Again Josh, Official SpokesGay writes a Facebook post that I have to put here.
Had a long conversation with one of my best friends last week. We talked a lot about how different life, sex, love, politics look as we enter middle-age as compared to how it looked to us in the late 80s when we were just coming out.
About the double-edged sword of cultural ghettoization. How the closure of a famed gay bar provokes sadness and outcries about how those young baby fags don’t understand what they’ve lost. And they don’t, but not necessarily for the Very Important Reasons we middle-aged are thinking of.
So gaydar. That way “you can tell” if someone is gay. Maybe he’s a bit “artistic.” Maybe she cuts her hair short and doesn’t speak with the melodic pitch intervals associated with women’s speech.
Those old heuristics work less and less well. I’ve complained about how it’s hard to tell the straight boys from the gay ones anymore. Men can be foppish just a little bit more, even if they’re straight. Women can be just a bit more tomboy-ish even if they’re straight. Yes, the change is halting and punctuated with backlash. But it is happening. Because, millimeter by millimeter, non-negotiable gender roles and their behavioral cues are becoming more negotiable.
So what am I complaining about? The fact that the codes and tells developed as self-defense mechanisms aren’t as relevant anymore because there’s a tiny bit less of a need to self-ghettoize? Yes, that’s what I was complaining about.
This is to mistake the edifice, the costumes, the arbitrary behavioral etiquette, for the essence of what it means to be gay or queer. It’s fetishizing a subculture that arose in reaction to violence and squelching. It’s bemoaning the loss of a cultural identity that only ever existed as a way to give some solidarity to a terrified group of people who had to hide in the shadows.
But then, we are all nothing but the people and identities who emerge from a specific time, a specific place, with specific vocabularies and restaurants and film stars and laws and brands of coffee. There is no Platonic essence of us. We are only emergent manifestations of our when and where. That’s the really-real, the there-there. So maybe we can be forgiven a bit for mourning the loss?
Affection for one’s subculture is complicated. It’s always bittersweet. And it almost always misleads one by emotion; you have to second-guess yourself when you start pining for how it used to be.
I don’t know where to go with it all. But I do know it’s no good to age into a comfortable but reactionary nostalgia. Even if it seems like a loss, one must remind one’s self that longing for the comfortable, familiar signals of the ghetto one grew up in is not an unalloyed good. It may not be a good at all.
Revolutions never turn out as revolutionaries intend.
That is quite a good post.
Remember the “metrosexuals” of, what, the 1990s? I think that was a huge step toward the majority embracing certain characteristics that were once associated with homosexuals or women. For example, men getting a manicure or a pedicure. That’s certainly no big deal now, is it? I don’t see it as such – nobody seems to care. But back in the day, that was something exclusive to women. Getting one’s nether regions waxed? That’s quite commonplace among professional men, particularly the under-50 set. Why should a man have to feel uncomfortable and smelly, when waxing is an available remedy? (So I’ve been told.) This sort of grooming was also associated primarily with homosexuals and women, but is now quite mainstream among straight men as well, the white-privileged-cis-Christian-dominant demographic (that was quaintly referred to as “WASP” back in the day).
I think it was a huge coup when the homosexual community demonstrated and became associated with so many elite characteristics. Remember “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”? That show demonstrated the valuable and desirable fashion sense that is now a stereotype for gay men (and I loved it). The fact that women are so often drawn to gay men for friendships also no doubt caught the attention of many straight men. But first, there had to be enough characteristics classified as “gay” to identify someone as being of that group. There is no stereotypical [fill in the blank] until you can define a stereotype in broadly-enough recognized terms that it applies to [fill in the blank].
Where am I going with this? Oh, I dunno – the OP spoke of how things change and how things used to look and the bittersweetness of it. I often remark on that within the feminist movement – once a great source of pride for a lot of women, there are now women who claim to be feminists attacking the movement and advocating anti-feminist attitudes, all under the guise of promoting a “rational, sensible, healthy” feminism. I can’t see that happening within the gay rights movement, but perhaps I’m just lacking in creativity. Just as interracial marriages became ho-hum, perhaps the ideal is for gay marriages to become likewise ho-hum – so normal that no one bats an eye any more. Nobody’s fighting to re-segregate marriage, after all, although it was widely illegal some decades ago. Of course, then there will no longer be the galvanizing passion and energy to fight injustice against [demographic group]…not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. There will always be plenty of injustices to fight, I’m afraid…
Having hair makes you “uncomfortable and smelly”?
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.
You can see the same sort of thing playing out with trans people. There are trans women my age who still place a high priority on “passing” and staying in the background. The hatred that they show to younger trans people who have no interest in passing and staying quiet about being trans is staggering. It is as if they insist that future generation must have the same obsicles the we all had growing.
I hate this attitude. While I wish it was easier for me, it was not. But I am happy that for some, it actually is.
Janine … @ # 6: … the same obsicles …
Is that when behavior patterns freeze in place, become brittle and dependent, then finally drip away?
Blanche, I’m curious. What evidence do you have that straight guys getting their crotches waxed is now commonplace amongst professional men, however one defines them? Anyone else here is free to chime in with any data they might have.
Supporting Blanche (#3), and answering Tim (#8), as one data point on the zeitgeist, this video is on Gillette’s corporate YouTube channel: How to Shave Your Groin
I agree with Janine on the trans issues. It is sad that we older trans people felt (and still feel) so much pressure to conform to outdated stereotypes that we either continue to police our post-transition selves, or stay closeted.
I am absolutely delighted that many younger people feel comfortable enough to be open about who they are, and do not feel obliged to fit into the old cultural stereotypes of ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’. I will love it when that becomes universal.
Their attitude has helped me be more open. Indeed, it helped me to find myself.
Remember all those self-help books whose advice boiled down to “Just be yourself!”? They baffled me, because I had locked away my true self so thoroughly as a kid that not only had I no idea who I was, but the assertion itself held no meaning for me. Until I came into contact, via the internet of course, with several young trans people who were/are completely open about themselves and their journey – and the locks on my internalised closet were smashed wide open.
Gone are the days when the whole of humanity was expected to fit into one of two boxes – either androphilic, (passively) sexual, female, feminine, or gynophilic, (aggressively) sexual, male, masculine. I was misplaced at birth, then forced as a child, into the first box, and I can’t/don’t want to jump into the second instead, because that won’t fit me either*. The younger generation have given me permission to create my own box. As the majority straight(ish) population frees themselves from the strict gender binary, they create a whole new set of boxes, making space for all the people who couldn’t possibly fit comfortably into one of those two old boxes however hard we tried.
The people who first stood up and declared “I won’t fit into those boxes! Here’s one my friends and I have made!”, against strong opposition, deserve to have their contribution recognised. Without them, we’d all still be closeted. But I understand, thanks to Josh’s post, the bittersweet emotions they must be feeling now that younger people don’t want those boxes either, and want to make their own.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I would describe my own, personal box as being ‘androphilic, asexual, male, on the masculine side of the femininity/masculinity scale (but not all the way to the end by any means)’.
Of course there are a ton of other descriptors in there too. =^_^=
I’m sorry to be the one to broaden your imagination on this (truly), but, of course it’s going on with gays. Just as it does with every oppressed group. Some better-situated person attacks the more vulnerable members of the group to win credit with the mainstream majority.
Andrew Sullivan is an example.
We call these men “Uncle Marys,” a portmanteau of Uncle Tom and Mary, the classic gay nickname for other gay guys (which is becoming archaic). Or, rather, I call these men Uncle Marys despite the spluttering outrage it provokes. Because that’s what they are.
chigau (違う) says
November 30, 2014 at 2:45 pm
and
timgueguen says:
November 30, 2014 at 10:25 pm
I am a white, cis-hetrosexual male that is professional (I even have a custom tailored suit to show for it – because of my 3+ sd size). I have waxed in the past, which is anecdotal. I waxed because of my sports and the ickiness of the sweat tied with the public hairs where even constant washing impeded what I thought was good hygiene. Waxing helped that and felt freaking awesome. I loved having my arms and arm pits waxed. The smoothness helped wipe the sweat off on my arms during sports.
