Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Conversation >

Homo 101

Page: 1 2 3 4 5(6)

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:55 / 10.05.06

Cam actually said he would get married, but only if it was 'real'. In a church with a priest and legal. All of which is not possible in Australia.

Supplementary question - are "in a church with a priest" and "legal" the same thing in Australia? In Britain, basically every religious marriage ceremony not performed by a priest of the established church is not a legal statement of marriage - you need to have it recorded by a registrar also. So, the easiest way for the British to get equality under the law would be to sever the Church of England's right to marry people...

10:02 / 10.05.06

As I understand it, heterosexuality didn't exist as a noun either before the invention of homosexuality as noun. This was conceived by people to demonise same sex relations, and heterosexuality (as noun) became the opposing "default" as a consequence.

I suspect there's an interesting discussion to be had about the (contrived?) opposing of 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual', particularly with regard to male sexuality - specifically, could either define itself without reference to the other?

I agree that there is a distinction between noun and adj but have heard some church groups espouse this as a way of "curing" the people who practice homosexuality (as opposed to the homosexuals who are presumably less likely to change their ways), so not really sure how helpful it is.

I think it's helpful in that it's slightly more courteous - y'know, in the same way as saying "gay man" is a little less grating than saying "gay" - and it probably helps emphasise the fact that someone is not completely defined, as a person, by sexuality alone.

The religious exploitation of that difference derives, I think, from 'love the sinner, hate the sin', which maxim encourages a splitting off of loveable (presumably sexless/neuter) person from hateful behaviour. I agree that this particular use is unhelpful in that it attempts to reduce sexual orientation to the level of addiction behaviour ie. something it's possible to 'give up' and still live a perfectly happy, fulfilled life. Sexuality is more than that, IMHO, but also less than the totality of a person. I'd therefore tend to use "homosexual" as an adjective, but be aware of the ways this can be exploited by those with an evangelical agenda.

21:35 / 10.05.06

Supplementary question - are "in a church with a priest" and "legal" the same thing in Australia? In Britain, basically every religious marriage ceremony not performed by a priest of the established church is not a legal statement of marriage - you need to have it recorded by a registrar also. So, the easiest way for the British to get equality under the law would be to sever the Church of England's right to marry people...

I'm not sure, but given how many british systems we use I wouldn't be surprised. Even so, it is illegal for same sex couples to marry (or even have a civil union) in this country. Cam's BF has made motions that he'd like to have a 'committment ceremony' or some such (ie. a wedding without any legal status) and Cam just scoffs at it.

08:58 / 11.05.06

Identifying oneself as a "cub", for example, is shorthand for saying one is a young(ish), possibly slim(mish) male who's attracted to older, bulkier, hairier males ("bears") - thus one can quickly and easily communicate what one wants from a partnership or encounter.

I think this might also have something to do with the lack of a single, central narrative for sex or single 'sex act' in same-sex encounters. I'm thinking also about Whiskey Priestess's 'What do they [heterosexuals] do in bed?' - which was at least playing off the idea that we all know what heterosexuals do in bed - and Dead Megatron's terrifying (to me) admission in the Het 101 thread (post is here) that if women do not do what he wants in bed he will be "pisse[d] off to the point of getting up, dressing up, and leaving", despite the fact that he apparently does not negotiate with them beforehand that the encounter will have to include this sexual act. (Was any of this covered in the sexual negotiation thread, btw? I've been staying out of that one.) And also, I vividly remember a friend of mine when I was in my first year at uni saying about an encounter she'd had with another woman, She thinks we had sex and we didn't!. (I think they both agreed about what had actually physically happened between them, they just disagreed about whether it was 'sex'. I hear this kind of miscommunication is becoming more and more common among young heterosexual people in the US, as abstinence-based sex education means more and more teenagers are having oral and/or anal sex but not calling it 'sex', since the girl's vaginal virginity is not at issue.)

