Just Say Gay
Hey Now! If it’s the start of the week and it’s time for Down the Pipes, a (currently bi)-weekly blog emailed to your inbox. Weekly DTP will resume when season one of We’ve Got A Band wraps up this summer. This past week on the pod we had mountain climber, self-amputee, and 127 Hours inspiration Aron Ralston, it’s a powerful interview that has Gabby and I getting choked up by the end. Check it out.
Words matter. How we express ourselves with words are how we make our internal ideas real and understandable to the people around us, and the words we use to label things is how we share an understanding with each other.
For example: We can all agree a school bus is “yellow,” an undeniable statement of fact to anyone capable of seeing a full spectrum of colors. We’ve all agreed that yellow is yellow the same way that we’ve all agreed that a dozen is twelve of something. There’s no confusion or ambiguity when we talk about hues or integers.
Less precisely, a road may be “long and winding,” a statement of relativity and opinion based on the fact that it curves some and goes on for a bit. If you wanted to be dense you could perhaps argue that “long” is an imprecise measurement of something and “winding” is an amorphous shape that merely means “not straight,” but generally we’re capable of having a shared understanding of that ambiguity.
There are some words, however, that have lost all meaning because of how all-encompassing they’ve become. “Literally,” for example, can mean both “truly” or “not truly.” “I am literally starving” is a common utterance that does not typically mean “I’m in danger of death by emaciation,” it merely means “I could eat.” Meanwhile, “I’m literally in meetings until 5pm” can be a statement of truth: My calendar is jam packed and I don’t have time for anything else.
There are literally tons of words that fall into this last bucket to some degree. When I was a “Digital” Director at TAO Group, I thought I was signing up for a job that would involve digital media buying, social media, email newsletters, content production; basically anything involving internet marketing. But I learned quickly that my bosses defined digital as “anything that plugs in or has a screen,” including digital billboards on the Las Vegas strip, in-venue TV screens, and even print advertising if the publication also ran a website. I had to solve IT issues around geo-fencing and public WiFi networks, introduce internal comms platforms like Slack, and wrangle social media celebrities who wanted a night out in the club. “Digital” has so many meanings, its meaning is easily lost.
Which brings me to the many-meaning-ed word I’m here to talk about today: Gay. In the 13th century, the English word “gay” was derived from the French “gai” and generally meant joyful, carefree, and merry. Happy.
In the 17th century the meaning shifted to focus on the “carefree” sense of the term: Any kind of loose, immoral action was gay. A man with lots of girlfriends and no desire to get married was considered gay. A married woman who drank too much and enjoyed nights out on the town was gayly going about her life.
Any commitment to carnal pleasure that fell outside of the “norms” of post-Tudor, pre-Victorian England was considered immoral and gay, though homosexuality wouldn’t specifically and directly join those ranks until the mid-20th century. Prior to that, a gay person was merely in contrast to someone who was “straight-laced,” a person who followed the norms of society.
By the 1950s and 60s, gay started to diverge its meanings. Within hip circles, “gay” was an accepted codeword used for men who found homosexual to be too clinical (in fact, it was erroneously considered a mental disorder in the DSM until 1973) while “queer” was still considered derogatory. Like the n word within black lexicon and community, gay men took a word that was used by power structures to indicate a negative and started using it as a positive among themselves.
This doesn’t stop the word from being used derogatorily though, in fact use of these words as pejoratives has only increased over the last 60 years. Like a kind of dark yin and yang…the more a community attempts to feel pride in a word that was once used to oppress them, the more the oppressor feels confident using those same words with brazen malice and disdain. It becomes a word with more than one meaning, and therefore runs the risk of having no meaning at all if your audience doesn’t share your understanding of the word or concept.
As a child of the late 80’s and early 90’s in lily-white, Roman Catholic, suburban Long Island, gay was a word that was introduced early and often, like elementary school bus stuff. Kidspeak. It was not a “bad” word in the sense that it would get you in trouble for cursing the way a fuck or a shit or even a hell or crap would, it sat with words like moron, butthead, friggen, heck, and darn.
To be clear, this was not the case in my house…we actually swore with real curse words and then grandma would threaten to wash our mouths out with soap, usually while swearing herself. It wasn’t as fucked up as it sounds…we all had fun with it, they say people who swear are more intelligent anyway. She never actually washed our mouths out, for the record. I digress.
Gay wasn’t a word that got tossed around in the house though, being of a liberal, pseudo-metropolitan, artistic family meant we probably had more exposure to the gay community than most kids on the south shore of Long Island, and my folks were quick to reprimand us for letting it slip.
It slipped sometimes, of course, the way we had to speak on the bus to avoid being called gay required that we call other things gay. I wasn’t the best at this game, so I spent a fair amount of time being called all kinds of homophobic names, namely because I didn’t play sports and liked hanging out with girls more than guys (which I still argue made me the least gay, I may have been going to all the field hockey games but I wasn’t taking showers with my all male teammates after a hard afternoon of physically touching them).
