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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13801
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How many heterosexual men realise that the guy who worked to save them was gay?
And how many gay men were saved by redneck gay hating men?
How many fathers worked alongside gay sons, all unknowing?
My point? That sexuality is wholly irrelevant except in a very small portion of our lives. The more important parts of us are our humanity. We are not gay first. We are ourselves first.
So why does being gay feel so important when it is not?
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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It feels important because that is expected. How many have you met that just.. didn't care about you being gay, in a good way? My count is one, I think.
But I wholly agree with you.
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timmy wrote:
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> So why does being gay feel so important when it is not?
and Silfer said:
>
>It feels important because that is expected. How many have you met that just.. didn't care about you being gay, in a good way? My count is one, I think.
It's things like this that make me realise how very fortunate I've been.
I've chosen to live and work in surroundings where being out and gay is not generally remarkable - to most of my colleagues, friends and neighbours my sexuality is of no more importance than my ethnicity or my gender (ie, none at all). And conversly, of course, I do my best to take people as I find them. There have been odd exceptions (I've twice been queerbashed badly enough to end up in hospital), but that is pretty rare. Even when I attended a 20th-year reunion from my old school none of my old schoolmates really seemed to care when it became apparent that I was living with a male. partner.
As for importance - for me, anyway, being gay is of *fundamental* inportance. I think of myself as being gay in the same way as I think of myself as being male - it's not something that rises to consciousness all that much, but absolutely underpins almost everything I do, in that it is one of the foundations of myself as a person and has shaped my view of the world. But at the same time, it is not specifically relevant to most of the things I do and the interactions with other people that I have, so in a day-to-day sense it isn't all that important.
Trivial example: when I was partnered, I would often buy a couple of tickets for us to see a movie. It would probably have been clear to the cashier that we were a couple, but totally irrelevant to me handing over the money. But my reasons for going to the movie, and the person I went with, would have been determined by being gay.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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It should perhaps also be added that I am still largely in the closet but getting out of it, to account for my count stated earlier. And also, I meant people who don't really care about from the beginning, and not those who have to "rethink" before they act well. Then again, rethinking is never a bad thing.
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I've come out to -- oh, I don't know -- half a dozen people. They were either neutral or positive about it.
I think being gay is almost a non-issue among young people these days, at least in the UK. (Though most people are unknowingly heterocentric, which is understandable.)
It's at times like these I realise how lucky I am to live today. There is probably nowhere and no time that I could have had a better response than I have. It's a pity America is quite so far behind Europe, but there's an easy solution to that (for me): don't try to live in America.
I don't see myself getting really involved in gay politics, as I don't really see anything that I would like to change. It's attitudes that need to be changed round here, not policies, and on the whole the closed-minded people are dying out. That's not to say I'm apathetic: I worry that Europe may go the way of America; if it starts doing that, I *will* do my best to counter it.
Luckily(?) there is just the slightest of indications that America's position as the political and economic heavyweight of the world may be coming to an end. Let's just hope that it is liberal democracy that takes its place.
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That post makes it sound like I am anti-American. I'm not: however, I dislike the American government and what it stands for. (Conservatism, war, homophobia, religious zealotry.) I have nothing against the American people... well, apart from those who voted the present government in.
I do dislike excessive and intrusive displays of patriotism; I suspect this is largely because I have a typically British distaste for hyperbole. It tends to smack of insincerity.
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marc
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Needs to get a life! |
Registered: March 2003
Messages: 4729
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I guess it depends whether or not they were wearing their team jersies......
Life is great for me... Most of the time... But then I meet people online... Very few are real friends... Many say they are but know nothing of what it means... Some say they are, but are so shallow...
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