[Vol. 10] Where's the Love in the Same-Love Community?
Let's talk gay-on-gay hate.
First of all, I just want to start the 10th volume of this newsletter (!) with the announcement that there’s a whopping 50 of you getting this here email 🎉 📧 !
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Imagine this: You’re a 17-year-old closeted gay kid and you’re on the brink of coming out.
You’ve finally figured out the big mystery of why you keep having those weird dreams about Channing Tatum, and you’ve decided it’s time to come out and admit to the world your affinity for washboard abs and nice arms.
You’ve always felt somehow different, the “other” amongst your friends and family, for so long, and you’ve had enough of it. You’re ready to jump into the warm embrace of a community of others like you; a community that gets you.
But, *kill the fairy tale music, cue the record scratch*, turns out there’s no big hug waiting for you on the other side of that pesky closet door.
Buckle up, because you’re about to fall into a world of internet shade, dating app drama, and icy, judgemental comparison.
Sorry to burst your bubble kid, but that warm hug you’re expecting? Grab a number and get in line, because we’re all still waiting.
The LGBTQ+ community you’ve been picturing isn’t so much a supportive, after-school special as it is a half-abandoned, every-person-for-themselves rec center that newly minted gays like you just happen to stumble into.
Ok, you know I love a good metaphor or two, but let’s bring this point home without any fluff, shall we?
Here’s the question I feel the audacity to ask today: Why doesn’t the gay community have each other’s backs?
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As a writer, I take some creative liberty with the amount of drama I want to open these newsletters with. I like to keep it a little spicy, just so I know I have your attention.
That having been said, do I really feel the gay community is “a world of internet shade, dating app drama, and icy, judgemental comparison”? Not entirely … but, you guessed it, also yes.
The gay community isn’t a community.
No, it’s not all bad – I know a lot of gay people that truly support their fellow LGBTQ+ friends and family to the fullest degree – but it’s definitely not like what an annual pride parade or the Trevor Project Instagram page might make it look like.
As is my theory with all so-called “communities” that exist in our world (Ex. the gay community, the black community, the disabled community etc.) there really isn’t anything connecting anyone in the LGBTQ+ community unless we decide to believe that our varied sexual orientations and gender identities are enough to bind us together. When we make that decision, collectively, great things do happen, and it really can feel like a warm hug (think the smiley attitude of your High School or College’s Gay-Straight Alliance Club).
But we rarely ever come to that collective decision unless we’re pushed together.
Case and point: I never joined my High School or College’s GSA.
A 2015 psychological study focusing on health and wellbeing in mass gatherings (such as, for example, pride parades) concluded that while such events may be bad news for infectious spread (*ahem* the big Covid elephant in the room), they could also be beneficial to overall health in that they create “a sense of shared identity” and “social support” within a given community.
Obviously, the psychologists working on this report couldn’t possibly have known that mass gatherings like this would be outlawed just half a decade in the future due to a global pandemic, and I’m sure they’d argue that you should stay your ass home now. Regardless, it’s good to know there’s some evidence-backed psychology behind all those warm, gushy, hug-everyone-in-sight feelings you get as a gay person running around a pride parade (you know, besides the fact that you downed three tequila shots before heading out).
In these moments (and just for a moment), the otherwise ethereal “LGBTQ+ community” feels like something you can quite literally embrace.
In the mundane of every day, however, the LGBTQ+ community isn’t bound to each other as much.
Not across the different identities in the rainbow spectrum, and not even within our own shared letters. A gay man might identify with the capital G in LGBTQ+, but it’s a long shot to say that he would also identify with everyone else that’s huddled under that G.
As I’ve experienced it, our shared gayness just isn’t enough to make us feel obligated to support one another.
So, we’ve established my take that the gay community isn’t so much a community as it is a bunch of individually gay people. That’s all fine and dandy, but it still doesn’t explain my whole diatribe on gay-on-gay hate. So let’s dig into that.
Here’s what I mean when I say gay people don’t have each other’s backs.
Recently, as I was chilling in bed and semi-mindlessly tapping my way through Instagram stories, I came across the story of one of my longtime favorite gay YouTubers, Mark Miller. Having pretty much started his YouTube journey by making candid videos with his then-boyfriend Ethan Hethcote, Mark’s videos have pretty much always had a gay arch to them – sometimes more subtle, sometimes at the forefront, but always there.
As you can imagine, all that honest and open gay content – compounded by the fact that he’s a good looking dude – has attracted quite the gay following. I don’t know just how many of his 600K followers are gay men, but I’d venture to say there are a lot of ‘em.
