More To It Than That

I was asked the question about nine months ago. It's not the first time that I've ever been asked it, but for some reason, that time, it stuck with me. Maybe its because there was no malice in the question that time. Someone was just genuinely curious. I had the answer, but nothing more. No reasons. No examples. Nothing to back up what I knew instinctively was true.

The question is: “Is there more to being gay than sleeping with other dudes?”

And I instinctively knew that the answer was “yes.” I knew that there was more to being gay than the literal definition. I felt that there was something else to be said, but I didn't know what it was. But then, it finally hit me.

In an ideal world, there's nothing more to being gay than your sexual preference. In a vacuum, there's nothing else to it. When there is no stigma attached to a label, then you don't make a culture out of it. There's no glasses culture. There is no Methodist culture. There is no red-head culture. Because these things don't exclude people from the normal at-large society that we all belong to.

But, at any time, someone could say “You don't belong here” as has so long been said in the subtext of American society. And so what literally means “sleeping with the same gender” suddenly comes to mean so much more. So, yes, there is a lot more to being gay. Because we've had to fight for a long time to be who we are.

For the longest time, I used to say that I didn't ever want to be a banner-waving queen. I took it as a badge of honor that I didn't read “queer.” And then, I ran across a quote from someone (can't remember right now who said it), and it said “Whenever you rail against those that are too 'feminine' and 'swishy,' think about where we would all be without them.” Where would we be?

Fucking nowhere, that's where.

Once upon a time, a brave man dared us to push ourselves. He dared us to come out, because the community would stand with us. And we did. We came out so much that a bad coming out story is becoming less and less common. We're coming out at such a rate that a 15 year old can come out in small town south Georgia and not have a word said to him. Sure, it was the talk of the school and church for a few months, but people (well, most people) got past it. And as we came out, we got to have a good look at ourselves and we realized something: We were not the same as everyone else. But then, we encountered a problem: We are not all the same.

We run the gamut from gym bunnies to politiqueers, from DILFs to gerds. Every aspect of society can be found in the queer community. There's nothing to unify us. There's nothing that ostensibly binds us together. After all, just because you share a common trait doesn't mean that you have to have the same agenda or even similar characteristics.

But through it all, gay culture has come into its own. There are some things that bind us together as a gay culture. First off, we all have a coming out story. At some point, we all had to tell the world that we weren't quite so heteronormative. I don't know if its universal, but I love hearing people's coming out stories. I love reading strangers' stories. I love watching it in movies. I think it becomes such a common motif within gay culture for two reasons. First, its something that we all have a common, so easily becomes common ground among an incredibly diverse group of people. Second, this is one of the hardest things that many people ever have to do. Thus, it obviously has an effect on people. And hard stories are interesting stories.

Another thing that binds the gay community together is the stigma that comes with being gay. I don't care if you've never had a negative personal experience, the illwill generated by those opposed to the homosexual community is palpable to us all. For every person that is totally fine with us, there are more that give lip services and vote against us, rejecting hate crimes legislation, marriage equality, and equal rights for military service. For every person that is not us but that stands with us, there are those people who choose any place that cameras show up to protest our very existence.

This hatred of us isn't rejected to any religion, creed, race, or class of people. There reasons are varied, but their goal is not: the eradication of the homosexual community. And yet these same people have the audacity to ask us why we reject their culture. Why we make our own. Why it becomes so dreadfully important for us to have an identity all our own. If these people want nothing to do with us, then we want nothing to do with them. And as such, we must create a culture and a life that allows us to live without them.

For some unknown reason (call it the collective unconscious), gays have gravitated towards certain people. We fall in love with stage divas. We love Margaret Cho and Kathy Griffin. We will be there for every Cher come back tour. We unabashedly own copies of Spice World. And for all of our trashiness, we also as a culture support the arts. We feature a huge number of writers and artists in all mediums. We love a good wine tasting (and a good vodka tasting...and a good rum tasting). But none of these single things bind us together because they aren't complete characteristics, so we start to squabble. Is it okay to be effeminate? What's the best way to look? What's the place of bears in all of this? Is there a place for the stupid? The intelligent? The blue-collar? As a culture, how do we all fit together and how do we make a stand? Shit, if we can't even agree about what rights we want, then how the hell are we ever going to make any headway?

I don't have the answers. But every time that I think that I can make rules for the world, I have to take a step back and realize what an idiot I'm being. We're all obviously not going to agree. Our diversity makes us stronger as a culture. And we're allowed to have disagreements. But, sometimes we have to look at the bigger picture.

A friend of mine recently made the point that we have a history that includes some incredibly illustrious individuals and that so many of our people have no idea about their history. It blows my mind that I have gay friends who didn't know the story of Harvey Milk until the Gus Van Sant film. It worries me that they don't know about Stonewall. It worries me that they don't realize how tenuous the rights struggle has been in this country or how capricious the courts of the US have been in granting our rights. It worries me that they don't know me and it angers me that they don't care.

If we as a culture decide that we would rather be left alone than confront things that make us uncomfortable, if we decide that it's simpler to live our lives in our tiny worlds rather than exploding out and demanding our rightful place, then we fail. We allow all of the ignorant assholes to believe what they want and we damn another generation to the hell of growing up gay.

Yeah, it's hard to fight. You're not going to convince them with your fists or your knives. No bombshell or hail of legislation will swing public opinion, though these things are not entirely to be discounted. A few more celebrities coming out is going to change society. No, the force of change is you and me. Its in our faces. Its in our lives. Our smiles. Our culture. Our history. That is where our strength comes from, because many people have stood up in the past and said, “I'm not going to fucking take this anymore.”

So, if you're completely happy with the state of the American homosexual, I commend you. But I'm not. Sure, we've come along way. We made it to the top of a hill. Now, though, I can see the road ahead for the next little bit. And its important that we keep walking.

Until I was 15, the most important thing that I had ever done was to come out of the closet. I have a feeling, though, that that's where many of us stop. We just barely make it out of the closet. Instead of just creeping out, though, we should set fire to the door so that we can never go back. And don't stop walking when you hit the bedroom. Go out of the door and into the streets. Confront the world with who you are. Don't take their shit. Don't make them force you back into your house. Stand and march. Where once it was said that we would stand with you, I hope we enter a new generation. I hope now that we march together, literally and figuratively, until we get to wherever it was decide we want to go. Together. All of us.

I didn't start this to be a rant at the gay community. And you are more than welcome to disagree. But that brings me back to my larger point: so long as their stigma attached to homosexuality, than American culture forces us to adopt our own culture.

This is the birth of any sort of group counterculture. If you willfully exclude someone from being a full member of your society, you beg them to create a counterculture to subvert yours. The disparity of racial culture in the United States is one major example of this. “Why can't they be normal?” I ask you, why can't you be more accepting?

Acceptance is uncomfortable. Acceptance means that you take all of us. No exceptions. You don't get a chance to say you don't like bull-dykes or swishy queens. You don't get a chance to say that bear culture freaks you out. You take people as they are. That's acceptance. Only then will we become part of your culture. Part of your world. Once upon a time, tolerance was simply enough. But I reject that defeatist philosophy. We're here. It's your move. Until then, though, there's going to be a lot more to being gay than just being gay.