Tuesday, November 22, 2011
[This post is a duplicate of a post on another of my blogs, "Newark USA"]
Boycotted Panel on "Queer Newark". Madness has seized control of the Robeson Center at Rutgers-Newark. Its staff permitted a one-day conference to be held on its premises that was called, insanely, "Queer Newark". Let me make clear, for people who just don't know, or have been misled by the propaganda of bizarre gay and lesbian self-despisers, that the word "queer" is the exact equivalent of "nigger". It is profoundly and permanently offensive to the great preponderance of people for whom it is intended. It cannot be "rehabilitated" or "reclaimed", but will always be absolutely unacceptable in polite company. It must NEVER be used by straight people — EVER. If Rutgers-Newark would not smile upon a symposium titled "Nigger Newark", it should never have approved of even a one-day program called "Queer Newark".
Moreover, how do you compensate for long-term, indeed historic refusal to recognize the contributions of gay or lesbian Newarkers, as the materials for the "Queer Newark" program spoke of doing, by means of a ONE-DAY program?
Here is the text put online about this program by Newark Pulse:
The website actually uses the insane term "LGBTQ" — for Lesbian [which must always appear before "Gay", because gay men are second-class citizens in their own "community", even tho they constitute the great majority of all members], Gay, 'Bisexual' [a mythical, nonexistent creature], 'Transgender' [another mythic, nonexistent creature], and 'Questioning' [people so moronically un-self-aware that they don't know what the heck they are]. Relatively few gay people, be they teenagers or grownups, do not know full well that they are gay, but all the organizations adjust around the few, maladjusted losers who at least pretend not to know what they are. My friend and fellow gay militant, John Lauritsen, has used the term "synthetic insanity", which refers to people who PRETEND to an insane stance they do not in fact believe but cleave to because it is politic in this demented age to do so. They pretend to think they are women, when they are actually men and know full well they are men, because society has been persuaded that it is biologically possible for someone to be other than what one's genes mandate. It is not.
There is in fact no such thing as an "LBGT...etc." community. The different constituent groups of that preposterous, synthetic "community" have nothing to do with each other. Gay men do not crave being surrounded by lesbians, but do not generally feel comfortable saying aloud that they don't want anything to do with lesbians, but want to be alone with men. Lesbians do not want to be surrounded by gay men. Fortunately for them, given the bizarre double standard that straight society has, regarding men's rights and women's prerogatives, generally do not hesitate to say they want men to leave them alone. No gay man or lesbian wants anything to do with "bisexuals", but hold them in contempt. And all well-adjusted gay men are puzzled by "transsexuals", who pretend to believe that they are not what biology, and their eyes and hands, tell them very plainly they absolutely and unequivocally are. Sometimes "transgendered" people make themselves entertaining in their flamboyant make-believe, but they are basically seen by everyone on Earth as tragic lunatics. Madness is not a form of happiness. Quite the contrary, the insane are almost uniformly miserable, and we do them no favor in pretending to believe that they are sane but the world is mad.
People in straight society have been so misled about the entire issue of homosexuality and/or lesbianism that they tend to believe whatever they are told by "LGBT[Q...I...you-name-it]" organizations. Little do they know that such organizations are, for the most part, headed by self-despising losers who were raised to be heterosexual and have NEVER been able to overcome that early training. As each generation of would-be activists, who start out with good sense enuf to be indignant at the way they have been treated, enters those organizations, they accept what they were told, first by straight society, then by the insane organizations that have themselves been unable to repudiate that heterosexual training. Only later, by years, do they grow beyond such nonsense, and realize that the things they were required by those organizations to say, are nonsense, then leave those organizations of sad, psychologically deformed losers.
Still, they don't denounce the b.s. that the organizations they belonged to inflicted upon society, to correct the record. Rather, they just leave those maladjusted, ridiculous organizations. Alas, that leaves the organizations always under the control of maladjusted losers, and always spouting antihomosexual b.s.
To attend a conference called "Queer [Anything]" would 'confer' legitimacy upon the use of that despicable term, and THAT, I will not do, so I refused to attend.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay men had many discussions, in many forums, about which terms were acceptable, and which unacceptable, and why. In addition to "homosexual", "gay", and "lesbian", there were other terms for gay men, lesbian women, and businesses, publications, organizations, and such intended for such audiences, some of which were then and are now generally regarded as disparaging ("fag", "faggot", "fruit"; "dyke", "bulldyke", "lez"; etc.). There was NO agreement over whether "homosexual" could apply to both men and women, nor whether terms like "homophile" (for organizations and publications) were self-assertive or self-denying.
