Gay Men and the Thin Line Between Sass and Sexism
The gay community has an issue with misogyny — guised under the dangerous idea that “gay men can’t be sexist.”
As a gay man, I have never felt like I truly fit in — there’s a certain narrative for everyday life that doesn’t speak to me.
It’s as though I am not important enough for myself to be individually addressed.
As a result of this I often feel a deep sense of anxiety, not stemming from history of mental illness, but rather human nature — and our imagination’s ability to make us think we can read other people’s minds and hear all the horrible things they are saying about us.
I know that I am not the only gay man who thinks this. It is just one of the grueling side effects of being gay, and it is something straight people will never understand.
With that being said, there has always been a deep, personal connection that women almost always seem to share with us. A certain empathy of one person being able to connect to another, in a mutual expression of respect and care. The way they look at us and can relate to the feeling of not belonging, or being made to feel as though they are the lesser than the men around them.
Women, straight or not, have played such a vital role in the lives of gay men both personally and politically. Yet this camaraderie is all too often taken advantage of by gay men, who take this kindness, but offer nothing in return.
Evidently, there’s an issue within the gay community — perpetuated by a dangerous myth that continues to harm women everywhere.
Because in the gay community there’s a unique sort of misogyny, and it’s one that’s rarely discussed. Guised under the dangerous idea that “gay men can’t be sexist.”
As a young person I am constantly discovering new aspects of the world, and gradually becoming more socially aware as the world moves with me.
I have been openly gay for just over five years and still have a lot to learn about what that part of my identity means to me.
Coming out at such a young age, I was exposed to so much through media and people around me as to what being gay is supposed to mean, and how I’m supposed to carry myself. During such a formative time for my brain I can confidently say: this fucked me up quite a bit.
I saw the way gay men on TV would speak, especially the way they spoke to women. “Oh my god, bitch!” “You’re such a little slut!” “You fucking, whore I can see your fish!” were some of the things I heard.
Characters like the fun hairdresser or the perky assistant would gleefully say say these things toward women. As if their higher pitched tone made it ok.
Girls my age, going through the same brain development, were also being exposed to these ideas, and began to believe this was the way women and gay men spoke to each other. My girl friends wanted me to be their sassy gay friend and I wanted to be accepted, so I obliged.
At parties girls would want me to say something sassy. No context, just sassy. So I would. I would absolutely tear these girls apart verbally, but because I liked dudes and my voice had a bit of flare, it was ok. Most of my friends were girls and I still had that circa ‘13 logic that if you had friends of a certain group it meant it was impossible to be bigoted towards them.
But then something happened.
Rapper Azealia Banks has made quite a name for herself, through her impressive ability to put her foot in her mouth.
To call her outspoken would be an understatement. She has garnished more attention for her twitter feuds than her music (she’s actually quite talented, I would strongly recommend checking out her album Broke With Expensive Taste).
It was in late 2014, however, that one of her feuds took on a meaning far beyond the limitations of a quick 140-character message exchange. In a public spat with the openly gay internet-blogger Perez Hilton, Banks referred to Hilton using the homophobic slur, faggot
This hateful word has caused myself and many others so much harm. There is absolutely no excuse for it. But afterwards, Banks brought up an interesting point surrounding her logic for using it.
In response to her use of the word she was met with intense criticism, to which she replied, “Gay men will call women the most misogynistic things but then cry when they get called a faggot. Why is it ok for you to call me a bitch, a whore or a cunt but it’s so terrible for me to call you a faggot?”
I paused. Even though she had no idea who I was or whether I was listening, it felt like she had looked in my eye and directed the question right at me. In that moment, she called out every “sassy gay friend” for their bullshit on behalf of every woman who didn’t feel comfortable being affectionately called a “slut.”
I felt guilt, the kind you get when someone tells you that you hurt their feelings with a joke you made a month ago, even though up until now you thought it had been perfectly harmless.
Although the politics of Banks’ aggressive and blunt opinions, and the graphic vocabulary she uses to articulate them, can be debated, the point she made that night hit me hard.
From that moment forward, I checked the comments and replies for whenever a woman in the public eye would make a divisive statement about gay men, to see how my community would attempt to combat the situation.
Every time, the results were disappointing. I began to realize how many gay men in North American media had based a career around criticizing women publicly, whether it be magazine editors tearing down women for their personal lives in gossip columns or TV personalities dissecting every inch of a woman’s ensemble on a red carpet.
The biggest instance of such blatant disrespect for women in the public eye that I can remember came in a video I saw from the 2009 Miss America Pageant. In the video, Perez Hilton asked Miss California for her stance on same sex marriage, to which she respectfully answered, “I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.”
Although her view on the subject came from a place of bigoted ignorance, she said what was her right to an opinion in a civilized and mature matter. I hoped it would be met with some form of intelligent argument. I was wrong.
Instead, Hilton later posted a video on his website calling the young woman a “dumb bitch” and questioning her intelligence and civility as a fellow human being. Instead of using reason and wit to defeat such a backwards ideal, someone from my community instead responded with the very same vile hatred that we had felt the opposite end of for so many decades.
