![[HI! logo, incised block]](hiblok170.JPG)
Note: This website has no control over the ads placed on it. Caveat emptor.
[c. 7,500 words] [End]
November 11, 2001
When I "came out" in the 1960s, the "gay world" was a multifarious, partly hidden complex of Mafia bars and after-hours clubs; men's rooms, parks, bookstores, truck parking lots, and special areas of beaches, libraries, and other places where men interested in sex with men could find each other; plus an occasional organization dedicated to improving the legal standing and quality of life of homosexuals.
Police in the service of bigoted and puritanical governments tried to entrap homosexuals into propositioning them, so they could arrest us, drag us off to jail and then to court in order to humiliate us publicly, ostensibly to stop "perverts" from luring young people into a life of depravity. You had to be ever on guard against the possibility that the nice young man making himself available would turn on you, pull out a badge, and arrest you, with all the resulting embarrassment and possible repercussions on job and family. You had to look around before you dared enter a gay place, for fear of being seen by someone you worked with, and if you chanced to see someone from work IN a gay place, you left in a hurry, afraid to be seen lest that co-worker was not gay but just visiting with a friend, or that, if gay, he might not guard your secret carefully. If you were robbed in a gay gathering spot by a street thug or at home by someone who was after your wallet, not your body, you wouldn't dare complain to police, because you risked (or felt you risked) being the one arrested.
For all that, gay men were in some ways freer in 1965 than they are today, because they got to see themselves as unique, as different, and understood that what they were, gave them a community, a group of like-minded men among whom they could let down their defenses and be themselves. As a community under siege, they felt a powerful camaraderie and mutually defensive loyalty to those they were able to "come out" to, and felt no need, in each other's presence, to pretend to be anything they were not.
In April 1969 I formed Homosexuals Intransigent! to help gay men become themselves. Less than three months later, the Stonewall Riots spurred many gay men to try to create a new world for themselves, in which police would not entrap, gay men would own their own bars, free of the Mafia, and every aspect of our culture would reinforce us in who we are. We have STRAYED very far from that ideal.
The "gay" world today is in fact overwhelmingly, oppressively STRAIGHT. It is not so much "gay" as "stray", STRaight in form and substance, peopled by "gAYs" who aren't nearly so homosexual as they need to be, because their surroundings endlessly perpetuate straight ways of thinking and behaving.
Much has changed since 1965, not all of it for the better. Public "tolerance" of homosexuality is much greater, tho active, aggressive intolerance prevails in some areas of society, such as the military. But the tradeoff is that gay men must now present themselves as essentially straight — heterosexual in all ways except as to whom they actually have sex with.
We must immerse ourselves in straight culture, accept that heterosexuality must prevail everywhere, even in gay bars, and pretend to love women except in bed.
In the typical gay bar, not one minute of gay men's music is ever heard. Indeed, between 70% and 95% of all the music played in "gay" bars is of women's voices singing — or screaming — heterosexual lyrics. Never do men sing romantically of men. Worse, these singing/screaming women are often shown on TV screens, bumping and grinding suggestively, filling an ostensibly "gay" space with disgusting heterosexual images one's eye is constantly drawn to. Elsewhere in the same "gay" bar, there will be a regular TV turned to one or another of the many heterosexual TV stations of the general community -— as tho we don't have TV at home, so need to watch straight TV in gay bars. I don't know about you, but I have four TVs and four VCRs at home. If I wanted to watch straight TV, I wouldn't go to a gay bar to do so.
It is in the nature of the human creature, as both predator and prey,
to watch constantly for motion, which could indicate food or threat. Between
a relatively stationary man nearby and a flashing TV screen in the distance,
the eye is drawn ineluctably toward the moving image. Thus instead of looking
at each other, we are drawn into watching heterosexual TV!
Why on Earth is there straight TV in gay
bars?
This is aggressive, antihomosexual viciousness inflicted upon us by managers
who don't have any understanding of homosexuality.
You'd think they would, since today most managers of gay bars are themselves (sort of) homosexual. But they don't live in the world the rest of us live in, so feel no need to get away from the straight world for a few hours, as the rest of us do.
