Gay Need Not Mean Gaudy: Another Outsider Queer Rant
There’s nothing like being ahead of the curve to give one a lifetime of sighing, head-shaking and waiting for everyone else to catch up. If you know me well, you probably already know what I’m on about, as I do a slightly varied version of this rant every year or so: I’m talking about the puerile, backhanded little bitch of a community that is largely accepted as gay “culture.”
We should be clear and distinct here; when I say ”gay culture,” I’m referring to all gay people, everywhere. Queer men and women, growing in the world’s Petri dish, diverse, individually unique, unpredictable and glorious. I’m honored to be a part of that culture, which is hardly a culture at all, so much as an aggregate of individuals, leading individual lives, the individual triumphs of each of which, we can all point to as another chalk mark on the wall that brings us closer to freedom from hatred’s cell block.
When I talk about gay “culture,”, I’m talking about a minority of queer people, who have hijacked the face of the community, caked it with gaudy make-up and danced up and down the streets wearing it like a mask. To them, gay culture is party and club-based. To them, gay culture culminates each year in a gay pride parade. To them, anyone who finds their clothing, their soirees, or their behavior not to their liking, is homophobic. I’ll have none of that, and no amount of incognizant attempts to villainize me because I’m not fond of tacky, showy, self-conscious partying will change the fact that I’ve consistently met hordes of homos, thirsting for something better.
I’m just old enough to have seen a handful of generations younger than myself come of age, and with each new wave of gay kids, I’ve had a little cadre of queer youth who’ve turned to me as a kind of mentor. Not because I’m some kind of wise, world-worn guru or because I know better than everyone else, but because me, my life and my unapologetic refusal to tow the line even in the gay world, are things that they can relate to. For a lot of gay kids, myself included when I WAS a gay kid, there’s a glaringly obvious hypocrisy involved in helping the youth down off the cross of heteronormative expectations, and then asking them to lay down and take it like a pro when they’re nailed to the cross of homonormative expectations.
Don’t like drag as a performance medium? You can expect to be called a bad faggot. Not too into the Indigo Girls? You might want to prepare yourself for some lesbians calling you a traitor. Hate the color pink? Hunny, get the fuck outta here. It’s like one group of kids made a tree house, declared it THE tree house, and will only accept club members who adhere to a list of seemingly arbitrary rules. What’s stranger is that these kids are in the minority within their minority, but their flamboyance, talent for attracting attention, and their ability to show folks a raucously uninhibited party seems to trump all else. These people are not the gay community, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find people who think otherwise, be they gay, straight, allies or enemies.
And so it is that year after year, I get letters, e-mails and messages from gay kids as they come of age, expressing their trepidation with the “culture” into which they’ve suddenly been thrust. Not quite fitting in for most of their lives, they had expected to find themselves fitting in nicely with gay culture. They thought they’d finally be home, that they’d feel content and fulfilled with “their own” and that even if they continued to be rejected by straights at large, they’d always have a home in the gay world. For many, it didn’t take long for them to figure out that while gay “culture” with its bars and parades will definitely protect them from the more bitter outside world, they didn’t really find much within it that made it (for them) worth staying in.
I try to serve as a bit of a beacon for these kinds of kids. I want them all to know that they have choices beyond staying in the closet or waving a feather boa on a float. Thankfully, with each new generation of queers, our youth are recognizing that their sexuality is only one part of their persona; something to be celebrated and embraced, to be sure, but not the whole of their identity. More and more kids are coming of age with a recognition that one can be out and unabashedly unashamed of who they are, without having to dive headlong into the Pride Pool. Living an openly gay life is something that happens in the supermarket, in the classroom, the workplace, the family holiday gathering, the city council meeting and when mowing the front yard. It isn’t something that needs to or should be sequestered to certain neighborhoods or events; it’s something that permeates all aspects of our lives, but rules none of them.
