Gay is not Good

[Latbear4blk]

Living in the post HIV/AIDS pandemic era, and considering the rising of awareness around intersectionality and the cultural nature of humanity, maybe it is time to question again whether or not "Gay" is the right place to be and to fight for. I do not think so.

GAY IS NOT GOOD

[vinapu]

1 hour ago, Latbear4blk said:

 whether or not "Gay" is the right place to be and to fight for. I do not think so.

 

 

apparently there are some  conversional therapies so your gayness may be cured

[Pete1111]

Thank you for sharing your blog.  That is a lot to chew on.

I'll always remember reading about the last two gay dudes that were hung by the neck until dead in England for the crime of buggery,  after which the death penalty for the "crime" was abandoned for some reason.  What I remember about these two fellows is that they accepted their fate, and that they were sick with grief over their sins, and how their destiny was likely hell.  At the end, they wrote letters to their loved ones pleading forgiveness.   One of them had a wife and family.

Isn't that the ultimate in internalized homophobia, accepting you are so  bad that you deserve such an awful fate?  

English common law and the practice of killing gays spread all over their empire to such places as India which only recently has begun to lighten up on LGBTQ people.  Sadly in much of the world, gay people are still demonized and suffer death at the hands of the State or their own families. 

Homophobia is still a big problem in the United States today.  Religious and political leaders use it as an emotional hot button to fill the collection plate and to prompt campaign donations.  In light of that, the idea of gay pride continues to make a lot of sense to me.   Many still need to remind themselves that they are worthy, that queer, gay, etc. is not bad.

Queer and questioning is good, yes!  I especially realize now how all those straight guys in college that flirted with me and made comments about my body were part of a bigger population not as queer as me, yet needing to question themselves and be OK with the answers.

Just because all the answers don't fit me, or don't fit them, is not reason enough to ignore the need to have pride in ourselves, including our sexuality.

 

[Latbear4blk]

1 hour ago, vinapu said:

apparently there are some  conversional therapies so your gayness may be cured

I do not think you have read beyond the headline. 

[Latbear4blk]

1 hour ago, Pete1111 said:

Thank you for sharing your blog.  That is a lot to chew on.

I'll always remember reading about the last two gay dudes that were hung by the neck until dead in England for the crime of buggery,  after which the death penalty for the "crime" was abandoned for some reason.  What I remember about these two fellows is that they accepted their fate, and that they were sick with grief over their sins, and how their destiny was likely hell.  At the end, they wrote letters to their loved ones pleading forgiveness.   One of them had a wife and family.

Isn't that the ultimate in internalized homophobia, accepting you are so  bad that you deserve such an awful fate?  

English common law and the practice of killing gays spread all over their empire to such places as India which only recently has begun to lighten up on LGBTQ people.  Sadly in much of the world, gay people are still demonized and suffer death at the hands of the State or their own families. 

Homophobia is still a big problem in the United States today.  Religious and political leaders use it as an emotional hot button to fill the collection plate and to prompt campaign donations.  In light of that, the idea of gay pride continues to make a lot of sense to me.   Many still need to remind themselves that they are worthy, that queer, gay, etc. is not bad.

Queer and questioning is good, yes!  I especially realize now how all those straight guys in college that flirted with me and made comments about my body were part of a bigger population not as queer as me, yet needing to question themselves and be OK with the answers.

Just because all the answers don't fit me, or don't fit them, is not reason enough to ignore the need to have pride in ourselves, including our sexuality.

 

I do speak from my privilege and understand if someone still needs to grabs to an outdated way to understand sexuality. However, if you arre living in an urban area in a progressive city in most Western countries, and still feeling a thrill for Gay Pride, I humbly think you are setting the barre too low for yourself. 

[TotallyOz]

I have always preferred the term gay to queer. I do not like the word questioning because I am not and have not been questioning in ages and it also makes me think that I might not be gay if I am not sure myself.

But, great read @Latbear4blk

[PeterRS]

5 hours ago, Pete1111 said:

English common law and the practice of killing gays spread all over their empire to such places as India which only recently has begun to lighten up on LGBTQ people.  Sadly in much of the world, gay people are still demonized and suffer death at the hands of the State or their own families. 

In England penalising homosexual activity had been the official law of the land for centuries. Being accurate, it was not an issue of common law but enacted law. The 1533 Buggery Act affected both men and women. Those found guilty were put to death. That clearly did not stop the upper classes from enjoying the act. The son of Mary Queen of Scots, King James VI of Scotland who became King James ! of England from 1603 till his death in 1625, was a noted homosexual and had multi-year affairs with several of his courtiers. The 17-year old Robert Carr, later the Earl of Suffolk, was one. But the love of his life was the Duke of Buckingham. The 17th century French poet Theophile de Viau commemorated the liaison in a poem that ended, "And it is well known that the King of England / Fucks the Duke of Buckingham."

That 1533 law was superced by Parliament during the Victorian era in 1861 when it was replaced by the Sexual Offences Against the Person Act. This removed it as a capital punishment offence and replaced sodomy with a term in prison. It was this Act that the English gradually spread to all its colonies. The first irony is that in many of those colonies, particularly in Asia, homosexuality had been far from uncommon. As is well known, many colonial masters thereafter still took male locals as their lovers. The second irony is that having got rid of most of its colonies, England then repealed the 1861 Act in 1967 and effectively decriminalised homosexuality. But that was too late for it to change the laws in its former colonies. Hence, countries like Singapore and Malaysia still have that 19th century law on their statue books!

A few years ago, parliament in London passed another law offering pardons to around 50,000 who were penalised under the 1861 Act. Oscar Wilde is one who was somewhat belatedly pardoned. Another was Alan Turing, and the Pardon Act is now commonly referred to as the Turing Act.

Like Totally Oz, personally I dislike the term queer. To me it was a definition at its time and of its time - and these were not good times for gay men and women.

[Latbear4blk]

I find interesting that no one says anything about the pervasive Racism, Classism, Misogyny, Machism, and overall Conservatism I find in nowadays gayness. 

[vinapu]

1 hour ago, Latbear4blk said:

I find interesting that no one says anything about the pervasive Racism, Classism, Misogyny, Machism, and overall Conservatism I find in nowadays gayness. 

another point that gayness is converging with  mainstream and reflects whet is prevalent everywhere else ?

[NIrishGuy]

On 5/29/2021 at 8:13 PM, Latbear4blk said:

 maybe it is time to question again whether or not "Gay" is the right place to be and to fight for. I do not think so.

GAY IS NOT GOOD

 

Last time I checked it wasn't mandatory - if YOU dont like the idea of being gay then you can simply "stop" being gay ( yeah good luck with that) - the rest of us who are gay will I'm sure just carry on just fine thanks.

 

[forrestreid]

Firstly let me say that I enjoyed the drawings by Marcelo Pombo, Latbear4blk

And I agree to considerable extent with many points made. I too hate to see any misogyny or racism in the gay community, and I feel a bit uneasy when I see the likes of Amazon sponsoring their gay staff to walk in the Pride parade. Whilst not wanting to deprived the staff of their “day out” I cannot help feeling it implicates the gay community in unconditionally supporting the likes of Amazon. And I also hate the current trend of some who want to make a Pride parade more respectable by excluding those who parade in leather gear and as part of kinky groups and so on.

However I think some of your statements are be a bit overblown. For example what you said about gay people being offended at being addressed playfully as women. In my experience no gay was ever really offended by that, unless there was a straight person addressing him and the gay man was concerned felt he was perhaps being undermined or insulted.

And I’m sure a man who identified as queer would not appreciate being referred to by feminine nicknames by a straight guy who he (the queer identified guy) felt was trying to subtly undermine him in some way, despite his abjuration of the fake masculinity of the “gay”. I think the reaction of people in such cases depends more on the situation than their ideology.

Also, your example of gay men in the gay bar being jokingly disparaging about women struck me as rather weak as a critique of gay identity. You may think it crass or not funny, but how do you know when the gay man is expressing his privileged position in the misogynistic patriarchy, or just being crass? I think there is an innate repulsion towards the sexual organs of the gender you’re not sexually interested in. I imagine there something similar regarding lesbians and men’s sexual organs. Of course in that case one can make the point that the lesbian joke isn’t from a (relative) “position of power”, But perhaps also you can read too much sociological meaning into peoples jokes.

And general terms regarding terminology, I sometimes wonder if this is just a natural progression in the generations . I think there is a general tendency for one generation of a particular group to see the terminology last generation as being insufficient. In the early 70s, “gay” was seen as something of a radical word. The gays rioting at Stonewall were rejecting the compromises of the earlier generation who had referred to the movement as the “homophile” movement. You had a somewhat similar situation in the black community, with the move from Coloured to Negro it to African-American etc.

How much of this is a genuine insight into the deficiencies of the terms in question, and how much is just each generation thinking it knows better, I don’t know.

To be honest, your article felt to me a bit like somebody who is dissatisfied with a lot of the conservatism of a general gay culture (as I said I sympathise to a considerable degree) and attaching that critique to an ideology (being “gay identified”) that you ascribe to homosexual men of many different views and politics.

Some of your arguments are in danger of disappearing down a bit of a rabbit hole, I fear. For instance I understand your point about the celebration of “coming out” putting pressure on men who might feel they can’t, or are not confident enough in their identity to do so.

