Editor's Note: The title isn't original, and it doesn't really have to do with anything David wrote about in his entry, it's just a good title, and appropriate for what I want to talk about today.
I suppose that despite the voyeuristic nature of the weblog, I've always tried to remove myself from actually showing too much. As defense I've intellectualized damn near everything on this site, and by some wacky coincidence it's actually worked, and I suppose I'll keep doing it, even here. This is the entry that I don't really want to write, that I don't really want to have to write. Enough with the vague ramblings.
From the onset, the gay community looks like this inclusive grouping of targeted people, and in some senses it's really is, but in other's its not. We're not inclusive of anything more than surface level cultural and racial diversity, and the community is barely inclusive of all its members, and that vision that you find at the onset very quickly begins to splinter, and fall apart.
Why?
Good question. The term internalized homophobia is something that a lot of people know, a lot of people even acknowledge it, but until very recently I haven't really known what it means. And even then, I haven't rid myself of this curse, and while I'm making progress, I'm not there yet, and given the nature of the curse, I kind of doubt that I will be.
I was talking with David at some point and he said that people will say "I didn't know you were gay" or "You don't act gay" (whatever that's supposed to mean) as if it's a compliment. Acceptance in our culture apparently means "I can accept you for what ever makes you diverse, as long as you don't act, look, sound, think, or smell diverse." That's not true acceptance, and is only a short cry away from tolerance, and in some ways is even worse.
Which brings us to this statement: Gayer than thou.
This implies that someone can be more or less gay, which depending on what we mean, might be possible, but by quantifying someone's gay-quotient, we establish hierarchy, and as hierarchy's are prone to doing, they exclude people, the push people away. After all, people are either gay, or they're not; they're either bisexual or they're not, they're either lesbian or they're not. There isn't a "kinda" box. There really shouldn't be boxes of any kind by, as Kinsey said "_ Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigion-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects._" That's as evident in my own speech as it is in the rest of the world.
It wouldn't be so bad if the categories didn't hurt people, but they do. They hurt the people that we try and force into categories they don't belong in, but they also hurt us. By separating and 'ranking' people, the community loses cohesion and a splintered community is ineffectual and incapable of caring for the members of the community as a family should. We're not just hurting our friends we're hurting ourselves.