It pained me to see such a lack of empathy from a community that has endured so much pain and torment.
I wondered what would happen if someone like A$AP Rocky, a straight black man, had advocated for “traditional marriage.” Would the response directed at him be a slew of racially-charged slurs, followed by the public casually allowing it?
Or if a gay man like Hilton would have voiced an opinion that a woman cannot do a job as well as a man, would straight women be allowed to direct homophobic slurs back at him?
The hypocrisy of it all revolted me, and I felt more than just guilt. I felt shame, in what I unconsciously had been not only allowing, but participating in for so long.
Moving forward in life, I promised myself that I would not only refuse to participate in such harmful bigotry, but not allow others around me to either. I had a roommate last year who had only recently come out of the closet. Although he was a year older than me, in gay years he was merely a baby, entirely new to the world of his recently embraced identity, and I was his wise elder.
I saw in him many parts of my former self. Traits that I regretted and only rid myself of after figuring things out the hard way. Although he was extremely outgoing I saw in him a deep insecurity, and a need for validation that forced him to be overly flamboyant — as if he was trying to fit the same archetypal mold that I once was, in attempt to “fit in.”
My issue was not so much him, but rather the boyfriend he brought home. His boyfriend was older than him, twenty-nine to be exact, and had been out of the closet for some time, yet for whatever reason was just as immature as my roommate.
He was stubborn, obnoxious, but above all else he was vindicated in whatever he believed was correct, no matter how absent of logic his words seemed.
As annoying as this was, it was tolerable given a bottle of wine being within reach to help wash my disagreements and disappointment down. That is, until he felt entitled to share his opinions on women’s appearances.
It was very evident that he desired to be seen as witty and edgy in the same way many openly gay male comedians are, so he followed in their footsteps of women-bashing in an attempt at being the Don Rickles of the room.
As such, he would tell stories about women whose faces were so ugly he thought terrorist attacks would go off when people saw them; how Blue Ivy would never be successful because she isn’t as beautiful as Beyoncé, or how wrong it was that if a woman claims she was raped, it was so easy for her to get a man in trouble and have everyone believe her.
“Ugly cunt-monster” become a common term around our place. When I finally mentioned to him the misogyny of his language, he went on a tangent about how gay men can’t be misogynistic by comparing it to what straight men say. He followed that by chanting, in a low-toned voice, “Oh yeah man, I’m gonna fuck her in the pussy bro! Yeah dude, I just got some sweet ass from that slut, man!” much to the humor of my roommate.
Instead of arguing my point by discussing the lower level of power gay men hold in the patriarchy, he decided to take the opportunity to make more harmful statements about women, but through the lens of someone else.
The root of his argument was that he, nor any other gay man, could ever disrespect women, due to the fact that they were not sexually desirable to him. Therefore there was no other way to possibly disrespect them if not by sexualizing them.
This actually, in fact, was the literal meaning of sexually objectifying women. By implying that if they cannot be sexualized, then they cannot be given any other deeper substance at all.
At that point I realized there really was nothing I could do to change either him or my roommate, who at that point had already begun placing certain value on women based on their looks. If he was telling a story about a woman, mentioning whether or not she was “gorgeous” was fundamental to the plot.
As sad as it was seeing two young men representative of a new generation of gay men carry the millennia-old-disdain for women with them, I remembered that this was my same identity several years ago.
His boyfriend was a grown man who had been out of the closet for years, and created his own identity. He is beyond saving, but I still have hope for my former roommate (who I have since lost touch with) that he too will one day be forcefully shaken to see how harmful he is being to the very women who are supporting him.
Every Pride I am joyed to see the amount of young straight people who come out to support the various queer people around them, whether they be friends or strangers.
Groups of girls as young as fifteen dance around with rainbow socks and glitter, soaking in the warm love of the LGBTQ community around them. In return, they offer a sentiment of kindness and acceptance fundamental to the celebration of Pride.
These girls remind me of the girls from my high school who supported and defended me when I first came out. The girls that taught me to truly be proud.
More so, they reminded me of the powerful women at the Stonewall Riots who stood by their gay brethren at a time when they themselves did not have a platform to stand on.
For whatever reason history chooses to forget how important women were in that movement — pretending that it was an attractive white boy who threw a rock through the window that started the riots, instead of a real trans-woman named Marsha P. Johnson throwing her shoes, as seen in the terribly offensive, white-washed 2015 film Stonewall.
It’s fascinating to look back at pictures of early Pride marches and the number of women standing so proudly in solidarity with gay men, then seeing marches of women’s rights movements those same years with not a single man in sight.
The loving nature of women, and their ability to give so much when receiving so little, is something I don’t think I will ever understand. But I will will always cherish it.
With that being said, there is no question that this is not an unconditional love to be taken for granted — but a gesture of mutual respect, with an expectation of reciprocation.
I love women, romantic or not I simply love women. They are too precious and too important for us to lose our relationship with, and it is for that reason that we as gay men must do whatever we can to defend them from whatever or whoever may try to bring them down, even if that means ourselves.