In time, a general agreement, tho not unanimous consensus, emerged. "Gay" is OK; "lesbian", for women, is also OK; "homosexual" has a medical sound to it, but is not offensive. But terms like "fag", "faggot", "fruit", "nancy boy", "poof[ter]", "fem", "dyke", "bulldyke", "lez", "drag queen", "tranny" (which is, in any case, ambiguous; does it refer to "transvestites", people, even heterosexuals, who dress in the clothing of the opposite sex, or "transgendered" people, lunatics who wish they were the sex they're not?) — and "queer" — were irredeemably offensive. There is no such thing as a "gay woman", any more than there is such a thing as a "lesbian man". Nor is there anything bizarre ("queer" in its original meaning) about homosexuality, which is extremely commonplace, much more than, for instance, lefthandedness. Dictionary.com defines "queer" thus:
Lesbians have NEVER been called "queer" by straight society. The embrace of the term "queer" for themselves by some lesbians is grotesque in every way.
If reality controlled, I would have to be recognized as the single most important gay figure in Newark, not just now but in this city's entire history, for having put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, in the committee that organized the first, annual gay (and, alas, lesbian) march commemorating Stonewall — which was a gay MEN's bar of which I had been a regular customer, not a "gay and lesbian" bar as it has now been recast. Homosexuality had, before then, been regarded as profoundly shameful, "the Love that dare not speak its name". The power of the term "Gay Pride", thus, was in completely reversing the assumption, from shame to pride.
"Gay Pride" moved the goalpost, in a good way: closer to the great preponderance of people, who understand the importance of self-respect, and who respect themselves, so expect other people to respect themselves. "Pride" is one of various terms for "self-respect", or "self-esteem", a feeling that educators in recent decades — and most especially since 1970, when I put forward "Gay Pride" — have made plain to society at large is quintessential to a person's healthy functioning and future success.
"Gay PRIDE" went beyond defending against assertions that gay men should be ashamed of themselves. It asserted that we are entitled to feel good about ourselves and what makes us, us. It tells gay men that homosexuality is ennobling, and that it's a very good thing not just for ourselves but also for society that some men see other men not as dangerous competitors we must vanquish, no matter how much harm we might do to others in order to vanquish them, but primarily as a source of esthetic, emotional, and physical pleasure.
The term "Gay Pride" has, thus, been transformative in a way that the title for the weekend of events we were organizing among host-city organizations and wanted to unite under a single title, might NOT have been if we had gone with the original thought, "Gay Pride Weekend". My thinking was that "power" is something that depends upon numbers and outside forces, but "pride" is something that depends upon nothing but yourself, internally. You could be in a gay community of a million in a great metropolis like the NY Tristate Metropolitan Area but still not be confident in yourself nor proud in your feelings about men.
Conversely, however, you could be proud of your nature, and your feelings for men, in total isolation from other gay men, hundreds or even thousands of miles from the nearest gay bar or community center. So gay "pride" was a much better term for a movement intended (remember, it was 1970, and we were inventing all of this) to make gay men feel good about themselves, than gay "power", which for most gay men, all around the Earth, would then, and still, to this day, be unattainable. Despite the nonexistence in most places of even the tiniest shred of gay "power" in their locality, every single gay man, in India, Cameroon, South Africa, China, Brazil, and every other place where there is not so much as a single gay bar or organization, could feel pride in their feelings for men if they understood themselves and how ennobling those feelings can be in a man's life.
Mind you, not every feeling that some people attempt to force upon gay men, or seduce them into, is wholesome, and gay men are often pushed to embrace insane and ugly attitudes, such as sado-masochism. Gay Pride is at once an antidote to the ugly, vicious, and insane misrepresentations of homosexuality that straight society's antigay propagandists promote, and to perverted, sado-masochistic attitudes that sexual degenerates proselytize for gay men to embrace — but which we must refuse.
I reject the entire idea of "loving yourself", which is sometimes used as justification for autoerotic self-absorption, as lunacy. No, love comes from one person and attaches to another, not himself. Esteem yourself, respect yourself, yes, to be sure. But "love" yourself? That's freaky.
Newark is large enuf a city to, in most places on Earth, be a center of homosexual in-migration. But Newark is also the second city of the greatest city of the entire world, and largest city of the United States, New York. Newark and Jersey City, in NJ, cannot compete with Manhattan for in-migration of gay men — unless we find something unique by which to distinguish gay life, present or future, here.
In speaking of preferences as to terminology, I am not just talking here of my own viewpoint, without evidence as to how other men feel. I long ago placed upon my "Mr. Gay Pride" website a poll of visitors, which currently shows this result:
If you add up the votes that favor the term "gay", you will find that they amount to 74% of responses.
