03/06/00: gay question

Posted By: Pseudonym

okay, in my psych class we were discussing homophobia. my teacher (whose specialization is homosexual studies) presented this as a question:

if shown two men-- one a big, strong, manly man and the other a well-dressed, puny one with a bit of a lisp and a limp wrist-- and told that both men were gay, would most people be more bothered by the manly man or the girly man?

he says that it's the girly man, which seems logical.

but i was talking with my gay friend about it, and he disagrees-- and his reasons make perfect sense to me. at my school, the homosexual population (meaning out of the closet homosexuals) is minute. i actually know a good number of them, since my RA last year was gay and started the gay-lesbian-bi organization on campus. anyway, generally speaking, the group consists of flamingly homosexual guys-- no lesbians, and no "butch" gay guys.

my friend is not flaming, but is openly gay, and he says that he feels less accepted by my school community and by americans in general because he does not play into the accepted idea of how a gay man should be. the other gay guys i know at school are, for the most part, accepted. you don't even hear people make jokes about them behind their backs.

the theory here is that, if you are going to profess your homosexuality, you should act the way the general population thinks a gay person should act. i personally think that, at my school at least, students would be more bothered if they found out that one of our star lacrosse players was gay than if we found out that a skinny guy who dresses really well was gay. it used to be unacceptable to be openly homosexual; now straight america claims to be accepting of that lifestyle, but seems to have a clear and narrow definition of how people that are homosexual should act.

anyway, maybe i'm way off here. after all, my school is far from being a representative cross-section of the american population. but i still think that we would, as a nation, be more bothered to find out that, say, Troy Aikman is gay than to find out that, i don't know, David Schwimmer is gay.

-- so what do you guys think? --

Pseu

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