Take me with you Gay Pride Parade!
I’m a gay man, white, 38 and I don’t understand the need to always differentiate myself from everyone else. I’ve known guys who only go to gay dry cleaners, eat in gay restaurants, and only shop in gay stores. It feels very divisive in my opinion and often turns into blatant heterophobia, which sounds crazy but can be just as insidious as homophobia!
I realize that I am very fortunate. Despite growing up in a very religious, rural Southern community, my entire family accepts and respects me for who I am. My friends and (eons ago, when I actually dated) my boyfriend/patrner was extended the same welcome in parents’ home that all my siblings’ husbands and wives receive. Actually, my mom loves the fact that she’ll never have to deal with a daughter-in-law! An ex-boyfriend from 12 years ago still visits my parents whenever he’s in their area and they adore him.
I was an ordained youth minister and, when I finally acknowledged that I couldn’t reconcile the church’s beliefs with the way I was born, they felt the need to not only revoke my ordination but completely excommunicate me. I was the first person in my former church’s 120+ year history to actually be excommunicated! They did so even though I acknowledged my homosexuality but had remained celibate.
A total of seven families publicly renounced their membership and quit the church in protest to my treatment. All of those people love me, gay or straight, celibate or not!
I lived in horror of losing my ‘salvation’ and being shunned by all my straight friends and family members if I ever admitted my sexual orientation. Instead, I was amazed at the support of my straight allies and didn’t lose a single real friend through the whole ordeal…
For some reason, Americans tend to celebrate the identity and existence of the “tomboy” as a legitimate and praiseworthy expression of womanhood that is independent and honest and real and still female. The opposite not so much - sissies have been largely denigrated. The whole “brony” phenomenon is a phenomenon because of this gender double standard. If a woman goes to James Bond movies with her husband and actually likes them herself and would go alone, nobody cares. If a guy says he actually liked a chick flick and doesn’t just go to them to score in bed later, he’s some sort of weirdo.
There are also guys who might arguably be called crossdressers but their point is more androgeny and destroying arbitrary gender role barriers rather than dressing like women. Sort of like women wearing pants in the first half of the 20th century - were they all women who wanted to pretend to be men or who wanted to be men? Sure, some of them probably did, but I think a lot of them just wanted to be able to wear pants and still be a woman and please leave me alone.
Question, and I hope this doesn’t come across as offensive, but why is it gay and lesbian? Isn’t that redundant?
The lesbians must be distinguished from the gay men, but you are correct that gay can apply to a man or woman. BTW, the guy I mentioned earlier that only patronizes gay businesses…his mechanic is a lesbian. She runs a shop called “My Favorite Mechanic Is A Woman”…not really relevant, but amusing…
“Gay” is sometimes used to mean specifically gay men, and it’s my impression that this was far more common pre-1990s than it is today. So the redundancy was, and to some extent probably still is, necessary to make it clear that a group really is meant to include both gay men and gay women.
:rolleyes: Yeah, sure is, what with all that recent anti-straight violence, all the gays pushing to prevent equal rights for straights, and the straight people that are in this day and age still fired and disowned for who they are by gay bosses and family members.
oh wait, no, none of that’s ever actually happened. Why in the world would you equate the actual real oppresion of queer people with a some guys’ shopping preferences?
IMO, the reason various groups should join together is solely due to facing many of the same oppressions and discriminations. People argue that trans issues are too different, but it’s no secret gay people are frequently discriminated against due to gender expression (ie, presenting as a feminine man or masculine woman).
That said, the lack of shared oppression is why the inclusion of “ally” (presumably straight and cis) and “asexual” in the acronym really doesn’t sit right with me. Glad to have you aboard in the movement, but not sure you need your names on the banner.
Well, there are certainly homosexuals who denigrate heterosexuals just as there are gay men who denigrate women (the famous “dog turd” joke comes to mind) and lesbians who denigrate men, yadda yadda yadda. But there’s a difference between persecuting someone and just being an asshole. As a straight man I’m not really feeling oppressed by the odd nasty joke and niche business; mostly I’m just vaguely annoyed. I can live with that.
I think the OP is raising an issue that’s central to advocacy movements. There’s a fundamental divide in general strategy.
One side says that you should treat each movement individually. No just lesbians and gays and bisexuals and transgenders. But other movements based on race or gender or other issues. This principle says each movement should be advocating for its own cause and alliances between movements should be based on a calculus of what your cause will gain from the alliance.
The other side sees all these issues as individual aspects of a common cause. All of these movements are fighting a common enemy: discrimination. So therefore they should all be working together. A victory for gay rights is also a victory for blacks and women and the disabled because every time society becomes more understanding of one group that’s “different” it also becomes more understanding about differences in general.
When I was in college back from 2004-2009, the acronym was LGBTQQIA (No jokes: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Allies).
Rather than splitting it up into it’s own support movements, I’m surprised they haven’t added more onto it by now.
My boyfriend helped found a group for gays of middle eastern extraction. After much vigorous debate, they settled on Southwestern Asian and North African Bay Area Queers, or SWANABAQ, for short.
My boyfriends was pulling hard for “Gayrabs,” but they felt that would feel exclusionary to Persians.
Thanks. That makes sense.
You remind me of that line in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian:
Tuskegee Airman: [to Amelia] Ma’am, I’d just like to thank you…
Amelia Earhart: For what?
Tuskegee Airman: Well, a lot of people didn’t think we could fly, either. Thanks for clearing the runway. [salutes her]
So white women’s advancement helps black men’s advancement? That would be nice! Interesting theory. (In the Civil War era, suffrage for women was sent to the back of the bus as suffrage for black men was successfully advanced. Women’s suffrage finally caught up half a century later.) I would like to live in a world where advancement for one oppressed group clears the runway for all the others at the same time. Maybe there is something to that, but I think it takes an indirect path.
I’m strongly in favor of the LGBT coalition, though since I fit into more than one of those at the same time, I’d better be! (I’m sort of a combination of L, B, and T.)
I imagine he’s talking about this joke:
Why are women like dog turds?
The older they get, the easier they are to pick up.
There can be some friction between the LG and T communities (not sure about B, I’m sure some have it). For instance, there’s that whole “cotton ceiling” thing, which seemed to be a mini-war between transsexuals who believed that cis lesbians were being “discriminatory” or “transphobic” by not wanting to have sex with transwomen (pre-op, primarily), and lesbians who made the argument that they still looked like men so they just couldn’t feel attracted to them.
It got a lot more heated (and a lot stupider on BOTH sides*) than that, but it did cause some significant friction.
- There were lesbians calling trans-lesbians “secret MRAs” or saying that they’re just straight male perverts who were trying to force lesbians to be heterosexual. There were transsexuals with a serious degree of sexual entitlement and those who tried to argue that their penis was “in no way male”, among other things. Even buried in the questionable rhetoric there were a lot of valid points beneath them, but it mostly just seemed to be a flame war.
This post makes me so fucking pissed off that I’d have to take my response to the pit. But it’s after 3 a.m. and I’m half asleep. So I’ll just say one thing: It’s those screaming flaming queens who paved the way and paid the price for those pathetic cowards who behave quietly, with dignity, within social norms.
Here here! I’m with you 100%
So what do we think of the new internet SJW thing de jour, the demisexual heteromantics?
That’s the one.