Tonight is the second night in a week that I have been considering the misogyny of the bad gay man.
I've alluded to it a while back in the middle of the gay marriage debate over three years ago. Let me give you a little well-disciplined background:
When I think of 'gay', I only think of 'homosexual' for a brief moment. Gay is to homosexual as black is to African. You can be born African, but you have to act black. Gay is a cultural and political expression of homosexuality born of an intellectual and political movement. A man who gets raped in prison is not gay. Let's not draw too fine a line on it other to say that you cannot be born gay, you learn to be gay. This is not to say that you cannot be born homosexual any more than saying you cannot be born a pole vaulter. How do you know until you try to express your desire? There will be natural talents and proclivities. The question is, what to do with them? That is a social question with which all of us, het and homo, are involved.
In other words, everyone has a right to say what is or is not a proper expression of sexuality. Simply because you are born differently does not give you an excuse not to heed the will of society. Ah, but there's the rub. Part of what Gay Pride is, just as with Black Pride, is telling society to take a hike.
So let us, for the sake of clarity, confuse things again by adding another term. Let us call all of the homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, transvestites and others who seek to politicize their sexuality as a thumb in the eye of society, queer. The question becomes, how many 'gays' as the object of liberal activism are actually queer?
I think more 'gays' are queer than liberal activists want to admit, and queers are not interested in marriage. The point of this title is that NPR hosts and other politically correct folks are thinking gay as in high school English teacher gay. They are not thinking male exotic dancer gay or prison guard gay. My nickel says that they are thinking timid quiet repressed people or odd creatives who need more than just a way to visit their friends in the hospital, but mainstream acceptance. They are not thinking about guys who look like Hulk Hogan or Tiny Lister or men who do actually very much hate and fear women.
It seems to me that multicultural ethics has a contradiction and/or blind spot. It claims Feminist values and it claims to be queer-friendly. How can this be for that section of the Venn diagram that describes man hating lesbians and women hating gays?
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