#your community ! irl most of the time the ''proud mean gays'' are really just harassers. and they harass indicriminately | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thechekhov · 4 years

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I struggle to embrace the LGBT community because I feel like it steals from the identity I built for myself as an individual. It's not something I see exclusively in young people and I dislike the pressure to be a loud and proud activist just because of some secondary personality trait. I know it sounds bait-y, but even that is revealing about the hypocritical pressure to conform within LGBT. Simply voicing this type criticism feels like an invitation to be attacked.

I think you’re probably expecting some sort of attack for this, which makes me wonder what sort of circles you’ve hung out in that you think this is a realistic possibility.

First of all, you mention the pressure to be an activist - if there are people in your life pressuring you into things you don’t want to be doing, that isn’t healthy PERIOD. Let’s just get that out of the way.

If your group of friends or acquaintances are out there telling you ‘you GOTTA come out’ or ‘you HAVE TO go to this march’ or ‘you’re not a real ____ if you don’t ____!’ then that’s Not. A. Good. Friendship. There, I said it. Unfollow those people, drift away from them, etc.

Now I know for a fact that many people are exactly like you - they wanna live their lives quietly, without letting their sexuality become an overt part of their lives. And I’ll be honest - irl, I lean towards this as well. I am more of less out to my closer coworkers but my sexuality or gender identity almost NEVER comes up. I think the last time it did was when I was sexually harassing a life-sized statue at an afterparty and someone said ‘Of course you would.’ - and that was over a year ago.

So I’m here to tell you the good news - out in ‘the real world’ - most people who are LGBTQ are NOT ‘pressured to conform within this LGBTQIA paradigm’. Unless you live in San Fran where the chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay and those frogs are climbing up through your pipes and croaking at you for not fulfilling your Rainbow Colored Clothing Items quota for the year, in MOST PLACES IN THE WORLD, you will probably be spared these ‘pressures’.

I mean, old map, but just as a crude example:

And by ‘crude example’ I mean that even within the US, where it’s painted so pleasantly green, there are still societal pressures going THE OTHER WAY - there are still prejudices, there are still straight camps, there are still parents that kick out their kids for being gay.

If you magically grew up in an area where this was not an issue, and if you did not hear it enough as a kid, or as an adult, I’ll be happy to tell you this:

Your sexuality doesn’t have to be a prominent part of your personality.

No one with any level of authority ever said it did.

You can be any part of LGBTQIA and just never remark upon it and live your life in peace. That’s-- honestly the NORM, despite what you may think. MOST LGBTQIA people don’t really have the time, spare change, or energy to be loud and proud activists. Most of us are tired, we have day jobs, we just wanna beat traffic and watch netflix and figure out where that smell in the kitchen is coming from.

...

But alright, look.... I’m not BLIND. I know that on some platforms, people of all expectations gather and they may very well have very skewed expectations. They may be young and fighty, they have be jaded, they may be loud and proud and encouraging others to follow the same way of living.

But there’s a reason they act this way.

Let’s address the most obvious - where does this Very Loud Pride come from?

Why do people try to make their gender or sexuality such a large part of their identity, and why are they so open about it? What is the purpose of this?

Well, to understand this, you have to first acknowledge that even if you exist mostly on tumblr, where the overwhelming majority of people are LGBTQIA or advocates for alphabet soup rights... the world is not tumblr.

And this phrase is thrown around a lot by a lot of people I consider to be very crass - “the world isn’t tumblr, you can’t act like this in public” which, surprise surprise - they’re right! But not in the way they think they are.

The world ISN’T tumblr.

In the world that isn’t tumblr, from a very young age, you cannot voice your crushes to your friends for fear of being ridiculed or beaten up or shunned. You grow up knowing you have to create a fake identity to blend in, to keep yourself safe. In this world, you must be very careful about pronouns around your family - that every day you control your speech and tailor basic, everyday questions from your parents to be more ‘palatable’. You are constantly being on guard, constantly hiding your phone, obsessively erasing messages, hiding magazines, clearing your chat history for your friends whom your parents don’t approve of. You are getting yanked out of choir class and being threatened to be transferred to a different school, away from your friends, where you would be isolated, because your mother is screaming at you at 3 am in the bathroom that your trusted peers and friends are ‘turning you gay’. In this world that isn’t tumblr, your parents disowning you.

Now step back in time, to the world before tumblr - before social media in general.

In this world we have the AIDS crisis, where, “by the end of 1990, over 307,000 AIDS cases had been officially reported with the actual number estimated to be closer to a million”. The US government is doing nothing because they consider it a ‘gay virus’ and something of a reckoning and ignored the thousands suffering and dying. Your loved ones are dying around you, not knowing why, and knowing that very few people cared because they thought this very slow, painful death was ‘deserved’ somehow.

Step back further, look at more of this non-tumblr world. Look at the gay and lesbian people denied basic human rights, look at the transgender people being murdered - even in this day and age - and no one batting an eye. Look at every single horrific piece of violent history inflicted on the people who identify as LGBTQIA - and dared do so out loud - and tell me what happens to them as a result.

And tell me - why do you think after hundreds if not thousands of years of being oppressed for even whispering - they are now yelling as hard as they can?

The world always isn’t going to be the way we like.

But more often than not, we end up owing our progress to the ones who dared yell, who dared to be visible, who risked their lives to be angry about the injustice that was happening.

So have a little respect.

#sorry but #i went off #chekhov answers #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtqia #lgbtqa #lgbt history #queer stuff #q word #Anonymous

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waywardcryptid · 4 years

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Do you feel that a person’s sexuality is a defining trait of their character? I personally find it unimportant. I don’t see how it’s something that should be a defining factor in their personality. Sorry if this ignorant, I’m just trying to understand it more I guess...

