Cultural ex-gayism

Anyone who knows me knows that when I hear queer people describe themselves or their desired mate/fuck buddy as "straight-acting", it's like nails on a chalkboard. I cringe, because there's too much internalized homophobia and self-contempt packed into that one phrase. And it's hard not to take it as a personal insult towards me, because what's wrong with acting gay? I'm not saying that gay men and lesbians should act like walking stereotypes, but that we should all be free to be ourselves, and, in that way, we can create our own identities and collude to construct archetypes of queerness that are diverse, inclusive, and constantly falling apart.

In other words, we should be who we are and love ourselves for it.

So when I found out about this, I just wanted to throw up. It's a site for gay men who describe themselves as straight-acting. Not much of it is up right now, although they do have a cool site intro, which makes me wonder how much work people have put into this. But you can take their Guy Quiz, think hard about the inane details that normal people don't obsess over, and, like I did, get told:

Hardly anyone would be able to pick you as a homo boy. All your actions are carefully crafted in a way that they never appear to be considered too fem. Only a fellow level 2 -- buddy might suspect you with the proper gaydar and it's just the way you like it.

After that, stroll into the message boards and read tens of thousands of posts about how everyone's just "relaxed" and "just being me". Funny how for gay men the act of not caring about your gender performance is itself a gender performance that one has to carefully maintain (c'mon, we all know what "chill" means in a gay.com personal). I wonder if that's developed the same way in lesbian culture?

Anyway, I'd have to say that this site actually affected me more when I first found it than Fred Phelps' page. Not because it made me angry, and it didn't make me sad either, it just made me rethink a lot about gay male culture. I knew that we definitely have an issue with trying to be like straight people. I just didn't think that people would make a snazzy webpage out of that sort of internalized homophobia. All that effort, and do these people really think that homophobes are going to accept them because of it?

Oh, and their T-shirt model doesn't wear pants. WEIRD!

OK, I haven't posted in a while...

Probably because I was annoying myself with the whole "we" thing, I haven't posted in a while. So I'm going to pretend like it was all part of an upgrade to Q-Bomb 2.0 for the New Year. New features include:

• No more "we" to refer to just me
• Not everything will be ironic, there will be a few sincere posts here and there
• Weekly features "The Homosexual Agenda", "Wednesday with a Humorless Liberal", "Qomics for Queers", and "This Week in Pink"
• Back-dating on posts to make it seem like I've actually been updating content on a regular basis
• A renewed promise to learn Photoshop so I can do something about the way this webpage looks

Right Wing News: Andrew Sullivan swings for both teams, decidedly annoying

The 2006 Warblogger Awards just came out (I'm sure you were waiting at the edges of your seats!). It's not really remarkable, they think that Michelle Malkin provides some of the best original content, when her blog seems to us to just be a bunch of blockquotes, except for the fact that Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish was rated the most annoying right-wing blogger and the second-most annoying left-wing blogger.

What? His obsessiveness on petty issues and then giving them immature names (like, most recently, "Mormon undies" and "gay peepees") is not endearing?

What's non-ironically surprising is that they can't decide if he's a conservative or a liberal. The man is a self-described libertarian who wrote a book with the word conservative in the title (and not in the conquer-and-destroy way, the I'm-proud-that-I'm-one way) and loves big pharma and hates non-discrimination laws, and that's all just from today.