If importance to changed perceptions of homosexuality were the criterion, I should always be among the first people ever thought of when gay groups think of a Grand Marshal for a "Gay Pride" Parade — which wouldn't even have that name were it not for me. But in fact I have never been invited to be Grand Marshal of ANY "Gay Pride" Parade. Nor, however, would I consent to lead off a heterosexually organized march that repudiated the very concept of Gay Pride, in insisting that men and women "belong together". No thank you. I reject the idea that men and women "belong together" — not in bed, and most assuredly not in a march for the right NOT to be compelled to be heterosexual.
I'm used to being overlooked, ignored, and actively disregarded when other gay people (or fictitious "LGBTQ...I...", etc. people) are honored. You see, I am a gay MAN, and refuse to identify with nor bolster lesbians, with whom I do not in any way nor to any degree identify. Oddly, that seems to have annoyed a lot of lesbians, even those who insist upon women-only organizations and events. All-female is fine; all-male, a crime against humanity!
I also actively object to the idea that gay men are not entitled to a unique identity but must always subsume their identity into an all-gender (i.e., non-gender: castrated, emasculated (for gay men) or de-feminized (for lesbian women)) identity. Biology — that is, actual science — permits of only two genders, or sexes: male, marked by an XY chromosomal configuration, and female, marked by an XX chromosomal configuration. Anything and everything else is ANTI-scientific nonsense that society needs actively to suppress.
There are no chromosomal "mistakes". That is a kindly, scientific way to address the crazy idea that God — 100% infallible God — somehow "made a mistake" and put a woman into the body of a man, or the other way around. Kindhearted people have wanted to accord logical and scientific credibility to the notion that "transgendered" people could indeed exist — but on the basis of what scientific theory?
Why are so many people desperate to accommodate insane renunciation of biology? Society does no favor to lunatics by pretending to believe they are right in their insane beliefs — be it that a modern-day, 6'7" man really is Napoleon Bonaparte, or that a confused, self-despising 20-year-old man is really a woman. Yes, all of society, all of science, reason, and reality is wrong, but YOU who say God made a mistake, are right. NO! Stop this nonsense! Society must tell lunatics that they are out of their mind, and need to let go of their insane delusions and embrace reality.
No one really believes that "Chaz" Bono is a man. Not one single person on Earth really believes that a person who has no male sexual organs and every single cell in whose body bears the XX chromosomal configuration is a man. Not one single person on Earth. So why are we endlessly assailed by lies from media that Chastity Bono, after a double mastectomy and being pumped full of male hormones, is a man, always referred to as "he"? Are all those women who had double mastectomies because of breast cancer now men? No, they are not, and Chastity Bono is not, no matter what she may call herself.
Chastity Bono is "collateral damage" to a Castration Conspiracy designed to destroy gay men surgically because society refuses to accept the masculinity of men oriented to men, even tho there is nothing more masculine than sex between men, in which there is no woman present. Gay men do NOT regard themselves as a kind of woman, but fully as men. WE don't have pink shower curtains, with pantyhose drying over the shower bar; nor duvets nor dust ruffles nor a dozen pillows on the bed. Quite the contrary, we have to question the masculinity of heterosexual "men" who consent to be emasculated by super-feminine decorating. Nor should anyone else ever think gay men less than men, but always as ONLY men. In the same way, no one should ever think of lesbians as anything BUT women. (That is not to suggest that I speak for women, but only that I imagine that lesbians resent the suggestion that they are somehow less than women.)
In promoting the idea that lesbians are men born in the wrong body, Ms. Bono is an enemy of lesbians, for telling the world that lesbianism is fake heterosexuality and gender confusion, and of gay men, in telling the world that homosexuals would be much happier and better off if they would just let the doctors chop off their genitals and pump them full of female hormones.
I received, this week, an email from a gay writer in NYC, Perry Brass, that purported to list the ten most important gay activists of all time. I was not on that list. That is, alas, same-old, same-old. Mind you, I did NOT, for the most part, participate in typical "activist" actions, demonstrations and sit-ins. But I did help organize the first annual march of the type now generally termed — because of me — "Gay Pride" parades, and did march (an activist activity, in anyone's judgment) in at least two of the first three such parades in NYC.
More to the point, my linguistic activism, "Gay Pride", has affected the perceptions of at very least a BILLION people in the First World, and possibly as many as, or even more than, THREE BILLION people all around the world. What other person on that list has had nearly that impact? No one.
People who have seen historic footage of the first few marches may have seen me there, near the front. I think that in the first or second march I was wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt, of ("pirate") puffy sort, and may also have been wearing a floppy straw hat against the sun. Such fotos or videos as I have seen do not, alas, record me in verbal clashes with pushy lesbians who felt that gay men had no right to be anywhere near the front of the march that gay men organized.
