With the exception of my few posts on best and worst first dates (and I plan on writing a few more of those, in case you’re wondering), I don’t really talk about my sexuality here. That also goes for real life as well; it’s not something that comes up in general conversation, excepting my repeated reminders to my friends that not everyone in the room is straight when they start saying things are “gay.” Maybe if I start dating a woman with more regularity I can stop having to remind people…anyway, on to the topic at hand.
All of a sudden lately it seems like everything bad is “gay.” “Gay this” and “gay that” and “that’s so gay” and it is really starting to get on my nerves. In vent chat with my guild last night, I heard no less than five people call something/someone “gay,” and I was offended and annoyed. In the same way I was sick and tired in middle/high school when everyone was a “fag.” “God, you’re such a fag!” I remember Tommy calling Josh in 3rd or 4th grade, and there began my first steps to being a social pariah when I decided to correct Tommy and lecture him on why he shouldn’t be calling people fags.
It is rude and wrong to use the word “gay” with negative meaning; it’s homophobic and it makes you, the user, look uneducated. You want to tell someone they’re stupid? Tell them they’re a raging ignoramus. Someone’s a total asshole? Just call them a Richard Cranium; it’s fun watching people try and figure out what you’ve just called them.
Q. Why do people not realize how homophobic it is to use the phrase “that’s so gay” with a negative connotation!?
A. People are ignorant, lazy and ill-witted buffoons would rather use slanguage than actually stop and think about how to properly express their feelings/opinions.
I’m [not really very] sorry to play “the race card,” but would you use a racial word in such a way? I can just imagine the outrage if a bunch of white suburban yuppie-offspring started saying “that’s so NIGGER” or “that’s so BLACK!” What about religion? How about “that’s so JEWISH?” So why is it ok for people to say “that’s so GAY?”¹
***** In which I liberally use HTML tags for ordered lists to debunk lazy arguments, and try my best to avoid fun words like “heterocentric” *****
- People claim it’s so widespread that it’s become deconceptualized. Well, if I’m here and I’m queer and if I’m telling you repeatedly to stop calling things gay, maybe it’s not so fucking deconceptualized.
- People claim it’s harmless; it’s just WORDS, right? Sticks and stones and all that?? Well, it’s homophobic and emotional bullying; it’s a cultural disease that reinforces the “mainstream” (OK I’m going there; the heterocentric) idea that being gay is bad in some way, and it will keep spreading as long as people don’t say something. I’m especially worried here about kids still in school that will be afraid to come out because they don’t want to be that bad thing.
- I also think this reinforces the otherness of being gay. The queer community is already completely marginalized within the greater culture in the US. How many men have you seen kissing on TV? Not that many? I think I have only seen two men kissing “Will and Grace” – a show that only made the GAYNESS of it’s two male characters OK by making them comical, bumbling, chronically incapable of keeping a romantic relationship. And even then, it was a “for show” kiss, between two friends – granted, to “make a point,” but at the same time, not a real in context of the show and the characters being gay kiss. If I go into women kissing on screen, I’ll get off on a completely different topic (the fetishizing of lesbian/bisexual women in our culture) so I’ll skip that…for now.
- It supports the idea that gay people are less than and as such undeserving of the same rights and responsibilities of non-gay individuals. With all that’s happened with Prop. 8 these past few months, this is the exact opposite of what should be happening. I want to see more people complaining about this actively and visibly, because these two phenomena are just parts of the whole of homophobia in this country.
- It undermines queer community, especially with my favorite group to cite, the kiddies. When the majority of the kids at your school are repeatedly telling you that being gay is bad, why would you want to be out? Who wants to be a part of the stupid community?
Honestly, I can more easily forgive Obama for picking that pillock Rick Warren for praying at inauguration than I can a friend next time I hear this ignorant phrase come out of their mouth. Obama made his choice, I think, in the hopes of showing he was interested in true diversity, even in the kind his voter base isn’t a fan of, and I suppose that’s OK as long as he publicly bitch-slaps Warren if he crosses any lines with his prayer.
I’ll leave you on a light note; in an email conversation with my favorite activist (and leading expert on the religious right) Frederick Clarkson, he says, and I quote:
saying it’s so gay is so passe (and has always been so offensive) that it is so gay to say that it’s so gay. ;-)
¹ I understand that most minority communities experience ongoing discrimination in this country, which is why this argument works. A great read about this particular topic can be found at The Bilerco Project.
The first time I heard of the expression ‘that is so gay’, or a variety of that, was about four months ago. But it wasn’t until several months later that I discovered it was a negative qualification. I suddenly understood several things that I read before, but that had not made sense to me until that moment.
I must admit that I had not tried to look up the expression in a dictionary. But if I had, would it have helped me to understand (http://www.google.com/search?q=define:gay&defl=en)?