Most gay men work in straight-owned businesses, with women, for hours every workday, 35, 40, or even more hours a week. When we're done with work, we would like to be done with the straight world and women too. We go to a gay bar to be with our own people, to be surrounded by MEN, ONLY. Instead, we are punched in the face by video intrusions of the very same straight culture that we want desperately to get away from.
Why is that?
Perhaps it's because the staff of the bar do NOT work in the straight world, do NOT work surrounded by women, so don't understand in any degree how important it is for their customers to be in a place where women, and all the pressures to be heterosexual that even seeing women produces, are ABSENT; where it's "just us", just men, and just men who are sexually, esthetically, and romantically drawn to men.
For the bar staff, having straight TV on is just rounding out their world. For their customers, it is endless imposition of straight images, straight ideas, straight culture upon us against our will.
It's got to stop.
If bar managers cannot find gay MEN'S images to fill their video screens, they should
and let our eyes search out each other, not be drawn against our will to the fast-paced flickering images of straight origin that TV and videos endlessly display.
The Lesbianization of Homosexuality. Ask the typical straight person for an example of a gay person on TV and you are likely to hear "Ellen DeGeneres". Ask the typical gay man, and he will be hard-pressed to think of anyone male. Who is our most famous spokesMAN? No one. There is no gay man in the public eye, articulating gay MEN'S concerns to the general public. No one at all. Why is that?
There has been a more or less conscious decision among "lesbian and gay" organizations to REPLACE the public perception of homosexuality as SEX between MEN — a powerfully evocative and frightening thought for many straight men and insecure heterosexual women — with a "kinder and gentler" NEW homosexuality: all women, all the time. No, homosexuality isn't men doing disgusting things with each other but women holding hands and reading poetry to each other!
Gay men are effectively hiding behind women's skirts — except of course that the very-public lesbians of today rarely wear skirts. Certainly Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O'Donnell, K.D. Lang, Melissa Etheridge, and other prominent lesbians are rarely seen in skirts. But these are The New Homosexuals: all women, all the time.
The self-despising, fearful faggots who constitute the bulk of the membership of "lesbian and gay" organizations at any given time, have decided that straights are less upset by lesbianism than by homosexuality, so they will redefine homosexuality AS lesbianism and make gay men into, in effect,
The hope and expectation are that if straight people aren't upset by lesbians, they won't be upset with male lesbians. For this increase in perceived safety from heterosexual violence and oppression, all gay men have to do is throw away their gender identity — a small matter for the gender-confused losers who control the "lesbian and gay" Movement. (As I use the term, "faggot" refers to a man who is homosexual only as regards actual sexual activity but is in all other ways essentially straight — or wishes he were.)
The most terrible pain gay men suffer is gender confusion, the feeling that if they are homosexual, they are necessarily, somehow, less than men.
Straight people may not understand what I am about to say, but a gay man feels MOST masculine — supremely, triumphantly, ecstatically, wholly and purely masculine — when actually having homosexual sex, because the manhood of his partner reinforces, magnifies, and glorifies his own manhood.
It's "just us boys — no girls", and we're back in the days when we were the normal ones and boys who liked girls were abnormal.
We knew what we liked then, we know what we like now, and it's the same thing.
The 'lesbian and gay" Movement actively, monstrously, and insanely devalues gender identity as unimportant, whereas it is in truth HUGELY important.
Without a secure, confident, and stable gender identity, no one can function sanely. Gender identity is a sine qua non for being human.
Thus it is the worst thing in the world to worsen gay men's confusions about gender to win heterosexual "tolerance" — a phony tolerance built upon a willful misrepresentation of homosexuality.
Phony Heterosexuality. Another of the ploys of the "lesbian and gay" Movement is to heterosexualize homosexuality for straight consumption. The Official Line (or should I say "Official Lie"?) is that gay men are gay for only a few minutes or hours a day, and all the rest of the time they are exactly like everybody else. They go to work on the same trains, buses, or cars; work at the same jobs; eat the same foods; watch the same television shows; go to the same movies; and live exactly the same as everybody else — except for that 'one little thing', if they happen to live with a lover. Even then, sex occupies them for only a few minutes a day, and all the rest of the time they are living a quintessentially straight existence.
