Thank you SO much, Eva! For those of us growing up being called "queer," and told we were mentally ill for loving our own kind, and having not one book or anything that supported us, this "Pride" month time should be a time of relief and finally feeling safe. But it's much worse than ever because our worst enemies are being praised and worshipped at our expense. For a brief period of time, it used to be understood and supported that Lesbians had the right to say no to men perving on us, but now, those same het men (in the grotesque costume of "trans women," -- though trans is no more real than "trans race" and no one can change sex) are in charge of what used to be our communities.
We never agreed to have "T" or "Q" added to "LGB." Not long ago, this time of year had "Lesbian and Gay" marches and parades. But that left out het men and het women.
So now Lesbians are increasingly erased. Where I live, the media is full of "GBTQIA" (and considering how many of those are, I joke "why not add KKK?"
I wonder how many Lesbians will be raped and murdered during this time also, as regular het men become enraged over what looks to them like children being groomed for sexual assault. "Drag queens" are showcased on television every day here, prancing around in caricatured female-hating uniforms and many of them do have a history of assaulting children.
I do not want us associated with them in any way, but that is being done to us already and we don't have the power to counter such dangerous lies in the mainstream media.
We can't even count on other Lesbians to support us because they are so far into the trans cult that most don't even know or care about the increasing number of Lesbians and women and children murdered by these "transwomen" men.
Piggy-backing other groups and events to make their own movement seem bigger than it is, is a tactic, an Illusion to those watching that trans people are everywhere, which they are not.
I'm a gay guy in my late 60s who is quite out of step with most of the kids in the so-called LGBTQ community for rejecting "queer" both as an ideology and as a scene. One would think that as a gay man I would be allowed to object to the use of the hegemonic term "queer" as a synonym and substitute for "gay." Not so.
Below you can read the flak I received in the Substack comments from a recent episode of the podcast "Blocked and Reported." As these things go, it could have been a lot worse. It could have been a real pile-on. Still, it was aggravating that I received pushback from the podcast's predominantly liberal listeners. (The commenters' names have been changed.)
Me: Jesse [Singal] should heed his own criticism of Vice [for alienating its audience]. He’s alienating this gay man and others like me every time he slings the word “queer” around to show he’s with it. Stop it.
Bones: What about his usage were you not happy with? I don't remember the context of him saying it.
Me: Jesse used "queer" a couple of times as a catchall term for all sexual and gender minorities as well as queers, whatever they are. That non-inclusive term not only erases gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, it queers them involuntarily.
I am not the only gay man who wants nothing to do with "queer," be it a scene, a trend, an outlook, a philosophy or some other type of notion about sex, sex roles (I reject the contemporary concept of gender) and society. Not my beliefs, not my tribe.
As much as I dislike alphabet terms such as "LGBTQ2SIA+" or even "LGBT" because they imply an allyship that does not exist, they're preferable to "queer" because they lack the latter's potent and, in my view off-putting, political, cultural and ideological connotations.
There was a time when people used the term "sexual minorities" to refer to gays, lesbians and bisexuals." It was well accepted. It would be worth reviving it today, because it would then be possible to refer to "sexual and gender minorities" without entangling the two.
Bones: Are you fighting a language battle? I think queer means all of those things now. The word has changed. Are you trying to take it back or something? By yourself?
Me: It's not a language battle, it's a cultural battle and, to some extent, a generational battle. One might say it's like being gender critical.
And I'm not fighting it by myself. I'm not the only gay person who really dislikes "queer." Katie herself isn't particularly fond of it. I didn't come up with #LGBwithouttheTQ.
I stand by what I said. Try engaging with the argument instead of making about me.
Bones: I'm trying to explain to you how you're wrong, you're the one making it about yourself, as if I should care more about your views on top-down language control because of how gay you are.
Me: Well, you’re the one who is wrong because you will not engage with the point that other gay men have the same viewpoint as mine. Goodbye.
Longstack: Words are violence, do better Jesse.
Me: Yes, and the “words are violence” thing is straight out of the woke Queer playbook.
In 1995 at a Christmas Dinner in Amsterdam with my future husband, I was asked for my opinion about something gay, and said being gay is a hobby. You most of the men laughed, and going further I spoke about sailing and bird-watching, or gardening. You do it, it’s a community, your weekends and vacations are spent doing that thing with other people, you don’t make money at it, some people find it peculiar if they don’t share the enthusiasm. Weekend sailing, birding vacations, garden centers, magazines, shows, secret clothing, the whole shebang. All walks of life. Money spent.
Most people paused laughter, but one man almost became enraged, because “gay” was all about legal freedom. We debated - we agreed that “gay” was an organizing principle in 1968 or so, but as we drifted away from sex we drifted from the core legal issues. For people who are supposed to be so highly sexualized, gay men are astonishingly prudish actually (I’m not, more later).
