So W. F. Price of The Spearhead has made a momentous discovery: there is a television show called Glee. In a recent post, he shared some of his findings with the regular crowd:
I’ve only recently heard of the teen drama Glee, which is evidently a big hit with the teenybopper crowd. The other day, I came across it while flicking through channels and forced myself to watch some of the show.
Apparently, it is really, really gay.
First, I have to say that I now do believe the conservative Christians are correct in saying that the media is pushing a gay agenda. Of course, I don’t really care (one can always change the channel), but it was so blatant on Glee that I couldn’t help but laugh. The show revolved around a “glee club” (an insipid American high school institution for you Brits), cheerleaders, football players, gay football players, football players in drag, football players with cheerleaders, with gay cheerleaders, etc. There was even Broadway-style singing and dancing.
The horror!
Glee is about the gayest show I’ve ever seen on TV. Even the name is gay.
So, you’re saying it’s gay.
Still, Price did have one little complaint about the show:
The gay issue aside, there was one thing about the show that, although unsurprising, was still obnoxious: it features the same old negative stereotypes about normal males. The teen sluts (both gay and straight) are the heros, while the villains are generally straight or straight-acting males … .
It’s true. No one in American society is more oppressed than “normal” dudes. How dare Glee add to this bigotry!
Shockingly, it turns out that there aren’t any Glee fans amongst the Spearhead set – at least none willing to speak up.
In the comments, Meistergedanken explained that Glee was just a part – a loud, singing part — of a devious queer conspiracy:
It’s all part of the plan. Just like “Desperate Housewives”, “American Horror Story” or “Dawson’s Creek”, or any of those other shows created by the queers, straight couples – particularly married ones – are inevitably shown to be the most hypocrital, intolerant, ignorant, mentally unbalanced and emotionally dysfunctional characters. In this way normality is portrayed as a sorry sham. …
It’s so strange to see the progressives insist on marriage for gays, while at the same time showing married couples (and the husbands/fathers especially) as the worst people out there. They want to tear down marriage so they can scrounge the tattered remains for themselves, I guess.
Towgunner, for his part, delivered up a long, rambling manifesto of sorts on the subject of the gays. Some highlights:
Is it a tragedy that gay people suffer? I honestly used to think so, but I don’t really think they suffer all that much. They seem pretty happy at their parades. Matter of fact, I’d say that a balding women (regardless of her sexuality) or a poor black family or an orphan in Africa suffer thousands of times more than some sappy fruit.
In that light homosexuals have proven to be one of the most selfish groups in all of history, right up there with women – after all they want to be women anyway. …
Furthermore, it says something about our culture that gives only homosexuals and other sluts special treatment. … All this to facilitate a small group’s ego so they feel only slightly less guilty at themselves when they orgasm. That’s where your taxpayer money goes to…to make a pervert feel good about itself.
So, apparently, the government is giving out gay orgasm grants, or something?
Andybob, meanwhile, spoke up for the gays. Or, at least, the gays who hate Glee. And women.
The first time I saw “Glee” I wanted to punch my flatscreen through the wall. Here again, gay men/teens are being shown as shallow, trite, superficial, dismissable, malleable, silly, flippant cretins with nothing to offer the world except fashion advice and sloping shoulders for whiny bitches to cry on. …
Those of us [gay men] who live far from Hollywood and have no connection whatsoever to Broadway musicals are very likely to be very aware of issues confronting men. Some of us are even vocal MRA’s. … [We’re] not handicapped by the need for sex from women. We can recognise their manipulative BS from miles away. The female psyche laid bare is an ugly thing.
Gay men like men, identify with men, actually are men. We watch men we care about like our brothers (I have a straight twin brother), fathers, and mates get ground down by a system created and maintained by feminists and their pussy-begging lackeys – and yes, some poodle-carrying flamers along for the ride. Women are always shocked to learn that most gays side with men. That’s not what they see on the telly. …
The bitchy gays who discriminate against straight men … are the manginas of the gay world. …
Women don’t like gays and straights to collaborate because they don’t want us to compare notes. I have seen women try to shame my straight friends out of hanging out with me. They are threatened by our mutual support. Together, we are able to construct a composite picture of women that would peel paint for sheer gruesomeness.
Gay men and straight men – together, united in hatred of whiny bitches!