What is never said is that while we are on those trains or buses or working at those jobs or watching those TV shows and movies, our minds are working differently. We are looking around for somebody masculine, good-looking and possibly gay to set our eyes at ease. We are translating what we see into our own language, and readjusting all the heterosexual fantasies onscreen into homosexual fantasies. And if we had our druthers, we would NOT watch straight TV but would watch GAY TV — except there isn't any. If there were a gay culture as complete and pervasive as the straight culture — myriad choices on myriad TV channels or in myriad theaters, 24 hours a day, every day of the world — we wouldn't spend two minutes watching straight stuff.
Oh, at first we'd miss Everybody Loves Raymond or another favorite straight TV show, but we'd soon find better choices for our own lives and forget about the straight world, just as most of us stop watching cartoons when we grow up.
The Official Line is actually far more heterosexual than just pointing
out that most of us as a practical matter live lives that are indistinguishable
for most of the day from those of straight people. The Official Line is that
even emotionally we are almost entirely identical to straights. We LOVE women
and can't get enuf of them. We want to be with women constantly — even
more than straight men do. We are never so comfortable as when we are with
women (because, of course, we are male lesbians). We find deep spiritual
happiness and human companionship is the wonderful, warm, loving relationships
we have with women, who are the center of our universe. We are more "accessible"
to women than their own husbands. We are "there for them" and will listen
to them with endless fascination. If we could, we'd BE women, so much do
we love them. We won't have sex with them, but that's not because we find
them physically disgusting — oh, no, that's not it at all! No, it's
just that it would be like, like, what? Having sex with your sister? or mother?
It's the incest taboo, that's all, that keeps us from having sex with women.
Otherwise we'd love to, so we could spend 24 hours a day, every day of the
year and year of our lives, completely wrapped up with women. What a load
of crap! But that IS The Official Line about gay men's feelings for
women.
When will the "lesbian-and-gay"
Movement tell the truth about gay men's feelings for women? Perhaps
never.
Let ME tell the truth about women here and now: gay men do NOT want to be wrapped up with women 24 hours a day. If we had our choice, we'd spend essentially NONE of our time with women. We DON'T want to listen to their endless chatter; we DON'T want to hear their gossip and bitching; we can't STAND "peals of girlish laughter", and are often utterly puzzled at the things women find fascinating or that send them into howls of laughter or prolonged bouts of giggling. The idea of having to live with a woman and accommodate her moods, let her decorate our space in feminine colors and clutter it with bric-a-brac, etc., HORRIFIES us. If we work with women, we may find individual people who happen to be women nice to talk to and work with, but we don't want to take them home with us; we don't want to go out after work with them; and we would NEVER want to live with them. Quite the contrary: after several hours working with women, we need to GET AWAY from women, and desperately crave the company of men. Being surrounded by women makes us cringe, and makes us want to fly into the arms (and other parts) of men.
Even when we have a good time with women who as people are fun to be with; even when we comfortably banter or joke or talk about serious issues with women, we are very happy to be able to LEAVE them and return to a man's world. This is not ingratitude for the company of nice women; it's just the desire to be in a world structured for and compatible to us. A comparison may help.
Say your native language is English. You think in English, feel in English, relate to the world, to ideas, to people in English. It is fundamental to your experience of the world, how you describe it and interact with it. You then learn Spanish very well and become fluent in it, but don't think in it. Everything you say in Spanish occurs to you in English first, and then you translate it, check the grammar, and only then let it pass your lips to be heard by people whose first language is Spanish. Suddenly, you find yourself surrounded by people who speak only Spanish, and you can function, but it's WORK. You have to translate EVERYTHING, everything they say, everything you say. You can do it, you make sense of the conversation, can contribute to it, can understand the humor and wordplay, and can even create plays on words or express your thoughts eloquently on occasion. But it's wearing, extremely, extremely wearing. You depart the company of that group, find your way back to people who speak English, and are RELIEVED not to have to speak Spanish anymore. That's what it's like to be gay in a straight world, and that is why it is so important for gay men to have places where THEY are the group and everyone else is an outsider, where OUR RULES apply, our TASTES rule, and we can be ourselves. We want to be someplace where we don't have to translate everything.
