Text 10662, 112 rader
Skriven 2007-01-24 19:21:38 av Vorlonagent (14097.babylon5)
     Kommentar till en text av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Ärende: Re: My Presidential Pick for 2006
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"Angelika Tobisch" <kamyra@arcor.de> wrote in message 
news:45b74dc3$0$30315$9b4e6d93@newsspool1.arcor-online.net...
> Vorlonagent schrieb:
>
>> I agree that there is discomfort with and even some prejudice against 
>> gays
>> abroad in american culture.  What I can't understand is why the gay
>> presentation of itself PLAYS to those stereotypes rather than seeks to
>> dispel them.
>
> There is no one gay presentation. Parts of the gay community are pretty
> much indiscernible from "normal" people as long as their not with their
> partner, other parts are more flamboyant. As I understand it you're
> asking why "normal" gays don't prevent the flashy ones from being
> flashy. There's a two-part answer to that question.

Actually, I'm wondering aloud what the flamboyant gays are hoping to 
accomplish by publicly playing to the very stereotypes that continue their 
aleination.

The quiet gays are just that: quiet.  We don't know they're there unless we 
happen to know one personally.  (I know or have known gays of both types)

All society sees is the flamboyant side, however.  I believe that acceptance 
lies in greater awareness of the gays who are just trying to live lives like 
everybody else.


> 1. You can't very well ask other people to accept you in spite of being
> different and at the same time shun people who happen to be more
> different than you are. Well, you can, but it would be highly
> hypocritical to do so.

Even more obviously, you can't control what someone else chooses to say.

But you can put your own POV across.  No repudiation of flamboyant gays is 
required for quiet--"normal" if you would?--gays to put out a different 
message.  Something that reminds people that there's more to the story than 
the flaming-queer, sexual fetishism or eternally-angry activist?

Is that too much to ask?


> 2. What you're suggesting amounts to an approach of "Look, we're not
> really different. We're being nice, we're well adapted, we're just like
> you, so please, please be kind enough to grant us some of the little
> things we're asking for." This is not what the movement for gay rights
> is all about. It's about "Yes, we are different, we have a right to be
> different, so you better learn to deal with it because we're not going
> anywhere."

That's your way of putting it.

Mine is:

"What the hades does being gay have to do with how I do my job?  I'm human 
like everybody else.  Get out of my way and we'll all be happier."

The key difference is you are embracing being "different".  Meaning no 
disprespect, gayness is not that special.  Everybody's different and to some 
degree alien from each other.  If it's not gayness, it's skin color, 
glasses, gender, intelligence, charisma, beauty, subculture...the list goes 
on and on.

That also means that gays aren't the only ones to feel the sting of 
alienation.  I'm not referring to race or gender or any politicized minority 
when I say this.  People can and will inflict alienation on anybody for any 
reason.  Yesterday, I saw a truck with a bumper sticker that read, "It's not 
a crime to be a biker".

We're all human first.  Then these other properties attach themselves. 
Acceptance means gayness is another one of those properties.  It's another 
pigement in the pallet of how people are painted.

To embrace being "different" is to embrace your own alienation.  You aren't 
"different".  You're one of us.  You're human.  Come inside for a glass of 
tea and tell me how your day was.


> If someone had approached Martin Luther King and offered him a pill to
> make him white, therefore granting him all the rights white people had,
> do you think that would have been the way to go to win that fight? I 
> don't.

I don't either.

King asserted his essential humanity and that his skin color wasn't all that 
big a deal by comparison.  I see King's dream every now and then when I see 
black and white and hispanic kids or walking home from school talking and 
laughing like any peer group does--oblivious to how which-knuckle, caught 
breath this kind of association might have been 30 years ago.

And that's why I'm not a liberal anymmore.  Liberalism these days is about 
accenting the black, underlining the gay.  About choosing to be separate. 
It's how liberalism derives its power after all.  If everybody's human, 
equal and accepted, what happens to interest-group politics?

-- 
John Trauger,
Vorlonagent

"Methane martini.
Shaken, not stirred."

"Spirituality without science has no mind.

Science without spirituality has no heart."

-Methuselah Jones
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