This week saw the Oscars and the world’s most famous lesbian Ellen DeGeneres took to the stage to host this prestigious award ceremony. However Ellen made a faux pas and called Liza Minnelli a “drag queen, an impersonator and sir”. Although Ellen was probably alluding to the fact Liza looked a ’little different’ (New dress? New purse? ) from normal, the gag backfired. Tweets accusing transphobia followed but these were counteracted with “Ellen’s a lesbian, she can’t be transphobic!”
So can we, the LGBT community, be phobic to ourselves?
It’s weird, because about a week ago I probably was. There is a guy who works in my building who is “obviously gay”. What does “obviously gay” mean? Well, he does dress flamboyantly; he is very theatrical and throws some mean jazz hands when talking. On the day in question, he had a new hairstyle, which kind of finished off his overall look. I found myself chuckling and then instantly corrected myself. Surely me (internally) mocking someone about how gay they looked was wrong!
I’ll admit I felt a little ashamed.
It might have been that I was actually jealous of his hair. With the nic ‘thatbaldguyMK, my days of being “worth it” are over. My hair has sadly spread to my chest, shoulders, back and chin and last week, on twitter, I posted that I was contemplating going beard-free for the first time in about 10 years. This caused uproar! Why? Because beards are seen as manly and as gay men we must not look camp!
Around this time, Ellen Page came out as gay and a couple of straight people I know commented that it was “nice that a feminine lesbian had come out”. All they saw was, long hair = feminine. Roll forward to the Oscars and there was Ellen Page in her tuxedo and lots of tweets about her “lezzing it up”. Another point that made me ponder was reading an article on ‘femme lesbians’, although I could totally see it’s hard for a ‘girlie girl’ not to be seen as a ‘fag hag’ when socialising on the scene, and that not every ‘lipstick lesbian’ wants to drape themselves in a rainbow flag when they go out to maximise visibility, the article was quite harsh about gay women who looked like ‘dykes’.
So have we become a community that is blacklisting ‘camp’ men and ‘butch’ women as well as hinting at transphobia? Are we readily doing to one another what some narrow minded heterosexuals do to us? Should we be more aware?
The word ‘community’ is often overused and the spectrum of LGBT people is broad and that should be something that is celebrated and respected and we need to ensure that we don’t start that criticism from within.
I have to say Liza Minelli did look very different tho……
ThatbaldguyMK
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“So can we, the LGBT community, be phobic to ourselves?” Absolutely!
First of all, we need to question whether we are a community. The L, the G and the T have very little in common. L and G are usually grouped together because they are both groups of people with same-sex attraction and a man attracted to men must be the same as a woman attracted to women, right? Actually, aside, from the bullying in school, we have very little in common. Then, we have the T – this is a different category altogether as Ts are not having a problem of sexual identity, but of gender identity, which is a completely different set of problems. Unless, of course, you consider that nearly every T is probably an LG either before or after transitioning, which does bring us back to the same group.
On the other hand, we need to learn that we can be critical and mocking of each other without being “phobic”. It is not because you make fun of someone’s bizarre haircut that you are demonstrating homophobia, your are commenting on their taste, on the abilities of their hairdresser, not on their sexuality. Perhaps we need to learn to stop being so easily offended, or even, in some cases, seeking offence where it is difficult to find. Recently a person with a female name (that is all I know about her) stated in a private LGBT support forum that homosexuality was due to nurture, not nature; a person with a male name, responded that was bollocks. The first responded immediately took offence, complained of homophobia and filed a report to the group moderator and to the chairman (a woman) of the charity sponsoring the site. This was an over-reaction from a person who did not want to be contradicted because she had no facts to support her argument, but the fact of raising the phobia flag immediately created a series of issues and interventions which were not warranted in the context. (BTW the guy who used the words “bollocks” did publicly apologize, but the apology was rejected).
I truly think it is time that people stop both getting offended about everything under the sun and stop worrying about offending someone every time they find something amusing. If gay men cannot have a laugh at how gay a gay man is, we are living in a very sad world, indeed.
Final point, I am a fan of Liza, Cabaret remains one of my all-time favourites, but today she does look like a bad dream and the outfit she was wearing for the Oscars did her no favours.