Can straight people understand that? I think they can. So why do we falsify our nature preemptively to defuse their (presumed) anger and make ourselves more presentable by creating a false notion of who we are and what we want?
It's not necessary and not advisable.
We must BE ourselves and be TRUE to ourselves. If other people don't like who we really are, that's tough.
Gay Men's View of Lesbians. The Official Line is that gay men LOVE lesbians and lesbians LOVE gay men. We can't get enuf of each other. If we had the choice, we would spend all our time with each other when we're not actually in bed with one of our own kind.
The only good thing about lesbians, in our view, is that they take some pressure off us to "service" and marry a small proportion of the female population. That is a preposterously trivial basis for accepting them into our organizations and permitting them to make infinite impositions upon our lives.
The reality is that gay men don't understand lesbians AT ALL and don't like them AT ALL. If we had our druthers, we would NEVER have anything to do with them.
They so obviously wish they were men, but can never be men. Their sad, manhoodless bodies and manless sex must, from our point of view, be empty and disgusting. "What can they do with each other?" is the base question gay men ask each other about lesbians, meaning, what kind of sex can there be without a penis? "Bump pussies" is the standard initial answer, and altho we know there are other activities lesbians can engage in, we know as well that they have to strap on a dildo to do things gay men can do without artifice or device.
We look at bull dykes dressing in men's clothes and trying so hard to prove their (nonexistent) manhood that it makes us terribly sad for them, and disgusted at their attempt to fool people.
We are especially disgusted with bull dykes who so closely imitate men that we are initially fooled into thinking they might be men.
So our attitudes toward bull dykes are simultaneously pity, irritation, and hostility.
If we were heterosexual, we would as well feel competitive with them, which some straight men must feel, and to the extent that we retain some heterosexual component to our own personality that we haven't yet outgrown, we may indeed still feel some competition with bull dykes, especially when they challenge us on our own turf, in our own areas. There are some pool (billiard) leagues and other sports leagues in which demented fairies and dykes insist on playing together, in which intersex hostilities get a workout.
Gay men don't want to lose a pool game or anything else to lesbians. Fortunately, in most such leagues, lesbians are poor runners-up. But a gay-vs.-lesbian pool game is an angry and unpleasant contest that should NEVER occur. We don't like it; they don't like it. Why does either group put up with it?
Well, you see, The Official Line is that lesbians and gay men are the SAME and so must do everything the same, and together. We don't WANT to, but that's only because we aren't "liberated". Yeah, that's right: gay men aren't "liberated" from our BALLS.
We don't like lesbians and don't want to be around them, nor to play (anything) with them, to compete with them, or to have anything whatsoever to do with them, and the GAY Movement should stop being a "lesbian-and-gay" or "male-and-female lesbian" Movement, instead to divide itself into a gay men's Movement and a lesbian Movement — except that lesbians can't make anything work, so must latch on to our organizations.
That is the traditional pattern of gay and lesbian interaction in organizations.
Gay men have the male ability to form purposeful organizations and make them work. It's in our genes, this ability to form hunting parties, work groups, corporations, organizations, even nations.
We see a problem and our first reaction is to get people together to attack it. We seek out appropriate people to lead it, or set ourselves up as the organizers, then recruit, finance, set out a program, assign individuals or committees to specific tasks, and start to get things done. Then lesbians join and start destroying the organization by demanding attention to lesbian issues, heterosexual women's issues, "gender parity", etc.
They demand that gay men give over their moneys to causes that have nothing to do with gay rights, such as breast cancer and even that most nonhomosexual (and evil) of causes, abortion.
If gay men even HESITATE to cave in to women's demands, lesbians start using women's historic tool for getting their way, manipulation of guilt. Considering that gay men start out filled to overflowing with (undeserved) guilts, that is really like shooting ducks in a barrel.
