Lez Bro
Ben and Coach at Solly's for a photo shoot regarding a TNG MetroWeekly story.
I’ve never been much of a ladies man.
I have a great relationship with my mom and my sister, and I’ve had deep and fulfilling friendships with a few female friends in college, yet I’ve never felt the consistent need to seek the company of women as sources of comfort or friendship. This is particularly true in the years since moving to the district. In nearly 10 years as a DC resident, I’ve only had one substantial relationship with a woman (we are still friends, yet we rarely speak since she moved to NYC to become a famous cupcake maker). As a gay man, I realize my history with women makes me both typical and atypical, depending on whether the women in question are straight or gay.
Gay men and straight women have long been natural allies. The reasons each has found security in the other’s company are many, with the most cited being the process of elimination--it's difficult to be friends with the people you want to fuck (or who want to fuck you). However, this bond between gay men and women seems to fray when the women aren't heterosexual. For this paradox, I don't yet have an explanation that satisfies me.
I find it unfortunate that I rarely see gay men hanging out with gay women. The few female friends I’ve had great relationships with are the independent, intelligent, kick-ass types that have brought out the best in me, and most of these women are either lesbians or bisexuals. It’s from these ladies and the amazing gay women I’ve met recently that I draw much of my positive regard for women, and my own history and the limited state of our gay/lesbian union leads me to believe that the gay brotherhood is much poorer for being strangers to the gay sisterhood. And vice versa.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to see the lack of women in my life as more of a failure than a personal preference. The need for balance in every aspect of life becomes more evident as I’ve put distance between my current self and the full throttle deviance of my gay 20s, which did not require the company of women in the slightest. In being more open to meeting women, spending time with them, and enjoying the rewards of their charming company, I’ve recognized that my yen needs their yang in order to be a more balanced human being. While I’ve recently had some success developing friendships with heterosexual women, I’m particularly interested in connecting with lesbians, mainly because I find them more interesting and assume that I may have more in common with them. Unfortunately, in my efforts to become more of a friend to gay females, I often feel as frustrated as a 16-year old straight boy in figuring out how to relate to them.
I’ve made an effort to attend a few lesbian events in the past few months, and I’ve noticed a communications code that eludes me. Conversations are often awkward and I typically sense a lack of ease and trust (in both me and the women) that I suspect is hard wired into the historical relationship between both groups as they exist in this city. It’s a strange tension that seems to imply that we don’t know what to do with each other. Also, I’m not a feminine man, yet with many lesbians I sometimes get the sense that no matter how restrained I am when saying hello, goodbye, or attempting conversation, I’m never quite butch enough to connect on their level. On more than one occasion I’ve left interactions feeling like a female wanted me to understand the ease in which they could crush me against their forehead like a beer can...and those are just the girls who liked me (I think so, anyway). One girl, on two separate occasions (the same girl at two different bars on two separate occasions) “stepped to me” as if she wanted to fuck my shit up, for no other reason than being in her way, and possibly for being a man (maybe she remembered me from our previous encounter, when I was slow to back down from all 5’3 inches of her fury as she was leaving BeBar). Through TNG I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know (some more than others) the five truly exceptional lady gays who blog for this site, yet even around them I’m unsure of how I should relate. I’m beginning to realize this will take more thought and effort on my part if I’m going to succeed at having more gay women in my life.
Through TNG I’ve been a part of an attempt to create a forum for gays and lesbians to talk about issues and opinions and share stories about our lives (somewhat successful) and bring gay men and women together under the same roof to socialize and have fun (less successful). Among these efforts, I’ve seen personal progress in my attempt to be a lez bro (male friend of a lesbian). I’m not nearly as awkward anymore, and when I went to Phase 1 a few weeks ago for the Phasefest music festival, it felt good to know several of the women in attendance and spend time in a gay venue where I was the gender minority yet still had a great time.
