Until at most a couple of months ago, when I started posting to the JUB and making tentative moves to confront my sexuality, I had very similar thoughts. In fact, looking back, there were three main reasons why, to me, being gay was such an unspeakably awful thing that I wasn't even able to *think* about my sexuality in an open way (I'm in my late 20s):
- gay people are women in men's bodies
- gay people are neurotic nut-cases
- gay people have very little in common with straight people and might as well live in a ghetto
That's stating my views very starkly, but you get the idea. I've largely abandoned those views, so the purpose of this post is to explain how and why.
Basically, for the sake of fairness and your own self-image, you need to make an effort to test your generalisations. I think they don't hold up once you actually get to know a range of gay people, on the one hand, and really think hard about the lives of straight people, on the other.
Have a careful look at the JUB. Have a look at people's photos, at the interests they say they have, at their descriptions of their love lives, at the friends they have, at the kinds of work they say they do. Don't cherry-pick when you do this. I was really surprised at the variation I found, to the extent that talking about 'general patterns' and 'exceptions' doesn't make any sense.
I don't know what kinds of gay people you know in real life. It must really depend. I didn't know any until I started posting to the JUB 3 months ago, except at best as nodding acquaintances who I would avoid. Those I have met and talked to since then (one skype friend I met on the JUB, people I met last week at a drinks evening organised by a local organisation of gay professionals and business people) certainly don't fit in with the steriotypes I had in my mind. OK, some were a bit different in a superficial sense, but if you talk to people face to face as individuals that turns out to matter very little. They were uncomplicated and friendly, they did not hit on me, they had no obvious hidden agendas, they struck me as psychologically well-anchored and decent people who tried to make me feel welcome and good about myself.
Talk to your straight friends about their problems and the problems of their friends. Read books or see serious movies made by and for straight people. I reread Anna Karenina a month ago and was amazed at what I could relate to. Once you move away from the specifics, most people, regardless of their sexuality, deal with some degree of self-esteem issues, fear of embarrassment or shame, relationship problems, or other anxieties. Some handle it well, some badly. The straight population is just as heterogeneous as the gay population.
I still think that it's probably true that you are likely to meet more effeminate, or neurotic, or alienated people in the gay population than in the population as a whole, but that doesn't mean that most gay people are like this. Also, think about the gay people you know who are narcissists or neurotics or whatever, and ask yourself if that is because they are gay, or because they have been exposed to unusual psychological and social pressures and have dealt with that in a bad way. Then think about what that says about the people who have dealt with similar stresses in a good way. I've come to have a lot of respect for people who have been through those pressures and have come out OK on the other side, because it shows that they have a lot of inner resources. I hope I will be able to count myself as one of those people. If you had asked me a couple of months ago I would have scoffed at the idea of 'gay pride', and I still dislike the term, but to the extent that this is what it refers to, there is something in it.
, but I worry when when we begin equating pride with a puritanical behavior and thnking one should be ashamed to be a slut. (Who exactly is looking at all the pics on JUB? Or do you just come for the posts?)
ride:
