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Written with Code Igniter in PHP. Fuelled by tea.
Here's a thought. I was going to turn it into a blog, but this is all I managed to get down, so take it and be happy, there's intellectually starved people in the American midwest who go a whole week without seeing a good wholesome thought like this one:
Not all men who have sex with men agree to be called gay, and not all men who call themselves gay have sex with men, either through choice or merely lack of opportunity. To be homosexual is not an identity, it's a sexual preference. The word "gay" in itself doesn't have to be an identity, but in general usage it is. And having fought since Stonewall to establish an identity for that word and defended their right to maintain that identity, it would be a betrayal of all those proud gay men who fought if other homosexuals took their identity away through some misplaced sense of political correctness.
So you don't have to be camp and like disco to have sex with men, but maybe you do have to do those things to be gay, because that's what the (majority of?) men who call themselves gay define the word as meaning.
I don't know what identity women who call themselves gay have, and if it is related to or separate from lesbians. (And I don't much care :-) )
All content is copyright © 2000-2008 Seldo.Com and licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-sharealike license. Remix away!
Comments
Leah
First off, Stonewall and a hell of a lot of the early gay rights struggles and gay identity was driven by some of the most marginalised members of society at that time- the actual fight back against the police at Stonewall was driven by street people, various gender non-conforming folk and generally groups of people who have little or nothing to do with the modern day ‘proud gay men.’ Some slippage over history would be understandable (and is generally crucial in forming the identity of a movement) but as they formed a movement those selfsame ‘proud gay men’ systematically began to exclude and marginalise the very people who’d started the fight and suffered the most from homophobia and the intersection of other oppressions so it’s pretty galling to see that movement appropriate other’s history whilst refusing to exert themselves to try and better the lives of those on the margins.
Second, men who have sex with men is a clinical and epidemiological term- it’s used by the medical community precisely because there are a large group of men who fuck other men, but don’t ID as gay (and might have female partners or children) and so don’t use health services directed at gay men. MSMs, whether gay or not, have broadly the same risk profile for contracting STDs and it makes a lot of sense to create a term that lets you address both gay and non-gay men who sleep with other men and direct services towards them without using language that is going to stop the non-gay men accessing services that could help prevent infections. It’s not a question of taking identity away, but rather creating a specific and more expansive identity for a particular purpose (namely public health and infection preventiontreatment.)
Third, why do you think camp (or disco) equates to gay? I think you’re almost certainly committing a heuristic error in that you’re generalising from people you know, the scenes you go to or the vapid representation of gay culture in the media and assuming they represent gay culture at large. It’s also frustrating because it makes gay culture sound so horrifically shallow (although a lot of gay culture, particularly gay male youth culture does seem to be pretty shallow.) I know you see being gayqueerbi (I’m slightly uncertain how exactly you ID nowadays) as being a very important part of your identity- do you really want it reduced to such a limited conception of what being gay is? Also, gay men don’t have a monopoly on gay culture.
Finally, your last paragraph makes you sound like a bit of a prick.
edan
For myself, I came up with a glib little sound bite that covers how I define gay.
Take the phrase "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (as in the film) replace "gentle" with "gay ", and "blondes" with "guys" (or some masculine moniker). I don't know if that definition would work for anyone else, but I guess that's not the point. The way I look at it it's just a preference, albeit with grossly disproportionate implications.
It's like calling a forest a tree sometimes.