What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

canadianwheatpirates:

what-even-is-thiss:

what-even-is-thiss:

What and who is included in the lgbt/queer/gay(general) communities aren’t always super clear cut actually and like… that’s fine.

Like a cishet man that likes doing drag likely doesn’t consider himself queer and neither would any of his queer/lgbt friends but he might still be super active in the community and mostly hang out with gay guys and bring his girlfriend to pride and maybe even perform at pride. And maybe the queer community is where he feels most at home because he’s kind of feminine, and doing drag is a big part of his life.

Irl probably almost nobody would kick this guy out. A lot of internet discourse would. But that kind of makes no sense.

I grew up in the theatre community, and after I learned what being gay was I discovered that gay people were everywhere in theatre. But so were straight people that just kind of fell outside of societal norms a bit. Straight people that often just felt more comfortable around gay people because they could just be themselves.

And yeah that’s an obvious example of people that aren’t queer hanging out in queer spaces but there’s also a ton of gray area. Straight polyamorous people for example. People that identify as cis that “crossdress” or even do some things that might be considered to be part of “transitioning”. Or some intersex people that don’t id with the lgbt community. Or people that id as non binary but not as trans.

At some point you need to stop trying to figure out who definitively belongs in the club because like… there is no club. Irl queer spaces tend to cover huge swaths of people. There’s a lot of gray area. And also you’ll also tend to find a lot of cishet gender conforming people in these spaces too. Because their significant other or a family member or a good friend is lgbt+ or because they’re poly or because they just feel more comfortable around queer people or they just feel like fighting for gay rights is something that they’re supposed to be doing. And if they’re respectful and the space isn’t explicitly “no cishet right now” then like, them being there isn’t that much of an issue usually.

All of this internet discourse that tries to exclude or bully people just isn’t grounded in reality.

There is literally a significant subgroup of men who have sex with other men, but consider themselves straight and don’t respond to outreach for gay/queer men. Like, this is a known thing, particularly when it comes to HIV outreach campaigns; it’s why HIV campaigns use MSM (men who have sex with men) when most other LGBT+ stuff doesn’t.

Now, a lot of people’s first impulse is to say they have internalised homophobia, but a) that’s rude as hell to assume about a stranger and b) a lot of them just… don’t. They’ve thought about it and they aren’t gay! They have straight lives that they’re fine with, and sometimes they have sex with men!

And something that gets me about Queer Identity Discourse is that it would just immediately declare these people Not Gay And Not In Need Of Our Resources, when they clearly are! They have the same struggles with HIV/AIDS as gay men, they get criminalised by anti-gay sex laws the same as gay men – they just happen to identify as straight!

When we fixate on trying to declare people as queer or not based on their identity, we miss the ways in which behaviour pushes self-declared straight people under our umbrella. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to realise that these straight people are being harmed by homophobia, transphobia etc.

(via jackironsides)

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  21. what-even-is-thiss posted this
    What and who is included in the lgbt/queer/gay(general) communities aren’t always super clear cut actually and like......