[Vol. 67] "Hi Gay!" Girls Are The Worst

It's not just men, sis.

Welcome back to That’s Gay 🌈 A biweekly newsletter for all the folks outgrowing "the way things are" – written by a queer kid who knows the feeling.

Candid, current, chaotic, and always tongue-in-cheek.

Live from New York, it’s Monday and Thursday mornings @ 11 A.M. 🌟 Subscribe and don’t miss a beat 💌

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I used to see this one guy that had come out pretty recently - he was a freshly minted gay, I guess you could say. Since he seemed like he had a lot of straight guy friends, I asked him how coming out to them had gone.

They were very fratty dudes, so I was genuinely curious.

“Honestly,” he answered, laying next to me, “I’ve had a harder time with the girls.”

He was at a house party last weekend, he’d told me, and after telling a girl he was gay, she asked him if he liked taking it up the ass.

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Folks, today I have an unpopular opinion to hit ya’ll with.

Women can be just as homophobic as men.

We don’t hear it enough, so I’ll say it here: They are not exempt – and can’t be exempt if we want to properly address the weird, whacky world of modern homophobia.

But while women are, in my opinion, as homophobic as men, they are so in entirely different ways.

This next part might make the straight/cis men reading my newsletter here a bit uncomfortable, but it has to be said. The only time I worry for my physical safety anywhere is if there’s a straight/cis man present. If there were no straight/cis men in the world,* I’d feel free to take a lot more expressive “risks”, a lot more often. From everything I’ve heard from my friends, I feel like it’s safe to say the same for women as well.

*Obviously, this isn’t the kind of world I want, but just for explanations sake (although I can’t say I’m not sometimes tempted to think about it).

But the blame doesn’t belong solely to men here. You can’t just shove it on them and consider your hands clean.

Yes, it’s true, I rarely (if ever) feel in any physical danger around women, but homophobia isn’t just perpetuated by physical violence. If we measured discrimination only by acts of physical violence (like a lot of people do, might I add), we’d look in a lot better shape than we actually are.

Some of the moments I’ve felt most belittled – most stereotyped by my identity – has been around women.

Funnily enough, it was always the women who claimed to “love gay people” the most who I had the hardest time interacting with. I always thought I was overreacting until I realized how many other queer people (particularly gay men) had similar experiences to me.

Let’s call them “hi gay!” girls – in honor of one of my favorite Tik Toks to-date. If you haven’t seen it, you need to watch it now – beautiful piece of comedy making fun of corporate appeals to the gays during Pride Month *chefs kiss*

The way I see it, “Hi gay!” girls see gay men (or queer people that present as men) as mirrors they can talk into. The gay man they’ve come to expect is much less a person than a reflection of themselves they can gab about their boy problems to, ask for fashion advice, and fish for an endless stream of creative (and validating) complements from.

Need a visual? If you’re a Sex and the City fan, picture the relationship between Carrie Bradshaw and Stanford Blatch (RIP the recently deceased Willie Garson).

Carrie Bradshaw with this season’s hottest accessory on her arm. Image via Glamour.

I use the word “relationship” here loosely, because honestly it’s mostly just Stanford getting caught up in Carrie’s massive orbit and string of bad relationships for 6 seasons and two movies straight.*

*Not to mention when Carrie dares to try and center Stanford’s own fucking wedding around her weird choice of hat in the first (and only relevant) SATC movie?? That character lost me many times before but she definitely lost me then. Anyways, I digress.

The shortcomings of my favorite show aside (it was the 90s 🤷‍♂️ ), the most important lesson a budding and/or seasoned “hi gay!” girls can learn, in my opinion, is to respect boundaries.

Just because he’s gay, doesn’t mean he owes you anything. Not unearned validation, not a shoulder to cry on, not intimate details about his own life. That’s called a boyfriend, girl – and even one of those has its limits.

Now I will say, gay men play a part in this too. Especially from knowing what it’s like to come out and feel insecure in your identity, I can say with confidence that that’s a fact. It always takes two to tango.

Early on, we often do our part to perpetuate the survival of the “hi gay!” girls by feeding into her image of gay men …

1) because we want that validation.

2) because we want the protection that their validation grants us. You can’t fuck with the gay kid if he’s hanging out with the girl everybody likes.

Still, that doesn’t excuse “hi gay!” girls for not taking the time to see a gay man as a whole person, separate from themselves. Here’s a golden rule we should all follow more often: A person’s sexual/gender identity shouldn’t dictate how you treat them.

Love and respect to all the amazing women and girls in my life now that know that ❤️

- Till

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Find me on Instagram: @till_kaeslin

Check out the newsletter’s home on Instagram to see this post there, and more like it: @thatsgaynewsletter

See you in Volume 68, folks! 

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