Lez Keep It Real

Before I get into the nitty gritty of this post, I would just like to take a quick moment to apologize for my absence over the past couple of days. When holiday time comes around, everything seems out of sorts. It always takes me a few days to get my groove back … even as I type this sentence, my fingers aren’t going where I tell them to go! I was on vacation for about a week, so bear with me. I hope you all had as good of a Thanksgiving as I had.

Onto the point of this post, in which I came across a column where someone finally said something poignant about the “gay lifestyle” and said it right.

I’ve spoken about the supposed “gay lifestyle” before. Whenever I see the religious right or some conservative snob talking about how the “gay lifestyle” is full of sin, drugs, corruption - you name it, I want to smack them upside the head.

My “lifestyle” or how I choose to live has absolutely nothing to do with my sexuality. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip. I live everyday exactly the way I would live it if I were straight. I dabble in alcoholic beverages now and then. I go to movies with my friends. I shop. I play basketball and soccer. I run. I write. I read. I watch Law & Order SVU. I own two Chihuahuas. I call my parents on a weekly basis. I basically lead a life that most gay people lead but never gets talked about because of two simple reasons:

1. It’s incredibly boring.
2. It serves no purpose in aiding the anti-gay proponents because if the secret got out that gay people lead normal lives, then everyone would think being gay was OK … right?

I saw this column this morning in the American Chronicle and I was elated.

The Gay Lifestyle. Are You Missing Out?

If I read or hear the words “the gay lifestyle” one more time, I’m going to chew nails, or yell like a summa wrestler whose butt’s been kicked. I’m fed up with this phrase and the people who use it. They pretend it has some real, substantial meaning. It doesn’t! Let’s get this straight (and no comments from anyone abut the use of that word) - it’s usually not a phrase used by actual red-blooded gay folks to describe how they live or who they are. Just as straight people never refer to themselves as living the “straight lifestyle”, most gay people I know or have read about don’t see themselves as leading any particular lifestyle based on who they love or sleep with. It’s really a meaningless, worse yet, a misleading term. But somehow, the fundamentalist far-right religious camp has actually managed for years to successfully use this phrase in very negative ways to bash homosexuals.

So, what does the “gay lifestyle” really refer to and why is its use of such continuing importance to anti-gay groups?

Let me offer some possible reasons. Many words (no matter in what language) have meanings that associate easily with mental pictures. If I ask you to think about pink elephants or frizzy brown hair, chances are a visual image will cross your thoughts at least briefly. Some words are more visual than others. Christmas has more visual images associated with it than do the words real estate. Now consider the term “gay lifestyle”. What image comes to mind (if any)? Well, that of course is going to depend on who you are and what experience you have or don’t have with gays.

If all you’ve seen or heard about gays is from the religious right or those with similar agendas, you might mostly recall that depraved video your church showed of how gays marched near naked, or worse, in a San Francisco parade. You might remember images of wild parties, men lurking around school yard fences or some other such negative things. Heck, you might even have seen this kind of stuff on TV, say FOX NEWS for example. I’m told they like that kind of thing. It sells. It entertains. In any event, you are “seeing” just what you are supposed to see in your minds eye. It’s been deliberately designed by the anti-gay propaganda machine to be that way. Propaganda has been well known for decades, perhaps thousands of years. Something like it was at work during the time Jesus was hounded and persecuted by his own people. Repressive regimes often become masters of this kind of visual propaganda. For example, by the time Hitler came to full power, most Germans literally saw Jews as dirty, lazy and deceitful people. Nazi propaganda pounded those images over and over till the populace believed them. African Americans suffered similar negative visual image pictures in the minds of whites for years. In some quarters, they still do.

So by using the term gay lifestyle, which has constantly been negatively spun, the hope of the propaganda machine is that there will be a non-thinking automatic negative emotional response in the minds and hearts of most people. Well, I fear it has worked with a distressingly large number of otherwise good and gentle folks. These same people never consider what kind of kinky heterosexual sex films could be made at a New Orleans Mardi Gra or the annual Carnival Festival in Brazil. In both events, open sexual intercourse in the streets is not all that unusual. But these nice folks don’t think about these things or even the thousands of images that could be pulled from heterosexual porn. And even if all this were paraded in front of them, it would never be used to condemn all heterosexuals for sinful misbehavior. Yet, somehow, the stupid immature shenanigans of a relatively few gay people is always offered-up and usually accepted as evidence that all gays are somehow evil, sick and depraved. READ MORE

Dave Muskera, the author, said it right.

Finally.

Send this column out to any one you know who uses the “gay lifestyle” term. Send it those people you come across who throw it in your face. And send it to those people who just don’t know any better.

I’ve told you my “gay lifestyle,” what’s yours?

gay lifestyle, american chronicle, dave muskera, religious right, thanksgiving