We’ve recently been enlightened by a straight man’s perspective on how to dismantle the homophobic oppression of the straight man’s world. I think we already got the gist of this perspective, given that it kind of dictates political and social scenes as it is, but it was useful to see it written out.
Here it is, another Wespoken attempt to provide a queer eye for the straight (and/or conservative gay) guy.
I’m sure you’ve noticed, Erich, that there have been numerous incidents of assault and harassment against queers, and they have all arisen in an atmosphere of institutional homophobia. Queers are being oppressed and intimidated (not that this applies equally; I have the luxury of feeling relatively safe as white and male-presenting). We are reacting radically to what we experience as radical attacks upon us. It was painful for me to see that when it comes a particular route of queer activism, you “can’t take it anymore”, and are moved to the point of writing a Wespeak that doesn’t even bother to denounce the homophobia you apparently know so much about destroying.
You mention that you are fearful of being “attacked” because of your straightness, maleness, and whiteness. You should feel lucky that being chalked up as a homophobe is the only form of “attack” you have to fear. All of these axes of privilege that you have, while I appreciate your acknowledgement of them, should not be used as points of pity or reasons to believe you represent a novel perspective.
You made your point clear that deliberately making people feel awkward will never end homophobia. I say that it is one of the most important tools for ending homophobia, and all forms of oppression. Because one can ignore hir homophobia if ze can avoid thinking about what being queer often entails and is indeed largely defined by.
It is unpleasant for you as a straight guy to have to acknowledge that queer sex is happening all around you. Well, it is all around you, and we will continually have to confront you with this fact until you acknowledge that all of us roaming around who “happen” to be queer also often “happen” to fuck, rim, suck and jerk each other off. It is an exercise of homophobia to patronizingly suggest we closet this aspect of our “multi-faceted” existence in order to be tolerated by our straight friends. Sex is, after all, the aspect that homophobes fear (it is, like, PHOBIA of homoSEXuality, and other kinds of SEXual deviance).
One can’t overemphasize the value of “constantly and consistently throwing [our] sexuality in [your] faces.” After all, straight people do it to queers all the time, perhaps not in chalk, but in every branch of the media and at nearly every campus party, to name a few channels. It’s amazing how queers can achieve the effect of seeming the constantly and consistently sexual ones by having a half-dozen kiss-ins and writing some swiftly erased chalkings! How potent a queer kiss is!
However, people who choose to publicly and proudly exhibit their queer sexuality aren’t necessarily saying that sex constitutes their entire personality, nor are they refusing to ever participate in verbal dialogue. I don’t really know where you got this idea from. If seeing sexual chalkings and watching kiss-ins causes you to fail to see queers as multi-faceted human beings, then that sounds like a personal problem.
It’s frustrating that in this environment of homophobia, heterosexism, hate crimes and harassment, we should have to suffer through another opinion piece condemning the steps we take to express our dissatisfaction with this environment. It’s particularly egregious when this condemnation is coming from a self-identified straight white guy who takes it upon himself to be an arbiter of decency. However, I’m glad to see that queers are finding avenues to shock and offend even when our modes of communication are being shut down.
Although, queers, I think we dropped the ball in ’02. We clearly weren’t chalking enough at the time about how hot a bed of lesbian and gay fucking Wesleyan truly is. Several pre-frosh, now ’07ers, were duped, and now they are in such anguish they announced they never would have come here had they seen such proclamations. They matriculated with no sense of how many “kiss-outs” (and how plentiful they were!) they would have to endure. Let’s take whatever measures we need to avoid misleading sex-o-phobic pre-frosh in the future.
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