Coming to this realization is something natural for some of us. It’s just obvious. For others, it’s more of a struggle, and for a whole other set of others, it’s damn near impossible. I should be clear about that: Some people really NEED gay “culture,” for whatever personal reasons, reasons which will vary from person to person. Maybe their family has utterly rejected them and they want a new-found family that is completely antithetical to those that set them adrift. Maybe they just love the hell out of glitter and bitchy-snark humor. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe they’re a wee bit insecure and need to be surrounded by similar people in order to feel comfortable. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. We all need support and encouragement, sometimes. But some of us have found that we can get it from any circle of supportive friends. They needn’t be wearing platform shoes or stiletto heels.
It’s for this reason that I’ll gladly be seen as an asshole to make a point. This is why I sometimes go out of my way to stir up shit. I don’t stand idly by and let complacency or homogeneity take unmitigated root in the queer world. I won’t. And fuck you if that bothers your queer sensibilities. Not all gay people have to like Madonna, or Kiley, or RuPaul or The Golden Girls. There is no universal queer handbook, which insists that they all like to dance, or that they should all be fashionable, in great shape, and ready to party. When a gay person says that they want to distance themselves from gay “culture,” that is not a sign of internal homophobia or weakness.
In fact, it’s probably quite the opposite. It probably means that they’re secure enough in who they are that they don’t feel a need to surround themselves with people who are similar to them in that one way. They’re not saying “You shouldn’t do that/act like that,” they’re saying, “I see no reason to do that/act like that just because I’m gay.” They’re taking a stand and speaking from the heart. Gay “culture” seems constructed, regulated, and off-putting to them. They not only feel no need to “fit in” in the straight world, they don’t see a need to do so anywhere. The fact that they make this clear is not anything remotely akin to self-hatred. It’s exactly the antithesis. They see who they are as more valuable than who they would become if they just swallowed their pride and marched in a Pride parade.
I’ll never stop saying it: Pride in anything over which you have no control is taking the credit for something you didn’t do. Similarly, shame in anything over which you have no control is taking the blame for something you didn’t do. If you go around assuming that my fellow self-righteous homos are ashamed simply because they’ve got a lion’s share of very valuable humility, well I’m sorry to say that you’re the one I think we should feel sorry for.
Now, I know that many of my readers are big ol’ nelly queens, who love them their spangles and garters. I know that many of you look forward to each new Pride with fondness and you have yourself a fuckfest of a blast, topping last year’s grandeur with this year’s fabulousity and then some. That’s beautiful and you should keep it up. But if a single one of you pink bitches gives one of my oddball homos a hard time because they’re not into that, you’ll find my foot way up in your intestines with a spiked toe.
To help you put it into perspective, look at it this way: Imagine if you came out of the closet and jumped into the throng of gay culture, only to discover that it was all about NASCAR, drag races instead of drag queens, and football instead of footwear. Imagine that in order to be seen as part of mainstream gay culture, you had to be flamboyantly and loudly macho. Imagine that you were expected to chew tobacco and spit it out of the side of your mouth. Imagine that you even tried to jive with that out of a sense of solidarity, but holy fucking damn, you just couldn’t do it. That wasn’t who you were. That isn’t who you are. You find that shit to be distasteful, useless or vapid. Why should you partake in it, just because one cluster of fags claims that this is the way it is?
You shouldn’t. You should be yourself, and if your true self has any kind of integrity, you’ll point to that stuff and say “That? That shit? No, that ain’t me, no way, no how, I hereby dissociate myself from that.” Which is what me and my tiny little army of post-queer gays have done in the face of lipsincing men in mascara, thumpingly repetitive music and chest-waxing. It’s not our thing. We’re cool with it being your thing, but we’ve got to keep yelling to the hills that it’s not us, because every time we turn around, friends and foes assume that it is. We’re the ones who have to constantly remind straight people that, no, they are not allowed to assume that all or even most gays are like that. Saying so forcefully, in public, and often, does not mean that we hate ourselves or that we hate you.
It means that we hate stereotypes. We don’t embody them or even relate to them. If you feel like embracing them because they feel natural to you, that’s awesome, but we have to demonstrate the diversity in our ranks, or each new generation will include some sad homos who go along with it because they don’t know they can go another way. If a black man tells you that he hates rap, that does not make him self-hating, it makes him rap-hating. We are not ants. We do not have a group consciousness. We are individuals and expressing as much is the pinnacle of loving oneself. Don’t oppress your own, simply because you were oppressed. Truly celebrate diversity and whatever floats someone’s goat is grand, so long as they don’t try to stop others from floating theirs.
