Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Identity politics

Although it has been branding dogma for some time now to speak of the LGBT community...Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender...I have always thought of it as a sexual Yugoslavia: the politicized amalgamation of groups that actually do not belong together.

Like People of Color. As if, aside from not being White, a Japanese and a Jamaican have anything in common. Or better yet, observe the warm POC interactions between local Blacks and the Asians who run the 7/11s.

And recently some SF Bay area bisexuals have complained (shocka) they are not really respected, that gays and lesbians think of them as unreliable fence-sitters, able to fade into heterosexual privilege whenever they want. Trouble in paradise?

Well, I am not LGBT. As I have gotten older, even the G part has to be put into quotation marks. Not because my erotic nature has changed, but because I dissent so sharply from the herd-values of leftwing politics, feminist-inspired ambivalence about masculinity, and chronic victim identity.

Where I call myself gay or homosexual or androphile or a man-loving man, my sexual identity comes from me, from the shape of my sexual desire for other men.

The amalgam of LGBT includes T, which is a desire not to be the gender you were born as. And in the case of MTFs, a desire to cut off your dick, get breasts and have a vagina installed with the remnants of your penis. Why someone like that should be part of my community I have completely failed to see.

The only commonality I can see is that all these folks have taken their cue from the trannies and embraced, consciously or not, their identity as gender deviant. Whether because of sexual object or gender behavior or gender identity, they interpret themselves as Men Who Are Not Really Men and Women Who Are Not Really Women. In 2010, the International Mr Leather Contest, a celebration of at least the trappings of (hyper)masculinity, chose a wheelchair-bound contestant who was born female. A triumph of LGBTism.

Why the LGBT power caste have not yet incorporated transvestites --who are almost always heterosexual males who get a sexual charge out of cross-dressing-- is a mystery.

LGBT are defined by what they are not. It is only because all the folks in the LGBT group are outside the realm of sexual normality (straightness: both of sexuality and of gender) that they form a group. It is a political tactic, not a personal quality. Like People of Color.

A strategy, not an identity.

And I say the hell with it.

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