I will target this at the gay sector of this board as they are the ones who can answer my questions.
I think on a whole society is becoming a lot more knowledgeable and accepting of the gay lifestyle but i wonder if societies still has its issues with gay men and women
Are you affected on a daily basis. By discrimination, looks, stares, comments etc?
Do you feel safer and more relaxed if you stay within a majority based gay community?
Do you have a even amount or more gay/straight friends?
Are family members accepting of you being gay? and do they accept your partner(s)?
Do you let the negative reactions of others affect you or do you ignore them and go about your own bussiness?
Do you live in a area where being gay is more obvious/non-accepted, and if so does that affect how you act?
Sorry, a lot of questions i know
(1) There's a lot of country-club, low-key discrimination thrown around by people who assume I'm straight and as bigoted as they are. It's so understated it could be missed by someone who wants to ignore it. But the underlying premise is this: All right-thinking people ("right" in both senses of the word, I might add) believe that gay is NOT good, and we (the speaker assumes I am straight as well) share that presumption.
It's usually based on religion, upbringing, or degree of comfort with difference.
But yes, I'm usually affected at least once a day, often more than that.
(2) NO, I'm not "safer" or "more relaxed," because I'm not a white 30-something club queen trying to look like he's 20-something. Gayborhoods have their in-groups and out-groups also.
And even if I'm temporarily in a gay-friendly space, five seconds after I leave that space I'm back in repressed, homo-hating "culture."
Do I sound bitter? Maybe it's because I can't even hold hands with the man I love without "inviting" physical violence. That's why when I see cute young heterosexual things all over each other in public, I really want to spray a firehose on them and shout "get a room!"
(3) I have a small, select group of friends. More straight friends than gay, though that's slowly changing. Perhaps I'm becoming more tolerant of aging club queens, or maybe they're growing up--or some combination of the two.
(4) The answer to this variant on the age-old "does your mother know you're gay, and what does she think about it" is various. First, it shouldn't matter what your parents think of your sexuality; it is what it is, and exists whether "approved" or not. Second, "family members" means many different things to different people, especially LGBT and questioning people (and all those other categories I've forgotten at the moment) who've learned that "family" is created, not the group of people into whose lives you're arbitrarily born.
Third, my immediate family and some of my extended family know I'm gay. For many years, I felt I could not bring my boyfriend home to meet the family, because (a) my mother was incredibly anti-gay and my 'whipped father went along with whatever she said and (b) several people in my extended family, both sides, are racist (and my boyfriend for twelve years was a beautiful Black/Cherokee man).
More later on how he and I occasionally weren't served in restaurants.
Fourth, I came out to my father's father when he was 98 (in 2003). We hadn't known each other well while I was growing up, due to a family schism based on my grandfather's loudly expressed concern that marriage to my mother would be VERY bad for my father--although he turned out to be entirely correct, my upbringing included only TWO (count them, TWO) times when my father's parents visited us, so we really didn't know each other well at all. My grandfather turned out to be a remarkably accepting person who remembered what I'd told him
and remembered not to assume that I was heterosexual. Quite a feat for a man who was nearing 100!
[Side note: He was also a deacon at First Baptist Church in Greensboro for many years and was highly religious. He died in April 2005, four months after reaching the age of 100. I wish I could have had more time with him, but what I had was amazing.]
And I came out to a couple of cousins who were in my high school class (male cousins on my mother's side of the family), both of whom said they'd guessed
and wondered why the hell I'd waited so long to tell them.
But I have an ex-beauty-queen aunt (by marriage) who keeps asking why I don't ever seem to mention a girlfriend. I think she's a bit clueless. Well, maybe more than a bit clueless. I've overheard her husband (my mother's racist brother) telling her she should "figure it out" after a particularly amusing conversation at a recent family reunion.
So it's a mixed bag.
(5) When you're not served in a restaurant because you're obviously a male couple, it's kind of difficult to ignore the reaction and go about your business. And yes, that happened to us several times during the 12 years I was with my ex.
Generally, though, I do try to remember that the problem is in bigots' attitudes and behaviors, not mine. That tends to give me a thicker skin these days than I used to have; when I was in college, I wore "gay" on my sleeve, which really didn't help matters any (though it did persuade drunken--and questioning--frat boys to come to my dorm and try to inquire about nonreciprocal blowjobs while I was hanging out with friends in the lounge--yet another way that homophobia plays out in this fucked-up "culture"). Now, I have a bit less patience with bigotry and call people on it more readily when it manifests.
(6) I live in the buckle of the Bible Belt: North Carolina. Did you ever hear of Jesse Helms? The former senator from my state? Ironically, he was brought low by prostate cancer--ironic first by the method by which it was diagnosed (a thick finger up his ass), but doubly ironic because increased sexual activity is actually good for the prostate. There's some poetic justice in both of those ironies.
If I said he was hysterically homophobic, that would not express the full extent to which he was convinced that the world was going to hell and that we homosexuals were the prime mover of that "cultural" destruction. As though we homosexuals chose which gender made our cocks get hard.
Do I feel safe here? I have NO RIGHTS. None whatsoever. Anything I think I have is only contingent on whether someone else thinks I'm a citizen or even a human being. This is the problem with the current conception that "the majority rules"--the minority is fully and completely disenfranchised, unless your particular minority is on the "approved" list for lip service to be paid to your needs.
[I'll pass on the discussion of gay marriage, since I have already posted in a thread in "Et Cetera" on that point.]
This country is not free, Lee_M. Anyone who tells you it is also has some wonderful land to sell you in Florida, somewhere in the middle of the state below Orlando. Be careful, though--it's a little wet when it rains. You might have to put up with a damp basement.
My life partner and I are looking into moving to Canada or Spain so we can live in a place where we have the legal rights we expected to enjoy here.
NCbear (who's letting a lot of accumulated bitterness over being rejected frequently and systematically by his home country show a bit much, but who doesn't mind if it helps people understand some part of what he feels)
P.S. There is no such thing as "the gay lifestyle." Homosexuality is not monolithic. The only thing gay men share is the fact that we get turned on by other men. The only thing lesbians share is the fact that they get turned on by other women. We are all different people who happen to be homosexual in our orientation--just as you, a heterosexual person, should not be defined exclusively or even predominantly by that fact.
Oh, but wait. In this country, and in many parts of the world, we homosexuals share something else: The certain knowledge that there are plenty of heterosexual people who would happily kill us--wipe all of us off the face of the earth--if they knew they could get away with it and if it would be a "final solution."
