Tag Archives: microagression

Straightsplaining and ‘No homo’ are still very much things

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A tumblr post recently came across my dashboard that summed up an issue I keep running into (often with folks who I consider friends). The original blog, feministpixie.tumblr.com, has been deleted, but the words are still true:

“Oh, so because I’m straight I’m not allowed to have an opinion on [insert LGBT issue here]”

Listen.

I’m an english major. I know next to nothing about science, engineering, and astronomy. Sure, I think space is cool. I’m very supportive of NASA’s efforts. I might even have an opinion on where we should send the next shuttle or how much money we should spend on space travel.

But at the end of the day, my opinion on the matter is not valuable. I’m not going to enter into a discussion about the next shuttle launch with a bunch of trained scientists and expect them to take me seriously.

Sometimes, your opinion is not valuable. Sometimes, you aren’t qualified to enter a discussion.

And, lets be honest, straight people’s opinions are valued in literally every other situation. Hell, straight people get more awards for lgbt “activism” than queer people themselves.

If you really can’t accept that sometimes your voice isn’t the most important in the room, you might need to get over yourself.
—feministpixie.tumblr.com

“Take a step in the right direction. No racism. No homophobia. No sexism. No transphobia.”
“Take a step in the right direction. No racism. No homophobia. No sexism. No transphobia.”

Recently I’d re-tweeted something someone else retweeted in which a person commented about some “no homo” behavior he had observed in the real world with a comment about how fragile some people’s masculinity seemed to be. A friend jumped on the tweet to lecture me about how there were plenty of other reasonable explanations for the observed behavior, specifically saying the observation was the moral equivalent of an anti-gay slur.

I pointed out that the original observer was summarizing something he saw in a 140-character tweet, and might have left out a lot of other cues that he might have observed to deduce that the guys in question were homophobic. To which the friend replied, “That’s like gaydar, which is fun, but—” and then went on for a bit, concluding with the tired old chestnus, “I try to just mind my own business and not judge strangers in public.”

There are several things to unpack here:

  1. Gaydar isn’t merely a game. Gaydar isn’t accurate (though there is science to show that it is more often right than random guesses). And I’m sure to a straight person someone claiming to have gaydar is just about fun and giggles and guessing who might be part of the family. But that isn’t what gaydar is. Gaydar is an outgrowth of a survival mechanism. In a world where people are gay-bashed (sometimes to death), a queer person learns from a very early age to start looking for signs of who might be a friend, and who might be an enemy. Gaydar is just one manifestation of that.
  2. Therefore, keeping a wary eye for possible homophobes is not being judgmental. Again, as a queer person, I don’t have the luxury of minding my own business in public. I have never had that luxury. It isn’t just the bullies that beat me in school. It isn’t just the junior high coach who called me “faggot” all the time. It isn’t just the stranger on the street who shouted the word “faggot” and other things at me as I walked to work years ago. Gay bashing still happens. It isn’t just the occasional nutjob who goes on a mass shooting and kills 49 queer people in a single night. We never know when it might happen. So again, from an early age we look for warning signs, non-verbal cues, et cetera. We learn to avoid certain types of people, not because all of them are violent homophobes, but because some of them are and not being careful is risking more just getting our feelings hurt.
  3. It isn’t always about you. I get it, you’re not a violent homophobe. You may share some superficial characteristics or behaviors that a stranger might interpret the same way, but you would never attack someone. That’s good to know, but this isn’t about you. This is about our own safety and our experiences.
  4. Being thought of as possibly homophobic is not the equivalent of being gay bashed. I also understand that when you, a straight person, read about this sort of thing, you get your feelings hurt because you think that queer people who don’t know you might think you’re a homophobe because you act in a similar way. I’m sorry that your feelings are hurt, but your fear of being judged doesn’t balance out against our very real fear of being attacked. You’re not going to have to go to an emergency room to get stitches in your feelings. Your loved ones won’t be going to a funeral for your feelings. We, on the other hand, very well might get beaten or worse if we just mind our business and be ourselves around the wrong person.

I hate the fact that I still have to check myself constantly. I hate the fact that I can’t just be in the moment when I’m out in public, especially with my husband. I hate the fact that I have to keep an eye out for how strangers around me are acting. I hate the fact that I always do a quick assessment of our surroundings when I’m in public with my husband and one of us calls the other “honey.” I desperately yearn to live in a world where I can just mind my own business and not pay attention to how other people talk or act or what their facial expression is when they look at me, et cetera.

