Reply #23: I thought those sterotypes were dead.

[Senior citizen]

You know, gay males don't hate women, they just prefer other males, but lesbians hate men?

Think for a minute. As a male, how would you feel if you lived in a country where the average male college graduate only earned as much as the average female high school graduate, where there had never been a male president, where you constantly referred to males in terms that females considered insulting, and where schoolchildren, when asked what they'd do if they were the opposite sex, overwhelmingly said that if they became female they'd accomplish great things but if they became male they'd commit suicide?

How would you feel if you, as a gay male, went to a PRIDE parade and a lesbian in a VERY expensive car deliberately ran over your foot and you limped the rest of your life?

Do you think that, as a gay male, if you grew up in a country like that, and suddenly a terrible disease became prevalent among lesbians, you'd do everything in your power to help them?

Now, for a change, suppose you were a lesbian and, needing counseling, you went to a GLBT center. Suppose it became obvious that the councelor, a gay male, had erroneously assumed that you were male. Assume that while you were talking, he asked how you felt about women. Assume that, sensing that he did not like women, and wanting to say the most outrageous thing you could think of, you said that women were like urinals--you had to use them occasionally, but you wouldn't want to walk down the street with one, and he just chuckled agreeably and went on to another question. How would you feel?

These are not hypotheticals. These are facts of life and real situations that happened to real people.

Do you know how GLBT happened? Gay males with AIDS, on their death beds, reluctantly accepted care from the only people willing to help them: lesbians. The gay male community had little choice but to accept (or at least pretend to accept) lesbians as part of the gay community. Lesbians then had the power to open the community to bisexuals and transpeople. Just because you live in a patriarchal society where everything that happens from the moment that you're born tells you that you're superior, doesn't mean you have the right to be smug about it. In a patriarchal society, straight males prefer other males for everything except sex, and gay males prefer other males for everything including sex--male is the epitomy of patriarchal superiority. Take a look at the male gay bars in your town and then look at the lesbian bars. Unless you live in a predominantly lesbian community, what you'll see will convince you that lesbians are second class citizens in the gay community.

So who hates whom? Before you shout reverse discrimination, it might be a good idea to distinguish between the oppressed and the oppressors, because there is not yet an equal playing field.

And before you make assumptions about me, let me explain that I consider most people, both male and female, straight, gay, and lesbian, to be scabs. They are acting out gender roles but they do not belong to any actors' union or guild and they're not getting union scale--most don't even know that they're acting. They think their gender role IS their primary identity.

In my city there are a great many more gay males than lesbians. Yet in most progressive activist groups I've seen, lesbians vastly outnumber gay males. DU seems to be an exception, probably because it isn't as much effort to post as it is to organize.

If the lesbians you met hated men, it was probably for a darned good reason. I know countless stories of lesbians (including my daughter) who experienced discrimination from gay males, but I don't know of any gay males who were discriminated against by lesbians--do you?