Am I Really a 'Gay Male'?

Last semester, in the heat of the Undergraduate Council elections, I went to a meeting of the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered Supporters Association (BGLTSA). The meeting started out innocently. Some announcements were made; a few business items were discussed. And then came the feature presentation: seven or eight council presidential candidates bending over backwards to show how "pro-gay" they were.

It all started, as I remember it, when Lamelle D. Rawlins '99 raised the specter of ROTC, claiming that some of the candidates present at the BGLTSA meeting were supportive of the campus military organization that excludes gay people. Specifically, she charged that several of the candidates present were guilty of voting "no" on a council resolution last year that would have asked the administration to bar ROTC graduation services from Harvard Yard.

After the ROTC hit the fan, the candidates' speeches devolved into a discussion of their viewpoints on ROTC and gay people. All of the candidates, of course, argued that whatever their position on ROTC, they were still sensitive to gay and lesbian issues, that they were pro-gay rights, etc. The way many of the candidates were speaking, it was as if our homosexuality meant that we inevitably favored a gay students' center, gay rights, and kicking ROTC graduation exercises off campus.

The problem is that we aren't. I have several friends who are opposed to the idea of a gay students' center. Many gays, lesbians, and bisexuals differ over what "gay rights" mean. Some radical gay activists, for example, argue that the current focus on gay marriage is a capitulation to an institution that is inherently heterosexual, that gay people do not need and should not want conventional marriages. And we disagree over what needs to be done about ROTC, if anything.

In sum, what bothered me about the meeting-turned-spectacle was that I felt like the (presumably heterosexual) council candidates were speaking less to the people in the audience than to their own preconceived notions of what gay people are and what they want.

The problem as I see it is that no preconceived notion of what gay people are could ever possibly be correct. At the meeting, there were people of all different racial and economic backgrounds. Some were even Republicans. And I'm sure that every one of the people present had some different conception of what it meant to be "sensitive to gay issues" or "pro-gay rights."

The incident reminded me of my freshman year, which I spent at Columbia University before transferring here. It was all the rage to be gay there; gays and lesbians were viewed by a sizable portion of the undergraduates as fashionable and interesting, fabulous people to know. A friend of mine there complained about it all the time: he felt that many heterosexuals wanted to be around him because his "gayness" intrigued them, and he was concerned that these people were overlooking the rest of his personality.

To some people at Columbia, gay people were "cool" to the extent that they seemed to dress fabulously and go out a lot (never mind that some of us dressed "normally" and stayed in). To others, they were "glamorous" to the extent that they continually fought against the repressive straight male heterosexist patriarchy (when in fact some of us were conservative reactionaries).

A woman in my dorm captured this type of thinking perfectly when she beamed that "we've got two on our floor," as if gay people were a valuable commodity, all similar in some way, and what counted was how many you knew.

I do not mean to berate the council candidates for discussing gay issues, and it is much more fun when people admire you because you're gay than when people hate you for it. But I am appalled by attitudes toward gay people which on some level assume that people of the same sexual orientation inevitably have a common outlook, common political viewpoints, a shared fashion sense, an aura of "coolness."

I don't like living in a world where I am presumed "straight" by some people because I do not "seem" gay. Nor do I like it when people ask me what "gay people think about issue x," as if we all always thought the same thing. More important, the statement "I am gay" becomes laden with all sorts of unintended connotations when people wrongly apply their wrongly developed preconceived notions of what being 'gay' means.

The problem goes beyond my personal inconvenience: if gay and straight people are ever to get along, notions of what "gay," "straight," "lesbian," "bisexual," etc., will have to be thrown out. I can't live in a community of straight people if I believe that my telling them "I am gay" automatically means that I am fabulous, or interested in advancing certain gay rights, or promiscuous. And I think that any straight person who really thinks this way can never really appreciate individual gay people as they are. I hope that for you, the reader, words "gay," "lesbian," etc., carry fewer connotations now than they did when you were first reading the article. I am indisputably gay and a male, but if the term "gay male" is going to be a charged one, then I don't want to be described that way; unless you know me personally, I want the word "gay" in the sentence "I am a gay male" to mean as little as possible.

Andrew T. Davis '98 is a junior living in Dunster House.