Anyway, so what was all that about? Oh yes, the idea that gay identities and styles are sometimes and to some extent shaped around patterns of attraction or desire for certain sexual acts in a way which isn't symmetrical with heterosexuality, where it is assumed that only one act (hide-the-penis-in-the-lady) is fully sexual. Heterosexual identities, styles and sexual negotiations have to take account of that - and they do so in ways which tend to be invisiblized or naturalized in our culture, so that homosexual categorizing/stylization becomes hypervisible, 'unnatural' and mockable by contrast.

I think.

09:13 / 11.05.06

Oh yes, the idea that gay identities and styles are sometimes and to some extent shaped around patterns of attraction or desire for certain sexual acts in a way which isn't symmetrical with heterosexuality, where it is assumed that only one act (hide-the-penis-in-the-lady) is fully sexual.

Indeed. The lack of a single central defining 'act' in male-male sex (in the way penetration - with, perhaps, the attendant awareness/pressure of the possibility of pregnancy, etc. - defines the idea of male-female sex) is one of my occasional hobby-horses; I'll shamefully admit to having wheeled out "yes, but what do you mean when you say 'gay sex'?" on Christian boards in the past, usually in response to the sentiment that it's not teh gays that are necessarily an abomination, it's teh gay sex. So if teh gays can simply steer clear of anything that might constitute "gay sex", they might stand a particularly well-packed snowball's chance in Hell of going to Heaven.

Anyway, yes, asking "yes, but what do you mean when you say 'gay sex'?" almost invariably reveals that the term is being used either to mean cock/arse penetration (in which case one points out that not all same-sex couples are into anal penetration, and not all opposite-sex couples aren't) or is being used in an unexamined way as a sort of catch-all Anything That Gives Gay Men A Stiffy (they haven't usually considered lesbians).

So yeah, the absence of a single central "gay sex" act is doubtless pivotal to the development of stuff like the hanky code, and the evolution of distinct subgroups ('queans', 'rough trade', 'clones', 'bears', etc.) which give an indication of what one might expect, physically, sexually and perhaps emotionally.

Gendudehashadenough

00:30 / 15.05.06

I have recently experienced, or become aware of, a hightened reaction to homophobia in the contextual use of perjorative terms (fag, pillow biter, etc.) by people who are unaware that even though they may be used in a completely joking manner, it is still distasteful at best and obscenely offensive at worst.

I'm interested to find out how to respond to such bigotry without getting into an argument that will lead to a drawn out eplaination of why, in that case bigotry was not the received or intended outcome.

Fer instance, it's fine imho, when someone calls me a "fag" to simply say "I aint no fucking cigarette, unless you fancy smokin' my cock". What level of sarcasm do you usually employ when responding to queer-perjoratives with people who you know will not like being called on their use of the term because they feel they know how to use it without being offensive?

01:24 / 15.05.06

At my work, I tend to be seen as the bad guy anyway because I'm the boss, or at least the supervisor. When people use "fag" and "gay" in a very hateful sense, all my good-natured sense of humour goes out the window.
"Is that really what you meant? Is that the word you meant to use?"

When people are just horsing around and somebody throws it out in a non-malicious way, my experience is to take what they said to an extreme for a humourous effect that doubles as pedagogical.
Them: "That knife is gay."
Me: "Really? You saw that knife have sex with another knife? Oh my God! Call the authorities."
Them: "Er, ha ha."
Me: "Man, imagine knives having sex! They'd be so cutting edge."
Them: [some joke, and then subject change]

That way I don't look like an asshole and neither do they. We're all friends and hopefully I have planted the idea that language such as that is inappropriate.

02:41 / 20.05.06

Bump.

I'd like to post a big thank you to everybody on this thread for educating me on subjects I had very little clue on. It came in handy today when people at work looked to me for answers re semi-anonymous sex in a washroom in a public park. I was able to identify it and explain it for those who were not aware.