I have friends who do not wax, but do “manscaping” using an electric razor to trim-and-snip their pubic hairs. As far as I know for aesthetics. These are things that I would have never done in the 90s – or thought of doing in the 90s. Now, not much of a big thing for my friends and I.
Of course, anecdotal but with a whiff of “plausible” that this is more common – especially among the younger whippersnappers. Of course, my teenage nephew was a bit stupefied / horrified / questioning why I waxed my legs so there is anecdotal evidence the other way. As a former swimmer, shaving body hair never phased me (groin area was a different barrier that I had to break through)
Exactly. He’s built his reputation on being “reasonable” so that people think that he’s not one of “those” gay men who make them think uncomfortable things or confront their internalized bigotry face-on. And it works: he posts admiring reader comment after admiring reader comment declaring how open-minded and reasonable he is, and they all declare that they are going to subscribe to his blog and buy his coffee cup and blog shirts. Those admiring fans are earning him close to a million dollars a year, and HE lives in a place where he was granted the right to marry his husband, so why not urge same-sex couples in, say, Mississippi to just pipe down, don’t make waves, and don’t push for civil rights. Everything looks just great from where Sullivan is sitting.
Blanche Quizno @3:
I hate to continue raining on the parade, but….
That’s not even the first time the term “New Feminism” was applied to a conservative movement, either. Wikipedia has this to say:
The “welfare feminism” bit probably isn’t true, [3] but the rest checks out. Suffragettes argued loudly and bitterly over what “equality” meant, and at various times included the wage gap and sexual assault in the mix. The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in the USA was especially divisive.[4] Some of them took an everyone-or-nothing approach to voting rights, which unfortunately tended to mutate into outright bigotry. [5] [6] Others had no problems incorporating and even being led by black women. [7]
Then World War I happened. In Britain, the government supported a radical feminist group with strong fascist tendencies;[8] meanwhile in Germany, the Social Democratic Party combined extensive socialist reforms with an emphasis on party loyalty.[9] The result was a peculiar mix of progressive and traditional values, advocating for suffrage as well as a separate-but-equal view of men and women. A sexist branch of feminism.
At the same time, many women had taken the jobs of men during the war, and learned they were just as capable. Science had finally gotten the tools needed to begin rigorously studying gender and sex over the prior decades, and myths were starting to fall.[10] So not only was there a groundswell of support for feminism, science was starting to clarify just want “equality” meant. The majority of the feminist movement would not settle for just the vote, they wanted to stamp out other forms of sexism.
You can see this conflict in the written record of the time.[11] I wish I had the time to dig into all those references, but the snippets by themselves are tantalizing:
I’m not sure Wikipedia’s summary of what a “New Feminist” believed is accurate, as it looks like both sides of that divide slapped that label on one another, but certain modern parallels should be obvious.[12] [13]
[1] http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae_en.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_feminism#History
[3] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=welfare+feminist%2Cwelfare+feminism&year_start=1900&year_end=1950&corpus=15&smoothing=3
[4] http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2011/03/womens_suffrage_and_racism_ida_b_wells_vs_frances_e_willard.html
[5] http://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137681070/for-stanton-all-women-were-not-created-equal
[6] http://womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/bl_crisis_1912a.htm
[7] https://www.nwhm.org/html/exhibits/rightsforwomen/AfricanAmericanwomen.html
[8] http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/womenww1_three.htm
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Social_Democratic_Party_of_Germany#Pre-republic_1863.E2.80.931918
[10] Woolley, Helen. “A Review of the Recent Literature on the Psychology of Sex.” Psychological Bulletin, 1910. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Thompson/psychsex.htm
[11] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=new+feminism&year_start=1900&year_end=1955&corpus=15&smoothing=3
[12] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html
[13] http://www.conservapedia.com/New_Atheism