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” *****

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.