Completely agree with Ozy’s post. Politicians are an ok outing target if those politicians are actively working against equality.
Cassandra and Pecunium: I will not continue this discussion or get into a back and forth over this. Why are you making this thread about me?
Can the martyr act, Dan. It’s getting tedious.
“Exactly. It’s not really about the hypocrisy, it’s about the narrative that there’s something wrong about being gay as such.”
This is my fundamental problem with the tactic of outing even people who are a. public figures and b. loathesome people. I can understand why people want to do it, I’m just not sure that there’s any way to do it without playing up to homophobic attitudes, since the bite of outing is dependent on the existence of cultural homophobia. It’s just a bit too close to “fuck their shit up” for comfort, and when you start getting straight people jumping into the “yeah, let’s out people!” conversation then the discomfort just amps up even more.
DSC: Not sure I could ever understand your personal feelings on the issues because I have never lived it. But if a cis-hetero (like myself) openly supports and advocates for LGBT equality, I do not see the argument on how we would be seen as untrustworthy just because we would expose people like Larry Craig.
Holly says it continues the idea that “queer sex” is shameful. But that is the message those closeted politicians are already spreading. If you take away the voice of the bigots, then it weakens the argument of those bigots in society. And that should be the overall goal here, to do whatever it takes to weaken bigotry in this country. The shame a closeted politician who runs on an anti-LGBT platform should feel is not for the acts they do in private, but for the hypocritical acts they are doing in their public political life.
Because once straight people get into that game, LGBT people don’t know who you’d expose next. Once straight people are making the decision to out the people that they deem deserve it, that’s getting into dangerous territory.
See the talk about exposing queer teenagers for just how creepy this can get.
…Yeah, that’s the problem. Using their own tactics against them means that we can take down the people, but not the ideas. We can take a specific queer homophobe down, but only by appealing to people who think the queerness is the real problem with them. And what if the next homophobe to come up really is straight? Should we act like that somehow legitimizes their homopobia?
@Dan
I’m staying out of this conversation because as a straight dude with no real ties to the LGBT community, aside from supporting their right to equality, I have nothing worth hearing to say. However, I just want to comment on what you said. As a cis-hetero, you’re part of the oppressor class. When you are willing to betray a member of the LGBT because you think that they are hurting the cause, you are showing the LGBT around you that your support is conditional. That means that they have to worry that someone, who has no understanding of the power he holds, may decide to use it on them. In opposition,when an LGBT outs someone, they are much more cautious because a) they know the dangers of being out and b) any possible shrapnel is very likely to hit them, and they tend to be very aware of that.
i see Holly beat me to it!
Support for outing just fundamentally means something different coming from straight people than coming from queer people, and of course queer people aren’t going to trust straight people to fully understand all the possible implications precisely because they don’t have the lived experience necessary to do so. This is one of those privilege awareness issues where if you’re not part of the in-group involved you need to back off and let the group themselves thrash out the issue internally.
lj4: Cassandra and Pecunium: I will not continue this discussion or get into a back and forth over this. Why are you making this thread about me?
Because you pulled a passive aggressive ad hominem You made a slap at someone, and then (when called on it) said, “oh no, we can’t go into that, that’s derailing.”
Which means you are insulting someone else, and then saying that pointing it out is off limits. That’s bullshit, and you don’t get to pretend that pointing out your double-dipping passive aggression is us being the assholes.
” That’s bullshit, and you don’t get to pretend that pointing out your double-dipping passive aggression is us being the assholes.”
Especially not in a thread about queer issues, where your initial comment was accusing a queer person of being “oversensitive” when talking about those issues, and you are not queer yourself. Which was why I smacked that comment down in the first place.
lj4: DSC: Not sure I could ever understand your personal feelings on the issues because I have never lived it. But if a cis-hetero (like myself) openly supports and advocates for LGBT equality, I do not see the argument on how we would be seen as untrustworthy just because we would expose people like Larry Craig.
Because it shows a willingness to engage in a potential harm that you are in no way at risk from. Sure, someone could accuse me of being a homosexual (it’s happened), but it won’t fly. There isn’t anyone who is going to come forward and say I hired him to “carry my bags” to Thailand. No one will ever find a long unknown arrest for soliciting a blowjob in a tea-room.