Women's tears don't work on gay men, so lesbians have to wheedle and whine and try to make gay men feel guilty for the "crimes" of straight men, for which gay men (somehow) must atone. We must be "better than that" and prove that we don't hate women by giving women everything they demand. As men, we share the guilt of male dominance and exploitation of women; we are as bad as wife batterers, rapists, and pimps. We profit from "male privilege", and have an easier life because we are men.
We are men and benefit from that, and if you don't understand that, you haven't spent enuf time listening to lesbians. Forget about "gay-bashing", which concentrates SOLELY upon men. The Official Lesbian Line is that gay-bashing is of no consequence, and gay men have a wonderful, easy, and safe life because we are men.
Because of our easy life as men and the terrible, hard life women have because of us, as men, we OWE women support, and can't escape that responsibility by disowning heterosexuality.
We must in effect take a lesbian wife — who won't, of course, give us any benefit of any kind, even housework, but to whom we nonetheless owe perpetual, unquestioning, political and financial support, and unthinking ideological obedience.
If only one tenth (or even one hundredth) of an organization's membership is female, the group must nonetheless be called "lesbian and gay" — gay men must always ride at the back of the bus, must always be second in prominence and importance to women in their own organization. It doesn't matter if gay men established the organization. It doesn't matter if every action taken by the group to that point was planned and carried out by gay men, without the participation of even so much as a single lesbian. It doesn't matter if 99.9% of the funding and 99% of the people who show up for actions are male. Every single action, every single organization, must have women at the head. Lesbians are always to have "pride of place": they are the only important thing in the lesbian-and-gay movement. Gay men are nothing, and deserve neither credit nor preeminence.
Every single march that commemorates the Stonewall Riots, every year in New York City, must be headed by "Dykes on Bikes" — lesbian motorcyclists — or at least by SOME lesbian group, because lesbians are the be-all and end-all of the gay world in the Through-The-Looking-Glass world that the "lesbian-and-gay" Movement has created, in which men are nothing and women are everything.
Gay men must open the top leadership positions in every organization to women, on a one-for-one, male-to-female — so sorry: female-to-male! — ratio. If the President and Secretary are male, the Vice President and Treasurer must be female. Et cetera ad nauseam.
The more women that show up at meetings, influence the content of programs, and take over publications, the more men LEAVE, which, alas, only increases the power of women. Gay men who don't realize how anti-male the organization is becoming continue to pay dues and show up at demonstrations, until eventually even the blindest man sees that an organization he thought was working FOR him is actually working AGAINST him, whereupon the group collapses as men abandon it wholesale.
That pattern has repeated itself hundreds of times across the gay world.
You'd think gay men would learn to form MEN-ONLY organizations to prevent such things from recurring, but they don't DARE, because that would smack of "discrimination" and suggest to the world that they don't love women, whereas it is so very important to prove to the straight world that we are straight, except for that 'one little thing'.
Clearing the Air. We need to tell straight people — and impressionable gay men and boys — that gay men AREN'T lesbians. We DON'T hold hands with women and read them poetry.
We grab men's bodies and pull them to us. We grab men's crotches and fondle them, then move on to full-scale, hardcore, lust-filled sex, man on man. We do all those 'gross and disgusting' things straights don't want to think about, and we LOVE it.
That's what we REALLY can't get enuf of.
The more sex we have, the more we want, because sex between men is WONDERFUL, the most wonderful thing in the world, and we are truly happy only when we are physically intimate with a man.
Do straights want to "tolerate" us? Then let them tolerate THAT.
They don't have to think about us DOING those things to accept that we have as much right to do them as they have the right to do things WE find disgusting. We must not allow them to impose upon us an obligation to "respect" their revolting sexual practices, in order for them to extend to us the same "respect".
In truth we DON'T respect heterosexuality and don't really expect straights to respect homosexuality. We just want them to abide by the one rule that makes it possible for different peoples to live in the same society:
As time goes by, we find that none of that applies to us and begin to wonder when it's going to happen that we will want such a life. Some of us realize very soon that we don't want anything like that from OUR life. Others take a lot longer. Some of us realize that the mere fact that heterosexuality isn't for us doesn't make us bad, it just says we're different, and it's alright to be different. Others think there must be something wrong with them that they can't look forward to a straight life. They must not be "normal". Not-heterosexual means defective, perverted, sick, queer, disgusting. They try to be what they're not, find they can't, find that even if they can function sexually as hets, they really find the whole experience unrewarding at best and profoundly disgusting at worst, and realize that life as a straight man would be unendurable hell. Only after years, or even decades, of trying to reorient their life, do they give in to the inevitable and go over to the other side. But always the feeling remains that they have failed, and that that "failure" is due to there being something WRONG with them.
