This week on two sites I frequent, Gawker and Joe. My. God., there has been some gay controversy (gaytroversy, if you will). Basically, it boils down to the gay community, it is achangin', or at least some think it is.
I truly believe everyone should get to be who they want to be and live how they want to live. I lead a hum-drum suburban life, and, with some caveats and qualifications, enjoy it. I'm really temperamentally suited to it. So I know it's kind of surprising/hypocritical of me that I almost vomit at the implication these articles make, about how and gay people need to stop it with hooking up on Manhunt and living in cities and being subversive and settle into "normalcy," which is old-married-couple monogamy and white picket fence suburban conformity because we're coming out earlier these days and everyone loves and accepts us. Ugh.
I'm sorry, but it seems to me that the new "aspiration" of the (affluent, urban, white) cognoscenti is basically 1950s June Cleaver with a broomstick, sweeping all the drag queens and "in-your-face" activists and sluts and go-go boys back under the carpet because (a lucky few) of us don't need them anymore and we'd really just rather be like the straights, because if we're domesticated enough and show then we can be just as boring as they are, they'll love us and give us equal rights and stuff. *sigh* It's just a new sort of closet, and so many are running into it with gusto and smiles on their faces, and tut-tuts for the ones who choose to live a different way.
Be who you want to be. Live how you want to live. Don't try to conform to some regressive, patriarchal relic of the past just because you think it makes straight people like us more, or that it's the "right" thing to do to adopt 2.3 babies like everyone else. Don't live a life of drugs and parties and meaningless Internet hookups you don't actually enjoy just because that's what's "expected" of gay men. Don't go out to bars if you don't like that; don't stay in checking Manhunt compulsively if you'd really rather be out there having fun and building communities with your activist friends. We should all live our own lives, and damn what anyone else thinks; our rights and dignity and happiness aren't dependent on what the straight world or "mainstream gays" think, they're innate and inalienable. We're here, we're queer, we're crazy diverse; get used to it!
3 comments:
Cheers you Mr. Bourgeois.
are they relaunching hetero vs homo normative again? blegh
I thought they had this out last year after Dagon's rant? Could it not settle into their tiny brains that maybe some want both, or each, or none? What is up with the inherent desire for uniformity all the while calling it freedom? Maybe I don't want to worry about my bf giving me aids or syphilis? is that too much to desire?
Yup. But if you choose to fry your brain you can take responsibility for it, regardless of the gender you're fucking. I don't care to see self-destructive behaviour paraded as some sort of 'liberation'. There are plenty of straight people out there doing exactly the same thing without the excuse that they're 'subverting' something.
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