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!

Gathering stuff...

I'm getting everything together to start posting today, and I'll do a bit more than usual to make up for the lack of posting yesterday. I'm a second-shift blogger, and I fully intended to post yesterday, but a bottle of Skol vodka got the better of me. :)

The first post I was putting together was a summary of state marriage/civil union/domestic partnership developments from the week. I generally don't like to post about things like that because the constant relegation of agency to the government, which queer people on some level have to do regarding forming relationships, is demeaning. When framed in terms of being allowed to get married in such-and-such a state, we're relinquishing our ability to determine our own sexual destinies. The only other beings in our society that are told with whom they can have sex are dogs, horses, and livestock. This is why I prefer framing the issue as the state or federal governments respecting our relationships - they're going to exist either way.

With that in mind, I still see a lot of winning and losing rhetoric surrounding marriage equality. While it's true that we can win or lose some specific benefits from the state that have a material impact on our lives, it's not true that we could actually lose the overall war unless we let it happen. The stated goal of the anti-gay movement is theoretically impossible. They say they want to eliminate same-sex relationships (they already exist in abundance), prevent queer people from becoming parents (we already are in many ways outside of same-sex marriage), and, ultimately, prevent people from being gay (fat chance of that happening).

Since their stated goals are impossible, it leaves us to decipher their real goals. First, they want to materially harm us just because they plain don't like us. You can see it in their "gays are going to Hell" mentality because the Bible doesn't say anything about gays going to Hell. Sure, there are passages about male prostitutes or male-on-male rapists going to Hell, or not inheriting the Kingdom of God, but gay and lesbian people as we know them? I think the reason that they say we're going to Hell is more an outgrowth of them just putting anyone they don't like in Hell, which people have been doing ever since Dante's Divine Comedy. The result of that guttural antipathy is to be as mean and demeaning as they can be to us in this world.

Second, they want us to disappear, also because they just plain don't like us. They say that we're taking over television, when we don't even get represented in a fair 5% of TV relationships. They say we're throwing our sexuality in their faces, but considering the lengths most queer people go to to hide their sexual orientation from others, if they think we're throwing it around, it can only be because they get stuck on whatever small representation of queerness that they might have the occasion to see.

So while their first real goal is definitely possible, and is definitely worth fighting against, we shouldn't tie our self-worth to such legislation. I know that you're thinking, Well, duh, Alex, thanks for the heads-up. But every time I read or hear queer people getting into heated discussions about the state of marriage equality law, I have to wonder how much of our self-esteem is whittled away by our opponents' attempts to disrespect our relationships.

Anyway, this is (partly) why I don't post every little detail of marriage equality news here as it happens.

Happy No Name-Calling Week!

Listen to this wonderful idea from GLSEN:

No Name-Calling Week is an annual week of educational activities aimed at ending name-calling of all kinds and providing schools with the tools and inspiration to launch an on-going dialogue about ways to eliminate bullying in their communities.

This week is GLSEN's No Name-Calling Week, and it seems like a really great set of lesson plans that tackle the issue of bullying in schools in a way that kids can understand (to read suggested K-5 lesson plans, click here). Bullying is a big-time LGBT issue because it's a powerful weapon that our heterosexist society wields daily against queer people. Gender policing through bullying is a constant, direct attack on GLBT youth's self-esteem, ensures that they feel meaningless and abnormal, and takes away their entitlement to basic rights by forcing them to internalize heterosexual supremacy. The resulting tangible impacts of bullying are a direct result of LGBT youth losing the right to achieve and translate into an economic disparity later in life.

So of course something like this is going to attract negative attention from anti-gay forces. The AFA has "Sodomy 101: Gay activists are transforming public schools into propaganda factories" as their top story today, and a group of anti-gay parents got riled up over this. These people are only concerned when the current hierarchy being upset, so this shows that GLSEN is going in the right direction. I don't recall ever reading anti-gay propaganda about how the HRC's Buying for Equality Guide is destroying families. (To clarify, I'm really glad that they have that guide for moral reasons, but as a strategy to fight heterosexism, let's be honest....)

The great thing about these lesson plans is how simple and age-appropriate they are, and how being opposed to the content of them really shows anti-gay folk for how callous they really are. For example, in the first lesson at the elementary school level, kids are asked to think of names that they like to be called and names that they don't like to be called, sharing those names with the class, and then making a list of "Names I want to be called" and "Names I don't want to be called". This gets kids thinking about the importance of constructing one's own identity, listening to others' feelings and respecting their wishes, and thinking about the consequences of their words. Truly radical, because the ability to construct one's own identity is at the crux of queer self-esteem.