Boy howdy what a complicated ask to wake up to on my Sunday

This is a lot, and quite a bit more complicated of a subject than I think you realize, but I’mma try and answer it anyways to the best of my personal ability.

Full disclosure so you know the angle I’m coming at this from: I’m a trans gay man. I’m out online and to most of my irl friends, but not to my family (except my sister), so needless to say my sexuality is pretty significantly tangled up in my gender identity.

Disclaimer aside, heterosexual cisgender people have the benefit of experiencing representations of themselves and their sexuality as the cultural default in... well pretty much everywhere. I’m American so I can only speak through that lens, but it doesn’t take a particularly astute person to be able to look at the world and see that.

What that means is that, because they’re the majority, heterosexual people have a pretty different relationship with their sexuality, how it informs their personality, and the way they present themselves from anyone who lands on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. I could (and many other, smarter people have) write an entire book on the inherent problems that come with heterosexuality in the forms of toxic masculinity, performative femininity and a million and one other things that make life that much harder for everyone. Just to be clear, I’m not trying to say that heterosexuality is bad in any way, simply that even when you do fall into the ‘default‘, socially acceptable category, you have your own share of issues regarding your sexuality. It’s usually just less immediately obvious than the persecution that LGBTQ+ people have traditionally suffered.

When you say ‘I don’t see how a person’s sexuality is important‘ or ‘how it’s something that should be a defining factor in their personality‘, what this immediately puts me in mind of is (mostly) heterosexual people that say ‘I don’t care if you’re gay or not, I just don’t want you to be so in my face about it‘.

I don’t want to make any assumptions about you or what your orientation is; for all I know you’re LGBT+ yourself and maybe just a little disconnected from your community. Maybe you’re in a place where it’s hard for you to accept your own sexuality in an open way and so you unconsciously cope by wishing others would ‘tone it down a little‘ so you wouldn’t have to be reminded of it. That’s just what this question feels like to receive, if you get my drift.

Whatever baggage heterosexuality comes with (and it is significant, if slightly more insidious and difficult to pin down on first glance), they’ve never been persecuted for being what they are (no matter what some of the more extreme right-wing voices out there might be screaming atm). Being anything outside of heterosexual was not only outright illegal until frighteningly recently here in the states, but still is in many parts of the world. Hell, here in America there are STILL a few states (*side-eyes Texas*) that have anti-sodomy laws on the books that have never been repealed and are still used to make people’s lives difficult when it suits the people in power. And all that is before you even get to extra-legal harassment, violence, and even murder that is disproportionately inflicted on the LGBT+ community (and god help you if you also happen to fall into some other kind of minority category on top of that).

Still, things have gotten better in recent decades. You can’t legally kill people for being gay (or whatever) these days, and there’s even some laws on the books that protect us from discrimination (though there’s still a long ways to go), and so LGBT+ people now feel at least a little safer in being open about who they are and who they love.

After a long, long time of being persecuted for who they are, some LGBT+ people finally feel secure enough to be out and loud and proud in the face of a system that has been trying to humiliate, ignore, or outright exterminate people like them. So, yes, their sexuality becomes an important factor of their personality because for the first time they (in some parts of the country) don’t have to sneak around in the shadows and pray that this person they’re interested in that seems to be interested in them too actually is and isn’t going to report them to the freaking police for ‘indecency’ or something.

Coming out is difficult. I’m not looking forward to having to come out to my own parents because there is a very real possibility that they’re going to disown me, or at the very least the relationship itself will be crippled for the rest of our lives and will never go back to what it was before. But I’m still going to do it because the idea of living a lie for the rest of my life for the sake of their comfort and the comfort of others is completely insupportable. I only get one life to live and I don’t want to live it like that, I want to live it as me, and I assume most other LGBT+ people feel the same way, which is why they make that leap.

At that point there’s a good chance they’ve given up a lot to get to the point where they’re out and able to be themselves, of course that part of them that they’ve sacrificed so much for will wind up being something of a focus for them.

That said, even LGBT+ people who aren’t ‘loud‘, one might say, can often be perceived as such by the heterosexual majority simply for not obviously being one of them. If a gay man likes wearing makeup because he likes the way it makes him look and feel, is that him making his sexuality a character trait? A lot of hetero people would say yes, and if a straight man decided he liked to wear makeup, most people (including many in the LGBT+ community) would probably make a snap judgement that he was gay when they saw him.

But the thing here is that the hets also perform their sexuality as part of their personality. But so long as it falls within the norms set by our traditionally patriarchal society, no one really notices. If a heterosexual person likes to flirt, would you say that they’re making their sexuality part of their personality? How about one of those traditional country boy ‘manly man‘ types that likes to talk down about city guys that put a lot of effort into their looks because it makes them ‘look gay‘? Is that not just a form of aggressive heterosexuality they’ve turned into a personality trait? What about women that tear down other women for not putting more effort into make-up or their wardrobe or whatever?

There are less toxic versions of heterosexual ‘personality traits‘, of course, but you get my drift. The point here is that everyone performs their sexuality, it’s just that the heterosexual version of that is so widely accepted that it’s not even really seen anymore, so anyone performing anything else sticks out like a sore thumb and is treated as some sort of caricature.

This applies to the ace community too. Even if you have no interest in sex, or are even repulsed by it, you still perform that disinterest. That lack of sexual attraction becomes a personality trait if you’re ‘out‘ (and still is if you’re not out, it’s just being suppressed at that point).

So, tldr; everyone’s sexuality (or lack there of) is a defining part of their personality, whether they realize it or not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It informs what we like, what motivates us, and how we present ourselves to the world at large; to try and separate it from the rest of ourselves is a fool’s errand.

Hope that answers your question, lol XD

#jack answers #sexuality #Anonymous

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