So my risk is that of any other person falsely accused. The homosexual who is “outed” has the usual risk of being a known homosexual, combined with the risk that comes of those who believed that person to be straight feeling betrayed; on top of being some sort of public figure.
For a person with no personal risk (I won’t say straights have no dog in the fight), to be willing to do that; to use someone else’s life as a political pawn; when they aren’t risking the same… is grounds for someone who has that set of risks to feel nervous about them. It’s enough to make them untrustworthy.
In the same way I think Jonah Goldberg is untrustworthy when he says some struggle is so important we need to send soldiers to kill, and be killed, but when asked why he’s not joining up, to take part in this existential struggle, tells people, “I can’t afford the reduction in my income.”
Damn, hit post too soon: Because Jonah Goldberg isn’t willing to take the risks he is willing to impose on others.
“So my risk is that of any other person falsely accused. The homosexual who is “outed” has the usual risk of being a known homosexual, combined with the risk that comes of those who believed that person to be straight feeling betrayed; on top of being some sort of public figure.”
Not to mention the personal implications. Now, I don’t like homophobic policiticians, but precisely because I am queer there’s a level of damage that outing them might inflict on them that I’m a. aware of and b. uncomfortable with the idea of inflicting. Even if I may eventually decide that it’s justified in certain cases, it’s not a simple decision, and what I’m seeing here is some straight people being far too cavalier about it in a way that’s intimately tied up with their privilege.
My cousin came out more than 15 years ago. There are members of the family who still won’t let him in their houses, and who have never met his child (and this is why I am still not out to some people in my family). And my family isn’t even all that conservative, compared to the families of the kind of people we’re talking about outing. If a queer person wants to talk about whether or not they think potentially inflicting that level of damage on politician X is justified then I’ll listen to their reasons even if I disagree, but if a random straight person is getting all belligerent about the same issue and then calling queer people who have concerns about the potential implications of outing “oversensitive”? Well, then I’m going to be a lot less willing to listen.
I’m willing to admit that my feelings on the issue are informed by my bisexuality and that my views may not coincide as much with those of gays and lesbians. To me the closet is definitely a privilege I have over others. I’m straight presenting/masculine presenting outside of a few quirks that can be easily chalked up to nerdiness/lack of social cues rather than being a ‘sissy’ or feminized (I tend to stand too close to my brothers and male friends, which makes them uncomfortable when they gender police themselves in public, for instance). Whereas I’ve been friends with lesbians who were into non-heteronormative looks (shaved head punk rockers) who are automatically flagged as lesbians and could never ever attempt to hide in the closet (to be fair, even if they were hetero they would be considered lesbians in all likelyhood).
I also have bad experiences with predatory 40-50ish gay/bi males married with a beard taking advantage of the fact I was young and wanted to please/be polite to have sex with me that was on the iffy side of consensual. I’m willing to admit that my hate on for adult gay men in the closet *in general* due to these experiences might give me a negative bias here. I consider an apolitical person hiding in the closet to preserve high status or high income to be taking advantage of the efforts of politically active queers, and that it is parasitic behavior. I’m already borderline in my tolerance for that, so once that behavior crosses into direct attack on queers, I get angry.
I’ll refrain from discussing this any further due to it being so problematic for me.
I’m poly. That’s enough of a “non-trad” situation to be it’s own problems. When my fiancée came out to her parents…. it was stressful. She was afraid they might disown her. Part of the reason she didn’t come out sooner was that it might have hurt their careers.
I’ve got lots of queer friends. This is a far from settled topic among them. I recall my second step-father taking me aside (I was 18-19, or so) and asking if I was bi. He didn’t really care; but he wanted to know. I think, had I said I was (or that I was gay) he’s have done what he could to be supportive.
I’ve had people think I was gay (hard as that is for me to believe). That’s an interesting situation. I did what I could to ignore them (I’m removing guys who hit on me, them I just told I wasn’t interested, or, “thanks, but I’m straight”). But I’ve never felt I was in danger from such things; at a systemic level… incidental gay bashing is a different risk.
True story. Friend of mine was leaving a gig he had as a DJ at a gay club in N. Hollywood (about 20 years ago). He got knocked down by a couple of guys and fought back. He then went back in, to take a look at his face/clean up. Which was when he figured out it wasn’t a bashing, but a really badly done robbery.