Unfortunately, some of the male friends I brought to Phasefest didn’t share my appreciation. While I met some very nice women and felt a significant amount of goodwill from them, two of my friends saw little more than anger manifested in multiple forms, be it the music, the spoken word, or the crowd. One friend told me, “on a typical Friday night out, gay guys will just laugh, be goofy, and make fun of people. But all I see here is anger.” I didn’t know what to tell them, because a small part of me sensed this veneer of rage as well, and was also turned off. Later in the night, after my friends left for Remington’s, DJ Natty Boom started to spin dance music (buy a mix CD from her…she is mad talented) and the floor quickly turned into a hoppin’ dance party packed with ladies. From my perch by the DJ booth I saw three of the TNG ladies dancing in the center of the floor, and my immediate inclination was to run into the center of this great energy and act the fool, but I didn’t. I resisted because a central part of me said that a 6’2 gay guy in a camouflage tank-top probably wouldn’t be welcomed among this crowd. Maybe I was wrong, but in that moment, it was how I felt.
I was moved by Ms. Cavanaugh's post last week about the relationship between queer men and women. I also found it unfortunate that for the many comments it inspired, so few of them directly tried to answer the question of whether or not it is possible for us to be less segregated and more involved in each others lives, instead of being bonded only through our sexual inclination towards members of the same sex. The general sentiment in the comment thread seems to be that we should accept that at best we don’t have a desire to be around each other, and at worst can’t stand each other. I had hoped for better.
A large slice of TNG energy and idealism has been directed towards creating stronger bonds between the lesbian and gay community, yet Ms. Cavanaugh, the rest of the TNG team and I seem to keep hitting a wall. We’ve expended considerable energy trying to get more women to write for TNG, going into the community and spreading the word that we want not only a multitude of voices (who are good writers) but the creation of social spaces where men and women and queer persons of color (QPOCs) can connect with one another. While we’ve had some success, we seem to receive more community criticism than community involvement. I admit, at times I wonder why we even bother.
While morale in this particular area is low among TNG staff, we’re not ready to give up. We’re currently planning to redouble our efforts to attract more full-time contributors (one well written post a week, please) and occasional contributors who represent a broad spectrum of race, gender, ideology, and thoughtful opinion (if not always civil, unfortunately). We are also planning events (we really need your involvement with planning) that bring us together in both bar/non-bar environments, so that we can hopefully become better acquainted, should we decide to meet each other half way.
Only time will tell if our efforts are a fool’s folly, but ultimately I know there is only one person that I’ve got to win over: me. Ultimately, it is my choice to push myself out of my comfort zone and try to learn about, better understand, and connect with lesbians, or stay disconnected and out of touch with the entirety of their community. It is my choice to let women in to my life, or shut them out. The same is true for all of us, regardless of gender.
This is a personal journey, but my hope, and TNG’s hope, is that you also make it your own.
8 comments:
Here are some problems with the approach: it's heavy-handed and reeks of quotas("one well-written post a week") as though you could quantify the amount of diversity needed to appease your internal struggles with objective criticism; and it arrogantly ignores tons of mixed space and diverse relationships that have existed both publicly and privately for decades before this blog was conceived. It falls in line as another example of the major failing of this blog: the assumption that your ideas, accusations, frustrations, complaints, music preferences, attempts, parties, rantings, etc. are new and the persistent complaint that no one else is doing anything about it but you. It continues to read as disingenuine. Open your eyes and pay attention to the many other approaches and you'll probably feel a little less alone.
Clarification: when Ben wrote that we want "one well-written post per week," that had nothing to do with an attempt to "quantify the amount of diversity." All of us who write for the blog on a regular basis are asked to contribute at least "one well-written post per week."
This is finding offense where none was intended.
'Full throttle deviance of my Gay 20s' -Love this phrase.
The supposed 'gulf' between gay men and gay women, in addition to gay men and straight women relationships are both interesting social conditions to ponder.
