10 gay positions we need to ditch
Shallow and stupid. You, not him
I’ve noticed two things about gay life in London recently.
- Loads of people are sick of the gay scene’s brainless commercialism and petty cliques.
- There is a real fire under a lot of people, from many different gay subcultures, who want something better.
Exactly how to go about making gay public life better for us all, however, is a tricky question. On a small, intimate level, I think a good start would be to try treating each other with more respect, kindness and tolerance. While there is a lot of generosity and mutual support out there among gay people – I experience it daily, in part from people who read this site – I can’t help feeling we could all approach each other with a little more love and a little less judgement. I need to do this as much as anyone. In the past I’ve been quick to reject and slow to forgive, happy to dis people I didn’t know because they made me feel insecure, ugly or out of touch (even in print).
But if you want to change, where do you start? From my own viewpoint, here are some phrases and standpoints not all that uncommon among gays that I think we could all do with ditching.
1. “No Asians please: no offence, just not my type” on Internet profiles.
Totally unsexy. You, not him.
What so out of over a million Asian men in the world, you can confidently say that you don’t find a single one attractive? And are you really so constantly inundated with offers of Asian loving that you need to make an excluding banner statement making sure that Asian men don’t dare to join your club?
2.“Muscleboys are all vacuous idiots”
Really? So you’ve given every single one a personality and IQ test? Demonising a whole group of people because you suspect they don’t want to sleep with you is hardly a sign of intelligence.
3.“I have no respect for people who don’t look after themselves”
There are a thousand ways to “look after yourself” – say, spending time with your friends, enjoying food or studying – that have no visible effect on your body. To assume that exercise is the only way people can boost their health and happiness suggests that you are doing a poor job of it yourself.
4.“Why do so many Lesbians want to be men?”
Because they don’t. That some lesbians want to ditch a conventional feminine image that they find both oppressive and a bit silly on them is one thing, changing sex is another entirely. Just because some find female gender stereotypes a cage doesn’t mean they want to swap theirs for ours.
Wants to be a man. You, not her.
5.“I can’t stand politics, I just want to have fun”
Don’t we all want to have fun? Politics can sickening and dull, but ignore them and you may find yourself chewed up and spat out by the people who have chosen to act on your behalf.
6.“I can’t stand queeny gays. I only like real men”
Everyone has their fetishes, but stigmatising people you consider to be less than butch smacks of projected self-loathing– especially as so many “fem-haters” have a hint of campness to their behaviour that they’re unwilling to accept.
7. “Ewwww, this place is full of Breeders!”
Granted, it was straight people who started it on the prejudice front, but stigmatising people for fancying the opposite sex and having kids makes no one look big or clever.
8. “You don’t know the tracklist for Kylie’s new album and you dare to call yourself a gay man?!?”
For the record I AM familiar with the track list for Kylie’s new album (and quite like it), but the assumption that being gay automatically means a love of mainstream gay icons is a pain in the arse for the thousands who couldn’t give a toss about Liza or Gaga. Likewise the belief that all gays have an innate aesthetic sense makes shabby gays like me, with razor cuts, magnolia walls and beaten up furniture, feel inadequate.
9. “He/she’s such a fag hag / chicken hawk / muscle mary / rice queen etc”
There’s a venerable camp tradition behind a lot of these terms and no one wants gay chat to turn bloodless – but it’s depressing that, whoever you are and whatever you do, gay slang will find a way to make you sound ugly.
10. “Gays are just so shallow and dysfunctional – except my friends and me, we’re all lovely”
Bullshit – there is plenty of love and kindness out there. Seek and you shall find.
Popularity: 34% [?]
Liking the article a lot it’s all true. How can we as homosexuals affect changes in the way we are viewed by society if we aren’t united ourselves.
Best of your pieces I’ve read so far!
You’ve hit the nail on the head! Love this article
Gay people constitute some of the most homophobic people I have ever met. Similarly, black people some of the most racist.
As a psychotherapist I recognise this as projection. Unfortunately to the majority of people it is just plain hate.
In order to sort out the collective projective unconscious of our communitites, we need to tend to the mental and emotional health and well being of the individual.
In other words, personal development. Groups, individual therapy, workshops, reading self help books, whatever works to raise self awareness. Just do it and get to know who you are and what drives you. Then you can begin to understand and eventually tackle what comes out of your mouth before you’ve put your brain in gear!
Great text. The “position” that bothers me the most is prejudice against camp/feminine guys. So many years fighting for acceptance and gay rights and now all this bullshit about who is more macho in the scene. You see that a lot in the Bear scene, most bears think because they are hairy, have a massive beard and wear a Fred Perry top they can consider themselves more masculine than the G.A.Y. twinks. Yeah right, until the moment you take them to bed and the “straight-acting” mask drops and they want to wear their sister’s high heels.
One things I don’t like about the gay scene in London is the fact that everything is a ghetto, pubs for bears, for muscled guys, for non-circumsized Jews, for gay hobbits, for Asian boys into older men, I find that frustrating and in my opinion it creates separation and prejudice. The nicest places are mixed / gay friendly, where you can have fun with straight your friends as well.
Awesome post!
Amen to all that (unless said sentences uttered by gay men are said with intelligent irony and dry sense of humour…).
well done for having the balls to say all that!!
Great article, but I’d add one more: please can we ditch ’str8 acting’?!
I have a few friends in the community who are certainly guilty of 2 or sometimes even up to 4 of the above. I myself would have to certainly say i’ve been guilty of numbers 2, 6, and 10. 8 only on a sarcastic level.
I wouldn’t say that i necessarily accuse muscly or butch guys specifically of being vacuous, but there are many sub-types in the gay world who i might assume to be so, and i have ended up right on a number of occasions. It’s not led me to pre-judge, but i think i certainly end up judging a venue, site, or type of man from his Facebook profile, based on previous experiences with the same sort.
Though I have a few queeny friends, i don’t judge such a means of expression purely on its level of femininity. Hell, as druid who works with Goddesses, i’d have to be the last sort of person to act like that, and i wish pagan communities had more gay men in them especially of that type! But i think it’s easy to wish that such men wouldn’t be air-headed or shallow and then reject them when it turns out they are, mostly because in my case i find that like so many things in life the whole gay thing seems to just be about ticking everyone elses’ appropriate boxes and expecting very little if you don’t. Perhaps it’s a little hypocritical of me, given such views, but just as you would say that the heteros started it first Josh, i would say the gay community pushed me into my little corner of veiled pseudo-homophobia.
Hence why i’d also pre-judge so many gays. But i guess i have kept a good number as friends up to now, on whatever levels though mostly non-sexual. And so as a result i guess i like to think that such friends make a good standard which most gays ought to live up to. Again somewhat hypocritical coming from the guy who can’t stand ticking endless boxes. But if it’s because my friends are generally noble and generous, what’s so wrong with asking for the same positive qualities in others?
Perhaps if i do have prejudices, i simply need to turn them into affirmative actions, to get the right sort of men in my life, and hopefully a special enough one (or two or three
to stick by me.
Thanks for what could be considered some helpful input there, Josh.
This is a great article. I really appreciate seeing it. I’m not a Londoner (American, living in Indiana). Much of what you said in the article fits American men, too (in fact, I can’t think of any that doesn’t). I do find it interesting (not a criticism) that one point of the article is denouncing the idea that gay people are dysfunctional, but the other nine points about gay people really point to our dysfunction.
But to your point…if one looks for love, one can find it…and that is valuable in and of itself. Again, hello from America…and thank you.
Matt Pearcey