It is not, mainly, my purpose here to complain about the craziness of New York City "gay" marches, community centers, or anything else — nor of the Gay Men's Chorus's always having a female soloist, because all GMC concerts must be heterosexual in form — so much as to encourage gay men in Newark to REFUSE to let lesbians impose upon them in any way, but always to be proud to be MEN attracted to and, if we are lucky, in love with MEN who love them.
I do not resent lesbians' being lesbians, but only their insisting that gay men identify with lesbians and let them dominate The Movement. Gay men and lesbians have nothing intrinsically in common. Gay men must stop letting outsiders define them, but must refuse pressure to identify with the opposite sex and to give up their masculine purity to accommodate people who are nothing like them. My defense of gay men's right to an all-male identity is of necessity also a defense of lesbians' right to an all-female identity. Why don't lesbians see that?
I do not expect Newark to have a major parade on Broad Street each "Gay Pride" Day, even tho the term as it is now used does derive from a current Newarker (altho I lived in Manhattan when I put the term forward). I reject the idea that gay men have some special bond to lesbian women, so must always organize with and march with them. How supremely bizarre this notion is, that men and women must march together to assert the right not to be pushed at each other.
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Rather, I hope that gay men in Newark will learn to think of themselves before they think of anyone else, and see themselves as the norm before they EVER compare themselves to anyone else. We must be the men we are. Love the men we love. Crave the men we crave. And never apologize to anyone for being who we are.
Regular readers of this blog [meaning, here, "Newark USA", from which this post was copied] will know that I rarely discuss gay issues, largely because there is almost nothing for gay men in Newark (otherwise I would include gay items regularly, since gay events are part of the world I report on) but also that my capsule profile at top right always includes mention that I put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. I would, however, be seriously remiss in not objecting to antihomosexual bigotry — albeit unintentional — by a major Newark institution, such as the Robeson Center of Rutgers-Newark. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I will step down from my soapbox, hoping that straight people among my readers will have learned something that no one else will tell them.
Fotos today are from the little Gay Pride march up Halsey Street into a litely attended gay (and lesbian) festival in Washington Park in late June 2010. I was a little late arriving (what else is new?), so the first few fotos show marchers from the back. I am not protecting their identity, and they were marching openly. I didn't get to this year's event — there's only one of me, and I can't get to every event in the busy New Newark — so don't know if it grew any.
Boycotted Panel on "Queer Newark". Madness has seized control of the Robeson Center at Rutgers-Newark. Its staff permitted a one-day conference to be held on its premises that was called, insanely, "Queer Newark". Let me make clear, for people who just don't know, or have been misled by the propaganda of bizarre gay and lesbian self-despisers, that the word "queer" is the exact equivalent of "nigger". It is profoundly and permanently offensive to the great preponderance of people for whom it is intended. It cannot be "rehabilitated" or "reclaimed", but will always be absolutely unacceptable in polite company. It must NEVER be used by straight people — EVER. If Rutgers-Newark would not smile upon a symposium titled "Nigger Newark", it should never have approved of even a one-day program called "Queer Newark".
Moreover, how do you compensate for long-term, indeed historic refusal to recognize the contributions of gay or lesbian Newarkers, as the materials for the "Queer Newark" program spoke of doing, by means of a ONE-DAY program?
Here is the text put online about this program by Newark Pulse:
Date: Saturday, November 12, 2011
Time: 9am-5pm
Location: Paul Robeson Center - Rutgers - Rm 231
Cost: Free
Rutgers-Newark partnered with community leaders to present "Queer Newark: Our Voices, Our Histories," a free, full-day, oral history conference examining gay life in Newark. It will be followed by an evening of entertainment at The Coffee Cave from 6-9 p.m. Newark Mayor Cory Booker will welcome participants and guests.
"The city of Newark, New Jersey has a fascinating and well-documented history. There are studies of its rich cultural, musical, and literary legacy, its educational system, political life, religious life, immigrant roots, and history of racial conflict," said Prof. Beryl Satter of the Federated Department of History at Rutgers-Newark and conference co-chair, "yet, there is one group whose undeniable contribution to the city’s life has rarely been the subject of historical or academic study -- Newark’s LGBT community. The Queer Newark conference is a way to rectify this omission."
This is the front of the march. Two white people, both female? Why is that? Do white gay men have to sit in the back of the bus, in their own march, in Newark?
Three generations of LGBT Newarkers will be on hand to reflect on their lives as LGBT people in the city of Newark. Panelists will discuss everything from childhood experiences to religion and spirituality during the moderated discussions. Community members, historians and scholars of Newark history and LGBT history and studies are encouraged to attend.