We should be clear and distinct here; when I say ”gay culture,” I’m referring to all gay people, everywhere. Queer men and women, growing in the world’s Petri dish, diverse, individually unique, unpredictable and glorious. I’m honored to be a part of that culture, which is hardly a culture at all, so much as an aggregate of individuals, leading individual lives, the individual triumphs of each of which, we can all point to as another chalk mark on the wall that brings us closer to freedom from hatred’s cell block.
When I talk about gay “culture,”, I’m talking about a minority of queer people, who have hijacked the face of the community, caked it with gaudy make-up and danced up and down the streets wearing it like a mask. To them, gay culture is party and club-based. To them, gay culture culminates each year in a gay pride parade. To them, anyone who finds their clothing, their soirees, or their behavior not to their liking, is homophobic. I’ll have none of that, and no amount of incognizant attempts to villainize me because I’m not fond of tacky, showy, self-conscious partying will change the fact that I’ve consistently met hordes of homos, thirsting for something better.
I’m just old enough to have seen a handful of generations younger than myself come of age, and with each new wave of gay kids, I’ve had a little cadre of queer youth who’ve turned to me as a kind of mentor. Not because I’m some kind of wise, world-worn guru or because I know better than everyone else, but because me, my life and my unapologetic refusal to tow the line even in the gay world, are things that they can relate to. For a lot of gay kids, myself included when I WAS a gay kid, there’s a glaringly obvious hypocrisy involved in helping the youth down off the cross of heteronormative expectations, and then asking them to lay down and take it like a pro when they’re nailed to the cross of homonormative expectations.
Don’t like drag as a performance medium? You can expect to be called a bad faggot. Not too into the Indigo Girls? You might want to prepare yourself for some lesbians calling you a traitor. Hate the color pink? Hunny, get the fuck outta here. It’s like one group of kids made a tree house, declared it THE tree house, and will only accept club members who adhere to a list of seemingly arbitrary rules. What’s stranger is that these kids are in the minority within their minority, but their flamboyance, talent for attracting attention, and their ability to show folks a raucously uninhibited party seems to trump all else. These people are not the gay community, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find people who think otherwise, be they gay, straight, allies or enemies.
And so it is that year after year, I get letters, e-mails and messages from gay kids as they come of age, expressing their trepidation with the “culture” into which they’ve suddenly been thrust. Not quite fitting in for most of their lives, they had expected to find themselves fitting in nicely with gay culture. They thought they’d finally be home, that they’d feel content and fulfilled with “their own” and that even if they continued to be rejected by straights at large, they’d always have a home in the gay world. For many, it didn’t take long for them to figure out that while gay “culture” with its bars and parades will definitely protect them from the more bitter outside world, they didn’t really find much within it that made it (for them) worth staying in.
I try to serve as a bit of a beacon for these kinds of kids. I want them all to know that they have choices beyond staying in the closet or waving a feather boa on a float. Thankfully, with each new generation of queers, our youth are recognizing that their sexuality is only one part of their persona; something to be celebrated and embraced, to be sure, but not the whole of their identity. More and more kids are coming of age with a recognition that one can be out and unabashedly unashamed of who they are, without having to dive headlong into the Pride Pool. Living an openly gay life is something that happens in the supermarket, in the classroom, the workplace, the family holiday gathering, the city council meeting and when mowing the front yard. It isn’t something that needs to or should be sequestered to certain neighborhoods or events; it’s something that permeates all aspects of our lives, but rules none of them.
Coming to this realization is something natural for some of us. It’s just obvious. For others, it’s more of a struggle, and for a whole other set of others, it’s damn near impossible. I should be clear about that: Some people really NEED gay “culture,” for whatever personal reasons, reasons which will vary from person to person. Maybe their family has utterly rejected them and they want a new-found family that is completely antithetical to those that set them adrift. Maybe they just love the hell out of glitter and bitchy-snark humor. Nothing wrong with that. Maybe they’re a wee bit insecure and need to be surrounded by similar people in order to feel comfortable. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. We all need support and encouragement, sometimes. But some of us have found that we can get it from any circle of supportive friends. They needn’t be wearing platform shoes or stiletto heels.
