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You are here: Home > Forum > A Place of Safety > General Talk > Role models for gay kids (and adults, come to that!)
Role models for gay kids (and adults, come to that!)  [message #53030] Tue, 09 September 2008 07:02 Go to previous message
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13818



Roger made a short and substantial point. He said:

> Gay boys, (most that ive known anyway) have low self esteme. They for the most part have grown up in hostil environments. boys or girls both gay and straight need role models to look up to. It really doesnt mater if someone is gay or str8t except to show a gay child that anything is possible even for them. that gay men can become heros, world chanpions and acomplished actors and actrisses.

I think the most important words are in the middle of that statement:

> It really doesnt mater if someone is gay or str8t except to show a gay child that anything is possible even for them.

This is a drum, in one guise or another, that I've been beating for a long time, too.

When I grew up, and, since Roger is of a similar age, when he grew up, queers and fags were reviled. But queers and fags didn't have decent role models within the queer and faggy folk. With the best will in the world, Liberace (who won a libel case against a newspaper who said he was homosexual for that "slur") and Kenneth Williams were not role models one would, in general, aspire to be in the least way similar to.

Those people in my view did "us" (if there is an "us") great harm as role models (I argued some time ago for the good they did in a different way in a different field). But quiet and decent role models there were not. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears were part of an unreachable elite, so they could not count, despite some form of tacit acceptance of their arty farty relationship. For all the rumours, Cliff Richard is celibate and doesn't count.

We needed, I needed, someone to look up to. I didn't have low self esteem. But I was disgusted that I might be queer because of the unpleasant queers I saw in the press and on TV. It would have been good to find an Olympic gold medal diver who just happened to be gay to show that queers could be athletic, too, or an important businessman who just happened to be gay, or a politician who just happened to be gay.

All these folk compete on level terms and sexuality is unimportant in their success or failure.

They are around today. They weren't around back then.

In the UK our first gay Prime Minister will be a matter of course and statistics. We may even have him in post today by some reports. In the USA your first gay President will be assassinated.

[Updated on: Tue, 09 September 2008 07:03]



Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
 
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