Now, the universe runs by a pretty simple rule: A lot of gay followers = a lot of gay commentators.
And not all of them are lurkin’ to give Mark a warm, virtual hug.
In the Instagram story I came across, Mark had been promoting his latest video – a video in which he was showing off his friend’s fancy, secluded house he was staying in as he was self-isolating from ‘Rona. As I kept clicking through his little promo snippets, suddenly there was before me, a screenshot. It was a screenshot of the comments section under his latest video.
I can’t find the comments he screenshotted anymore (having a major case of not-taking-a-screenshot-of-the-screenshot-regret right now), but basically, they were all gay men theorizing that Mark had a sugar daddy to pay for the place he was staying in.
One comment even read something to the effect of, “I knew he was a bottom”.
I laugh, but also I cry.
Mark’s response to the comments was a 10-second Instagram story where he asked his followers why gays weren’t supportive of other gays like “you would think”; why we weren’t a “family” as he once expected.
He also left a comment on the video, as follows: “Hey folks. Yes, I paid full price to stay here. No, Bill is not my sugar daddy. Though I wish he was. He did not ask me to make this video. I love design and architecture and cute bags and a bunch of other shit that if I wish to post about it, it's because I wanted to. If I were paid, I am legally required to disclose it. xo”
Now, is this the biggest deal of all time? Are there more serious things going on in the world right now than gay guys shading other gay guys over house bills and sugar daddies on YouTube? Yes, of course there are, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic.
But relative “seriousness” doesn’t make this issue not serious. It’s not just one YouTuber’s comment section; gay-on-gay hate is endemic to the community.
In doing a little ~ research ~ on this topic (love whenever I get to say that) I came across a strongly written Op-Ed published in The Advocate, “Why Do Gay Guys Hate Other Gay Guys?”. If you get the chance, read it and let me know what you think (it’s super short and digestible).
In the article, Blake Pruitt, the author, recounts his experience doing sit-down interviews with his fellow gay friends for a documentary he shot inspired by the very subject of gay-on-gay hate, 20MALEGAYNYC.
*Note: I haven’t watched the doc myself yet, just referring to the article here.
Given all the interviews he did, Pruitt decides that all this in-community hate must come from an internalized sense of self-hate many gay men carry around with us. To put it simply, Pruitt argues gay men hate on other gay men because they see in them the stereotypical qualities that they too have seen in themselves and been subconsciously taught to hate and distance themselves from.
Because I think his closing lines are better written than I could ever summarize or recreate in my own words, here they are: “We all have this concept of “the other”: those flamers out there ruining it for the rest of us; but we're ruining it for ourselves. This internal judgment becomes external when we try to act cool for the straight guys by hating limp-wristed clichés as much as they do.”
So, does gay-on-gay hate come from self-hate?
It just might.
Even the now-famous and buzz-worthy Instagram account Gays Over Covid, although valid in its callout of gay men clearly flaunting Covid-safety violations, seems to me like it’s playing a little on the easy-to-hate gay stereotypes.
Vapid; self-centered; hyper-sexual; flamboyant; pretty boy.
Again, I’m not saying all of the hate gay men get is irrelevant – because, let’s face it, gay, straight, bisexual, whatever you may be, an asshole is an asshole. I’m just pointing out a pattern that’s been pretty clear to see for as long as I’ve been out and about.
The pattern in question? Gay-on-gay hate is a thing, and it’s not always warranted.
So, if the gay community isn’t really a community at all – unless, of course, in the situations in which we want it to be – why do we always come together? Moreover, if we’re not all that nice to one another, why do we continue to be drawn to each other?
It’s like an estranged family – you’d expect them all to just go on with their lives and leave each other alone, but it never really works out that way.
It’s a giant gay situationship: Not quite a community, but not quite isolated.
Although it’s not really a community in the physical sense, the gay community, just like that estranged family, still has entanglements that keep us snapping back together – almost as if we’ve all been loosely tied up by a rubber band.
To state the obvious first, we’re attracted to and love each other, so there’s really no way around that binding force. More interesting, though, is our connection beyond the obvious forces of love and sexuality.
We may not think about it a lot, but gay people need each other.
We do need each other’s support. We do need that warm hug after we come out – and it’s not the same coming from a straight person as it is coming from someone with the shared experience of feeling like an “other”.
As Pruitt writes in his Op-Ed, “… we cannot reasonably expect to be embraced as complex, layered, loving human beings when we reject each other so easily.”
Damn, Pruitt. That’s all I’m saying.
And that was That’s Gay, Volume 10. We made it to the big 10! See you in Volume 11, folks!
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