I'm currently interning at a large Architecture/Interior Design office in Manhattan, and among 50 or so employees, no fewer than 10 are gay men, myself included. There is also a significant contingent of young and young-ish women, several of whom I have befriended to the point of going beyond 'office friends' to 'I have your cell number, let's go out after work-friends'.
Almost daily, it seems as though the lunchtime conversations inevitably turn gay, and that's in large part because the biggest gossip is coincidentally a capital-Q Queen. He's nearly 40, and didn't come out of the closet until he was 30. Mr. Q is nearly friendly with all the women in the office, some in a seemingly genuine way and others in a clear-as-the-blue-sky 'frenemy" sort of way. Although Mr. Q jumps at the opportunity to discuss an off-color anatomical or sexual topic, he is respectful of physical boundaries and maintains a generally bucolic back and forth with our mutual female friends.
Another gay co-worker of mine, we'll call him Sideler, is 23 and a recent college graduate. Sideler has a different approach and outlook on his lady friends than Mr. Q. My good lady friends from the office have told me about how he often makes them uncomfortable with his cat calling, touching of bra straps and skirts, and creepy emails saying things like 'I saw you at the scanner today, you looked sexy'. Admittedly, a few years ago or even a year ago, I would consider this behavior acceptable and would even do and say similar things with some of my girl friends at school. Only recently, and especially since working here and befriending these girls, has it dawned on me that your status as a gay man does not give you an all-access pass to behave as you like around lady friends. Just because my Facebook says 'Interested in: Men' doesn't mean I can get automatic immunity from notions of misogyny or near-harassment being leveraged against me.
I know this won't seem like a radical concept to anyone reading this who is gay and has had a pulse for the past 5 years, but I've found that some of the most blatant and unapologetic misogyny in contemporary urban society comes from gay men. Because we don't spend our time figuring out how to charm and cajole our female counterparts into the bedroom, it becomes easy to marginalize them or use them as 'accessories'.
The term 'fag hag' is a serious, and I think unacceptable knock to both gay men and their straight friends alike. Though I've been desensitized to it, I still hesitate to say 'fag' myself, and still get an angry, sinking feeling in my stomach whenever I hear a stranger use it. I have to think that a woman being referred to as a 'hag' might have a similar reaction.
I want to wrap up this absurdly long comment by introducing a third gay from my office, we'll call him Bubble Butt.
I've got a bit of a crush on bubble butt, and not just for that aforementioned quality, but for the fact that he is handsome, muscular, and generally amicable. Also, he sometimes likes to break up the day by sending out some Corbin Fisher or Sean Cody pics via the work e-mail system (This is a very gay-friendly office environment).
Anyways, at a work picnic over the summer, Bubble Butt and some of my good lady friends at the office got into an initially funny but soon awkwardly heated discussion about the female anatomy. BB referred to the vagina as 'a gaping wound', and drove the point home by saying 'Dirty Dirty Dirty' in a way that we mock and laugh over in retrospect, but was really surprising and insulting at the time.
I have no interest in the vagina, and my incredibly limited experiences with it have only confirmed that It's just not for me. However, to refer to it as a 'wound' is blatantly misogynous and hypocritical, considering that that 'wound' and its counterparts are where we first come into existence, male and female alike.
I don't have time to write a conclusion, for I am about to join some of my lady friends for lunch, and they are ready to go. I'm really in the mood for tuna...
Ha !
It's possible Lesbians and Gay men are uncomfortable with each other because they make different assumptions about gender and sexuality, based on different lived experiences.
While I'd argue gender is biologically determined (brain structure, development and chemicals; chromosomes; hormonal differences) it is also grotesquely exaggerated to Grand Guignol proportions in this culture. In general Gay men (and heterosexual women) approach gender uncritically. Most Gay men affect some exaggerated but conventional gendered identity (whether it is masculine or feminine) which is basically seen by Lesbians (and some other Gay men) as a performance with questionable motivation.