Is that an unusually broad-shouldered woman? Or not? If not, why is he wearing women's clothes? Perhaps a white patch of fabric on her hip makes this actual woman look like a "drag queen", in visually narrowing her hips. I am among the many gay men who have never had the problem of being gender-nonspecific. My proportions, chest hair, facial hair, etc., have always plainly marked me out a man. I feel very sorry for gay men who have been tempted to conceal their manhood because they could. Very sad — but nonetheless contemptible. Other people may not see you naked, but you do, and you know what you are. Be what you are!
According to Darnell L. Moore, former chair of the City of Newark’s LGBTQ Advisory Commission and conference co-chair, "This conference will be the beginning of a larger, ongoing project that we hope will foster an intergenerational discussion of LGBT life in Newark. It will also be the foundation of an archive on LGBT Newark that can be used by historians and by future generations. This is a major first step towards preserving the history of LGBT Newark and bringing these voices and experiences into Newark’s broader communal history."
More Info: http://queer.newark.rutgers.edu.
The website actually uses the insane term "LGBTQ" — for Lesbian [which must always appear before "Gay", because gay men are second-class citizens in their own "community", even tho they constitute the great majority of all members], Gay, 'Bisexual' [a mythical, nonexistent creature], 'Transgender' [another mythic, nonexistent creature], and 'Questioning' [people so moronically un-self-aware that they don't know what the heck they are]. Relatively few gay people, be they teenagers or grownups, do not know full well that they are gay, but all the organizations adjust around the few, maladjusted losers who at least pretend not to know what they are. My friend and fellow gay militant, John Lauritsen, has used the term "synthetic insanity", which refers to people who PRETEND to an insane stance they do not in fact believe but cleave to because it is politic in this demented age to do so. They pretend to think they are women, when they are actually men and know full well they are men, because society has been persuaded that it is biologically possible for someone to be other than what one's genes mandate. It is not.
There is in fact no such thing as an "LBGT...etc." community. The different constituent groups of that preposterous, synthetic "community" have nothing to do with each other. Gay men do not crave being surrounded by lesbians, but do not generally feel comfortable saying aloud that they don't want anything to do with lesbians, but want to be alone with men. Lesbians do not want to be surrounded by gay men. Fortunately for them, given the bizarre double standard that straight society has, regarding men's rights and women's prerogatives, generally do not hesitate to say they want men to leave them alone. No gay man or lesbian wants anything to do with "bisexuals", but hold them in contempt. And all well-adjusted gay men are puzzled by "transsexuals", who pretend to believe that they are not what biology, and their eyes and hands, tell them very plainly they absolutely and unequivocally are. Sometimes "transgendered" people make themselves entertaining in their flamboyant make-believe, but they are basically seen by everyone on Earth as tragic lunatics. Madness is not a form of happiness. Quite the contrary, the insane are almost uniformly miserable, and we do them no favor in pretending to believe that they are sane but the world is mad.
People in straight society have been so misled about the entire issue of homosexuality and/or lesbianism that they tend to believe whatever they are told by "LGBT[Q...I...you-name-it]" organizations. Little do they know that such organizations are, for the most part, headed by self-despising losers who were raised to be heterosexual and have NEVER been able to overcome that early training. As each generation of would-be activists, who start out with good sense enuf to be indignant at the way they have been treated, enters those organizations, they accept what they were told, first by straight society, then by the insane organizations that have themselves been unable to repudiate that heterosexual training. Only later, by years, do they grow beyond such nonsense, and realize that the things they were required by those organizations to say, are nonsense, then leave those organizations of sad, psychologically deformed losers.
Still, they don't denounce the b.s. that the organizations they belonged to inflicted upon society, to correct the record. Rather, they just leave those maladjusted, ridiculous organizations. Alas, that leaves the organizations always under the control of maladjusted losers, and always spouting antihomosexual b.s.
These beautiful young men, carrying between them a banner with the term I offered in 1970, are exactly the kind of thing that makes me very proud to be homosexual. They are stunning, and proud to proclaim to the world that they are gay. Alas, there are in Newark no gay bars, coffeehouses, or ANYthing in which gay men might meet each other to "hook up" and perhaps even fall in love. Yes, men do fall in love with each other. Powerfully, manfully. But even if we don't fall in love, we sure do like to 'get busy', and make each other physically, if not also emotionally, happy. Why can't we state that plainly, in a society in which sexual crudity of all kinds is all over the tube? You can't tune into a single CBS sitcom, or some NBC sitcoms, without being hit in the face by heterosexual obscenity — all the while straight society pretends to be pure, and glowing, and noble, not ever hot for sex for the sake of sex. Truth be told, a lot of straight men would love to have, with women, the fast-and-loose, sex-for-the-sake-of-sex (which is good enuf) twos, threes, fours and mores, and when-it's-over-let-it-go—easy,-without-recriminations attitude of casual gay sex. Gay men have no problem with sex as recreation, which may lie behind the vicious denunciation of homosexuality by so many straight men, because they are ENVIOUS of gay men's not demanding more than sexual reciprocity in order to give sex on demand.