Also, I'd like to say thank you for my co-workers for being surprisingly understanding and interested and empathetic and and and. Thank you.

This thread is helpful in an actual practical way.

12:43 / 29.09.06

It seems to me that there are a lot more gay men about than lesbians. Is this just a reflection of my social circles or do fewer women identify as homosexual than men?

*

14:48 / 29.09.06

It's almost assuredly just a reflection of your social circle, and perhaps something about the social dynamics of being a queer woman vs. being a queer man. I think queer men have been pushed to segregate more. For a long time it was the norm that gay men only hung out with other gay men, and certainly not with lesbians (Public Sex, Patrick Califia).

15:05 / 29.09.06

Cheers, id. I assumed it was, but just wondered if there was more to it than that. Because it seems odd to me that my social circle is so heavily weighted against lesbians. For instance, I work in an industry with a high proportion of both women and gay men, but there are relatively few gay women. Just seems strange.

09:19 / 29.01.07

Incidentally, when time and botheredness allow, I may be persuaded to regale you with my oft-repeated anecdote of how two Alabama racists once mistook Xoc and me for members of the British far-right, on a train on the way back from Gay Pride...

Did you ever get round to telling this, 'Nesh?

17:38 / 29.01.07

Not in this incarnation of the board. Tomorrow!

11:11 / 30.01.07

I had a discussion a while ago with a gay man at my student's association who lamented on the pressure being put on young queer/gay people who've just "come out of the closet" (is this term okay?) to be politically active outside the gay and lesbian community. He said that it was more expected than not to join in protests, to politically advocate rights and to support the Gay Pride intitiatives (like the Gay Pride Parade here in the Netherlands). He saw this almost as a form of quiet oppression, wherein people who were openly gay/lesbian/queer, etc. were forced to more openly politicize their being what they were in order to be accepted within the community.

My question is: Do the people on this board who identify (are) gay/lesbian/queer, feel that there is such a pressure within the community? Is there such an emphasis on political outspoken-ness without one is less accepted?

13:16 / 30.01.07

Not really. In my uni the non-straights are just as apathetic as everyone else. TBH, some of the worst cases of homophobic/transphobic/biphobic/whatever stuff I've heard has come from members of our LGBT. Personally, I think my queerness means society pressures me into being a vapid hairdresser witha bevvy of fag-hags and conquests more than anything else.

*

15:05 / 30.01.07

Maybe that's the case in the Netherlands; I don't know. I've heard that from some folks in the Bay Area, but only stupid apathetic shits whose lives were being squandered going to clubs and having fun and who might as well never have been born (gay) for all the good they were doing The Party.*

Queer culture is still in the process of defining itself, and whatever it settles into, there will be folks who feel othered and pressured either to join in or react against. It's worth considering the effects of this situation: a queer culture founded on activism creates not only pressure to be active, but (in a few) counterpressure to be vocally against activism. At least that's what I think at the moment.

Frankly I feel more pressure to be skinny and white and young and good looking and go to clubs and drink a lot, but I try not to let it bother me. After all, how could thousands of gay men be wrong?**

*This statement not to be taken seriously. Do not hold this statement while running and then trip over the electric cord and poke your eye out as this could void the warrantee. If there was one.

** This too.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

15:34 / 30.01.07

Id am smart. Love the Id.

I think the endless activism can be tiring, certainly - after a while you just want them all to just leave you & your sexuality alone and not have to hear about it so much. And not everyone is equally knowledgeable about the reasons for the activism or what the problems are.

Generational differences, as well - older folk remember the bad old days more clearly than the young'uns and have a keener sense of what can be taken away.

Dissection of identity politics into smaller and smaller segments ("No, sorry, this is for gay people. You're not allowed to be gay and black at the same time here.") can disrupt the focus of activist thinking, a tendency to other the otherers (say that 10 times fast) and exclude non-queer allies (whatever "non-queer" means).

