Oh lordy, not this again.
An opinion piece in Pink News saying “don’t be so damn flamboyant if you want equal rights.” There was a discussion on Alex’s Facebook page around the same oh so helpful suggestion.
Topher Gen in Pink News:
You’re not being bold, you’re not making a stance and you’re certainly not making a statement – at least not one that’s helping us gain the respect and equality we deserve.
Perhaps you think I’m being too serious, that Pride is just ‘fun’. Well, you know what? Equality is reached through hard work and dedication, not staggering around the streets in a drunken haze whilst dressed in drag. And Pride does a lot more damage to the LGBT community than people care to realise.
When children are mocked and bullied at school for their sexuality, what hateful remarks are they subjected to? When I was at school, it was remarks like “bums against the wall, boys” or moronic digs and questions from my adolescent piers about “If I liked to wear dresses or make-up” or they’d flick the wrist at me; I even got pushed around. What’s my point? These remarks, these calls that teenage homosexuals are bombarded and plagued with, are heavily incorporated into every Pride march and then plastered all over websites, magazines and the TV for the world to see. It’s a parade full of six-foot tall queens, cross-dressing middle-aged men – and guess what, I’m not stereotyping here. That’s what a lot of the members of the procession dress like. It’s little more than a counterproductive, drag-queen pageant these days than it is a political statement. Yet, people still say it’s harmless fun. Around 40 percent of homosexual teenagers suffer from depression and 30 percent of all teen suicides are due to issues related to their sexuality, most notably being subjected to bullying because of it – tell me now Pride’s just harmless fun?
Hi. Let me explain something. Equal rights are not supposed to be conditional on being sufficiently sedate and conservative and conformist. The right not to be bullied shouldn’t be linked to a supernatural ability to avoid ever being annoying or even noticeable. Equality is not the same thing as sameness, in fact it’s pretty much the opposite of it – equality is not just for the “norm” of being like some Ideal Average, it’s for being like whatever.
The same applies to women. I keep seeing angry “arguments” that feminists need to stop talking about women all the time and just be normal and human with human rights like everyone else. No, we can’t do that and we shouldn’t be expected to. It’s no use saying “I don’t see color” and it’s no use saying “I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist” – that fight isn’t won yet, and I see little reason to think it ever will be, so no, we can’t and won’t just fade politely into the background. Stop telling us to.
Woah, chill out! Good grief – if you can’t stagger around the streets in a drunken haze* dressed however you damn well please, you haven’t got equality. Everyone else does it.
Also when kids at school bully and mock their classmates because some other people who share their sexuality have been dressing up and staggering drunkenly, you don’t have equality.
* If you’re still walking straight, you’re doing gay pride marches wrong.
Okay, I’m off now.
No, Pride isn’t harmless fun. It’s a political statement: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”
I remember the first time I ever ran across the word “feminazi”, in the late 1980s. I asked the user to define it; rather than quoting its originator, he said (this is a direct quote):
Ah, I replied. So it’s fine to be a feminist if I’m polite and genteel and ladylike about it. The moment I express a hint of annoyance or frustration, the moment I dare assert that someone is wrong, the moment I dare to be even the faintest slightest bit in anyone’s face about my feminism … I merit comparison to a Nazi. Nice to know.
Oh, I added, and by the way, go fuck a cholla cactus. Is that “in-your-face” enough?
Aside from everything else that is wrong with that little piece of crap, there is the fact that he used “piers” instead of ” peers”.
Yes. I am being petty. I tend to do that when someone says something stupid.
This viewpoint is depressingly ahistorical as well. Let’s put aside the way things should be, and just talk practical matters: Do “flamboyant”/”extremists”/whatever really hurt “the cause”? Not really, not the way I see it. People who push things “too far” make room for the moderates. Overton Window and such (though I hate to call it that, given the associations) So maybe your mom is no longer scandalized by the nice lesbian couple down the street that always keeps to themselves, and reserves her rancor for the chaps-wearing shirtless Pride marcher. If said Pride marcher were not there to draw fire, the “moderates” would be considered “flamboyant”, and they’d be taking all the flak.