It is the rare and happy homosexual who realizes early on that there's NOTHING wrong with him. He's just different.
He knows that he is a good person at heart and would NEVER do anything wrong, never even WANT to do anything wrong. He knows in his heart as well that he desperately wants to have sex with men (once grown) or boys (when still a boy). He is a good person but wants sex with guys. Ergo, having sex with guys cannot be wrong. The logical process works from the inside outward.
Those who cannot relax about their orientation work outside-inward. They accept that what their parents and society say they must be, has to be right; ergo, what they feel that doesn't fit with those teachings must be wrong.
Who's right?
Let's see: who has to live your life — your parents? society? No. You do.
So what matters in your life is YOUR nature, not your parents', not society's. You must do what makes YOU happy, or you will never be happy. Then the only problem is deciding whether you deserve to be happy.
Do you cheat people? steal? kill? rape? torture? Do you lie (other than the implicit and explicit lies about sexual orientation that we almost all tell or let lie some or all of the time)? Do you follow a course of conduct designed to exploit or abuse other people? Or do you just want to make other men happy, while they make you happy? If your desires for men are open and caring, mutual and reciprocal, you have nothing to be ashamed of. And if you are true to yourself, you want to make your partner happy, fully as much as you want him to make you happy.
How can that be wrong?
The self-directed person, then, who uses himself as the standard by which to judge all things, realizes soonest that there cannot be anything wrong with homosexuality, then asserts himself to pursue happiness as a homosexual. He doesn't have to justify himself to anyone or debate heterosexual bigots. He goes his own way, steered by his own, internal compass. And he tries to take others with him into a good and happy life as homosexuals.
The person who is controlled by other people's expectations and ideas, however, will find it very hard to break free of heterosexual conditioning. He will continue to let himself remain perpetually surrounded, outnumbered, and outvoted morally by straight people in his life. He won't even have the good sense to withdraw, gradually or suddenly, from the straight world in order to create a new peer group.
Each of us learns to be human from other human beings. We "imprint" upon others almost as much as do baby ducks. If we learn inappropriate behavior from people unlike us, and try to apply that to our own lives, we will be miserable. If we reach out to others to derive our value system and lifestyle, and those others are unlike us, we will learn only to be unlike ourselves. Conversely, however, if we can break free of identification with people we are simply not like at all, and create new links to new people who ARE like us, then we have a chance to become ourselves. But we can learn to be ourselves ONLY from people who really are like us.
Thus, again, it is enormously important that we surround ourselves with a homosexual environment, ordered around a base understanding that male-with-male is the proper pattern, male beauty is the ideal, men's voices are beautiful, and the natural interplay between men is what we want from life. Only then will we be able truly to be homosexual. In this, the blind cannot lead the blind, and slaves cannot lead the free.
The gay world has removed the chains from its arms but left shackles on its legs. We can walk but cannot run with the wind. Every trace of the straight culture that we insist on retaining in gay places, every TV screen or heterosexual video, every straight picture on a video game inside a gay bar, every heterosexual lyric blasting from the sound system, every female singer's voice filling our ears, every faghag or lesbian in men's places, is a link in the chains that keep us from being truly free. All such links must be shattered.
Gay men cannot learn to be gay men from lesbians, faghags, or well-adjusted straight women. Gay men cannot learn to be gay men from straight television, suggestive heterosexual music videos, straight lyrics, women's voices, Ms. Pacman, mixed-gender pool leagues, or organizations that promote the idea that (gay) men and (lesbian) women belong together.
Reverse the premise and you will see how insane and destructive the stray world is.
Do heterosexual bars fill themselves and their customers' eyes and ears with homosexual images and sounds? Is there nothing to watch on TV in straight bars but gay programming? nothing on the sound system but gay men's voices singing love songs to other men? nothing on music videos but men bumping and grinding salaciously with other men? Do gay men fill the dance floor at straight dance clubs, dancing with each other exclusively and suggestively? Do they feel free to invade every straight place and ostentatiously make out in front of everybody, without any concern for how other customers might react? Of course not. So why are gay bars so shot-thru with heterosexuality, so timid about objecting when straight people come in and impose their way of life upon us?
The straight world is organized around heterosexuality, while the gay world is organized around — heterosexuality!
No Homosexual Culture. Why is there no gay TV? Don't tell me that Will and Grace or the Ellen Show or Queer As Folk is gay, because they're not remotely gay. Will and Grace is oppressively heterosexual, pushing The Official Line that gay men live with women, spend all their time with women, are most intimate emotionally with women, etc., etc. Even the flaming-faggot character married a woman, and the cast is endlessly touching each other endearingly. Reverse that, again, to see if it is really homosexual. Would a heterosexual comedy have men clinging to each other so physically and intimately? Would a straight male character marry a man? Oh, one program, The Drew Carey Show — that most bizarre of network sitcoms — did have that storyline, in a bizarre take on the immigration laws that does not reflect the actual state of the law but is exactly counter to the law as it tends to work: namely, gay marriages is NOT recognized by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and professions of homosexuality would be more likely to get one deported than naturalized.
No heterosexual comedy or drama spends more than half its time talking about or adjusting around homosexuality. It would never occur to straight people that homosexuality is a necessary part of the lives of all heterosexuals and needs to be present in every TV show, but it is accepted in Will and Grace, etc., that heterosexuality is a necessary part of the lives of all homosexuals.
Ellen is lesbian, not gay, and minimally even lesbian. Most of the characters of that show are straight, as was the case with the prior Ellen DeGeneres show. (I saw the first new Ellen show and will not be watching any more.)
Queer As Folk is about lesbians-and-gays, and many of the actors are straight, who go on straight talk shows to tell the world they're not really gay. It is also available only on cable, which many people, myself included, do not care to waste money on (since there's no gay programming of consequence), so I have never seen it, only descriptions of it in the press.
In the Life, an occasional magazine show, is "lesbian-and-gay", female-dominated in every particular. It is more of The Official Line bullshit, in which gay men crave and seek out the company of lesbians and cannot live without them. Perhaps we should call such propaganda materials "Panlesbian", since they promote the notion that lesbians are everywhere in the physical and emotional life of gay men, and gay men are merely male lesbians fascinated with women. Female narrators intrude into everything, and if you don't want to listen to lesbians, hear about their lives, or see a show devoted to gay men only as a secondary consideration to lesbian women, In the Life is disgustingly, infuriatingly alien.
So where is all the gay TV we should have? There are tens of millions of gay men, including some of the most creative people in television and film. But they are all working on heterosexual projects, creating fantasies to make heterosexuals' lives fuller and richer. Our lives are to remain empty of warm images, devoid of public reinforcement.
Where is gay music? Why is there nothing but heterosexual music in gay bars three decades after Stonewall? Why are there NO men singing to men, but only women's voices almost all the time? Are there no gay musicians? Or are they all gutless cowards, like the notorious Johnny Mathis, who has been well known for DECADES to be gay, even by straight people, but who sings nothing but straight music for the edification of straight people and reinforcement of heterosexuality? Surely Johnny Mathis has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO LOSE by devoting the rest of his career to creating music that reinforces gay men and makes them feel better about themselves. He must be financially secure, and is reputed to have given generously to lesbian-and-gay services in Los Angeles. We don't need money from you, Mr. Mathis: we need music to love each other by. That's what you have given straights. Why won't you give it to us?
And what about other gay musicians? Are there none? Or are they all hiding, all making straight music for straight audiences? Do they do so because they need the money? or because they're ashamed to own up to being "queer"? And why do we take pride in knowing that singer X or drummer Z is gay, when he never produces so much as one note of gay music?
