Saturday, July 25, 2009

LGBT reconsidered

My unhappiness with the LesbianGayBisexualTransgendered thing is clear. I have called it a sexual Yugoslavia, an artificial group created out of parts that do not really belong together.

LGBT produces a Google number of over 11 million. If you put Gay in front of Lesbian, as in GLBT, you get about 6 million hits. Even though lesbians are numerically far fewer than gay men, the PC law requires that, as women, and because they are fewer, they get named first.

And the T thing has bothered me. I have not understood why someone like me, who is more than happy to be a man and who loves other men, should belong to a group with people who hate their physical gender and when they transition, often desire members of the newly opposite sex.

Ever since Jack Donovan (aka Malebranche) wrote Androphilia and rudely pointed out that Gay does not simply mean Happily Homosexual, but seriously implies effeminacy, my natural gender conservatism has been hyperactivated and the girly unmanliness of many, many gay men has become very irritating.

I have noticed how dominant is the assumption that to be a gay man is to be a kind of woman, or at least a womanish man or mixed manwoman. It is virtually inescapeable. I see it in movies and films, in common speech, jokes, etc. And importantly, I see it as much as or more in gay-produced and/or supposedly gay-friendly sources than I do in straight or mainstream sources. I have added the LOGO channel to my TV list and it is dominated by lesbian material and then gay male images that are overwhelmingly effeminate.

I don't have a one-dimensional notion of what it means to be a man. It doesn't require, as a lot of gays think, swaggering, burping and unrelated cluelessness. Or, when they are trying to be "serious", misogyny and violence. But I think it is an important question and although it will likely always be contested, being a man is certainly not a contentless drag routine.

Having said all that...

I am having the perverse and unfriendly notion that, due to the above reflections, the best way to understand the psychology of many male homosexuals is to see gayness precisely as a variant of transgenderism! The TGLB community: people who either physically or psychologically want to be the other sex.

Count me out.

----------------------------

3 comments:

DoDoGuRu said...

It's nice to know I'm not the only one bothered by the irritating (and I think pejorative) presentation of gay men on LOGO. I tried for a minute to be interested in LOGO, imagining as I did that I ought to connect more to "the community" somehow... but it didn't work. The channel is lesbians and vapid queens as far as the eye can see.

Anonymous said...

I never saw LOGO, but your description of it is not surprizing; I had been watching that LGTB news program "In the Life" for a while, and came to the conclusion that it was about the LT community.

--Nathan/LightSnake

Jack Donovan said...

Trans is the new gay.

It really is. Gay is boring now even to gay people, but trans is exciting and shocking and fulfills their adolescent need to rub something awful in the mainstream's face and get that horrified look that dad gave them the first time they put on eyeliner.

Trans seems to be the only "interesting" thing happening in gay land, and it seems to disproportionately dominate their media.

Your take here is interesting...though as you know harkens back to the early German movement that presented homosexuals as having the minds of women trapped in the bodies of men.

My pal Rex says that if they all want to act like women they should just get on with it and start hacking off their fun parts.

Thanks for the plug as always.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...