The comments on the site are very interesting. I particularly liked this one from "Del" on the most recommended list of comments: "You don't need to cling to Queer Theory to be gay, you don't need to cling to Fundamentalist Christian Theology to be straight. You don't need to live in San Francisco to be gay, you don't need to live in Wyoming to be straight. You don't need to be a professional gay, you don't need to be a professional straight. You don't need to be gay to be sexually attracted to be men, you don't need to be straight to be sexually attracted to women. You don't need to be sexually attracted to men to be gay, you don't need to be sexually attracted to women to be straight. You don't need to reject gays to be Christian, you don't need to reject Christians to be gay. You don't need to be straight to be Christian, you don't need be Christian to be straight. Before you lived a "gay" life, you were telling others how to live theirs. Before you knew what it meant to be "gay", you were defining it for everyone else. Before you live a "straight" life, you are telling others how to live theirs. Before you know what it means to be "straight", you are defining it for everyone else. Before you experience "Christianity", you are telling everyone else what that experience is. Life is not a theory. Live life.
You say, I think Del might be suggesting a post-gender life (as I've poked at on hubski here and there). Words and categories and theories are far too limiting to accommodate all of us. Del seems to prefer individual definitions for gay/straight/Christian/. However many people prefer stricter definitions for words - that's why "gay marriage" seems so obvious to some people and seems like a complete impossibility to others. I'm kind of hesitant to be too certain about anything.I dunno if I agree with it
Yes, it would be hard to argue for this one: You don't need to be sexually attracted to men to be gay
-- How can you describe yourself as gay if you are not sexually attracted to your own gender? Maybe there is a cultural definition of gay? Is Christianity a religion or also a culture, preference, lifestyle, philosphy?
While I admire the sentiment - living life according to one's own principles - "individual definitions" of collective terms seem, well, utterly useless. If I have my own idea of what my being gay means, that's fine, but if I try to talk with someone else it just won't work, as Raxyn suggests. It's like if I decided that "cheese" referred to pigeons. No-one would understand me.
Except that most people agree that there is a continuum running from 100% gay to 100% straight with most people somewhere in between - so how can you define gay as a collective term when there are 50 shades of gay and you can live your life redefining it from time to time. It won't work if they insist that gay means only one kind of gay.If I have my own idea of what my being gay means, that's fine, but if I try to talk with someone else it just won't work
Oh, I'll agree with you there. I'd never insist on essential definitions of sexuality (indeed, I'm aware that the notion of categorisation based on sexual identity is a historically recent construction). I'm just caught on your mention of "individual definitions". If I define "gay" as attraction to the same sex - let's just say a woman attracted to a woman (avoiding for now the debate re: gender and sex) - and you don't think it is necessarily defined by attraction to the same sex, then you and I will not understand each other. You will say that you are gay in conditions in which I will deny your gayness. My point is just that there is an inherent problem in asserting that you are gay if there is no criterion at all for gayness.
Yes, as I say above, that was one point in Del's comment that I had specific problems with. If, as he says, "You don't need to be sexually attracted to men to be gay" -- then I'm not sure what his gayness is based on - possibly other factors, as there is a whole associated lifestyle. Let me add that you don't need to be believe in God to be Jewish. (Hitler certainly didn't care what your belief was.) I suspect you also don't need to accept Jesus as your personal savious to consider yourself Christian. You may not need to support Obama to be a Democrat..... and so on. Labels are convenient ways of categorizing people and I think Del was showing how REDUCTIONIST all these labels were --- but for myself, I think I would have to be attracted to my gender to call myself gay or bi. On the whole I liked his comment but I agree that minimally one should have some attraction to the same sex to consider yourself gayish.