Social change requires both moderates and extremists. Every single meaningful social change has fit this pattern. Unfortunately, both groups also tend to throw each other under the bus, which is too bad… because neither can be effective without the other.
What a fucking load of victim blaming horseshit. *We* bring it on ourselves by being ourselves and taking pride in ourselves? How dare he!
Makes me want to fucking puke.
Well I was bullied for being a “faggot” in High School because I took art classes and sang in the choir instead of playing hockey and football. And I’m not even gay.
Seems to me the point of Pride is to say it’s OK to be someone who doesn’t fit the traditional gender stereotypes. Those teen suicides he’s talking about aren’t just because of bullying, they are because those kids weren’t allowed to be themselves. Telling them to shut up and pretend not to be who they are isn’t helping.
*applause* for James Sweet @5.
These some in every downtrodden, shitted-upon group: “Maybe if we act in a non-threatening, non-challenging way, just as our oppressors do, society will finally accept us! ”
“Conform… Conform… Conform…”
When I was younger, I used to feel the same way as the author and then I read up on gay history. If you look at events such as the Stonewall riots it was the flamboyant drag queens and those who were out and proud who led the changes and advances in gay rights. If everyone was like Topher Gen then we wouldn’t have the gay rights we have today.
Here’s a different idea: let’s teach children to accept all kinds of people and that it’s not ok to bully somebody because of anything.
I guess this person will also lecture Latin@ kids that if they don’t want to be discriminated against they should stop speaking Spanish and eat that damn furrin food and stop celebrating anything but the 4th of July
Oh, look! An appeal to the Heckler’s Veto. Is it already a day ending in Y?
If we were really, really cynical, it’s possible to see the “throw each other under the bus” move as being an effective strategy. It isn’t really consciously done that way at the time, but it’s often possible to see it that way in retrospect. Feminists like me and my equivalents in the 70s, married women dressed in conventional suits, often with pearls, benefited tremendously from not being like those shaven-headed butch women in their overalls with safety pins in their ears. And honestly we didn’t look very much like that, but we cheered and clapped when they spoke.
More importantly, people not like us listened to us when we spoke because the way was paved by the apparently different and more radical group and we were much more “respectable” – despite the fact that we had the same policies, went to the same meetings and marches and were very often personal friends. But the tendencies of television and newspaper reporters to focus on differences, however trivial or important, rather than similarities in the views expressed plays into and reinforces the perceptions of uncommitted onlookers. The occasional genuine infighting and genuinely different strategies reinforce that impression.
mikee @ 10:
Precisely. What this person is saying is not “just” an ugly example of internalised homophobia, it’s ignorant and ahistorical.
The problem is bullying, not which words bullies use. If children are bullied at your school, and being (perceived as) not-straight is something children are bullied for, there’s no shortage of hateful remarks to use. It’s not like the bullies would stop bullying if noone ever dressed in drag.
Why are only women allowed to wear dresses and makeup?
Cause, you know, being quiet, polite and invisible has worked on the road to equality never once in the history of humanity, but hey, maybe this time it might just be different.
When they grow up, do they get to be docks?
That’s Topher Gen’s stance on marriage equality. Against it, I assume, on the well-trodden grounds* that gay men can marry women and lesbians can marry men now?
*It’s barely not a mixed metaphor. You tread ground. Shut up.
Dan Savage has suggested that the spirit of the Pride events has shifted away from self-support, and encouragement for the still-hidden, towards generic (drunken) celebration. And that isn’t necessarily a Bad Thing. I don’t think Mardi Gras is harmed by drifting away from Catholic observance.
Why shouldn’t ‘Pride’ events include the most extreme, flamboyant, expression? The drag queens fought at Stonewall, why shouldn’t they have a place of extra visibility among all the Fire Fighters, PFLAG members, politicians etc. etc.?
s/That’s/What’s
s/now/already
Wow.
cactuswren, I must compliment you on your choice of insults. Sadly, living in the PNW, no one here would get it….