From what little I know, Lesbians see their gender identity as neutral or a rejection of an constructed "norm" designed to subjugate and oppress women. Lesbians are also doubly marginalized as women and homosexuals living in a heterosexual male patriarchy. They embody a level of difference against which Gay men have not had to struggle.
Perhaps Lesbians disdain Gay men in general for their demonstrated ignorance, complacency and unwitting collusion in oppressive institutions (like heteronormative gender and patriarchy), perhaps not. Perhaps the relative privilege of Gay men obscures their understanding of Lesbian experience, perhaps not.
Maybe I'm really off base. Like Ben I am hoping for a thoughtful discussion that will provide greater understanding. These are just a few random thoughts from a guy without a great deal of time on his hands right now. I'd like to hear what others think.
I'm not sure if this is something that can be generalized, but when I was a kid my best friends were girls. I was an 8 year old that loved playing with Barbies more than playing soccer on the street, and girls were accepting, if occasionally puzzled.
Then I became a teenager, I started to be very attracted to boys, but I knew I was supposed to like girls. And my mother, bless her heart, didn't think it awkward to arrange dates with my old Barbie playmates, in collusion with the mothers of those girls, so there were these two awkward teenagers together. Not to say anything of the huge pressure to date girls from your peers in school.
In any case, I wonder if one of the reasons gay men and gay women don't socialize with each other is because at one point we were shoved together with members of the opposite sex whether we wanted it or not. Maybe some of the misogynistic comments don't come from anger towards women as much as much as anger at the situations we were forced into.
Part of coming out, for me, was the fact that I could let go of this forced socialization with women. Until recently, I haven't felt the need to revisit that decision, maybe it's time to do that.
Thanks so much for the shout out, Ben.
Daniel, you bring aboot (false Canadian accent, not a typo) very interesting points around forced/expected socialization. I tend to think that hasn't been my experience, but I'm excited to think more about it in general.
In my experience, I rarely feel comfortable with men like I do with women. A natural connection that makes me feel at ease and makes conversation easy. I came out when I was 21: before that time, as much as I thought what I wanted was to date men (I was *quite* closeted), most of the people I communicated with on a daily basis were women by choice; even as a child I would ignore the boys, except when we had straight little-girl intrigues.
Even now, I am friends with three men, two straight and one bi. These friendships are different, the conversation different, than in my friendships with women. Many times, being friends with men feels like a deliberate move to me.
This does not mean that I want to ban the company of men from my life, or not even to party with them (at the last TNG party, I met some really friendly men, which was great, since they made up so much of the crowd).
But it means that for me and for queer women who also tend not to connect emotionally with men, chilling with them is not the warm and fuzzy experience that it might be for, for example, straight women, who tend to connect emotionally with men and value a friendship with a man where they are not constantly being evaluated as a potential sexual partner.
The Klein scale (which took Kinsey's sexual preference scale and added 6 other categories that all meld together to indicate an individual's sexual orientation) looks at 3 factors that have to do with being sexual, three that have to do with non-sexual comfort levels (Emotional preference: Who do you feel more drawn to or close to Emotionally?; Social preference: Which gender do you socialize with?; Lifestyle preference: In which community do you like to spend your time? In which do you feel most comfortable?) and then the one that you identify yourself as. This is to say that sexuality is much more than with whom you take your clothes off, and while we should all make an effort to be nice to each other and to live in community, it is unsurprising that some gay men and women need little to do with each other socially -- it's how their brains work.
i have about an equal amount of gay-guy and any-girl "best friends" but a lot more female acquaintances. i believe this is because i am generally too jealous of the male hip structure to be passing friends with them. sike! it's only cuz gladies are the funniest people in the world so of course i prefer their presence! sike again! i actually have no idea what brings on this phenomenon. but it probably has something to do with either scrabble or lindsay lohan.
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