Sex In The Public Square - history - Comments

the red-haired stepchild

Deliciously Naughty — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:38:29 -0700

As a woman who identifies as bi, I particularly agree with your comment that not all the letters in LGBT are equal. For many years I identified as straight, but with the qualifier of having fooled around in college. I did this mostly out of a desire to not offend anyone since my long term relationships have always been with men.

I get annoyed when people dismiss bisexuals as slutty fence-sitters, as if we're omnisexual beasts, preying on the choicest cuts of meat in the room without regard for the feelings of the straights or gays.

In reality, it is sometimes extremely hard to be bi. I have married a man, but that doesn't stop my craving for women. When I've been with women, I miss the feeling of a man's cock (as opposed to a toy) deep inside me. It is often confusing because you feel like you're always missing out on something. You then beat yourself up for not being able to pick a side, a person, a sex to be with.

Binaries are never good, and trying to straddle the line is often painful, like doing splits on the edge of a knife.

Ironically, as the community has gained acceptence, we have stopped being so accepting. As with feminism, if we spend all our time going after each other, we'll never achieve our goals, and like the ERA, equal protection for gays of all flavors might be lost to our own in-fighting. If we could learn a lesson from the Second Wave of Feminism, I would hope that the lesson might be to stop trying to create a smaller and smaller definition of what it means to be "gay" (or a "feminist") and excluding those who want/need to help you the most.

In feminism, the white upper class women cut dykes, poor women, and women of color out of the movement. Let's try not to do the same thing to Transgendereds, Bi's, Drag Queens, and the (as you put it) more queer among us in the Gay community.

Without the BT...

Elizabeth — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:13:34 -0700

"without the perverts, without the drag queens, without the leather daddies and dykes, without the transsexuals of every variety, without the dirty, disreputable people, there would be a lot of gay folk politely huddling in their closets. The LG is nothing without the BT."

Amen. It is so important to keep the contributions of the queer, the kinky and the generally nonconforming visible. Amazing how often and how easily they get rendered invisible by those who would be happier if the gay/straight difference were about nothing other than the gender of the person with whom you make your middle-class-monogamous home.

It's worth pointing out that the Feinberg/Rivera interview that you posted was published in Workers' World, hardly a middle class oriented publication. And it makes me think about organizations like Queers for Economic Justice that work hard on the intersections of economic oppression and queer issues.

Social justice is not about the right to assimilate into the dominant culture. It is about the right for all people to have decent housing, living wages, health, education.

What a find!

Elizabeth — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:33:20 -0700

I've missed your archival abilities, Chris!

Holy. Crap.

JanieBelle — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 19:55:08 -0700

What do you even say to that movie?

I am without words and aghast.

What a great/horrific find!

Elizabeth — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:42:04 -0700

What a great find! Did that come from archive.org? It was so important to be reminded that not so long ago homosexuality was framed as an illness "Not visible like smallpox" ... ! Can you imagine!

And of course today I got an email from about the nomination of Dr. James Holsinger to be Surgeon General. Holsinger in the early 90s produced a report, reputedly an analysis of medicaland academic studies to that point, finding that homosexuality was pathological and dangerous, likely to lead to illness or death.

How far have we come? Quite far by some measures. Some now say that "civil unions are the floor in the same-sex marriage debate," though while that's porgress it feels a bit hollow to me. And at the same time we're considering for AG a person whose research in the 90s -- 2 decades after the APA demedicalized homosexuality -- finds it to be a pathology that leads to illness or death.