I think of it as HobbyGay. I don’t know if that’s true for Lesbians, but the rainbow flag is the symbol of HobhyGay, not political organizing. The rainbow is as distinct a sign of HobbyGay as Nautical Blue is to Sailing. The rainbow flag 🏳️🌈 is as distinctive to HobbyGay as an Anchor ⚓️ to sailing, or binoculars ( perhaps telescope 🔭 ) to birding, a ball of yarn 🧶 to knitting). Hobbies all with symbols.
To discern “real” gay from HobbyGay, discussing sex is the great divider.
In Paris a few decades ago I was sitting with an on-again off-again sex buddy near the Centre Pompidou (my office was below the Fontain Nikki de Sainte Phalle, IRCAM, a music research institute.) we had tricked with a guy the previous evening which had overwhelmed the poor man ( we both had huge BDE to use a euphemism) and were discussion in in detail what had gone wrong… in English, quietly. The group around us turned out to be American and ran screaming away from the cafe. I found years later that talking frankly about sex activity with a friend was an easy way to clear people away from machines and weights in a gym. Except for gay men.
That’s the discriminator. Discussing sex, sexual literature, sex between men on TV and Film, then non-Gay hobbyists run screaming. Non-binary, queer, trans, you name it - they move away if they’re not gay.
I don’t know how we get back to actual G&L rights, focus on sex freedoms. Not focusing on that is at our peril.
Can't say that I've more than skimmed it -- rather poor quality scan if I remember correctly -- but seemed to address the "fatal flaws" in such -- largely subjective criteria for category membership if I'm not mistaken.
Apropos of which, this comment of yours:
EK: "You don’t have to have anything else in common with the other members aside from the trait that makes you a part of that community."
Exactly. Though one might emphasize that the ONLY things that makes us part of the "communities" of "male" and "female" -- along with literally billions and billions of members of other anisogamous species -- is having functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. As Paul Griffiths put it in his, "What are biological sexes?"
PG: "Finally, the fact that a species has only two biological sexes does not imply that every member of the species is either male, female or hermaphroditic, or that the sex of every individual organism is clear and determinate. The idea of biological sex is critical for understanding the diversity of life, but ill-suited to the job of determining the social or legal status of human beings as men or women."
Hey Nona, I appreciate your insight. I imagine I would have been of the same mind as you if I was born earlier and growing up as a lesbian in those times. Even before everything went super woke and gay was infiltrated by "queers" I felt similarly. It's always really nice to know that I am not just the super crazy odd one out!
Thank you SO much, Eva! For those of us growing up being called "queer," and told we were mentally ill for loving our own kind, and having not one book or anything that supported us, this "Pride" month time should be a time of relief and finally feeling safe. But it's much worse than ever because our worst enemies are being praised and worshipped at our expense. For a brief period of time, it used to be understood and supported that Lesbians had the right to say no to men perving on us, but now, those same het men (in the grotesque costume of "trans women," -- though trans is no more real than "trans race" and no one can change sex) are in charge of what used to be our communities.
We never agreed to have "T" or "Q" added to "LGB." Not long ago, this time of year had "Lesbian and Gay" marches and parades. But that left out het men and het women.
So now Lesbians are increasingly erased. Where I live, the media is full of "GBTQIA" (and considering how many of those are, I joke "why not add KKK?"
I wonder how many Lesbians will be raped and murdered during this time also, as regular het men become enraged over what looks to them like children being groomed for sexual assault. "Drag queens" are showcased on television every day here, prancing around in caricatured female-hating uniforms and many of them do have a history of assaulting children.
I do not want us associated with them in any way, but that is being done to us already and we don't have the power to counter such dangerous lies in the mainstream media.
We can't even count on other Lesbians to support us because they are so far into the trans cult that most don't even know or care about the increasing number of Lesbians and women and children murdered by these "transwomen" men.
Sadly, very true. The lesbian conversation has been hijacked and corrupted by perverted men, in real time! Great piece - thank you, Eva xx
Thank you! :)
Piggy-backing other groups and events to make their own movement seem bigger than it is, is a tactic, an Illusion to those watching that trans people are everywhere, which they are not.
The new homophobia is woke
I'm a gay guy in my late 60s who is quite out of step with most of the kids in the so-called LGBTQ community for rejecting "queer" both as an ideology and as a scene. One would think that as a gay man I would be allowed to object to the use of the hegemonic term "queer" as a synonym and substitute for "gay." Not so.
Below you can read the flak I received in the Substack comments from a recent episode of the podcast "Blocked and Reported." As these things go, it could have been a lot worse. It could have been a real pile-on. Still, it was aggravating that I received pushback from the podcast's predominantly liberal listeners. (The commenters' names have been changed.)
Me: Jesse [Singal] should heed his own criticism of Vice [for alienating its audience]. He’s alienating this gay man and others like me every time he slings the word “queer” around to show he’s with it. Stop it.
Bones: What about his usage were you not happy with? I don't remember the context of him saying it.
Me: Jesse used "queer" a couple of times as a catchall term for all sexual and gender minorities as well as queers, whatever they are. That non-inclusive term not only erases gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, it queers them involuntarily.
