person, intended for a largely gay audience. If books, movies, and music don’t constitute “culture,” I don’t know what does.
I have no idea how this example applies to the conversation at hand.
I guess there’s no such thing as gamer culture, anime culture, golf culture, basketball culture, soccer culture, craft beer culture, gym bro culture…
The fact that Joe is super into craft beer and the culture that sorrounds it doesn’t mean he can’t also have a Jewish upbringing that’s a much deeper and more meaningful shared experience than “we both like going to breweries and trying craft beer on the weekend”.
Right, but I wouldn’t describe those as shared values, necessarily; they’re forms of art that speak to a common experience (being LGBT in a society that’s largely cis and heterosexual) that people who partake in “gay culture” share.
I wouldn’t say that gay culture is built around shared values, beyond the shared values of gay acceptance; instead it’s built around a shared experience. Other cultures are built around common interests.
“Black” and “African American” obviously don’t mean the same thing. I have a friend, born and raised in Uganda, who lives in Hawai’i now. She’s Black, but she’s not African American. Her experience growing up had nothing to do with American Black culture or the reverberating effects on US-based Black communities of historical racism in America.
On the other hand, her son was born and raised in Brooklyn, as an American citizen participating all along in US culture as a Black man. He identifies as African-American. His mother does not.
And if there is no difference between “African American” and “Black,” does that mean the vast majority of citizens in Nigeria or Tanzania or Mozambique etc. etc. are “African American”?
FYI, “it isn’t happening and it’s good that it is” is a common kind of gaslighting from ‘woke’ people, where they first deny that something you object to is happening - often while calling you a bigot for accusing nice progressives of it - then when shown evidence that the thing in question really is happening, insist that it’s good, and you’re a bigot for objecting to it.
Extremely tedious and annoying. Some of them are simply ignorant, some are disingenuous. It’s generally not worth engaging… and I should remember that.
I remember an American journalist calling Lenny Henry (famous British comedian) ‘African American’ in an interview. Funny, but the journalist obviously learned it as a replacement for ‘black’ or whatever word he grew up with - a name for a racial group - rather than a parallel to terms like ‘Irish American’ and ‘Italian American’ as I assume was the intention.