Category: Gay Politics

In the second post on gay issues in a row, Tom decides to take a certain amount of issue with Mark Lawson’s article in the Guardian today on Will & Grace. Tom decides particularly to take issue with this excerpt:

Presented as dramatic courage, Jack really represents cowardice, because he’s there as a contrast with Will’s discreet homosexuality. Jack goes to a gay gym, Will to a mixed one. In Will, the writers have created a gay character who neatly avoids the two aspects of gay men which most provoke homophobia: genital activity and effeminacy. It’s a bit like a sit-com about a football supporter in which the central character never bothers to go to matches and prefers to watch The South Bank Show instead of Match Of The Day.

There are such people, but the characterisation seems dictated by caution rather than authenticity. Another insurance against switch-off is built into the plot. At least in the early episodes – as in the first two reels of The Next Best Thing – there’s nothing to discourage Joe and Joanna Six-Pack from the belief that Will isn’t really gay and that he and Grace will eventually realise that they are Harry and Sally rather than Arthur and Martha.

How many gay people do you know? No really. Think about it. How many gay people do you know? Ok then – now take the number of people you know – not know well, just know – and divide it by twenty. Studies be damned, this is a guess – some people say it’s one in ten, some that it’s one in ninety. That’s irrelevant. The fact is that across work, friends, friends of friends, family, friends of family, people you knew at University, people you knew at school, that out of all those people, many many more were gay than you had the slightest idea.

So somehow these people ‘pass’ for straight – or to put it another way, somehow these people do not come across according to your preconceptions of what it means to be gay. They probably don’t work in the media. They probably don’t wear purple lurex or get dressed up in drag, or have a really big thing about Liza Minelli. Some people will. Good. Excellent. But we’re talking about a huge and diverse community here – of queens who like Travis, queens who like Bach, queens who like the Sex Pistols, queens who like Napalm Death, queens who like Britney Spears, queens who – for god’s sake – like Queen.

Now I’ve no doubt that Will & Grace is a fairly reactionary show which represents a fairly anaemic idea of what it means to be gay. But is Friends any less anaemic a view of what it is to be straight? Or are straight people really all super-annuated three years olds whose obsession with caffeine has driven them close to paranoid dementia? But we’re getting away from the point, now. So answer me this, Mr Lawson – would it be any less mentally closeted to fill a TV show with the kind of queer that you can identify readily? We are, after all, everywhere.

A few years ago, while at University, I was quite active in gay politics – I was publicity officer at Bristol’s Lesbian and Gay Society for several years. I made some nice posters, and stood in the foyer of student buildings asking people to sign petitions for an equal age of consent. An equal age of consent that still doesn’t exist, I might add. I’d get people not looking me in the eye, and saying that they “just didn’t agree with that kind of thing”.

Every so often I’d be forced to listen to people tell me that “being gay is a choice and an immoral one at that”. But I’d be meeting young gay people who were too scared to come out the closet or who had been thrown out of their homes (and once stabbed) by members of their own families.

But it was always the statistics that made it clear to me why I was involved in the politics of it all. Gay teenagers were two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than straight teenagers. They were two to three times more likely to succeed as well. They were considerably more likely to be living on the streets, to suffer from depression or to be driven to cut themselves due to low self-esteem. When I was in journalism school I wrote a piece on a child who had been systematically taunted for being gay at school. He committed suicide as a result. Ironically, even after death, no one knew for certain whether he was actually gay or not.

All this came back to me today because of this article about San Francisco’s preparation for the holiday season. While I know that the vast majority of you are pretty gay-friendly (you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise), I’d be really grateful if you’d read this and give a thought to how you’d react if your son or daughter, or your best friend, or even if your mother or father after many years finally worked up the courage to tell you they were gay. And perhaps you could even think how you might make it easier for them to tell you if they were.

OK so it’s a standard conversation. You’re out with women and you’re chatting away about someone who’s just fucked them over in some way and they say things like, “All Men are pointless”, or “I’ve never met a man who didn’t like football”. And then you look a little perturbed and say, “Well I’m a man, and I’m not pointless and I don’t like football”, and then they look at you in a slightly conspiratorial / slightly pitying fashion and say, “Well straight men – you know what I mean”. They might as well actually say “proper” men.

OK so it’s a standard conversation. You’re out with women and you’re chatting away about someone who’s just fucked them over in some way and they say things like, “I wish straight men could be more like gay men – you know, cultured, tidy, good cooks that never belch.” And then you look a little perturbed and say, “Well I’m a gay man, and I belch and am a mess and eat pizza and watch bad television”, and then they sit there in a slightly embarrassed / slightly appalled way and say, “Well, other gay men. You know what I mean.” They might as well say “proper” poofs.