I am not the only gay man who wants nothing to do with "queer," be it a scene, a trend, an outlook, a philosophy or some other type of notion about sex, sex roles (I reject the contemporary concept of gender) and society. Not my beliefs, not my tribe.
As much as I dislike alphabet terms such as "LGBTQ2SIA+" or even "LGBT" because they imply an allyship that does not exist, they're preferable to "queer" because they lack the latter's potent and, in my view off-putting, political, cultural and ideological connotations.
There was a time when people used the term "sexual minorities" to refer to gays, lesbians and bisexuals." It was well accepted. It would be worth reviving it today, because it would then be possible to refer to "sexual and gender minorities" without entangling the two.
Bones: Are you fighting a language battle? I think queer means all of those things now. The word has changed. Are you trying to take it back or something? By yourself?
Me: It's not a language battle, it's a cultural battle and, to some extent, a generational battle. One might say it's like being gender critical.
And I'm not fighting it by myself. I'm not the only gay person who really dislikes "queer." Katie herself isn't particularly fond of it. I didn't come up with #LGBwithouttheTQ.
I stand by what I said. Try engaging with the argument instead of making about me.
Bones: I'm trying to explain to you how you're wrong, you're the one making it about yourself, as if I should care more about your views on top-down language control because of how gay you are.
Me: Well, you’re the one who is wrong because you will not engage with the point that other gay men have the same viewpoint as mine. Goodbye.
Longstack: Words are violence, do better Jesse.
Me: Yes, and the “words are violence” thing is straight out of the woke Queer playbook.
Thank you, well-written and thought out.
In 1995 at a Christmas Dinner in Amsterdam with my future husband, I was asked for my opinion about something gay, and said being gay is a hobby. You most of the men laughed, and going further I spoke about sailing and bird-watching, or gardening. You do it, it’s a community, your weekends and vacations are spent doing that thing with other people, you don’t make money at it, some people find it peculiar if they don’t share the enthusiasm. Weekend sailing, birding vacations, garden centers, magazines, shows, secret clothing, the whole shebang. All walks of life. Money spent.
Most people paused laughter, but one man almost became enraged, because “gay” was all about legal freedom. We debated - we agreed that “gay” was an organizing principle in 1968 or so, but as we drifted away from sex we drifted from the core legal issues. For people who are supposed to be so highly sexualized, gay men are astonishingly prudish actually (I’m not, more later).
I think of it as HobbyGay. I don’t know if that’s true for Lesbians, but the rainbow flag is the symbol of HobhyGay, not political organizing. The rainbow is as distinct a sign of HobbyGay as Nautical Blue is to Sailing. The rainbow flag 🏳️🌈 is as distinctive to HobbyGay as an Anchor ⚓️ to sailing, or binoculars ( perhaps telescope 🔭 ) to birding, a ball of yarn 🧶 to knitting). Hobbies all with symbols.
To discern “real” gay from HobbyGay, discussing sex is the great divider.
In Paris a few decades ago I was sitting with an on-again off-again sex buddy near the Centre Pompidou (my office was below the Fontain Nikki de Sainte Phalle, IRCAM, a music research institute.) we had tricked with a guy the previous evening which had overwhelmed the poor man ( we both had huge BDE to use a euphemism) and were discussion in in detail what had gone wrong… in English, quietly. The group around us turned out to be American and ran screaming away from the cafe. I found years later that talking frankly about sex activity with a friend was an easy way to clear people away from machines and weights in a gym. Except for gay men.
That’s the discriminator. Discussing sex, sexual literature, sex between men on TV and Film, then non-Gay hobbyists run screaming. Non-binary, queer, trans, you name it - they move away if they’re not gay.
I don’t know how we get back to actual G&L rights, focus on sex freedoms. Not focusing on that is at our peril.
Congrats on the wedding and Kiddo BTW.
Y'all might be interested in this old (1995) article on "Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma":
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242372156_Must_Identity_Movement_Self-Destruct_A_Queer_Dilemma
Can't say that I've more than skimmed it -- rather poor quality scan if I remember correctly -- but seemed to address the "fatal flaws" in such -- largely subjective criteria for category membership if I'm not mistaken.
Apropos of which, this comment of yours:
EK: "You don’t have to have anything else in common with the other members aside from the trait that makes you a part of that community."
Exactly. Though one might emphasize that the ONLY things that makes us part of the "communities" of "male" and "female" -- along with literally billions and billions of members of other anisogamous species -- is having functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. As Paul Griffiths put it in his, "What are biological sexes?"
PG: "Finally, the fact that a species has only two biological sexes does not imply that every member of the species is either male, female or hermaphroditic, or that the sex of every individual organism is clear and determinate. The idea of biological sex is critical for understanding the diversity of life, but ill-suited to the job of determining the social or legal status of human beings as men or women."
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
Hey Nona, I appreciate your insight. I imagine I would have been of the same mind as you if I was born earlier and growing up as a lesbian in those times. Even before everything went super woke and gay was infiltrated by "queers" I felt similarly. It's always really nice to know that I am not just the super crazy odd one out!