But that doesn’t negate the point that in general, that it’s better for sexual minorities that homosexual men come out rather than not. So the argument would be, is the pressure on gay men to come out a “progressive” pressure (the more gay men out the better), or is it better embrace a queer identity and it says “I don’t have to come out because I wasn’t already in”. That idea might seem logical from the perspective of a post-graduate seminar discussing a Judith Butler article, but I think it’s hard to argue that in the real world downgrading coming out would not have a conservative or regressive effect for sexual minorities.

And to turn the tables on you a bit, your handle would seem to indicate that you are a Latino who is into black men. Could this not be seen as fetishising a different race, which could be seen as rather dehumanising of them?

If I were the sort of university seminar lesbian who is in to that type of thing, I am sure i could work up 1000 words tearing into you as the worst sort of Latino racist who sees black men as dildoes (pingas) for his pleasure rather than men in their own right, who writes articles criticising the dreadful cis-heteropatriarchy of the term "gay" to cover up his own guilt at his own cis-heteropatriarchal racist fantasies of.....(you get the idea).

To be honest this is something that one could spend a whole evening and several glasses of wine discussing, if we met up in real life, but those are some of the issues (or could I be as grandiloquent as to say “internal contradictions”) that struck me from your essay anyway.

Edited June 1, 2021 by forrestreid
clarity

[Latbear4blk]

34 minutes ago, forrestreid said:

Firstly let me say that I enjoyed the drawings by Marcelo Pombo, Latbear4blk

Thank you! I love Marcelo, he was a huge influence when I was giving my first steps in gay life and activism back in the 80s, in Buenos Aires.

35 minutes ago, forrestreid said:

And I agree to considerable extent with many points made.

I am trying to trigger some questioning. There is too much mediocrity and self centered satisfaction in Gay mainstream, specially in the USA.

37 minutes ago, forrestreid said:

However I think some of your statements are be a bit overblown.

Did you hear of "épater les bourgeois"? 

Each one of my examples alone is of course a weak argument, and perhaps they may not coincide with your personal experience. Look at everything together.

42 minutes ago, forrestreid said:

And general terms regarding terminology, I sometimes wonder if this is just a natural progression in the generations .

It is not just terminology. There is a progression in our self awareness and in the understanding of how sexuality and gender are social constructions. The idea of more or less rigid sexual identities/sexualities is still mainstream, but a different understanding is growing. 

 

49 minutes ago, forrestreid said:

How much of this is a genuine insight into the deficiencies of the terms in question, and how much is just each generation thinking it knows better, I don’t know.

It is both.

49 minutes ago, forrestreid said:

To be honest, your article felt to me a bit like somebody who is dissatisfied with a lot of the conservatism of a general gay culture

Dissatisfied? I think you are too sweet.

 

51 minutes ago, forrestreid said:

Some of your arguments are in danger of disappearing down a bit of a rabbit hole, I fear. For instance I understand your point about the celebration of “coming out” putting pressure on men who might feel they can’t, or are not confident enough in their identity to do so.

But that doesn’t negate the point that in general, that it’s better for sexual minorities that homosexual men come out rather than not. So the argument would be, is the pressure on gay men to come out a “progressive” pressure (the more gay men out the better), or is it better embrace a queer identity and it says “I don’t have to come out because I wasn’t already in”.

I do not have anything against coming out. I am out and proud of it. What I find disgusting is the sense of superiority that privileged men feel from coming out (there is a difference between pride and self-aggrandizement), and the way they look down to other men that made a different decision in their lives. These idiotic fundamentalists of being out and loud, without considering privileges and circumstances, they are quite mainstream nowadays and just one of the things (remember, do not look just at ONE) that is tearing the gay out of me.

58 minutes ago, forrestreid said:

And to turn the tables on you a bit, your handle would seem to indicate that you are a Latino who is into black men. Could this not be seen as fetishising a different race, which could be seen as rather dehumanising of them?

Hell yes. My handle is a testimony of the last century. I am an old man. I considered switching it to Jose Soplanucas, my blog's handle. However, I am not ashamed of my past mistakes and misconceptions, but quite proud of being almost 60 and still keeping my mind open and my willingness to change the only thing where I can really operate changes, myself. So I decided to keep it, and keep all the history of my evolving open to everyone.

1 hour ago, forrestreid said:

To be honest this is something that one could spend a whole evening and several glasses of wine discussing, if we met up in real life, but those are some of the issues (or could I be as grandiloquent as to say “internal contradictions”) that struck me from your essay anyway.

You drink your wine, I smoke my pot.

[forrestreid]

On 6/2/2021 at 12:52 AM, Latbear4blk said:

 

Hi Latbear4blk.

Glad you took my criticism in good spirit anyway.

 

There is a lot of food for thought in your opening post, though I think in general my own critique of what you say is that you are thinking about people’s lived experiences a bit too politically, (a bit like religious conservatives who criticise what they see as the “gay lifestyle” from their worldview, except from the opposite perspective) rather than as a criticism of any of your particular points.

 

Enjoy your trip back to Buenos Aires.