Soap box
You know, looking through my previous LJ posts, I've realized that I have little to no actual content outside of quizzes and memes. I've had a reluctance, in the past, to voicing my opinion in written form, and self-doubt coupled with laziness has kept me from writing here on more than one occasion. Today was going to be yet another failed attempt at posting something that required mental effort, but I decided to try and break old habits by forcing myself to write.
Today I was watching an episode of the Tyra Banks show. I watch daytime talk shows a lot when I'm at home and have nothing else to do. Usually I watch with a detached sense of bemusement, and the 'hard hitting issues' that get covered over the course of the program rarely cause any kind of impact on my day. But on this particular episode of the Tyra show, Tyra had decided to make a point about communities that the public usually thinks of as unified, by creating a scenario that shows the rifts between ideologies within the social group. In this particular case, the focus was on the gay community. A 'feminine' gay man, 'masculine' gay man, 'feminine' lesbian, 'masculine' lesbian, drag queen, transgender woman, and a bisexual man were selected to represent the various facets of the group. Then they were put into a social experiment dubbed "The Gay Kingdom" where they had to assign roles in the community, pick which laws from a list to keep as laws for their kingdom, and select one member of their group to 'execute' and banish from the kingdom. (for those interested, the episode is on youtube: )
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was shocked when the other group members expressed their distaste for the bisexual man. He was accused of being 'not really part of the gay community' and 'on the fence' about his sexuality. He was also accused of giving straight people grounds to accuse gay people of just being 'confused'. The drag queen was also criticized as 'feeding the stereotype' of flamboyant gay men. As I continued to watch the program, I realized the main source of the conflict between the various members of the group.
Many of the people in this group, despite identifying as queer and wanting to be accepted for their queer identity, still held the mentality that they had to appease the straight community in some way. You can be gay, as long as you still 'act like a guy' for example, or you can be gay, as long as you commit to being gay. There is this unspoken belief that if these concessions are made, then they will find acceptance in the heteronormative community. As a result, the members of the group that were considered the most deviant by the group as a whole were treated with suspicion and even disdain, because they were seen as holding back the acceptance of conventionally gay and lesbian people.
Now, in the comments of the youtube video, you can see various people saying that the people chosen for Tyra's experiment are incredibly ignorant and that if you want 'worthwhile' opinions from the gay community that you should talk to GLBTQ university students. I think that this kind of thinking only exacerbates the problem, because it causes a valid problem within the gay community to not be addressed. Despite the more idealistic of us wanting to believe that everyone in the gay community is totally open and accepting of love in all its forms, this is simply not the case. There can be judgment within the GLBT community itself.
I'm of the belief that acceptance of only 'exemplary' gay people is no kind of acceptance at all, and that we wont see a world where homosexuality is accepted until we see a world where love and gender in any of their forms can be accepted. But, not all people within the GLBT community necessarily feel that way. It's very disappointing to me, to hear some of the ignorant things that people even within the gay community are capable of saying about bisexual people, for example. I think, it's something that I haven't had to think about often, because my circle of friends has a lot of bisexual people in it, myself included, and so most of us know firsthand that bisexuals aren't as a rule promiscuous, hedonistic, or perpetually confused about their sexuality. But, regardless of my personal feelings on the opinions some people have of bisexual people, I think that what really bothers me about these types of judgments is that there's this 'not my problem' syndrome going on. Some members of the LGBTQ community think that because they aren't as deviant as other members, that they wont be judged as harshly. But the reason that the LGBTQ community is so threatening to people isn't just because there are people that think it's 'wrong'. It's because there's a perceived challenge to preconceived notions of gender. Men and women are 'supposed to be' a certain way, they're supposed to dress a certain way, act a certain way, look a certain way, and like specific things, and every letter in the LGBTQ equation challenges that in some way.
The LGBT community is a diverse one, and a lot of people within that community already feel that their battle for acceptance is hard enough, without fighting for people that seem like they have nothing to do with them. But to try and split hairs by thinking 'Well, I'm gay, but I don't act like those flaming men' or, 'well at least I've committed to liking one gender' is ultimately self defeating. Whether they like it or not, gay people, lesbian people, transgendered people and bisexual people are all in the same boat. It can't just be 'it's okay for a man to dress like a woman' or 'a person can change their gender'. It has to be, 'people shouldn't be judged for the gender they choose to express' regardless of how they express it. In my mind, 'men can love men' and 'women can love women' isn't big enough in scope. The fight ultimately has to be 'people can love each other'.
