How do you define "Gay Culture"?

[Pix]

There's The L Word, mostly written by and for lesbians that got popular on Showtime. Even lesbians who hated it could often talk about it (one on YT said she was a "bad lesbian" for not watching it at all, and IIRC she lived in Norway) and I ended up watching it myself just to see what everyone else was always going on about.

'Course for it to be so popular goes to show how many straight people (mostly women) watched it. Some said it helped them to understand LGBT (*) better, though given how dysfunctional most of them were (as absurd as most other dramas) I can't help but cringe a little at that.

(*Why labels? Because it's faster!)

[Pix]

For fun, the Lesbian Cliche Song (mentions the L Word):




The first time I saw that it had an ad for a type of jeep and thought the marketing needed to do their research better...and then I realized my fairly cliche lesbian girlfriend had that jeep and looked it up...it was #10 on a list for stereotypical lesbians. :p

[Buzzer]

Some of us are feminine and it has nothing to do with "gay culture" but it's who we are. Now, many gay men hate us because they are afraid of whatever label they will get if they like us. And it's "cool" and "the thing" to say how you loathe us femmes. Yeah, there are some "bitchy queeny" types, but I think that doesn't have much to do with being feminine. It's an attitude problem and many "butch" guys have the equivalent, thinking they are God's gift. You know, the stud mentality.

I totally get that. And I agree that what you're saying does happen.

The only thing I dislike is when en masse-- either from the outside, OR from the inside, attempts are made to define gay people or the gay identity or the gay community as effeminate or as basically being "women in male bodies", or identifying as, or like, women or sisters or similar simply because, like straight women, we pursue men romantically. I don't think it's only to blame on one group or the other. I think many gay men embrace the idea, even if only subconsciously, that their sexual desire for men makes them more alike to women, when that is not necessarily so at all. It can become for some a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is, so far as I'm concerned, utterly nothing universal to gay men other than that we are oriented towards other men romantically. That's it. We're all from as huge a variety of backgrounds and cultural practices and beliefs and worldviews as any other randomly picked group of people around the planet. The small number of ideas we would largely hold in common as a result of being gay, such as the desire for equality and fair and safe treatment, are political and an issue of civil rights, not an expression of some separate cultural attitude or identity. We didn't become gay as a result of being raised by parents from a certain part of the world or speaking a certain language or believing in a certain religion or living in a certain way. Thus we share no global gay culture.

I'm very resistant to anyone trying to write, define, or push the idea that there is one [gay culture], and that if I'm not claiming my part of it I'm simply self-hating or whatever else.