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Dutch judges have struggled with a cases of people accused of insulting a police officer by calling him ‘homo’, which can be translated as ‘homosexual’, but can also be used in the sense of ‘faggot’. The defence lawyer argued that ‘homosexual’ is not an insult — absolutely true of course. However, judges up to the highest court ruled that in specific contexts, it still qualifies as an insult. For example, in one of these cases, the context was that a police officer had addressed a drunk man that had been urinating in the street and shortly afterwards, that man yelled ‘homo’ to the police officer through a window. He was fined 50 guilders (about $30).
You can be fined for calling the police names? Or was he fined for urinating in the street?
Yes, in the Netherlands, you can be fined for calling the police names. Moreover, it is an offence to call anybody names, although someone can only be tried for that offence upon a complaint by the victim. (The prosecutor cannot charge a person with “insulting” unless the insulted person requests it). This is based on article 266 of the Penal Code, which translates as
The second part of that article conditionally exempts insults intended to criticize the way public interests are handled.
Article 267 states that the maximum punishment is increased by a third if the insult is inflicted upon:
- public authority, or a public institution
- (government) officials executing their rightful duties [this includes police officers]
- the head of state or a member of government of a friendly state. [In the 1960s this was used against demonstrators shouting "Johnson murderer!"]
Punishment of simple insult is rare. Most people probably don’t even know that that is possible. Fines for insulting a police officer are much more common, as the police uses this as an instrument to retain stricter control in situations where the public order or public peace is endangered, such as places where there are many drunks, hooligans, or riots. So, if you are having a dispute with a police officer and you call the officer a dickhead, you can expect to be fined for that.
History
The Dutch Penal Code has its origin in the French Penal Code, introduced under Napoleon. In Wikipedia, I found that insult was made a punishable offence in France in the Law of July 29 1881 on the Freedom of Press. Translation of a quote: Any outrageous expressions, terms of contempt or abuse that do not include an accusation of a fact is an insult. The French term is injure. Insult of a public official is called an outrage in French (pronounce ootrAhzh).
US Law
Some information on the US situation can be found in Wikipedia, articles Insult and Fighting words. In the article Insult, I read “Many states and local municipalities enforce prohibitions against rude, offensive or insulting speech, leaving citizens, law enforcement officers and courts to decide what is and what is not an insult.” However, because of the constitutional freedom of speech, statutes and regulations that are too broad are considered unconstitutional by the courts.
Wikipedia linked to What is the Fighting Words Doctrine?. Two quotes:
“…Mr. Johnson was convicted of violating a city ordinance that makes it unlawful to “verbally abuse or make derogatory remarks” to a police officer. While the court admitted that on its face the ordinance sweeps too broadly, it noted that it was nonetheless constitutional because it could be interpreted to apply only to fighting words.”
“Although from its very inception the fighting-words doctrine has been redefined and recharacterized, nearly 60 years of legal debate on the issue demonstrate that the doctrine continues to play a role in modern jurisprudence.”
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Apparantly, I still haven’t learned to give a short answer to a short question. Like, if asked “You can be fined for calling the police names?” answer “Yes”. Oh well, whatever.
Actually, I loved your long response to my post, I just haven’t been around the computer for a few days =D
More is always better, especially with information!
I’m just getting caught up on your journal. This entry made me think about the girls group I run at school. So of course, I have to tell you all about it :)
I’m working with a group of girls this year on all sorts of social etiquette, college, career, etc stuff and this spring my focus with them is the broad topic “Awareness” to include self-awareness, cultural awareness, religious, racial, etc. My intern (I love having a competent intern!) and I are putting together all sorts of awesome stuff to throw at them.
We work with 10 girls and they are currently reading Luna, a story about a transgender teen.
Last week they did a self assessment about how they view themselves/personal backgrounds. We used it to discuss which words they didn’t like hearing to refer to themselves and which words were acceptable. When was it acceptable and who did they feel it was acceptable to hear it from… and then we put up images of people and played the game of “what can you infer about this person” (pushing the point that you really don’t know much about someone and can easily offend with your choice in words).
This week we’re doing the media’s influence. We’re planning to piss them off. We have about 95% minority groups within our group of girls and we’re going to start with the 1759 Encyclopedia Britanica entry on “Negro” followed by some other early American scholars take on Native Americans, African Americans, and gender roles. Then we’re going to show some movie clips. We’re going to jump ahead to the 1950’s and read the Good House Keeping’s take on what a good wife should be.
We have some other things planned to accompany, I want to do a food piece with them to go with one of my favorite quotes “Diversity is the spice of life” and my brother likes to add “while you don’t have to like every spice you should be open to trying them all!” I want them to try a bunch of foods from around the world.
We’re going to take them to the Holocaust Museum in DC in March.
Man, I would really love to see some of the stuff you’re showing them. That sounds like a great exercise. I wish we had done that when I was in school.