Ranting Powers ACTIVATE
Some folks have said that they have never actually seen me get all idealistic and ranty at people, and that they are curious about what it is like. This is a decent example of my ranting, prompted by a friend's Facebook post about gay people and her suggestion that God might be partially gay because He made the gays. The ensuing thread was full of adolescent foolishness, and I am in a tetchy mood so I decided to respond to it in nearly twelve thousand words. Be warned: this is what happens if you say things I really disagree with where I can hear them and the stars are right. Marked as Adult Concepts for swearing and tetchiness.
Some people in this thread seem confused about how privilege and societal conflict work, so I'm going to try to clear a few matters up.
@Original Poster: I respect your right to make your own word choices, but I'm going to toss out here that "fabulous" is perhaps a stereotyped and narrow pseudo-compliment for the entire queer community. Also, I love the word "queer" because it includes and encompasses a lot of non-heterosexual or non-cisgendered people, rather than centering and focusing on the cisgendered men who like men and ignoring everyone less normative but also queer. People who are transgender, lesbian, genderqueer, bisexual people, intersexed, trans*, asexual, genderless, pansexual, et cetera matter, too! Of course, it's possible that you really do mean "gay" and are not talking about all those other groups encompassed by "queer," under which interpretation your statements still make sense.
@J: "If it's not about you, it's not about you." Sometimes members of a non-privileged class express frustration with the oppressive or clueless behaviors of a privileged class. Obviously, many members of any given privileged class (straight people, Christian people, white people, male people, cisgendered people, temporarily able-bodied [TAB] people) don't enforce their privilege or enforce the oppression of others. However, to respond to criticism of a privileged class with, for example, "I'm a white person and I don't make racist comments! Why are you being mean to me?" is derailing. This tactic is really popular with concern trolls and other internet douchebags, and is a good way to take a conversation about a non-privileged class and the problems they are facing and re-orient that discussion to center the whining of privileged people who prefer not to be made uncomfortable. If, as you say, you aren't one of the folks using your privilege to make the world a fouler place, damn well act like it.
@P: What? So, there's two things going on in your statements that I'm going to try to clarify a little. Correct me if I haven't parsed you correctly, I admit that I'm not sure what you're trying to say. On the one hand, you seem to be saying "the gay is unpleasant and I, personally, don't want to engage in it." This is 110% an ethical and appropriate thing to say. "I would rather not engage in sexual contact with men/women/non-gender-binary people/anyone at all/my co-workers/you/them" is a sexual choice you are free to make, and none of the blogs I read, feminists and pornographers included, would take issue with that choice. So long as you're being honest and safe, do whatever (and whomever) floats your metaphorical boat. On the other hand, you seem as though you may be asserting in places that homosexual relationships are morally or objectively wrong. This is "fighting words," as it were. If John says that Sally and Jane (or any other metaphorical queer couple) should not be sexually interacting with each other, he's insulted them. John in this case is telling other people that their sexual partnerships are bad. As you may know, quite a lot of people in our society derive considerable self-worth from sexual interaction and consider their romantic involvements to be very important. See also: every song, every movie, every bit of cultural narrative that insinuates things along the lines of "all you need is love." So when John (or any other homophobic asshat) tells queer people to stop being queer, he's making an extremely personal and sexualized attack on their character. That kind of opinion gets used in political spaces to deny queer folks the same legal rights and societal privileges that cisgender heterosexual people (hereafter cis het people, for brevity) have.
I'm going to step back a little bit and talk about sensitivity and acceptance here. The queer rights movement is extremely young, and exists primarily in the population-dense regions of some parts of the developed world. I apologize if this is not a history lecture you need, but I'm going to put "extremely young" in perspective here. Most historians consider the Stonewall Riots in New York City to be the first event of the queer or gay rights movement - and Stonewall happened on the last weekend in June, 1969. A minority of historians point to the Compton's Cafeteria Riot as that first event, in San Francisco in August of 1966. Either way, the idea that queer as an identity is morally neutral and that queer people deserve the same kinds of rights and respect as cis het people is less than fifty years old. Homosexuality was removed from the third edition of the DSM in 1973 - meaning that before then, homosexuality was officially considered a sexual mental illness, in the same social category of diseases as pedophilia and necrophilia, by the American Psychiatric Association and American Medical Association. So our medical institutions have only been considering non-heterosexual people as not damaged and urgently needing cures for a bit less than forty years. All of this is still rather tame oppression compared to the actual historical origins of the pink triangle as a symbol for queer people, but I assume you're all big boys and girls who've studied /that/ already.
As a result of all this history, a lot of modern queers are extremely uncomfortable with the assertion that we should not exist. That kind of rhetoric, especially when it's about our choice of sexual partners, is eliminationist and insulting, and frankly pisses me off a lot more than being told to go to hell or go die in a fire. You see, when you tell me to go to hell, you aren't simultaneously threatening to help some of the fundies in this country do me personal and significant harm, and you aren't simultaneously threatening my loved ones and personal heroes, past, present, and future.
You want to talk about what the world was like when more people believed being queer was morally incorrect? Go read the Wikipedia page on Alan Turing and look me in the eye and tell me that's okay, that he deserved that, regardless of the fact that he was a WWII hero who defended his country against the Nazis, the fact that he was probably the best computer scientist of his era and the fact that you can only say any of this shit to me because you are using a Turing-complete machine to do it on - and nearly every computerized device you use is reliant on the mathematical theories of problem-solving he created. Those of you who believe we're morally inferior, thank queers for the fact that you have a mobile phone or a computer to spew this drek with.
