STEREOTYPED HOMO-NATION
Q: What’s the difference between a lesbian and a whale?
A: About 10 kilograms and a checked shirt.
Not my joke…just another one of the gems I had to listen to when I was having after-work drinks with some of my gay boyfriends. Usually I just brush it off and grumble something about silly fairies into my light beer (yes, I know that makes me just as culpable). But this time I went home and I couldn’t stop thinking about lesbians, gays and beached whales…and then I got angry. Angry at the way we treat each other and angry about the implications that this “witty repartee” has on our community.
I mean we all know the “comical” stereotypes that we as a community bandy about at every given opportunity. Lesbians joke that gay men have no bones in their wrists, that they’re all designers, that they’re all effeminate, that they’ve all slept with one another and that they have bad haircuts.
Gay boys go on and on about the lesbians’ lack of style, co-ordination, weight issues, being carpenters or mechanics and that they have bad haircuts. And even though semi-mainstream media has started to move away from these stereotypes with shows like Queer as Folk and The L-Word, we as a community still cling to our pigeon holes for all we’re worth!
Why do we do this? Is it because we think these negative stereotypes are funny? And why do we think they are so hysterical? Is it because by ‘OTHERING’ a group in our community, we in fact distance ourselves from being gay? This smacks of internalised homophobia to me. But I’m no shrink, although I do know where to find one. So I asked Glenn de Swardt from Triangle Project why we continuously slag each other off. His thought was that if we speak negatively about someone outside our safe group, we reinforce our sense of belonging within our own group.
So my interpretation of that is: if a lesbian calls a gay man a limp wrested queen, she underpins her position in the Dyke Tribe. Agreed. I see his point. But if she is in the Dyke Tribe, isn’t she still a part of the larger Homo-Nation? And isn’t she injuring the Homo-Nation by verbally attacking one of her own? Or maybe it’s like being a Sharks or a Bulls supporter. The Sharks will mock every last horn of the Bulls supporter, and yet when the Bulls won the Super 14 it was somehow ok, because South Africa won…
Glenn also brought up another sticky issue. “Straight acting” (I hate that description) gay men often ridicule the more effeminate boys, and lipstick lesbians can’t stop talking about how much they’d like to attack the butchies with some tweezers and lip-liner. So even in our male vs female tribes, there are sub-clans that want to do battle with each other! And if there is so much squabbling amongst the troops and the battalions, aren’t we just opening ourselves up to a verbal onslaught from straight folks who want to get in on the name calling?
I mean, if it’s so ok to call each other faggot and dyke, aren’t we sending out a clear signal that it’s ok to deride the Homo-Nation as a whole (call me paranoid if you like). Let’s open the flood gates of marginalisation here, shall we!
And yet here’s the strange thing: when an onslaught comes from outside the Homo-Nation, what you usually see is a collective circling of the wagons. If someone outside my community, let’s just say, a Stone Harbour-wearing, bad cologne-marinating, straight man calls ANY of my gay boyfriends a faggot, I’ll be first in the front-lines protecting him for all I’m worth.
My point is, then, that it takes many colours to make up that rainbow flag of ours. It takes the butchies and the fairies, the preppies and the muscle marys, the lipsticks and the dipsticks. We’re like a quirky extended family. There’s the crazy aunt, the cousin that no-one really wants to sit next to at Christmas, the pink sheep, the drunk granny, and groping uncle James… but we’re family. Bonded by some crazy chromosome that made us love and lust the same sex. And just like family we’re stuck together, so let’s learn to live and speak a little bit more respectfully about each other.
Jeanine Cameron is a television journalist/producer. She has a fixed opinion on almost everything and she’s happiest when she’s telling someone about it. She likes controversy, tattoos and round bums. She lives and loves in Cape Town.
