Open Forum Friday: Good Gay, Bad Gay

Earlier this week I participated in an interview with a graduate student in the UK. He's writing his dissertation on bareback culture, and bareback bloggers specifically. When he asked if I'd be willing to answer some of his questions, I was both intrigued and anxious to see where the dialogue might lead.

Much of the conversation focused around the idea of community. Did I feel there was a genuine bareback community, he wanted to know? If so, what ideals did its members hold in common? I personally think any group that self-identifies as such is nominally a community, though I think even those communities organized around mutual interest (whether of barebackers, or lesbians, or housewives, or vacuum cleaner salesmen) are as diverse, supportive, argumentative, or fractious as the actual communities in which we all live.

We did touch on a couple of topics that had me thinking well past the interview's end, however. While talking about the notion of bug chasing and gift giving, the much-publicized behaviors in which HIV-negative bottoms pursue HIV-positive tops, or vice versa, I brought up the opinion that while the taboo aspects of the forbidden act might make it a powerful fantasy for many, I didn't think in reality it was more than a niche phenomenon—but that more importantly, it was one of those flash points of culture that the gay community seized upon in order to divide itself.

As a community—and I'm including bisexual men and women, as well as the gays and lesbians and the transgendered—we have a distinct tendency to divide ourselves up into Good Gays and Bad Gays. The dividing line and the criterion that draw it are different for everyone, but the end result is always that the speaker is inevitably one of the Good Gays, the people who are upright and moral and on the side of the righteous. Some unfortunate collection of individuals other than the speaker, on the other hand, is going straight to hell.

For many in the so-called bareback community, for example, it may be that those who religiously practice sero-sorting when choosing their sex partners are on the side of the pure and true, while anyone who crosses the pos and neg streams is a fucking embarrassment. What these gentlemen might not remember, however, is that within the gay community itself, safe sex advocates think themselves the moral crusaders, while anyone who barebacks is regressing the entire gay movement a hundred years.

There are other schisms. Every time Pride rolls around, I hear men and women bemoaning the necessity of Pride fairs and parades. Their refrain is always the same: Pride doesn’t accomplish anything but allow the local news to broadcast images of men in leather and shrieking queens prancing around in next to nothing. It's an embarrassment, they mourn. Such behavior only makes the straight population think we're all like that. And it’s not! It’s just the freaks! These men believe that what we should be doing, as a community, is blending in. Playing nice. Obscuring our difference, rather than celebrate it.

We have the guys who worship the cult of masculinity—who cringe with embarrassment in the presence of whisper-thin twinks wearing dyed hair and jumping to Lady Gaga. Those fucking queers who drop purses from their mouths whenever they open them should be rounded up and dumped off the edge of a cliff, they'll say. Fucking mortifying, they are. Or drag queens—what's up with those freaks? Why should they have a place at the table, when there are so many other less scandalous souls waiting to be recognized for their worth?

It's said, I think, when we automatically label ourselves as the normal, good people, and brand anyone not like us—or who revels in being something we most fear might be true about ourselves—as deviants. We all have our preferences, sure. I might not be attracted to men who eat poop, but as icky as I might find the act, I recognize that some enjoy it, and know that some of the things I enjoy might disturb them. I'm not personally attracted in a sexual way to cross-dressers of any sort, but I love my drag queen and cross-dressing sisters for pushing the envelope and always being on the forefront of the gay rights movement. You go, girls! Yes, I actually said that.

I tend to be very careful about slapping a derogatory label on broad classes of people. The only Bad Gays in my eyes are the assholes, and those who go out of their way to act like dicks. I’m uneasy about calling other people shameful, or sociopaths, or abominations, because I know in so many ways I’m a freak myself.

I think that when we're conscious about the ways in which we divide ourselves into the Good Gays and Bad Gays, and when we’re aware of how easily we can be seen to fall on the wrong side, we tend to be less likely to indulge in that kind of crap ourselves. So for this Friday's open forum, I'm throwing out the question—what schisms do you find in the gay community in your own life? You may have been on the receiving end of someone else branding you a Bad Gayl. Who lumped you into that category, and what were they overlooking about themselves that might have made the whole thing ironic?

Or more bravely, where do you draw the line yourselves, when you designate your own categories of Bad Gays?

These open forums are really fun for me, because I get to hear your opinions in topics rather than beat you over the head with my own. I'm anxious to discover your thoughts on the topic.