“But I’m a Good Queer…!”
By Ben Hansen-Hicks (He/Him)
Most of us have experienced it: Happily chatting with a fellow LGBTI+ person when suddenly we say something that causes immediate side-eye. All this good queer, bad queer debate in our community is just a bit dull, isn’t it?
Point-scoring in our diverse melting pot; to keep a running tally, or – worse still – putting yourself on a higher pedestal than someone who doesn’t wear plaid (my lesbians) or doesn’t watch all 1000 Drag Race iterations (my gays) needs to really just get in the bin.
I think we’re still guilty of this policing at some level, of our own behaviour as well as those cultural pursuits of others in the community.
But who exactly does that serve?
Are the earlier struggles of being in the closet or being bullied for being anything other than straight made somewhat better if we’re top of the heap in the LGBTI+ pile? Just because we know every single cultural reference, new pop song, have a wardrobe full of plaid, and also binge RuPaul round the clock? I don’t know about you, but I find it simultaneously alienating and just fucking draining.
Let us just be queers, gays, and theys who are doing just fine, thanks. Relatively adult, with just a little chaos thrown in for good measure. We’re wise to remember that we’re just all humans trying to be adults – and not our 5-year-old selves – in a world that is constantly trying to question or pull us away from our reality and true self. I think, instead of trying to fit ourselves into someone else’s defined box that doesn’t suit our own needs, let’s just have slightly less judgement in what our fucking wonderful, diverse, divergent, welcoming community is, no?
A friend put it really well when we met for coffee the other day: The LGBTI+ community is so diverse, so wide-reaching, that there are so many different tastes and vibes bouncing around – how can one person be interested in it all? It doesn’t make sense. I couldn’t agree more. It’s all our power that this community is such a rich melting pot of all the stuff that makes us inherently and tangibly gay, queer, trans, bisexual, asexual, intersex, questioning, and everything else. I mean, the gays in the UK and Merchant Navy (1920s-1970s) had their own language, for God’s sake. It was called Polari and borrowed from Italian, Cockney rhyming slang and Yiddish. How impressive is that? Of course, it was at a time when homosexuality was still punishable by jail, so it definitely was a way of lowering your risk when out in public, with a quick way to make an estimation of whether someone was LGBTI+ or not in your daily life. But still. That must’ve taken a huge amount of effort to learn and keep alive.
It got me thinking of all the corners of our community I haven’t explored yet. Maybe you haven’t either. And that’s OK. We’ve got a whole lifetime to really see what makes us tick, that’s the beauty of it. Our diversity should be celebrated, not shamed. Our richness should be sampled, enjoyed, and experienced. Not everyone’s a circuit gay with rock hard abs, no social life and in a committed relationship with the spinning class or squat rack. Nor is everyone a RuPaul fan. Or a fan of queer fan fiction. Or a wearer of plaid, or a rainbow-flag toting Parade marching human rights activist. Sometimes we’re just a nerdy trainspotter from Horsens, or a Warhammer fanatic who happens to like sucking dick, or a regular guy called Mads who works a 9-5 at a bank and is into heavy S&M at the weekends.
As long as someone else isn’t hurting you, who the hell are you to point-score or undermine them?
As the owner of a glory hole here in Copenhagen once told me over a friendly conversation on Grindr after I’d messaged him to say that while it wasn’t my preference, I really respected what he was doing; ‘it’s all ‘smag og behag’ in the end.