But my ostracism only turned me into an early ally. My longest roommate in college was gay, I had gay friends from drama and music classes, and, like most young people who grew up around homosexuality, it really, truly wasn’t a big deal. Kind of an afterthought, really, though I will admit the stories that young gay men share in New York will spin your head in every direction.
Sure, there are the gay bars and Fire Island share houses, the orgies and the oglers. But there’s also a gross amount of bigotry, hatred, and stereotyping that the gay community is forced to endure in their everyday life. Things have improved considerably since the semi-recent days of “fag” being a slur for someone being lame, but not everywhere, and not all at once. Some places feel like they’ve moved backwards, another battlefront on a culture war that only hurts people with the best of intentions.
And while we’re on the subject of queer bigotry as a whole, the trans issue is another one that seems to be sucking a lot of air out of a lot of rooms this year. Transgenderism is not a new concept by a few millennia or more, in fact there’s mountains of evidence that Native American tribes almost uniformly accepted the idea of a third, androgynous gender (the west has adopted the term two-spirit to describe these individuals as they often exhibited male and female expressions of gender, though even the “two spirit” term is sometimes challenged as conforming to the European, Christian form of gender binaries, as opposed to the more fluid, spectral understanding that indigenous people have).
Fun trans fact: Iran has some of the most supportive trans laws in the world (the government will even pay for gender reassignment surgery), mainly because being gay is punishable by death, but the workaround has been gender transition which allows gay men to date other men without society shunning them. Somehow both backwards and forwards, but an interesting statistic nonetheless.
Still, the idea of changing genders deeply disturbs a large chunk of the population here in the US, and I regret to inform you that I’ve heard from just as many liberals as I’ve heard from conservatives that the trans thing “doesn’t make sense” to them. Everyone seems caught up on the sports thing…the insanely sensible solution to that issue by the way is to start and promote more professional co-ed leagues. Problem solved.
Regardless, here’s the thing: None of this should matter to you. How someone else chooses to express themself is of no consequence to you or your family, nobody is trying to groom anyone (well, not counting the enormous amounts of grooming that religious zealots offer kids to be and act “straight”).
Having known many wonderful non-binary queer folks (some of whom read this newsletter, what up my dudes, ladies, xudes, and xadie’s!), they’re uniformly better versions of themselves once they’ve fully been granted the space and grace to transition into the person they always knew themselves to be. Convincing a straight kid to be gay is a fundamental misunderstanding about how these kinds of things develop in people, and honestly if a kid thinks they might be transgendered or gay, accepting that and surrounding that child with supportive people who know what that child is going through is actually the most appropriate way to raise a happy, healthy adult.
We tell kids that this is the land of the free, home of the brave. We tell them they can be whatever they want when they grow up. Supporting them on that path, encouraging them to express themselves and their love however feels right to them…that’s as American as apple pie. It’s brave and it’s awesome and it’s what being free is all about.
The only folks who argue otherwise are clinging to a false, often faith-based idea of binary gender and sexual identity, an idea stemming from the middle 18th century European concept of prude, monogamous, cisgendered, heterosexual relations being the only universally recognized way of expressing one’s proclivities and identity. These are largely the same folks who think chastity rings are totally chill accessories to force their daughters to wear.
There was seemingly more pride than ever this year, but there were also more bullies trying to silence a movement of people who just want some privacy (in the legal sense) to love. It’s an easy issue to politicize (far more confusing to liberals than abortion, I’d say), but I promise: It’s not an issue.
Pat Robertson died recently, and he thought to the depths of his heart that homosexuality could bring down empires. That the Greeks and Romans and Etruscans and Persians and Chinese and just about every other major world empire had tolerance for an expanded slate of sexual and gender identity, and that’s the sin did them in.
But that’s not what felled them, that’s part of what made them. They were inclusive, they accepted their citizens and subjects for who they were, and they went about focusing their attention the shit that actually mattered, like do we have enough food and what are the fricken Huns up to (not to be confused with Hun Culture in the UK, a delightfully camp subset of gay lifestyle).
If anything, historians will mostly tell you it was the Christians who divided and weakened Rome. The Muslims sacked wrecked Persia. Western (read: Christian) influence ended homosexuality in China.
It is intolerance that destroys an empire, not love.
Happy Pride, everyone, I’m sorry it’s been a rough few years but I’m certain love will win. If you have a relative or friend who is intolerant, then let’s use some of that cis firepower we’ve got stored up to try and listen to their concerns, and then calmly school them on why they’re wrong. Like most things people fear, it’s usually because they don’t understand them, and once they do, it’s not so confusing or scary. People are just people.
Until next time.