There’s a website called Guyville and its tagline is, “Where Men Can Be Guys” – but really it’s all about birds and sports and gadgets and shagging. It’s a bit sad really.

I’ve been through three major episodes in my quest for a decent gay identity, and none of them have really fitted right. First came the pre-gay “Can’t we be just like everyone else” episode, where I wore what everyone else wore, sneered at gay people “celebrating” their difference on television and tried to cover up any “unnatural” urges I might have had to classmates at school and Uni.
Then came the early-gay “apologist” mode, where I appeared comfortable enough about the whole thing to declare myself gay to friends and family, and to live as a gay man, with the continual proviso that I should act in a politically appropriate way. This was when I was involved at quite a substantial level in student gay politics.
And then came the mid-gay, “fuck it” approach to the world, which is all about not allowing myself to pander to the whims of straight bigots or gay bigots, but just get on with things as loudly and annoyingly as possible. This stage has been great fun, and I sometimes wonder why so many people seem to spend so much time in the first two stages before realising the wonder of being a bloody nuisance whenever they get the chance.
With all this in mind, however, I decided to have a wander around some gay news, information and shopping sites – to do a survey, as it were, of the state of the gay (inter)nation. And unfortunately, I immediately came up against this: Gay E-cards so hideous and twee that it’s like my grandmother knitted them in a gesture of political solidarity.
I fear this is the final stage of the evolution of one’s gay identity. The individual concerned becomes so comfortable with being gay, that they actually start to return to the childish state of taking it seriously, and are again completely unable to see any irony or humour in anything at all. Only this time they’re buying each other bunches of chrysanthemums and washer dryers. I swear to god, the people who think these cards are cool can no longer be anything even vaguely resembling human. If this is the future of gay life, then I am a resolute homophobe.

There’s a really bizarre article about Richard Hatch, the so-called “Evil Queen” of America’s “Survivor” (which we don’t get over here in UK) over at the Washington Post: “Hard to Beat, Impossible to Avoid“. I kind of skim read the article until my eyes got caught by this little paragraph:

“The straight world is conditioned to think of homosexuality as a handicap, a weakness, a fey stereotype. The gay rights movement tries to present a warm, united front and yet somehow amplifies the notion that gay men and lesbians are marginal, lacking in power.”

Whatever the rest of the article says, this is a truth that will echo down through the ages. I prefer the “We Are Everywhere” approach. I’d rather be a super-villian than a cringing victim.

Jonno and Sturtle have been discussing my “anti-gay-marriage” piece.

“I understand what he’s trying to say: historically, marriage has been a sort of institutionalized inequity, so if queer politics are about reshaping norms and ideas of what’s acceptable and getting rid of social inequity, why adopt marriage as one of the planks in our platform? Unfortunately, that sort of philosophy falls on some very hard rocks in the face of legalities that prevent g/l/b/t partners from securing inheritances, visitation rights, and countless other benefits that legally joined partners enjoy (except, of course, in the great state of Vermont).” [Sturtle]

This misses my point, to an extent. I was arguing that we deserved the right to marriage, even if we didn’t take it up, but that if we were going to have “legally sanctioned relationships” at all (which I would rather we didn’t), they should be considerably more diverse. To make a further point: rather than bemoaning equal access to the financial advantages of hetersexual marriage, perhaps we should be removing those advantages and spreading the financial awards between all of us.

This point is particularly relevant for Jonno‘s comments:

“I would’ve agreed with a lot more of what Tom had to say about gay marriage (and the article he quotes at length) before I had a mortgage to deal with and started resenting the fact that Richard and I pay considerably more taxes than a het couple would in our situation.”

But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? They have chosen to operate in a similar relationship to marriage (even though they have also chosen to ignore aspects of the heterosexual equivalent) and now think it is unfair that they cannot reap the material rewards that go along with it. I’m more interested in why they are not concerned about the unfairness of people who have not chosen to occupy such a relationship helping to subsidy the lives of married straights! And in this I am asking EVERY single person, whether they be straight or gay, promiscuous or monogamous, serially monogamous etc. etc. etc. Why are married people being financially rewarded?

Just read an article on Salon.com called: “Same-sex marriage – I don’t care if it is legal, I still think it’s wrong — and I’m a lesbian.” and it brought home again a lot of the things that I was thinking about yesterday while watching Queer as Folk 2. The situation is this. Gay politics in the 80s was about being worthy, reasonable, “rising above” abuse, scrabbling for rights. And to an extent, that is still what it is about. It mirrored to the legal aspects of liberal feminism. But feminism progressed, and so has gay politics.