It’s for this reason that I’ll gladly be seen as an asshole to make a point. This is why I sometimes go out of my way to stir up shit. I don’t stand idly by and let complacency or homogeneity take unmitigated root in the queer world. I won’t. And fuck you if that bothers your queer sensibilities. Not all gay people have to like Madonna, or Kiley, or RuPaul or The Golden Girls. There is no universal queer handbook, which insists that they all like to dance, or that they should all be fashionable, in great shape, and ready to party. When a gay person says that they want to distance themselves from gay “culture,” that is not a sign of internal homophobia or weakness.
In fact, it’s probably quite the opposite. It probably means that they’re secure enough in who they are that they don’t feel a need to surround themselves with people who are similar to them in that one way. They’re not saying “You shouldn’t do that/act like that,” they’re saying, “I see no reason to do that/act like that just because I’m gay.” They’re taking a stand and speaking from the heart. Gay “culture” seems constructed, regulated, and off-putting to them. They not only feel no need to “fit in” in the straight world, they don’t see a need to do so anywhere. The fact that they make this clear is not anything remotely akin to self-hatred. It’s exactly the antithesis. They see who they are as more valuable than who they would become if they just swallowed their pride and marched in a Pride parade.
I’ll never stop saying it: Pride in anything over which you have no control is taking the credit for something you didn’t do. Similarly, shame in anything over which you have no control is taking the blame for something you didn’t do. If you go around assuming that my fellow self-righteous homos are ashamed simply because they’ve got a lion’s share of very valuable humility, well I’m sorry to say that you’re the one I think we should feel sorry for.
Now, I know that many of my readers are big ol’ nelly queens, who love them their spangles and garters. I know that many of you look forward to each new Pride with fondness and you have yourself a fuckfest of a blast, topping last year’s grandeur with this year’s fabulousity and then some. That’s beautiful and you should keep it up. But if a single one of you pink bitches gives one of my oddball homos a hard time because they’re not into that, you’ll find my foot way up in your intestines with a spiked toe.
To help you put it into perspective, look at it this way: Imagine if you came out of the closet and jumped into the throng of gay culture, only to discover that it was all about NASCAR, drag races instead of drag queens, and football instead of footwear. Imagine that in order to be seen as part of mainstream gay culture, you had to be flamboyantly and loudly macho. Imagine that you were expected to chew tobacco and spit it out of the side of your mouth. Imagine that you even tried to jive with that out of a sense of solidarity, but holy fucking damn, you just couldn’t do it. That wasn’t who you were. That isn’t who you are. You find that shit to be distasteful, useless or vapid. Why should you partake in it, just because one cluster of fags claims that this is the way it is?
You shouldn’t. You should be yourself, and if your true self has any kind of integrity, you’ll point to that stuff and say “That? That shit? No, that ain’t me, no way, no how, I hereby dissociate myself from that.” Which is what me and my tiny little army of post-queer gays have done in the face of lipsincing men in mascara, thumpingly repetitive music and chest-waxing. It’s not our thing. We’re cool with it being your thing, but we’ve got to keep yelling to the hills that it’s not us, because every time we turn around, friends and foes assume that it is. We’re the ones who have to constantly remind straight people that, no, they are not allowed to assume that all or even most gays are like that. Saying so forcefully, in public, and often, does not mean that we hate ourselves or that we hate you.
It means that we hate stereotypes. We don’t embody them or even relate to them. If you feel like embracing them because they feel natural to you, that’s awesome, but we have to demonstrate the diversity in our ranks, or each new generation will include some sad homos who go along with it because they don’t know they can go another way. If a black man tells you that he hates rap, that does not make him self-hating, it makes him rap-hating. We are not ants. We do not have a group consciousness. We are individuals and expressing as much is the pinnacle of loving oneself. Don’t oppress your own, simply because you were oppressed. Truly celebrate diversity and whatever floats someone’s goat is grand, so long as they don’t try to stop others from floating theirs.