To attend a conference called "Queer [Anything]" would 'confer' legitimacy upon the use of that despicable term, and THAT, I will not do, so I refused to attend.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay men had many discussions, in many forums, about which terms were acceptable, and which unacceptable, and why. In addition to "homosexual", "gay", and "lesbian", there were other terms for gay men, lesbian women, and businesses, publications, organizations, and such intended for such audiences, some of which were then and are now generally regarded as disparaging ("fag", "faggot", "fruit"; "dyke", "bulldyke", "lez"; etc.). There was NO agreement over whether "homosexual" could apply to both men and women, nor whether terms like "homophile" (for organizations and publications) were self-assertive or self-denying.
In time, a general agreement, tho not unanimous consensus, emerged. "Gay" is OK; "lesbian", for women, is also OK; "homosexual" has a medical sound to it, but is not offensive. But terms like "fag", "faggot", "fruit", "nancy boy", "poof[ter]", "fem", "dyke", "bulldyke", "lez", "drag queen", "tranny" (which is, in any case, ambiguous; does it refer to "transvestites", people, even heterosexuals, who dress in the clothing of the opposite sex, or "transgendered" people, lunatics who wish they were the sex they're not?) — and "queer" — were irredeemably offensive. There is no such thing as a "gay woman", any more than there is such a thing as a "lesbian man". Nor is there anything bizarre ("queer" in its original meaning) about homosexuality, which is extremely commonplace, much more than, for instance, lefthandedness. Dictionary.com defines "queer" thus:
If Dictionary.com knows that the use of the term "queer" for homosexuals is "Disparaging and Offensive", why doesn't the Robeson Center of Rutgers-Newark? Definitions 2 and 4 are also offensive, so why on Earth would anyone rush to EMBRACE "queer" for themselves?
1. strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different; singular: a queer notion of justice.
2. of a questionable nature or character; suspicious; shady: Something queer about the language of the prospectus kept investors away.
3. not feeling physically right or well; giddy, faint, or qualmish: to feel queer.
4. mentally unbalanced or deranged.
5. Slang: Disparaging and Offensive.
a. homosexual.
b. effeminate; unmanly.
Lesbians have NEVER been called "queer" by straight society. The embrace of the term "queer" for themselves by some lesbians is grotesque in every way.
If reality controlled, I would have to be recognized as the single most important gay figure in Newark, not just now but in this city's entire history, for having put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used, in the committee that organized the first, annual gay (and, alas, lesbian) march commemorating Stonewall — which was a gay MEN's bar of which I had been a regular customer, not a "gay and lesbian" bar as it has now been recast. Homosexuality had, before then, been regarded as profoundly shameful, "the Love that dare not speak its name". The power of the term "Gay Pride", thus, was in completely reversing the assumption, from shame to pride.
"Gay Pride" moved the goalpost, in a good way: closer to the great preponderance of people, who understand the importance of self-respect, and who respect themselves, so expect other people to respect themselves. "Pride" is one of various terms for "self-respect", or "self-esteem", a feeling that educators in recent decades — and most especially since 1970, when I put forward "Gay Pride" — have made plain to society at large is quintessential to a person's healthy functioning and future success.
"Gay PRIDE" went beyond defending against assertions that gay men should be ashamed of themselves. It asserted that we are entitled to feel good about ourselves and what makes us, us. It tells gay men that homosexuality is ennobling, and that it's a very good thing not just for ourselves but also for society that some men see other men not as dangerous competitors we must vanquish, no matter how much harm we might do to others in order to vanquish them, but primarily as a source of esthetic, emotional, and physical pleasure.
The term "Gay Pride" has, thus, been transformative in a way that the title for the weekend of events we were organizing among host-city organizations and wanted to unite under a single title, might NOT have been if we had gone with the original thought, "Gay Pride Weekend". My thinking was that "power" is something that depends upon numbers and outside forces, but "pride" is something that depends upon nothing but yourself, internally. You could be in a gay community of a million in a great metropolis like the NY Tristate Metropolitan Area but still not be confident in yourself nor proud in your feelings about men.
Conversely, however, you could be proud of your nature, and your feelings for men, in total isolation from other gay men, hundreds or even thousands of miles from the nearest gay bar or community center. So gay "pride" was a much better term for a movement intended (remember, it was 1970, and we were inventing all of this) to make gay men feel good about themselves, than gay "power", which for most gay men, all around the Earth, would then, and still, to this day, be unattainable. Despite the nonexistence in most places of even the tiniest shred of gay "power" in their locality, every single gay man, in India, Cameroon, South Africa, China, Brazil, and every other place where there is not so much as a single gay bar or organization, could feel pride in their feelings for men if they understood themselves and how ennobling those feelings can be in a man's life.
