Josh Jasper (thanks, Josh!) sent me a link to this interview with George Takei (most famous for playing Lt. Sulu on the original “Star Trek”). Takei has recently came out of the closet – to the press, at least (I take it he’s been open about his sexuality among his friends and family for many years). The interviewer asked Takei, who is Japanese-American, why he decided to come out of the closet. This, part of Takei’s answer, was for me the most interesting bit of the interview: You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young. My memories of camp…I was four years old to eight years old…they’re fond memories. We were first sent to a camp in Arkansas. I remember catching pollywogs and seeing them sprout legs, and then it snowed one winter in Arkansas, and for a Southern California kid, to discover snow was magical. Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp. We had to line up three times a day, and take our meal in a noisy mess hall…normal for me to go to school in a black tarpaper barracks, and I used to begin school every morning pledging allegiance to the flag, and I could see the barbed-wire fence out there, and the guard towers, saying, “With liberty and justice for all,” without being aware of the irony of those words. But when we came out of camp, that’s when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.
Sure, if a seven foot person needs to buy an oversized vehicle, that's fine - just as it's fine if…
Here’s an interesting side-note – expressed my startlement about this, and some straight perosn tells me that since she dosen’t come up to bepople and tell them “Hi, I’m x and I’m straight” why should Takei come up to people and say “Hi, I’m George, and I’m gay”.
Biting back my frustration and desire to beat her about the head and shoulders, I told her that it actualy is different. If no straight person ever did that she’d never suffer, but if no gay person ever did, the whole gay rights movement would suffer. It’s not Takei’s responsibility, but someone has to do it.
Her reply “while he is gay, it is not the only thing that defines him. So many folks make a big deal about the orientation of others, like its the only thing about them that is important.
I’m not even going to bother writing back, but when did it become acceptable for uppity little straight kids to be telling queer people about how to view finding out that someone famous is gay, or to imply that we find that this is the only thing that’s important about them?
One of my all time favourite songs, and one that makes me cry on a semi-regular basis is Everywhere, written by Greg Trooper & Sid Griffin sung (at least when I listened to it) by Billy Bragg.
It links the fate of two childhood friends during WWII:
Anyway it’s a beautiful song, and it’s also a relatively rare cultural representation of the Japanese internment camps. It’s amazing how much of a different that makes to the collective memory. It’s really important that George Takei is talking about this.
As long as being straight is the “default” in our society, it will be important for gay men and women to speak out like this. Its not about “flaunting” your sexual orientation. Its about challenging the assumptions people make and their attitudes towards gay men and women. Its not like he’s going to door to door to make out with his partner of 18 years in front of you. There is no sane reason for a straight person to object to this. Its just an expression of their own latent discomfort with gays if they can’t recognize that the experiences of gays and straights are very different.
Its not like he’s going to door to door to make out with his partner of 18 years in front of you.
No, but God knows that there’s gays that’ll dress up in leather or lace or body paint and make out with a partner of 10 minutes for a few hours while marching down Main Street during a Gay Pride parade.
I’ve never watched one in person, so I have no idea how many of the marchers are acting like this. But guess who makes the news? It does the image of homosexual sexual behavior little good among the breeders. It tends to feed the stereotype that you might do just what you’ve described, so don’t be too surprised when the image comes to mind.
It does the image of homosexual sexual behavior little good among the breeders.
Pride is a celebration, Ron. It’s one day a year when queer people just decide to forget about all the usual worries about what the straights will think, and act as if the world was already a non-homophobic place. (Just as straights, all year round, feel free to make out in public with a partner they met ten minutes earlier, without getting paranoid about what LGBT people think of their behavior.)
Ronf F. wrote:
And straight people do stuff like that nearly every week at some nationally-televised sporting event or another, in nightclubs, at Halloween, Xmas and Mardi Gras parties, etc etc… Your point ?