Believe me, I really wish that I could just mind my business.

But I can’t. Instead of getting upset because someone might misinterpret some of your behavior and be careful around you, be thankful that you don’t live in that same fear.

Stop straightsplaining. We really do understand homophobia far better than you ever could. That’s just a fact.

Adventures in being straightsplained

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Click to embiggen.
Click to embiggen.
Earlier this week I posted about how much I love fantasy and science fiction and one of the reasons why. Specifically that sf/f had been a refuge from some of the cruelties a homophobic society heaps upon queer kids while they’re growing up. Much of sf/f is about escaping oppression of one sort or another. Science fiction in particular is often about the triumph of the light of reason over the darkness of ignorance. That gave me hope, as a kid. Sometimes it was the only hope I had. Which is why it feels like a double betrayal when I encounter homophobia in sf/f circles. One phrase I used to describe the homophobes in question was, “whose ultimate goal is to erase us.”

Which led one commenter to tsk at me and insist that, while the people in question are decidedly anti-gay, there was no evidence they want to erase us.

Oh, goodie! Straightsplaining! Homophobia isn’t what I think it is, at all! How foolish of me to think that my 50+ years of surviving the slings and arrows of homophobia gave me any expertise in the meaning or aims of homophobia!

It’s possible the commenter has a reading comprehension problem and thinks that erasure must always literally imply extermination and is trying to claim that the people in question don’t want all queers dead. So, on the slight possibility that that’s the case, let me just explain that when I say “erase us” I mean “wish that we were invisible and that all or nearly all evidence of our existence was removed from stories, books, movies, television series, and society in general.”

And you know what? Every single homophobe in existence wishes that we were, in the least, invisible. It is part of the definition of being a homophobe! It’s a common lie they tell themselves and us all the time: “I don’t hate gay people, just why do they have to shove it in my face all the time?” Or “I wish they wouldn’t flaunt it all the time!” Or “I don’t want my children seeing that!”

And in the cases of the Sad Puppies, making us invisible is exactly what they’ve been talking about:

  • When they lament the fact that they can’t always be sure when they pick up a “book with a rocket on it” that they aren’t going to encounter gay characters inside? That’s wishing we were invisible.
  • When they insist (in the comments thread of the post linked in the first bullet) that it is deceptive that another book’s back cover blurb didn’t mention prominently enough that the protagonist is gay? That’s wishing we were invisible.
  • When they insist that in a novel about a young person’s quest for self-discovery the fact that the young person is gay isn’t revealed until nearly midway through the book (when the character finally admits it to himself) is some form of malicious deception? That’s wishing we were invisible.
  • And when a pair of artists/writers reveal in the final scenes of the finale of their cartoon series that the female lead and her female companion are in love, and a homophobic sci fi writer compares those artist to termites that need exterminating simply because they included queer characters in their story? That’s wishing we were invisibile.

And while we’re on the subject of John C. Wright: when he says that the “instinctive reaction of men” to “fags” is “beating them to death with axhandles and tire-irons,” that’s beyond wishing we were invisible, it’s an explicit statement that they wish we were exterminated.

To the commenter who kicked this off: I don’t know how you could have been paying close enough attention to the Bad Puppies to notice that they were anti-gay, yet missed the many times they have alluded to the bashing (and worse) of queers. Just as I don’t know how you could have been paying close enough attention to these guys to describe Vox Day/Theodore Beale as “vile” and have missed all the times he’s said that homosexuality is an existential threat to civilization that must be either cured or eradicated. Because all of that is also evidence that even more than wishing we were invisible, they wish we didn’t exist.

So please, don’t tell me or any other queer person that we don’t understand our own oppression. To paraphrase bunnika : when you were watching our lifestyles and checking out the homophobes’ web sites, we have been living our lives and experiencing actual homophobia that you have no right to ‘splain.

Thanks for your comment, though. And bless your heart.

Note: Comments on this entire blog have always been moderated. Specific commenters have been whitelisted, but everyone else’s comments sit in a queue until I approve them. And I don’t see any point in approving comments that are insulting, or obviously coming from sock puppets (there have been a lot of those this week) or—such as the comment alluded to here—indicate the person isn’t interested in listening.