|
||||
|
||||
|
Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
|
||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
 |
||
 |
||
| Gay misogynists?! | ||
|
by Beau Burriola -
SGN Foreign Correspondent misogyny (mi soj´? ne, ni-), n. hatred of women. "I lived in San Francisco for four years," Debbie explained to me, "but I had to leave. I found it so misogynistic." I was shocked. I was sure Debbie was going to explain to me that moving to San Francisco from Texas was the best move she ever made. After all, having escaped Texas myself as a cultural Gay refugee, I was sure that anyone who did the same was making a good choice for themselves. As a proud Gay man, I sure never expected to hear that. "Misogynistic? Really? But with so many Gay people, I'd think you would find it very accepting." I wasn't sure I was arguing for Gay people. After all, her perception wouldn't change with whatever I had to say. It was what it was. "I especially found the Gay men to be very anti-women. Oh, I had some good friends in that city who were Gay, but there was a lot of misogyny in the Gay community. I felt like an unwelcome invader. One time, at a dinner I was invited to by a friend, I found it very uncomfortable. The hosts weren't at all happy someone had invited a woman. Most of the people wouldn't even talk to me, as if my being there made their party less Gay." I felt terrible for Debbie. More than that, I was angry. I have always assumed that being Gay meant that my community was, by default, open to everything. We are, after all, the community that most claims to embrace all the outcasts and the unaccepted. If our community had a Queer Statue of Liberty, it might say "give us your trod-upon and rejected, your unwanted and unwelcome." So, it never occurred to me once that Gay men could ever be described as misogynistic. I began asking other women if they experienced anything like this. "I had an experience like that once," Jayme said, after I told her what Debbie said over lunch. "I went out dancing with some friends to a Gay bar and I got all these strange stares like 'what is SHE doing here?' I was uncomfortable enough to leave. I never went back." "There are as many misogynists in the Gay community as anywhere else," Dori wrote to me in an e-mail. "They don't really un-learn the behavior just by being Gay. You may think you are more accepting, but you're all still men. Don't worry, I still love you." So all this time, I've been waving around my big blue flag with the huge equal sign on it and all this has been going on? How could I, having lived in the middle of a sea of Gay men for more than ten years, have missed this? "Maybe that's why," my sister said. "You lived in the middle of a 'sea of Gay men' and you aren't a woman." You can live your whole life imagining the world to be right and fair and be blind to the injustices other people face every day. No matter which community you belong to, your blindness to that injustice makes you party to it. Just like when I first left Texas for a better view of myself, it took me moving away from the Gay community for a while to see where some of the cracks in the equality are. Now that I've got some idea of how many women are treated by even Gay men, I can do more for myself and my community to try to change some of that. I have to. Anything less than a Gay community without misogyny is just hypocritical. Beau Burriola is a writer with too few women in his life and a new goal to change that. beaubrent@gmail.com |
||
|
visit Beau at www.beaubrent.com
|
||
 |
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 post your own information onthe Seattle Gay Blog |
 |
copyright Seattle Gay News - DigitalTeamWorks 2007
USA Gay News American News American Gay News USA American Gay News United States American Lesbian News USA American Lesbian News United States USA News
USA Gay News American News American Gay News USA American Gay News United States American Lesbian News USA American Lesbian News United States USA News