Images used with the kind permission of RyaN von Schwedler, Andrea M. D, Chuck Wright, Arjun Kartha, Philippe Ramakers, Kathryn McCallum, Hannah Boettcher.
nuf said!. Here Here! The orator has spoken 😉
we should all be thinking so much
– and if that’s not too much to ask … we should be thinking like Ms. Cameron over here.
femme men.. as someone who doesn’t understand why many gay men feel the need to be femme, i do my best to respect them by staying as far away from them as possible. (this just so happens to include most of my boyfriend’s friends. shame.) unless you were born with a cleft palate, there is no need to lisp.
now drag queens — that’s a different story. if you can, as a man, get up every day, and dress like a woman, and go out into the world… i will take my hat off to you. i actually speak to drags in public, and carry their bags when they need help, etc etc. because, for lack of a better phrase, it takes BALLS to do that — to willingly give up male privilege in order to live your life as a woman. that’s gangsta. can’t f*ck with that. (i don’t sleep with drags, but i treat them like i treat any other woman.)
but sissies. ugh. can’t eff with them. won’t speak to them, will cross the street if they are coming to avoid laughing at them to their faces. there is no reason for a man to be full of swish. NONE.
May Jesus should live up to his name!. I honestly think that if you avoid crossing the road on the same side as someone for fear of laughing at them to their faces, this says a lot more about you than it does about the object of your ridicule.
Maybe you can explain what gives you the right to demean anyone merely because of who and what they are. Any rationally thinking person who is also gay should be able to identify with ANYONE who society has chosen to shun for their otherness.
But I suppose that actually begins with the premise that shitheads like you actually have a brain.
Touche. I could not agree with you more…insightful and freaking funny. Talk about going off the topic and turning the argument into a self-absorbed diatribe. I say no to Jesus.
careful. your lisp is showing.
again, unless you were born with a cleft palate, there is no reason to lisp, and unless you’ve had polio or any other disorder that adversely affects your legs, there is no excuse to swish.
simple as that.
it’s nice that you make excuses for yourselves, but at the end of the day, you have to look in the mirror and see what is wrong with you that you need to think that being a lithping, thwithing queen is what “gay” is.
wow. wow!! a gay nazi!! incredible that such a thing exists…
tell me, jesus, should lesbians be exterminated too?
what a gem of a human…
Gay Harsh Names. Get with the program people. Stop slagging off your fellow gay family. We have fought for so long and so hard to get the hetro people to accept us and now we are acting as if we don’t want to even accept each other. Remember all the people that have been bashed, jailed and abused due to being gay. Get over the name calling and be proud that there are strong guys, weak guys, strong girls and weak girls. Thats just the way we are. BE PROUD.
let the kumbaya mess go.. sorry, no bonding here. my parents knew i was going to be black long before they knew i was going to be gay, and provided me with the tools to deal with white folks’ bullshit. (again. i’m from latin america, which was, and continues to be, far more racist than apartheid south africa ever was — you can be a lot harsher when you don’t put your negro-hate on the judicial record.)
with a little twiddling, i learned how to deal with straight folks’ bullshit — knocking a few teeth out of the mouth of anyone who called me faggot generally led to people not calling me faggot or expressing any other homophobic sentiment towards me. funny how that goes….
and see, when my own blood family got stupid and started treating me like shit because i was gay — i got rid of them. told them to piss off, left the country, no forwarding address, and no one knew where i was for almost 8 years. sometimes the best thing for someone is to walk away from their “family”, especially when it’s horribly disfunctional.
Excellent! . Tolerance is the word … she could also have added the drag queens … how many gay men do not slander them …
Aha!! That’s where it comes from Jesus. Jesus (pronounced: Hey-sous),
It is now quite apparent that all this hate, self-loathing, bigotry and hypocrisy comes from your dysfunctional family history. I think you should re-direct your anger where it belongs and start loving yourself for who you are and then transfer that onto others. Believe you me, you will lead a stress-free life.
you’re absolutely right.
i have dealt with the dysfucntional gay “family” much the same way i dealt with the dysfuctional biological family.
i don’t socialise, speak to, talk to, or otherwise deal with FAGGOTS unless i absolutely have to.