Uh, at the local St. Louis Pride, largest in the mostly rural state of Missouri, the usual garb, male and female, is shorts and T-shirts with rainbow themes or fairly tame pro-gay slogans (eg, for lesbians, “I kiss girls”), plus rainbow Mardi Gras beads. It’s usually 90 degrees, 90% humidity, held in a local park, and picnic is the theme of the day, as are comments, “can you believe how miserably hot it is?”. About 0.3 to 1% of the participants wear leather, flamboyant drag (as opposed to transgenders, who dress in sensible clothing of the assumed gender), or Speedos. The Speedos at least would make sense on a blistering day – the leather and elaborate drag would seem conducive to heat stroke if done as full regalia. The float participants from the bars are the most Speedo’ed and greased, all the other floats are pretty conservative and the participants usually wear the T-shirt of their organization. Local straights and their kids attend the parade to get the mountains of candy and mardi gras beads thrown from the floats (not to mention the water bottles, probably most useful in this climate). I can’t say that I have seen indecent public behavior, though plenty of couples are doing the usual cuddling done by straights on picnic blankets and beaches all over the world.
So Britany Spears and Paris Hilton can be…Britany Spears and Paris Hilton any time they feel like it, but gay men and women can’t be themselves even during a parade that’s several hours long??
I thought this was the land of liberty, justice and freedom and all that….
Dream on, radfem. To paraphrase a quote attributed to Anne Frank, “What one outrageous straight person says and does is his/her business. What one outrageous queer person says and does is the business of everyone all around the world.” :p
My point being that there’s a stereotype that exists, and the leather/speedo crowd at the Gay Pride events feed into that. Especially since they get publicized by the media out of proportion to how many of them there are at the event. You act flamboyant, and you’re going to get the cameras pointed at you and get on the news because that gets people to watch the news.
RonF wrote:
My point is that you are a thinking adult. My point is that if you insist upon stereotyping all queer folk, to an extent that you clearly do not stereotype all straight folk, based upon media manipulation, you are applying a double standard. A noxious double standard, at that. My point is that you should take responsibility for your prejudices and rethink them, instead of merely blaming a few partygoers in thongs, the media, and what not with your tiresome –and common– game of I Just Can’t Help Myself They Made Me Feel This Way.
Do you go around telling racous, scantilly-clad straight folks to behave themselves and stop giving you a negative impression of their social lives ? Somehow, I doubt it.
I’m rephrasing your original post on this issue. Try to imagine yourself saying the following about, say, the straight celebs radfem mentioned;Or a bunch of straight revelers on Mardi Gras, at an adult Halloween party, etc.:
It does the image of heterosexual sexual behavior little good among the queers. It tends to feed the stereotype that you might do just what you’ve described, so don’t be too surprised when the image comes to mind.
It’s certainly hard for me to imagine you or any other in-house guardian of the public morals saying this. But perhaps you should try it anyway, as an exercise, to imagine how you’d feel if every random person you met was basing their opinion of your everyday life based on distorted media presentation of a few flamboyant revelers at a once-yearly parade somewhere.
Complaints like this – “oh, you can’t expect anyone to take you seriously as long as you have (fill in the blank) showing out at the parades” – have
been circulating as long as there have _been_ parades.
Curious thing is, back in the ’60s, ‘homophile’ groups holding public protests – e.g., Society for Individual Rights, Mattachine – routinely had their members dress in conservative, mainstream attire, such as suit ‘n tie for men, tasteful dresses for women, exactly so they wouldn’t attract this sort of criticism.
Guess what? They were either excoriated as ‘perverts’ or ignored completely. My guess is that a lot of straight people today would dearly love to have the second option back – they’re getting tired of being reminded that we exist. Some people would claim that having a photo of my husband on my desk at work is ‘flaunting my sexuality’. No, it’s flaunting my marriage. Get over your big bad self.
Actually, straights DO DISCREDIT THEMSELVES at Mardi Gras. Our Pride parade is a family friendly event, and the guys dancing on floats are not actively lewd, or no more lewd than body builders competitions, which also feature tight speedos. They just stand there and looked greased and show off their six-packs. In contrast, the local Mardi Gras parade, hugely straight predominant (gays hang out in their bars, if anything), features women flashing their tits in Girls-Gone-Wild fashion, and large numbers of folks puking and guys pissing in public. The gays use the porta-potties at Pride, and it’s really rare to see stumbling drunks.