Today I was watching an episode of the Tyra Banks show. I watch daytime talk shows a lot when I'm at home and have nothing else to do. Usually I watch with a detached sense of bemusement, and the 'hard hitting issues' that get covered over the course of the program rarely cause any kind of impact on my day. But on this particular episode of the Tyra show, Tyra had decided to make a point about communities that the public usually thinks of as unified, by creating a scenario that shows the rifts between ideologies within the social group. In this particular case, the focus was on the gay community. A 'feminine' gay man, 'masculine' gay man, 'feminine' lesbian, 'masculine' lesbian, drag queen, transgender woman, and a bisexual man were selected to represent the various facets of the group. Then they were put into a social experiment dubbed "The Gay Kingdom" where they had to assign roles in the community, pick which laws from a list to keep as laws for their kingdom, and select one member of their group to 'execute' and banish from the kingdom. (for those interested, the episode is on youtube: )
Click to viewI suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was shocked when the other group members expressed their distaste for the bisexual man. He was accused of being 'not really part of the gay community' and 'on the fence' about his sexuality. He was also accused of giving straight people grounds to accuse gay people of just being 'confused'. The drag queen was also criticized as 'feeding the stereotype' of flamboyant gay men. As I continued to watch the program, I realized the main source of the conflict between the various members of the group.
Many of the people in this group, despite identifying as queer and wanting to be accepted for their queer identity, still held the mentality that they had to appease the straight community in some way. You can be gay, as long as you still 'act like a guy' for example, or you can be gay, as long as you commit to being gay. There is this unspoken belief that if these concessions are made, then they will find acceptance in the heteronormative community. As a result, the members of the group that were considered the most deviant by the group as a whole were treated with suspicion and even disdain, because they were seen as holding back the acceptance of conventionally gay and lesbian people.
Now, in the comments of the youtube video, you can see various people saying that the people chosen for Tyra's experiment are incredibly ignorant and that if you want 'worthwhile' opinions from the gay community that you should talk to GLBTQ university students. I think that this kind of thinking only exacerbates the problem, because it causes a valid problem within the gay community to not be addressed. Despite the more idealistic of us wanting to believe that everyone in the gay community is totally open and accepting of love in all its forms, this is simply not the case. There can be judgment within the GLBT community itself.
I'm of the belief that acceptance of only 'exemplary' gay people is no kind of acceptance at all, and that we wont see a world where homosexuality is accepted until we see a world where love and gender in any of their forms can be accepted. But, not all people within the GLBT community necessarily feel that way. It's very disappointing to me, to hear some of the ignorant things that people even within the gay community are capable of saying about bisexual people, for example. I think, it's something that I haven't had to think about often, because my circle of friends has a lot of bisexual people in it, myself included, and so most of us know firsthand that bisexuals aren't as a rule promiscuous, hedonistic, or perpetually confused about their sexuality. But, regardless of my personal feelings on the opinions some people have of bisexual people, I think that what really bothers me about these types of judgments is that there's this 'not my problem' syndrome going on. Some members of the LGBTQ community think that because they aren't as deviant as other members, that they wont be judged as harshly. But the reason that the LGBTQ community is so threatening to people isn't just because there are people that think it's 'wrong'. It's because there's a perceived challenge to preconceived notions of gender. Men and women are 'supposed to be' a certain way, they're supposed to dress a certain way, act a certain way, look a certain way, and like specific things, and every letter in the LGBTQ equation challenges that in some way.
The LGBT community is a diverse one, and a lot of people within that community already feel that their battle for acceptance is hard enough, without fighting for people that seem like they have nothing to do with them. But to try and split hairs by thinking 'Well, I'm gay, but I don't act like those flaming men' or, 'well at least I've committed to liking one gender' is ultimately self defeating. Whether they like it or not, gay people, lesbian people, transgendered people and bisexual people are all in the same boat. It can't just be 'it's okay for a man to dress like a woman' or 'a person can change their gender'. It has to be, 'people shouldn't be judged for the gender they choose to express' regardless of how they express it. In my mind, 'men can love men' and 'women can love women' isn't big enough in scope. The fight ultimately has to be 'people can love each other'.