The Assimilation of The Gay Man

 

Jennifer Wright is found a good story on Congrats magazine and shortly you can read it below. But before going there I wanted to write about gay marriage and assimilation being that today is a big day for French gay citizens.
 About one part of the total picture of gay acceptance in the 14 countries including France as of today, that have allowed same sex marriage to take place just as straights couples do. 
We don’t know which part of the equation is made the world start realizing that gays are part of their population and they cannot be treated as they were from Mars. In the long run is bad for any government to have a large portion of their population in hiding and very unhappy. That’s the stuff that forced revolutionary change is made of and if we learn nothing from the emancipation of black people and women we should have learnt that is better to give what is not ours than to have someone come and take it from us. The latter always leave wounds and scars that are very hard to heal.

For something revolutionary to take effect you need many forces to work in tandem to make a combustible material become active. The current changes on how gay men look compare to how they looked during stonewall is different. Or is it? This is the part that becomes interesting. Gay men(ladies please forgive me for constantly mentioning men, but men particularly if they are white have a lot of power and they allow things to happen or not), have always been just gay men in the closet trying to assimilate to what the straights were doing.

 At the beginning of the fight for gay rights the most people that were out were men that tended to be more in the femme way as contrary to the butch way.  They had no choice but to come out because people already assumed they were gay. They started the movement and even though things moved, sometimes they moved back words. There was a lot going on particularly a new deadly virus that attacked the gay population first and then it moved to kill anybody. This generation of people now tend to be more conservative looking (men and women)and because of the flow of information they know when they are being fed “B.S.”  If this generation is told that we have the power to change and become straight? "Well let me look it up", let see if there are studies? Has it been successful in any major way? That’s how information changes myths into dust. 

These conservative looking men (less femme ) starting coming out and that’s where we see the change in the gay man. Has this made a difference in obtaining our rights?  I believe it does but only in part of a puzzle that has many parts. We are in the middle of it and it’s going to take the people after us to figure out the history of this wonderful change. No the world is not going to change it’s rotating speed or direction on it’s axis but it will be a better place for many that just want to be treated as other people. Hunger, violence etc.will keep being what they are for the time being, but one hole as been plugged. 
Adam Gonzalez

We’re supposed to live in an era where all gay people are acceptable, right? Well, obviously not everywhere, but among most forward thinking people? So it’s a bit disconcerting to see the divisions between different “types” of gay people that still exist among homosexuals.

One man recounts his story in Congrats magazine and says:

Peter is a gay man I slept with once. I met him in a gay bar when I was living in New York, and I thought he was perfect. He worked with homeless queer youth. He had a dog. He was a little taller than average, and stocky, wearing jeans, a T-shirt and Puma high tops. He was bearded. He said things like “you’re so unlike everyone your age” (he was 11 years older than I) and “I never go home with anyone the night I meet them.” When he did come home with me and we were naked in my bed, he kissed my neck, and I moaned, high-pitched and breathy. He stopped, looked me in the eye and said, “Don’t do that. It’s faggy.”

Now, this was several years ago, and I hadn’t yet learned that people like Peter are to be either ignored, laughed at or taught, so I became a caricature of “not faggy”: I grunted (no more moaning), I pretended that I wasn’t hurt by what he said (feelings are for girls, as I recalled learning during childhood), and I tried to act as masculine as possible, because that is the opposite of faggy, the opposite of the femme gay man who gestures, speaks quickly in a high-pitched voice and says “darling.” I became that silly thing because I wanted Peter to love me.

Ugh, wow, Peter sounds like a jerk. I have been with some not great men who have tried to change basic parts of me. However, none have wanted to change anything as basic as the fact that I made noises in bed. In this case, that seems like it points to some problems with the culture in general.

The author goes on to explains:

Assimilation was successful in that discrimination against LGBT people is now illegal in many forms, but it also created an “acceptable gay man,” and he was white and masculine and certainly did not say “darling.” It also created and validated a favorite excuse for anti-gay bigotry, “I’m fine with gay people as long as they don’t flaunt it,” because suddenly there were gay people who were not “normal.” “Normal” gay men today ape that heterosexual excuse for bigotry by blaming “abnormal” gays for the the maltreatment of gays as a whole.

Peter is a “normal” gay man, so when my behavior started to drift outside “normal,” he reprimanded me much in the same way that police officers, gym teachers or parents might have done in the ’50s (and today, to be fair). And although the ’50s were over 60 years ago, that attitude remains pervasive: Look at any on gay dating website or smartphone app and you’ll see our twisted heritage as “preferences” based on a hierarchy of who can pass as a successful straight man: “Looking for masc, musc, no femmes, white only.”

To some extent people always love people who represent extreme stereotypes of their gender. That is why women go for hyper-masculine action stars, and men go for Playboy bunnies.

However, accepting people really means treating people within a community as individuals, and not saying that there is a “right” or “wrong” way to be this or that. There is only a wrong way if your behavior is hurtful to people, and making moaning noises during sex is not hurtful. That’s as true for gay people as it is for straight ones. It’s not “okay to be gay” provided you look and act exactly like an action star. It’s just “okay to be gay”, period.

Picture via WENN