Y’all want talk about gay men as a uniquely prejudice-filled group while ignoring the existence of trans and nonwhite gay men or any other gay men who don’t fit into your bogeyman role; you also totally avoid discussion of, say, MEN as a group, or cis people as a group, or white people as a group, because then those critiques would apply to you and your buddies as well, and you are not actually interested in ameliorating any of this, you just want to talk shit about the mean ol’ gays without being called on your homophobia
gay men’s transmisogy is separated distinct and valid. just like lesbians. we can talk specifics it’s okay
Yes. Gay men within LGBT spaces (ESPECIALLY but not only able-bodied, white cis middle class gay men) developed a very specific subcultural flavour of racism, transphobia and sexism aimed at every group within the LGBT community that might threaten the power of white cis gay men within the LGBT community.
From ‘no fats no femmes’ to ‘gold star gay’ to ‘not everything is about gender’ to ‘gay but straight-acting’ to mocking queens and bottoms to putting a white cis gay man on the cover of every damn LGBT magazine, gay men have developped a specific flavour of bigotry within LGBT spaces and talking about that is not homophobia.Not gonna get into everything because yes gay culture makes certain systemic biases show up in different ways, but also most people in practice do pin shit on gay men to distance themselves from their own complicity in oppressive structures.
But.. for the record, bottom shaming and the like are gay community specific issues that are ours and ours alone to address and if you aren’t specifically gay, or at least mlm, no one wants to hear your ugly ass peanut gallery opinion on them.
1. I’m gay
2. The gay community makes its bottomshaming and femmephobia an LGBT community problem when they photoshop make up and drag on homophobic politicians they hate and do ‘that boy is a bottom’ montages on Putin.
Bottomshaming pretty much always involves a very loud, explicit disapproval of all things passive or feminine and is deeply rooted in misogyny. Women who have to listen to that kinda shit in LGBT spaces have every right to point it out.
First of all, those memes are homophobic and most (99%) of them come from cishet libdem people, esp the ones about Trump and Putin so that’s like an issue for gay people to address not take responsibility for, and on to point two:
As a gay person, you should know that gay people are predisposed to femininity not only because of our cultural zeitgeist but also our gender atypical neurological structure. Being in a society that expects a performance of manhood that’s fundamentally at odds with yourself is stressful af. Being yelled at for getting into your mom’s makeup leaves scars. Gay people who shit on femininity are almost always self loathing and having trouble coming to terms with themselves. We come at them with compassion, not yell at them and further push them away from the support and resources they need to heal.
I constantly see gay people doing the stuff I described. Do you remember the LGBT-organized anti-Putin protests in 2013?
Because I vividly remember standing in that crowd and feeling like my makeup and my femininity were being mocked. I felt like I didn’t belong. Just like I felt like I didn’t belong every time gay men complained about the ‘faggots’ ruining it for the ‘normal gay people’.
Some of that behavior comes from self loathing, but just as often that behavior comes from gay men’s experience of missing out on the top dog position of white cis straight men and wanting to at least be on the top of the picking order somewhere.
While we need space and compassion for gay men who want to heal, we also need to acknowledge that this behavior is violent, that it hurts other gay men who try to find pride in their femmeness and in bottoming and that when gay men hurt others we have a duty to stop them from doing so. Sometimes that involves shutting that behavior down.
We could talk about this whole night, there’s so many aspects to it. There have been books written about it. I recommend ‘
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?’. I don’t want to talk about it with you. It involves far too many emotions on my part.
I just want to point out that bottomshaming and femmephobia is violent, it hurts people. It is also in many ways transphobic and misogynistic and it saturates the LGBT community. That makes it everyones problem. All LGBT people have the right to be talking about this. Calling such conversations homophobic is a joke. There’s nothing homophobic about wanting to have better, less violent communities and holding gay men responsible for the damage their behavior does.
QueerAnarchism 