But at the same time we don't live in "Love is Full of Love" Utopian Society and there's all this shit happens and as much as you sometimes want to lie down and not have to hear the word "gay" for a while, there are all these people (who are, at best, vaguely defined in our minds like the idea of a headache that grows and grows depending on bad things have been, lately) who want to take away rights or don't understand why we should have them in the first place. And if you're highly privileged in other ways, it's easy to lose perspective on things.

Mind you, I live on the West Coast of Canada and there tends to be more of an air of activism hanging about, even with the omnipresent backlash vibe running against it.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

13:16 / 07.02.07

This Snickers advert is doing the rounds. It shows two macho dudes fixing a car. They're sharing a chocolate bar in a very unlikely manner and accidentally kiss. ONOES. One yells "Quick, do something manly!" and they begin screaming and ripping out their chest hair.

I thought it was kinda-sorta-funny, if rather contrived. But a lot of people have found it really offensive because it takes homophobia as a kind of default state. Where I read it as "Haha, look at the funny homophobes freaking out cuz of a little accidental boykissing" other people have seen "Yeah, you'd totally freak out if you accidentally kissed one of your mates, wouldn't you, eh? Woudn't want to look like one of those horrid gheys!" Which obviously made me reconsider my interpretation.

Was Snickers out of line with this ad? How should one handle homophobia when using it as a subject for comedy? Is homophobia really funny? How careful do you need to be to demonstrate which "side" you're on, to avoid inadvertantly giving comfort and succour to the enemy?

Less searchable M0rd4nt

13:25 / 07.02.07

I should also maybe add that the Snickers website also had alternate endings, where the two men beat each other up or drink motor oil to demonstrate their "manliness," which have been interpreted as promoting violence against gay people.

13:40 / 07.02.07

Well, I think, when using something as satire, that you need to be clear (if only subtley) that you are taking the piss. In this case taking the piss out of homophobia.

How often to men go about ripping out their chest hair. Really.

Look at the Stephen Colbert character on the Daily Show who regularly insults Democrats (despite being one), gays, Muslims, Jews (despite his mate and co-host being one) and so on and yet is clearly taking the piss out of the Right-Wing Newsagogue he's supposed to be.

I think Snickers are satirising homophobia here, whether that's been done well is another story.

Leigh Monster loses its cool

13:47 / 07.02.07

that reminds me of the "no means yes!" link in the thread about the Duke rape accusation case. I thought the joke (guys dressing up in Duke Lacrosse uniforms and shouting "no means yes!" at a Bay to Breakers Race), while obnoxious and over the top, was meant as satire and obviously didn't come from a pro-rape perspective or anything like that. However people found it offensive because it too cynical and was making light of something so horrific and serious.

Still--if you can't make fun of something like homophobia by portraying it as irrational, then isn't there a danger of losing a receptive audience? People are more open to being entertained than lectured.

14:11 / 07.02.07

Masterfoods has pulled the commercial due to public outcry.

15:55 / 07.02.07

I think Snickers are satirising homophobia here, whether that's been done well is another story.

I don't think it's been done well at all. Accompanying the ad on the Masterfoods website, were various football players reactions to it. It was mostly players making pained and revolted faces thusly.

Seems to me as being rather odd for an ad that aired during the Superbowl. It either shows that the players aren't "in" on the satire and they themselves are being satirised too, which is odd, considering that the company is supporting the NFL, or it shows that the player's reaction is the correct one, to be repulsed by what they're seeing and that the viewer, website browser should harbour similar opinions.

Bit of a failure of an ad for a bar that tastes like ground up tree bark.

Leigh Monster loses its cool

16:08 / 07.02.07

what, you mean you wouldn't exchange saliva with a homophobic mechanic in exchange for the orgasmic taste sensation of a snickers?

16:15 / 07.02.07

Maybe..maybe for a Mars.

17:42 / 07.02.07

It was an orgy. A Mars Bar party.

Page: 1 2 3 4 5(6)