Do they hate gay men?
There appears to be a thinking that lesbian women who have leftist political thinking, dislike and will not associate gay men.
The gay men i have spoken with usually say they get cold shouldered by most lesbians but face especially strong resentment from lesbians with leftist political leanings.
Is there any study to look at why this could happen. Is there a possible natural explanation for it?
I’m a left leaning lesbian, and I’ve never heard such nonsense.
It strikes me as a similar argument about feminists being man haters.
I know ‘hundreds/1000s’ of lesbians and gay men, and don’t know a single one that isn’t friends with the opposite sex.
As a gay man, not in my experience. I have more lesbian friends I talk to on a regular basis than I have gay male friends.
Here’s another lefty lesbian with nothing against men, gay or otherwise. I think there may be some confirmation bias going on.
I’m a gay man, and neither have I.
I read an article once discussing how some lesbian rights advocates were tired of lesbian rights being treated as an afterthought or a footnote tacked onto the larger gay men’s rights issue. But that’s a pretty far cry from saying there’s a natural resentment that needs to be studied!
There exist some lesbians who hate men, gay and/or otherwise, and some - maybe even most - of those are left-leaning. That in itself is an insufficient basis for drawing broader conclusions about entire subcultures.
Since I suspect most of the responses to this will be personal opinions or anecdotal, let’s move it to IMHO. If there are studies, they can still be posted there.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
IMHO people who use the term “leftist” are extremely immersed in right-wing culture.
Then there are those people who will refer to ‘right-wing’ but never to ‘left-wing’. Our bird has only one wing! That’s also sometimes a tipoff to somebody’s views.
Maybe ‘leftist’ is vaguely pejorative but it’s mainly descriptive. But the idea that one side of the spectrum is the ‘middle’ and only their opponents are ‘far’ or a ‘wing’ is a conceit you see on both the left and ring wings, or among leftists and rightists. 
On the original question it’s like the other recent thread about gay men being ‘nice’. There are competing stereotypes. One stereotype of either gay men or lesbians is that they’re more feminine/masculine so more on the wavelength of straight women/men as friends. The other (or another at least) stereotype is the gay men and lesbians have the natural cats v dogs conflict with the opposite sex that straight people have, but no need to curry favor with the opposite sex to get sex. Both can’t be universally true.
**Lesbian women with leftist political thinking. **
Your words are strange to me.
Just how many Republican Lesbians do you know? There must be some but I haven’t met any.
I think that’s a salient point. I do know Log Cabin lesbians, and none of them are radical separatists. I also know radical lesbian separatists, and to the extent that they interact with the larger society, they are involved in very leftist causes, and they do things that would get them labeled leftists-- they’re vegetarian or vegan, they reuse and recycle to the extreme, if they own a car, it’s a Prius, some don’t vote, and the ones that do won’t vote for men.
Now, radical separatists are certainly less than 1% of lesbians-- I doubt it’s that many, but that’s the highest estimate I’d believe, and I’m sure it’s much smaller, but they’re the ones whose sexuality and politics are first of all, intertwined, and second of all, worn on their sleeves, so you remember them. You meet one, and she may be the fifth lesbian you have spoken to that day, but she’s the only one whose sexuality you were aware of, and also the only one whose politics you were aware of.
It’s kinda like, how, if you aren’t a Christian, you often even up with a bad impression of Christians, because the ones you hear from the most are the members of the tiny Westboro Baptist Church.
Left-leaning lesbian checking in.
No, I don’t hate gay men. Many of my best friends have been and are gay men.
The prejudices I have observed have most often been in the other direction, that of gay men disliking lesbians, particularly butchy women.** Purely anecdotally,** I’ve encountered gay men who adhere to the “body beautiful” doctrine and have some scorn for lesbians who are, in their opinion, overweight, dressed badly, mannish, working class, and so on.
Many gay men are under pressure to be forever youthful, muscular, and successful earners; it may be that lesbians who are not these things are a repository for dislike. There are some gay men who seem to prefer socializing with “lipstick lesbians” (feminine gay women) and straight women (some of whom are “fag hags,” excuse the terminology) over more masculine-presenting women.
And, yes, there are lesbians who may choose not to socialize much with gay men and there are also radical contingencies who are staunch separatists. Gays and lesbians are not a monolithic culture, we are individuals with our own likes and dislikes.
So, that’s my .02.
Anecdote, not data, but I have never met a lesbian who refused to associate with, specifically, gay men, but was fine with straight men. Lesbians who are separatists are not OK with any men, while other lesbians who don’t have a problem with men per se, may not know many men other than gay men, because they know gay men from support groups and activist groups. A woman I dated for a while was best friends with a gay man she knew from a gay AA group. We used to go to a sort of open mike coffee house thing for lesbians and gay men, and so we knew some other gay men that way; for one of her birthdays, we went to a drag show, because a guy she knew was performing, and she wanted to see him. She absolutely had no problem with men, she just didn’t know very many straight men-- mostly just the ones she worked with.
Not gay here, but I had a plethora of out gay people in the cubicles around me. It was interesting over the years to watch people guess if it was OK to make references to that anomaly about our department. Anyway, I heard the phrase, “You straight boys have it easy. Women don’t care what you look like.” plenty of times and got an earful of how competitive out there. Not a big sample but then, that’s where I formed my opinions before the internet.
There was also an out lesbian of the ‘not that interested in dressing up’ kind. Super liberal I’m sure. They were all friends but there was much grumbling when the LGBT club was formed over what direction it should take is what I heard, from one side. Some friendship were broken. But that fight was pure internal politics.
Is it possible that it’s a personal situation? That one gay friend maybe likes to make sexist jokes or something that a lefty lesbian might not find appealing?
I can’t deny that lesbians who hate men exist. But I personally haven’t encountered people like that except maybe briefly in passing. It might have been more common in the past, I don’t know, but it certainly sounds strange to me nowadays.
Lesbian separatism is a thing, but I’m not sure why anyone looking to fash the patriarchy would differentiate between gay/straight men in favor of straight men. It’s usually the other way around, with gay guys being seen as the allies.
Or they’re self-identifying leftists who want to make sure everyone knows they’re not a liberal. Libs might pretend to be progressive, but no further.
This is what I was thinking. All of the gay and lesbian folks of my acquaintance have been somewhere on the left-leaning side of things between “Centre-left” to “Full-on New Age Hippy stereotype”.
Given that the rightist side is, generally somewhere between “you do you but keep it away from me” and at worst thinks they should all be made to go away forever, I’m not really surprised.
Q.E.D.