Hey kids, let’s talk about the gays for a second!
I have made it repeatedly clear that, for the most part, my opinions are largely of the “stay off my lawn” variety—I don’t have anything against the LGBTQABCDEFGwhatever, and I feel they have every right to do whatever the hell they want as long as they’re not doing it in the street and scaring the horses.
Of course, that a sizable number of them DO, in fact, choose to “do it in the street and scare the horses” is what the bulk of this discussion will be pertaining to.
Yes indeed, we’re talking about gay pride parades and other public outbursts of what some might damn me for calling faggotry. Being a quote-unquote Person of Color I am certainly attuned to the idea of “don’t embody negative stereotypes of your demographic”, and have encouraged “my people” to do so buymybook
*ahem*
So therefore I would extend a similar question to the homosexual community that I give to Asian people: Gays are stereotyped as hedonistic, flamboyant perverts, so why the hell would you act like hedonistic flamboyant perverts in public?!
Or, as the openly gay Jack Donovan might ask: Why have you chosen to make your lives revolve around sex, instead of just being three-dimensional men who happen to have sex with other men?
A bit of a segue: My ex-girlfriend was something of a fag hag, and thus I have been amicable with several of her gay male friends (not really now, but what the hell). I would like to point out that a not-insignificant percentage of gay men would agree with me on this issue, certainly more than you would think. But I digress.
No, the main issue I have with public displays of gayness isn’t that they promote negative stereotypes (although they certainly do), but rather that the reasons given for why these are needed are often half-truths at best and blatant historical revisionism at worst.
What do I mean? I am referring to things like the murders of Emanuel Jacques and Matthew Shepard, both of which were committed by homosexuals but have somehow become turgid passion plays excoriating straight white male hateful hateness. I know I’m certainly not the first person to point this out, but the term “rough trade” really should have been used in both of these cases.
(And for the record, NO, I am NOT saying that either of those young men deserved to die or to have been punished at all. Merely that two young gay men probably had sex in mind when they went off with gristly older butch men; butch men who, in both cases, had their own mental and emotional baggage, and said factor shouldn’t have been ignored to create this false “evil white man” narrative).
But let’s leave those two young fellows aside, and deal with a much bigger claim: the claim that the AIDS crisis could have been nipped in the bud in the 80s if Ronnie Reagan had just done something!!!1
Readers of this website will know that I am not a fan of Ronald Reagan by any means; in fact, I’ve gone on record saying that pretty much the only good thing to come out of his presidency was the golden age of action movies. But even with my disdain for the man, I can point out that he’s really not to blame for the AIDS virus spreading.
David Cole on Taki Mag wrote about this in great detail, so I won’t go over it point by point. Instead, here are the highlights:
1) Getting shot and almost dying were probably preoccupying the man. Just a little bit.
2, and much more importantly) The Gay community itself dragged its feet and impeded efforts to deal with AIDS every step of the way.
Yes, you read that right.
From the beginning, many famous gay publications and advocacy groups refused to acknowledge that AIDS, then known as GRIDS (gay related immunodeficiency syndrome), even existed, and was instead a hoax spread by evil homophobes to keep gays from having fun. So great was their paranoia, in fact, that he National Gay Task Force and the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a petition in federal court to delay the licensing of the first federally approved test for detecting HIV, claiming it might be used to discriminate against gays.
And far from ignoring it, the establishment was putting great efforts into curing aids, even (and this is the clincher) acceding to the gays demands to not “Stigmatize” the virus—and in practice go out of their way to not do standard protocols that would be done for any other virus.
Now, could the government have done MORE, enough so that gay *ahem* pussyfooting would be negated? Certainly, but as it is let’s not pretend that there was only one negative actor here.
Once again, most people’s problems are self inflicted, and now that we’ve established that, can we please have at least a slight reduction in men in leather thongs running through the streets?
Frankly, I’ve never understood the concept that the 80s was some font of homophobia. How anti-gay could the decade that produced He-Man really have been?