Mind you, not every feeling that some people attempt to force upon gay men, or seduce them into, is wholesome, and gay men are often pushed to embrace insane and ugly attitudes, such as sado-masochism. Gay Pride is at once an antidote to the ugly, vicious, and insane misrepresentations of homosexuality that straight society's antigay propagandists promote, and to perverted, sado-masochistic attitudes that sexual degenerates proselytize for gay men to embrace — but which we must refuse.
I reject the entire idea of "loving yourself", which is sometimes used as justification for autoerotic self-absorption, as lunacy. No, love comes from one person and attaches to another, not himself. Esteem yourself, respect yourself, yes, to be sure. But "love" yourself? That's freaky.
Newark is large enuf a city to, in most places on Earth, be a center of homosexual in-migration. But Newark is also the second city of the greatest city of the entire world, and largest city of the United States, New York. Newark and Jersey City, in NJ, cannot compete with Manhattan for in-migration of gay men — unless we find something unique by which to distinguish gay life, present or future, here.
In speaking of preferences as to terminology, I am not just talking here of my own viewpoint, without evidence as to how other men feel. I long ago placed upon my "Mr. Gay Pride" website a poll of visitors, which currently shows this result:
If you add up the votes that favor the term "gay", you will find that they amount to 74% of responses.
If importance to changed perceptions of homosexuality were the criterion, I should always be among the first people ever thought of when gay groups think of a Grand Marshal for a "Gay Pride" Parade — which wouldn't even have that name were it not for me. But in fact I have never been invited to be Grand Marshal of ANY "Gay Pride" Parade. Nor, however, would I consent to lead off a heterosexually organized march that repudiated the very concept of Gay Pride, in insisting that men and women "belong together". No thank you. I reject the idea that men and women "belong together" — not in bed, and most assuredly not in a march for the right NOT to be compelled to be heterosexual.
I'm used to being overlooked, ignored, and actively disregarded when other gay people (or fictitious "LGBTQ...I...", etc. people) are honored. You see, I am a gay MAN, and refuse to identify with nor bolster lesbians, with whom I do not in any way nor to any degree identify. Oddly, that seems to have annoyed a lot of lesbians, even those who insist upon women-only organizations and events. All-female is fine; all-male, a crime against humanity!
I also actively object to the idea that gay men are not entitled to a unique identity but must always subsume their identity into an all-gender (i.e., non-gender: castrated, emasculated (for gay men) or de-feminized (for lesbian women)) identity. Biology — that is, actual science — permits of only two genders, or sexes: male, marked by an XY chromosomal configuration, and female, marked by an XX chromosomal configuration. Anything and everything else is ANTI-scientific nonsense that society needs actively to suppress.
Kids were playing in another area of Washington Park at the same time as the Gay Pride Festival was running. Newark is very adult about these things, and doesn't worry that gay people are out to molest children, a favorite, wicked slander from the Radical Right.
There are no chromosomal "mistakes". That is a kindly, scientific way to address the crazy idea that God — 100% infallible God — somehow "made a mistake" and put a woman into the body of a man, or the other way around. Kindhearted people have wanted to accord logical and scientific credibility to the notion that "transgendered" people could indeed exist — but on the basis of what scientific theory?
Why is there this big portion of Washington Park without grass? It cannot be because events are held there, so the grass would be beaten down. Grass is one of nature's most resilient plants, and thrives on beat-downs you might think would kill it.
Why are so many people desperate to accommodate insane renunciation of biology? Society does no favor to lunatics by pretending to believe they are right in their insane beliefs — be it that a modern-day, 6'7" man really is Napoleon Bonaparte, or that a confused, self-despising 20-year-old man is really a woman. Yes, all of society, all of science, reason, and reality is wrong, but YOU who say God made a mistake, are right. NO! Stop this nonsense! Society must tell lunatics that they are out of their mind, and need to let go of their insane delusions and embrace reality.
No one really believes that "Chaz" Bono is a man. Not one single person on Earth really believes that a person who has no male sexual organs and every single cell in whose body bears the XX chromosomal configuration is a man. Not one single person on Earth. So why are we endlessly assailed by lies from media that Chastity Bono, after a double mastectomy and being pumped full of male hormones, is a man, always referred to as "he"? Are all those women who had double mastectomies because of breast cancer now men? No, they are not, and Chastity Bono is not, no matter what she may call herself.