Now, for me at least, gay politics isn’t like that any more. For me the horrors are the Uncle Tom like behaviour of happy little queens on TV and in films (stand up, you abomination Three to Tango) and the assimilationist politics that means that just because gay people are now beginning to have the rights that everyone else (and by this I mean straight, male, european caucasions of a certain age – I suppose) has, that they should want to do the same things that everyone else does. That is, of course, when it doesn’t offend people’s delicate sensibilities. “Let’s let them be like us,” goes out the cry, “and if there are things they are allowed to do, but just can’t, well that’s their problem isn’t it?”

Two examples:

• Gay Marriage
  Marriage is a legal institution and it comes with a range of legal and financial advantages and disadvantages. It is an option for co-habiting heterosexuals, but not for most gay people. Should it be an option – YES. Should a non-“institution of marriage”-type form of legally recognised relationship be instituted (for both straight and gay people) – YES. Should gay people “get married”. It’s up to them – but I’d say no. Why do it? For whom? Are there no alternatives that might provide better options for gay people? Will lesbians have the same relationships as gay men or straight couples? Are there no alternatives that might provide better options for relationships that are currently grouped as “heterosexual”? The point of gay politics has been to fight for a space to be different. And that difference doesn’t end when you are out of bed (or wherever it is people have sex nowadays)…
• Children
  Most gay men I know have spent at least some portion of their lives thinking that they’d never have children. The first thing parents say when they find out you’re gay is “No grandchildren for me”. The first thing friends say when they hear about coming out to your parents is “It must be a shock for them realising they are never going to have grandchildren”. But of course all of this is the same tacit assumption that a child must be the product of a “healthy relationship” – which encodes all kinds of things within it (the age of the respective partners, the number of people in the relationship [and I’m not talking about sex there, although I could have], their backgrounds, sexual orientations, race, occupations, preference to work or to look after children etc etc etc). By which we could easily read “normal relationship” of course. But gay people aren’t normal. That’s kind of the point. If we were normal we wouldn’t have had to fight for so much – we wouldn’t have had to fight for the right to have sex with people we love, or desire, or like – or to adopt, or not be subject to medical experiments, or to be bullied at schools, or to be thrown out of our parent’s homes. If people are happy to accept that there are different ways to have a relationship – why are they so resistant to their being different suitable relationships to bring children up within? And one of my favourite headlines recently: “Britains first gay parents” – as if the fact that they actually got a surrogate mother to conceive for them makes them any more legitimate than the thousands of gay parents who had to hide their sexuality in harder times, or who chose to conceive with a friend or ex-lover.

Laurie Essig (the writer of the Salon article) is completely correct when she says that marriage is “an institution founded in historical, material and cultural conditions that ensured women’s oppression”. That’s not to say that marriage can’t work well for a woman, but that it depends upon the adaptation of the individual to the institution or the institution to the individual. Marriage is also (as she goes on to say) founded in conditions that excluded “non-productive” sexualities, like homosexuality, masturbation, oral sex, anal sex – the list goes on indefinitely.

And I couldn’t agree more with her when she says:

“why should those of us who have organized our lives in a way that looks a lot like heterosexual marriage be afforded special recognition by the government because of that? What about people who organize their lives in threes, or fours, or ones? What about my friend who is professionally promiscuous, who for ideological and psychological and sexual reasons has refused to ever be paired with anyone? What about my sister who is straight but has never in her 40-odd years seen a reason to participate in marriage? Which group will gain state recognition next? The polygamous? The lifelong celibate?
“My point is not that we should do away with marriage but that we should do away with favoring some relationships over others with state recognition and privilege. Religions, not the state, should determine what is morally right and desirable in our personal lives. We can choose to be followers of those religions or thumb our noses at them. But the state has no place in my bedroom or family room, or in yours, either. ”

I got an e-mail from Kerry which included this open letter to Dr Laura:

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s law. I
have learned a great deal from you, and I try to share that knowledge
with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the
homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus
18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need
some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and
how to best follow them.

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a
pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They
claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?

I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus
21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for
her?

I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her
period of menstrual uncleanness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do
I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

Lev. 25:44 states that I may buy slaves from the nations that are around
us. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans but not
Canadians. Can you clarify?

I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2
clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill
him myself?

A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an
abomination (Lev. 10:10), it is a lesser abomination than
homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this?

Lev. 20:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a
defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my
vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you
can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal
and unchanging.

A Fan