Reply #24: This fundamentally misunderstands the LGBT community by relying on heteronormative stereotypes

[Prism]

It isn't the sexuality that is radical, but the willingness of the LGBT community to express that sexuality publicly. This is a crucial distinction. Very little of what takes place in the raunchier segments of the LGBT community is exclusive to it. Heterosexuals have engaged in these acts and expressions throughout human history, but social norms kept those expressions and acts outside of the acceptable cultural mainstream. LGBTers are neither unique nor more radical for having interest in these subjects.

What changed was that LGBTers decided to throw off the remnants of Victorianesque shame that clung to American cultural sexuality through the 1950s and early 60s. Heterosexual culture, as is the pattern, has quickly followed suit. Read any magazine geared towards heterosexual relationships and sexuality, and you will find the vestiges of oppressive respectability cast off, with straight men and women now behaving and thinking publicly in ways that were once seen as the province of those radical queers - particularly gay males.

Straight people *gasp* like sex, too. Furthermore, lots of straights like kinky sex. They have fetishes. They have "radical" interests that are actually fairly common, much to the point that all of it is somewhat boring.

The idea that LGBT ideas and expressions are radical or "anti-assimilationist" is an old canard that has been used by right-wingers and unfortunately adopted by a few radical queer theorists to paint LGBTers as fundamentally different and separate from the rest of the human race. Rather than seeing LGBTers as more similar than different, we were seen as deviants and mentally ill, fundamentally disordered and distinct in a way that justified different treatment and standards.

Attitudes like the one expressed in this essay cement these perceptions by painting the LGBT community's sexual expression as deviant, radical, different from straight people, unusual, abnormal. It's not. Any cursory reading of, say, a Dan Savage column will reveal a world of perfectly normal straight "freaks" out there, guy and girl alike.

This essay's attitude is an anachronism at best. It's a bit like hearing the word "colored" to describe African-American culture. Yes, people used to think that way and express certain attitudes. And it might even have been the mainstream way of thinking and expressing these attitudes. But that time is past. LGBT sexuality and expression aren't radical. And it isn't anti-assimilationist.

It's a liberation, one that younger generations of heterosexuals are now happily participating in. Had this been written 20 years ago, no one would have really lifted an eyebrow. But in 2011, attitudes like the ones expressed in the essay and some of the responses returns the LGBT community to a place where we are not a part of the human experience but an Other.

This is dangerous and has consequences. These attitudes deserve history's dustbin, and not a moment too soon.