He’d been shot across the lats on his right side by a .22. Because the risk of being bashed was as common as it was he didn’t think it was a robbery, so he beat up on them, and they ran off. I don’t have to live with that kind of worry. I don’t think it’s my place to put others at that risk, when I can’t really accept for myself.
I’m surprised that last guy is an MRA, seeing as how many MRAs tend to whine about something like a TV show brainwashing people by representing gay people in its cast of characters. The horror!
@lj4adotcomdan:
I actually agree that it’s a lot easier for bi people to stay closeted than it is for most other queer people, especially if we’re fairly conventionally gendered in appearance. Doesn’t mean that the closet is a great place to be, though, but it’s true that it’s a choice in a way that it isn’t for a lot of other queer people.
My own personal experience within my family, watching what happened when my cousin came out, has definitely had an impact on my view of this too. I once watched an aunt flat-out tell my cousin “it was your insisting on flaunting your lifestyle that killed her, you know” about his mother (who died of alcoholism – she was an alcoholic long before my cousin came out, which my aunt knows very well).
The closet isn’t a great place to be, but I can understand why some people, especially people from conservative families, choose to stay there, and what it would cost them to be pushed out of it. And again, in some cases I might even agree with the decision to do so. But not when that decision is being made by straight people who’ve given no indication whatsoever of knowing, or caring, about any of this stuff.
Y U NO WORK HTML ಠ益ಠ
@lj4adotcomdan:
Eh,you know, I think you said some thoughtful things in this comment thread, but I think you are crossing the line again. When queer people tell you that they fell uncomfortable about a straight cis guy talking about the pros of outing closeted homophobes, the best course of action for you would be to listen, not to talk over them or bring up a queer person who supports your standpoint (as has been pointed out, queer people are not a hive mind).
I actually didn’t have a problem with closeted public figures who are actively working against LGBT rights being outed, since this kind of hypocrisy pisses me off to no end.
There was just that certain satisfying feeling for me in subjecting those people to the kind of bigotry and hate they want us to be subjected to.
But the way people here put it, it really seems pretty homophobic in hindsight, so I consider changing my viewpoint on this.
I always hated it when straight people who considered themselves allies made jokes about homophobes being closeted, since it sorta paints queer people as the only ones guilty of homophobic bigotry.- sure, there are quite a few closeted homophobes, but there also are many straight homophobes who just happen to be that hateful.and bigoted.
I know, calling them gay is pretty much the worst thing you can call them – but that is exactly the problem. It’s still homophobic.
It’s why so many feminists took issue with people using misogynistic slurs against Palin.
They strongly disagreed with her views, but these views can be debunked and proven wrong WITHOUT making use of misogyny.
The same is true for closeted homophobes.
I hope that made sense?
If Billy Bob or Mary the politician/religious leader cites against gay rights while actually being gay themselves, I have no problem pointing out their hypocrisy. It’s not really about outing, it’s more like confronting someone about being a hypocrite.
There were a ton of rumors about Trudeau in the gay community in the 80’s. I knew people who claimed they had slept with him even. Yet Trudeau’s sexuality was not outed one way or the other. Why didn’t the msm out Trudeau?
It might be because he fought for gay rights, and he wasn’t a hypocrite.
Blackbloc, you realize you can not pass as straight or cis and also be closeted in some senses, right? I’m sure you’ve known people who are in a “glass closet” and everybody knows that they aren’t straight but the person refuses for whatever reason to confirm their LGBT status. Although these people are still going to get harassed more than somebody who’s “straight-acting” or whatever, the denial can still serve to protect them in certain domains, like at church or at home or the political realm or so on.
I’m half out (to friends) and half closeted (to my family), but I’m probably somewhat kidding myself about my family being in the dark. I’m not the stereotypical butch dyke or anything, but my appearance is queer enough that I can get The Look of Recognition from other queer people when I’m out and about, I don’t think anyone’s ever actually been surprised when I say I’m bi, and I have gotten a few slurs tossed my way. However there’d definitely be a difference in treatment if I were to confirm things 100% with my parents vs. their vague sense of “our daughter is probably not straight”. One would bring down a number of problems on my head (probably not homelessness, but I don’t want to try and find out) and the other one just gets me weird questions about whether my best female friend has a boyfriend, etc.