When even the rich and famous among us, who have nothing to lose financially from "coming out", do nothing to contribute to a homosexual culture, they should be rebuked and shamed into doing their part. Their part is not sending money to selected groups, secretly, or issuing a few words every sixteen years or so on behalf of Matthew Shepard or some other gay victim — victims whom their consistent public devotion over years might have saved — but in doing the work artists have always done: creating things of beauty in which we can see ourselves and take pride.
What of dance? There is for all practical purposes no gay dance. That must be because all male dancers are heterosexual, huh? No, actually, the bulk of male ballet and other dancers are queer as a $3 bill. But they devote themselves to making beautiful pictures of heterosexual bliss for straight audiences to luxuriate in. Why?
Is there no audience for such cultural productions? I'm sure there is. No one knows how many gay men there are, but a conservative number for the United States and Canada alone would be on the order of 20 million. Oh, antigay straights would have you believe that homosexuality is extremely rare, but how rare can it be if every single year on a single day, Gay Pride Day, half a million gay men show up all over the country in public demonstrations? Remember that this is a "hidden minority", few of whose members are willing to risk being seen as gay. Yet every year half a million and more show up in marches and street fairs at the same time on the same day — so they can't be the same few thousand moving from place to place, "Potemkin Village"-style. (Potemkin Village is, according to Merriam-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, a reference to a famous scam by a czarist Russian official, "Grigori Potemkin, who supposedly built impressive fake villages along a route Catherine the Great was to travel" to fool her into believing that Russia's peasants were happy and prosperous.) No, there really are half a million distinct gay men, showing up simultaneously in widely separated geographic locations. How could a hidden, shame-filled minority consistently, year after year, produce half a million demonstrators all across the country if there are fewer than about 20 million of us?
Consider as well that the largest demonstration in U.S. history, drawing from people of all communities after months of organizing and publicity, is on the order of 1.25 million people, and at least twice pro-gay demonstrations in Washington have approached 1 million attendees, gay, straight and lesbian all.
Plainly there are a great many gay men in this country and adjoining Canada, perhaps as many as there are people of every description in English Canada. But English Canada has its own television networks, film industry, recording industry, dance companies, etc., etc. across the cultural spectrum, whereas gay men have nothing like it. Something other than shame could explain that if, for instance, gay men were notoriously lacking in creativity, but that isn't the case, is it?
No, shame and confusion are the only reasons we don't have a thoroughly male, self-reinforcing gay culture to immerse ourselves in and learn from. NOT GOOD ENUF.
It's time for gay men to DEMAND all-male this and all-male that: gay MEN'S music and dance; gay MEN'S television and film; cultural products of every kind and description that focus on MEN, men's internal life, and men's feelings for and relationships with MEN.
Gay organizations must expel women and, thus, the heterosexual understandings and expectations they bring with them, instead to organize themselves HOMOSEXUALLY: men with men but WITHOUT women.
Gay men must stop feeling an obligation to misrepresent homosexuality as heterosexuality except for 'one little thing'. Sexuality is no 'little thing' but a HUGE part of our lives that affects our esthetics, emotions, politics — all things. No, we must stop letting other people tell us what we should be and how we should live, instead to set our own program and priorities without reference to straights or lesbians, AS OF RIGHT.
Freeing gay men is purpose enuf for any organization. Just as nationalist movements in the Baltic states advanced human liberty in struggling only to free Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia from Soviet oppression — without feeling any obligation to devote themselves to other, extraneous causes in order to justify their existence — so too do we advance the cause of human rights if we do nothing but free gay men. We don't need to feel guilty about dedicating our organization, publication, or media presentation solely to the rights and interests of gay men, and needn't drag in every other group and cause.
Worse, we cannot do one thing if we simultaneously set out as an equal purpose to do the exact opposite thing. That is, you cannot free gay men by making them feel guilty about not being entirely wrapped up with women.
The gay world must be truly gay: male, entirely male, entirely wrapped up in the lives of gay men, entirely reflective of the male esthetic and male sexuality. It must not confuse the message by incorporating alien and antagonistic messages, but must be consistent from top to bottom and start to finish.
(This is the end of this section.) [Go to the top of this page.] [Go to the main MrGayPride homepage.]