Regarding the tangental theological discussion, I shall state that I am rather vehemently secular and would not consider it polite to request that others accept or hear out my views on Higher Power(s) or lack thereof.
Some people in this thread seem confused about how privilege and societal conflict work, so I'm going to try to clear a few matters up.
@Original Poster: I respect your right to make your own word choices, but I'm going to toss out here that "fabulous" is perhaps a stereotyped and narrow pseudo-compliment for the entire queer community. Also, I love the word "queer" because it includes and encompasses a lot of non-heterosexual or non-cisgendered people, rather than centering and focusing on the cisgendered men who like men and ignoring everyone less normative but also queer. People who are transgender, lesbian, genderqueer, bisexual people, intersexed, trans*, asexual, genderless, pansexual, et cetera matter, too! Of course, it's possible that you really do mean "gay" and are not talking about all those other groups encompassed by "queer," under which interpretation your statements still make sense.
@J: "If it's not about you, it's not about you." Sometimes members of a non-privileged class express frustration with the oppressive or clueless behaviors of a privileged class. Obviously, many members of any given privileged class (straight people, Christian people, white people, male people, cisgendered people, temporarily able-bodied [TAB] people) don't enforce their privilege or enforce the oppression of others. However, to respond to criticism of a privileged class with, for example, "I'm a white person and I don't make racist comments! Why are you being mean to me?" is derailing. This tactic is really popular with concern trolls and other internet douchebags, and is a good way to take a conversation about a non-privileged class and the problems they are facing and re-orient that discussion to center the whining of privileged people who prefer not to be made uncomfortable. If, as you say, you aren't one of the folks using your privilege to make the world a fouler place, damn well act like it.
@P: What? So, there's two things going on in your statements that I'm going to try to clarify a little. Correct me if I haven't parsed you correctly, I admit that I'm not sure what you're trying to say. On the one hand, you seem to be saying "the gay is unpleasant and I, personally, don't want to engage in it." This is 110% an ethical and appropriate thing to say. "I would rather not engage in sexual contact with men/women/non-gender-binary people/anyone at all/my co-workers/you/them" is a sexual choice you are free to make, and none of the blogs I read, feminists and pornographers included, would take issue with that choice. So long as you're being honest and safe, do whatever (and whomever) floats your metaphorical boat. On the other hand, you seem as though you may be asserting in places that homosexual relationships are morally or objectively wrong. This is "fighting words," as it were. If John says that Sally and Jane (or any other metaphorical queer couple) should not be sexually interacting with each other, he's insulted them. John in this case is telling other people that their sexual partnerships are bad. As you may know, quite a lot of people in our society derive considerable self-worth from sexual interaction and consider their romantic involvements to be very important. See also: every song, every movie, every bit of cultural narrative that insinuates things along the lines of "all you need is love." So when John (or any other homophobic asshat) tells queer people to stop being queer, he's making an extremely personal and sexualized attack on their character. That kind of opinion gets used in political spaces to deny queer folks the same legal rights and societal privileges that cisgender heterosexual people (hereafter cis het people, for brevity) have.
I'm going to step back a little bit and talk about sensitivity and acceptance here. The queer rights movement is extremely young, and exists primarily in the population-dense regions of some parts of the developed world. I apologize if this is not a history lecture you need, but I'm going to put "extremely young" in perspective here. Most historians consider the Stonewall Riots in New York City to be the first event of the queer or gay rights movement - and Stonewall happened on the last weekend in June, 1969. A minority of historians point to the Compton's Cafeteria Riot as that first event, in San Francisco in August of 1966. Either way, the idea that queer as an identity is morally neutral and that queer people deserve the same kinds of rights and respect as cis het people is less than fifty years old. Homosexuality was removed from the third edition of the DSM in 1973 - meaning that before then, homosexuality was officially considered a sexual mental illness, in the same social category of diseases as pedophilia and necrophilia, by the American Psychiatric Association and American Medical Association. So our medical institutions have only been considering non-heterosexual people as not damaged and urgently needing cures for a bit less than forty years. All of this is still rather tame oppression compared to the actual historical origins of the pink triangle as a symbol for queer people, but I assume you're all big boys and girls who've studied /that/ already.
As a result of all this history, a lot of modern queers are extremely uncomfortable with the assertion that we should not exist. That kind of rhetoric, especially when it's about our choice of sexual partners, is eliminationist and insulting, and frankly pisses me off a lot more than being told to go to hell or go die in a fire. You see, when you tell me to go to hell, you aren't simultaneously threatening to help some of the fundies in this country do me personal and significant harm, and you aren't simultaneously threatening my loved ones and personal heroes, past, present, and future.
You want to talk about what the world was like when more people believed being queer was morally incorrect? Go read the Wikipedia page on Alan Turing and look me in the eye and tell me that's okay, that he deserved that, regardless of the fact that he was a WWII hero who defended his country against the Nazis, the fact that he was probably the best computer scientist of his era and the fact that you can only say any of this shit to me because you are using a Turing-complete machine to do it on - and nearly every computerized device you use is reliant on the mathematical theories of problem-solving he created. Those of you who believe we're morally inferior, thank queers for the fact that you have a mobile phone or a computer to spew this drek with.
Regarding the tangental theological discussion, I shall state that I am rather vehemently secular and would not consider it polite to request that others accept or hear out my views on Higher Power(s) or lack thereof.