I get where you are coming from that people who can pass as straight
(passing as cis is complicated in different ways so I’m not gonna touch that one for now) and are able to maintain the illusion that they are straight have certain advantages in comparison to those that don’t have that option. Which is true. But being able to voluntarily disclose that you are some variety of queermo often means that you are in an advantageous position relative to the people who can’t do that for fear of what would happen if they did (no matter how well they pass or how transparent their closet) .
If LGBT people get privilege from being closeted I’d say it’s basically a form of “passing privilege” (which as I said, a given closeted person might not actually have that much of) rather than its own “closet privilege” or whatever. And some people have passing privilege without actually being actively closeted..
Kavette – The problem is that you might be outing them as an attack on their hypocrisy, but people who see it will use it to mount an attack on their sexuality. You can’t out someone as “ha ha, hypocrite” without exposing them to “ha ha, queer.”
And the attitude of “don’t worry, we’ll only out the bad ones” has got to terrify people who are closeted and aren’t bad–but can never fully predict or control who might decide to use outing as a trump card in a dispute.
” And some people have passing privilege without actually being actively closeted.”
This too! Nobody ever immediately IDs me as bi, even though I’m out to everyone except some parts of my family. I have to actively out myself to each new person I meet. The privilege in question seems to be more tied up with ideas about gender normativity in a masculine/feminine sense than anything else. All of the queer people I know who get harrassed and bashed on a regular basis are on the clearly non-gender-conforming parts of the spectrum.
Also building on Holly’s point, a threat of outing coming from a straight person basically reads as a threat to use a queer person’s lack of privilege against them, as a stick to beat them with. Even if you think that outing may be a reasonable thing to do in some cases, the idea of the people who have the privilege threatening to use the stick against those who don’t is problematic. There’s a power dynamic involved there that just doesn’t sit well from a social justice point of view.
Kollege: I do not view it as a negative to A) Want to know why someone might feel the way they do and B) try to understand why. I can always work on asking my questions in a better way. However, if I have a question how is it supposed to get answered if I do not ask it?
There is a dispute in this thread by those who are part of the LGBT community on if outing such politicians is a bad thing or not. Some believe it is ok, others do not. Currently, I am on the side of agreeing that closeted politicians who support an anti-LGBT agenda are a valid target for outing. I also agree that as a general rule, outing someone is not ok. So perhaps the former is an exception to the general rule. But also admitted that because of my being cis-hetero that I do not have the ability to look at the issue through the eyes of someone who is part of the LGBT community who may disagree and who thinks there should be no exceptions.
And of course no group is a hive mind. That is obvious because some people feel one way and others do not.
“I know, calling them gay is pretty much the worst thing you can call them –”
To me, calling them a hypocrite is the worst thing you can call them. It would never occur to me that anyone would even think that the outing of the hypocrites was attacking those people because they were gay.
Like it never occurred to me that anyone would take the “lipstick on a pig” comment pertaining to Palin as being sexist (considering the fact that our senior Senator who is a woman often uses that same line frequently). But the people complaining about that comment I believed to be stretching it.
I do see what you are saying, and agree, that female politicians should be criticized without misogyny. Closeted anti-LGBT politicians should be criticized without homophobia.
And perhaps there are people who focus on outing those closeted politicians because they hope their voters (who are anti-gay) will pounce on them and reject them because they are gay. And if that is the case then I agree the motive and tactics are not in any way moral, are embracing homophobia, and should not be embraced.
However, if the focus of the attack is the hypocrisy and the people doing the outing are doing so to shine a spotlight on how bad homophobia is and that we should be living in a nation where this politician should not have to live in the closet in the first place, then I still do not see how that is homophobic.
Anyone who supported the homophobic statements of a bigoted public figure is obviously homophobic themselves. When that figure is outed, like Holly has said (unless I’m misunderstanding you), supporters are going to turn away because eww gay eww, not because of the hypocrisy. The people who would be disgusted by the hypocrisy wouldn’t have been supporters in the first place.
On a very different note, I would love it if someone could define “oversensitive” for me. It seems absolutely meaningless. Who gets to decide what is sensitive enough, if not the person who is actually experiencing the reaction?