Where is my mind.

[baratron]

Sad, stressed and profoundly sighy. Got about 15 minutes of useful work done today. Blah. Have cleaned the entire flat as a displacement activity. Hrm.

As procrastination, I have been reading A Straight Person's Guide To Gay Etiquette, as linked by j00j. It's very funny - I gave up trying to quote salient parts of it because I like all of it. The bisexual page in particular is brilliant, and the Weddings and Other Nightmares page was thought-provoking. I am so completely unsure about whether or not I want to get married...

Gah, well, I've wasted enough time without writing up a ramble about marriage.

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Cracks me up. :)

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

As procrastination, I have been reading A Straight Person's Guide To Gay Etiquette

(Below is a copy of the email that I sent to The Plaid Adder, who wrote the guide.)

I read your web pages ("The Fine Art Of Being Come Out To") a couple of days ago (after a link in someone's LiveJournal), and I was left with rather mixed feelings. Just for the record, I'm a white, male, middle-class heterosexual, so I'm guessing that I'm your target audience (although I'm British rather than American).

Firstly, the good - I thought there was some decent advice in there. Not much that was new to me, but it was worth saying, particularly the part about not being too enthusiastic to prove one's liberal credentials. And the comment about "Mild-mannered heterosexual by day--LOVE GOD OF THE GAY UNDERWORLD BY NIGHT!!" literally made me laugh out loud.

Mind you, you mentioned the misconception that "your outcomer is telling you this because s/he wants your body". I've only had two people come out to me in person (as opposed to other cases where it was common knowledge), and in both cases the outcomer was a significantly older man (a stranger) who was propositioning me at a bus stop, and was reluctant to take no for an answer. I'm certainly not claiming to be irresistible, so I just mention this as anecdotal evidence which may not fit in with your own expectations.

And just as a point of interest, some of the problems you mention (e.g. bachelor parties) may not apply to everyone. For instance, I've been to a couple of stag nights, which haven't involved strippers, and everyone who turned up split the cost (e.g. taking it in turns to buy rounds of drinks).

The basic problem I had with what you wrote was that you seem to have a chip on your shoulder regarding heterosexuals in particular, and the establishment in general. E.g. "I'm in love with a breeder. Well, FUCK." It doesn't automatically follow that all heterosexuals will have children, and that term (breeders) strikes me as pejorative, comparing humans to cattle. Similarly, your repeated references to "The Man" emphasise a "them and us" mentality. Then you compare a bar being raided by the police to an attack by skinheads. My view is that if the police are doing a raid, i.e. they believe that a crime is being (or has been) committed, then the best approach is to co-operate with them and be polite, rather than to "join your acquaintance in taunting and otherwise harassing the moron at hand". You may be suggesting that a bunch of redneck police officers will say "Hey, let's go beat us up some faggots", but how often does that actually happen? Given the amount of litigation in America, I assume that such an event would have led to a court case, so there would be evidence to support this (such as a newspaper report). In all my own dealings with the police (both when I've reported a crime to them, and when they've caught me doing something wrong), I've found that if I behave reasonably then so do they.

However, the sentence that bothered me the most was "You see, by virtue of your heterosexuality, you are the oppressor". As I interpret that (and please correct me if I'm wrong), you are saying that regardless of my actions or inactions, I am oppressing people simply by existing. This comes back to the "them and us" attitude - it sounds like "homosexuals and heterosexuals can't live in harmony, so the only way for homosexuals to be free is for all heterosexuals to die". The most charitable response I can think of is to dismiss your opinions as comic relief ("Help! Help! I'm being oppressed! Violence inherent in the system! Violence inherent in the system!" - Dennis, Monty Python and the Holy Grail), which I'm sure isn't the desired effect. To digress slightly, I saw "X-Men 2" the other day, where mutancy is a fairly blatant metaphor for homosexuality; using that metaphor, I think you come across as being more like Magneto than Professor Xavier. If this is truly what you believe, then you're entitled to your opinion, but it seems just as bigoted as homophobia to me, so it's certainly not going to make your other comments any more persuasive.

Regards,

John

[damerell.livejournal.com]

You know, it's traditional for Americans to become uptight because they don't understand humour written by the British, not vice versa.

I'm a "breeder" - wildly inappropriate as the term is in my case - and I thought this was pretty funny...

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends whether the original guide was written as a joke, or whether it was intended to be taken at face value. For instance, the Emily Postnews guide is clearly sarcastic, and is the opposite of what people should actually do, which I found entertaining. However, the context of the "gay ettiquette" guide doesn't seem to be tongue-in-cheek in the same way.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

My lack of response (to this and to your email) is not me ignoring you so much as me not knowing what to say. Thought I should make that clear.

Mind you, you mentioned the misconception that "your outcomer is telling you this because s/he wants your body". I've only had two people come out to me in person (as opposed to other cases where it was common knowledge), and in both cases the outcomer was a significantly older man (a stranger) who was propositioning me at a bus stop, and was reluctant to take no for an answer.

I think I would not call that "coming out". To me, coming out is when a person tells someone else that they already know about their sexuality. A person might come out to their family, friends or work colleagues. It's a case of "you already know X, Y and Z about me... now I want to tell you this other thing that might not have been obvious".

Having a stranger at a bus stop tell you that he likes men is not the same thing as your best friend that you've known for 5 years telling you that he does. Plaid Adder's advice is supposed to apply to the sort of coming out I have described above, when the outcomer is someone you know. A lot of people think that when a friend comes out to them, it means that friend wants to make a move on them - when actually, it's just supposed to be information: "for your knowledge, I might want to bring a same-sex partner to some social event sometime in the future, are you going to freak out?"

Whereas if a stranger at a bus stop tells you something, either he's bursting with happiness having finally told his parents something he's been trying to say for ten years, and thinks he might as well now tell the entire world, or he's got designs on you. The latter situation is much more likely than the former ;)