(and why is it when i am forced, in the name of being courteous to my out of town guests, to go out to clubs where you people congregate, do you white moffies think you have the right to touch me? you don’t. go away.)
and christ on a stick, who is the moron that gives some of you lithping thwithing queens a job? i would never hire you. ever. y’all would be taking me to court and suing me, and i would be “i wish to hire a man, not someone who wants to maintain his male privilege yet swish and act like a woman. sorry.”
i’d get sued, i’d probably lose, i wouldn’t care, because by that time i would have already hired someone suitable for the job and done legally creative accounting so that i wouldn’t be able to pay out. shame.
or
someone i’m forced to hire goes to the CCMA and says “anti-gay work environment”. i would say, it’s not an anti-gay work environment, it’s an anti-FAGGOT work environment. big difference.
to paraphrase chris rock… it’s like a civil war out there. between gay people and faggots. and faggots have got to go.
i see y’all keep trying to make excuses for your swishiness. that’s really fucking sad.
In war alliances are necessary. Lesbians and Gay men have historically been drawn together because they were fighting a common battle. This was their only real shared interest as groups. This alliance went as far as socialising together (bars and clubs) , as people tend to do during war in order to protect themselves. The war now largely over, they find that they have little in common. Being gay is surely not a “raison d’etre”, and if it were we’ve moved on, the world has evolved and the communities have as well.
let the church say AMEN!!. PREACH!!!!
Jesus my son…. …you have suffered and I have compassion for you. But my son, be wary, the abused tend to become abusers themselves. The intolerance shown towards you need not be mimicked and the retrograde ways of your own Latin American Caribbean culture should remain where they belong – at home. With the choice between hardline Catholicism and Voodoo it is understandable that you exemplify the antithesis of progress.
my father’s name is javier, not god. i’m not abusing anyone. i’m leaving you people alone (unless some dumb white man wants to put his hands on me, in which case he will have a physical price to pay if and when he does).
AGAIN. you people have this opgefokte idee as to what it means to be gay. i see you all around, many of you being just as feminine as you want to be, calling other men girl, and sister, and other womanly things.
if you want to be and act like women, either do drag full time or get the fucking chop. it’s that simple.
Hey, Heysu aka Jesus. You’re the one with a potted, formatted idea of what a gay person should be like. Most people think that screwing someone of your own sex means no more than that: sex. I assure you that there are many more invisible gays who are perfectly at ease with their sexuality than the effeminate shocking sort you decry so vocally.
Further, it appears that you’re also a bit of a racist. I mean, I find that a lot of black guys come on to me, does that entitle me to publicly threaten to beat them up if they continue to do so?
racist. i don’t need to worship at the altar of white folks, so i don’t. for some reason, this makes me a racist.
whatever.
(fortunately i don’t need to live for the white man’s approval, unlike so many of my black brothers and sisters in this place.)
Worship. Do you believe the nonsense you sprout or are you simply an attention-seeking provocative tit? Your black brothers – why do you persist in calling people your “brother” when apparently the only thing you have in common is your skin coulour – worship whom they please, if they feel sufficiently liberated to find a white guy attractive then it is because they have evolved, and not stuck in some backward looking ideological struggle best left to power hungry populist politicians. You, on the other hand, seem to have come to South Africa to wage battle, and you’re severely pissed off because no one is interested. Surely if you’ve the energy for a crusade it’d be best spent where it’s needed, in model Cuba for example…
que triste eres!!!. oh you are so sad!
please continue with your justifications.
don’t fool yourself, 99% of the time, there is nothing attractive about you except your (perceived) wallet. poor country and all that. when i was in brazil, poor white kids (as well as poor black ones) latched on to the older white men for almost the same reason.
it’s okay. just be honest with yourself. really.
honest.
but if you want to buy into the whole kumbaya thing, then that’s fine. i do a thriving side business in rose-coloured glasses, if you would like a pair.
(i live here, by the way, because my husband wanted to come home for a while. hopefully that “while” will be over soon, to be honest. it’s a really toxic place.)
Stereotypes. I’m going to kick myself tomorrow for being drawn into a showdown of wits with an intellectual cripple, but here goes….
The thing about stereotypes, and their commonplace usage, is that there is a lot of truth in them.
In the spirit of your obvious obsession with them, and on behalf of our entire country, thank you for expressing your views by encapsulating as much of them as possible: the violent black savage (with a bone through the nose no doubt), the angry-young-man who is gay but who finds it repulsive and unacceptable, the foreigner from a poor country who is displaced and feels sorry for himself because no-one actually understands how it feels to have such a big chip on his shoulder….the list is endless.
Good luck Jesus, I think you’ll need it.