Chastity Bono is "collateral damage" to a Castration Conspiracy designed to destroy gay men surgically because society refuses to accept the masculinity of men oriented to men, even tho there is nothing more masculine than sex between men, in which there is no woman present. Gay men do NOT regard themselves as a kind of woman, but fully as men. WE don't have pink shower curtains, with pantyhose drying over the shower bar; nor duvets nor dust ruffles nor a dozen pillows on the bed. Quite the contrary, we have to question the masculinity of heterosexual "men" who consent to be emasculated by super-feminine decorating. Nor should anyone else ever think gay men less than men, but always as ONLY men. In the same way, no one should ever think of lesbians as anything BUT women. (That is not to suggest that I speak for women, but only that I imagine that lesbians resent the suggestion that they are somehow less than women.)
In promoting the idea that lesbians are men born in the wrong body, Ms. Bono is an enemy of lesbians, for telling the world that lesbianism is fake heterosexuality and gender confusion, and of gay men, in telling the world that homosexuals would be much happier and better off if they would just let the doctors chop off their genitals and pump them full of female hormones.
This was one of the PERVERTED parts of the Washington Park 'gay' festival, a table at which dozens of CONDOMS were offered, but which table was staffed by a woman, probably lesbian. Truly grotesque. But this is what happens when gay is equated to lesbian, such that lesbians intrude upon gay men's sexual privacy. Disgusting. Truly, truly revolting.
I received, this week, an email from a gay writer in NYC, Perry Brass, that purported to list the ten most important gay activists of all time. I was not on that list. That is, alas, same-old, same-old. Mind you, I did NOT, for the most part, participate in typical "activist" actions, demonstrations and sit-ins. But I did help organize the first annual march of the type now generally termed — because of me — "Gay Pride" parades, and did march (an activist activity, in anyone's judgment) in at least two of the first three such parades in NYC.
It's more than a little annoying when even straight allies in defending gay rights send women to gay events. Alas, since gay men refuse to tell lesbians to get their own events, and gay men will stand on their own, always, straight organizations cannot know how offensive it is to gay men to be treated as lesbians.
More to the point, my linguistic activism, "Gay Pride", has affected the perceptions of at very least a BILLION people in the First World, and possibly as many as, or even more than, THREE BILLION people all around the world. What other person on that list has had nearly that impact? No one.
Wide view, from the far side of Washington Street outside the Newark Museum, of the setup for the gay festival in Washington Park.
People who have seen historic footage of the first few marches may have seen me there, near the front. I think that in the first or second march I was wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt, of ("pirate") puffy sort, and may also have been wearing a floppy straw hat against the sun. Such fotos or videos as I have seen do not, alas, record me in verbal clashes with pushy lesbians who felt that gay men had no right to be anywhere near the front of the march that gay men organized.
It is not, mainly, my purpose here to complain about the craziness of New York City "gay" marches, community centers, or anything else — nor of the Gay Men's Chorus's always having a female soloist, because all GMC concerts must be heterosexual in form — so much as to encourage gay men in Newark to REFUSE to let lesbians impose upon them in any way, but always to be proud to be MEN attracted to and, if we are lucky, in love with MEN who love them.
I do not resent lesbians' being lesbians, but only their insisting that gay men identify with lesbians and let them dominate The Movement. Gay men and lesbians have nothing intrinsically in common. Gay men must stop letting outsiders define them, but must refuse pressure to identify with the opposite sex and to give up their masculine purity to accommodate people who are nothing like them. My defense of gay men's right to an all-male identity is of necessity also a defense of lesbians' right to an all-female identity. Why don't lesbians see that?
This statue of Seth Boyden, a Newark-based inventor whom Thomas Edison (whose first laboratory was in Newark) called the greatest American inventor, stands in the incomprehensibly barren area of Washington Park. There should be grass there as much as anywhere else in the Park.
I do not expect Newark to have a major parade on Broad Street each "Gay Pride" Day, even tho the term as it is now used does derive from a current Newarker (altho I lived in Manhattan when I put the term forward). I reject the idea that gay men have some special bond to lesbian women, so must always organize with and march with them. How supremely bizarre this notion is, that men and women must march together to assert the right not to be pushed at each other.
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Rather, I hope that gay men in Newark will learn to think of themselves before they think of anyone else, and see themselves as the norm before they EVER compare themselves to anyone else. We must be the men we are. Love the men we love. Crave the men we crave. And never apologize to anyone for being who we are.
Regular readers of this blog [meaning, here, "Newark USA", from which this post was copied] will know that I rarely discuss gay issues, largely because there is almost nothing for gay men in Newark (otherwise I would include gay items regularly, since gay events are part of the world I report on) but also that my capsule profile at top right always includes mention that I put forward the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. I would, however, be seriously remiss in not objecting to antihomosexual bigotry — albeit unintentional — by a major Newark institution, such as the Robeson Center of Rutgers-Newark. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I will step down from my soapbox, hoping that straight people among my readers will have learned something that no one else will tell them.
