I wrote a piece last week about the polling results and use of the term "homosexual" and how it is both offensive and detrimental to the gay cause. Of course, sometimes the problem is when gay people use it themselves. I was reading this week's NYTimes magazine and came across this passage, from a piece about Broadway play director David Cromer:
The goal that day was for Cromer to live it up and buy a suit for his Broadway opening. Two openings, actually. "Broadway Bound," the sequel to "Brighton Beach Memoirs," was to open seven weeks later; together, they were marketed as "The Neil Simon Plays." Joining us was Cromer's old friend David Korins, a tall, trim scenic designer wearing jeans and a Paul Smith jacket. Offhandedly stylish, he had been recruited to exert an encouraging influence on someone who was not born to shop.
"This is just another way in which I'm a terrible homosexual," Cromer fretted in advance of our outing. "I should have nice clothes, I should be in better shape, I should cook, I should have a nice apartment. I live like a college student. I always have. It's a very arrested thing. It's hard to grow out of that."
Two issues here. The first is all of the "should" stereotypes, which keeps the stereotypes coming about what gays "should" wear, do, eat, etc. As someone who is a rapid sports fan, including football, hockey and college basketball, and who isn't gaga over Lady Gaga, I tend to find these stereotypes both wrong and limiting. On the flip side, when I was in high school, I was an excellent clarinet player, and then learned to play the tenor saxophone. I looked at picking up flute in part because I loved performing in musical pit orchestras, and you often need to be adept at all of those instruments to handle woodwind parts. But a member of my own family told me flutes weren't for boys, they were for girls, and that was that. So I never learned to play the flute because of gender expectations, a.k.a. a bad case of the "shoulds" that Cromer is promoting here.
On the second issue, a lot of my friends who refer to themselves as "homos" or "homosexuals", usually in jest as Cromer does, are the same ones who complain about the media's or general public's use of the term. There's even a widely-attended regular happy hour here in DC called "Homo Hotel". If folks are wondering where their friends, family, the media and the general public gets that it's okay to use the term, those are two likely sources. I've heard the same issue around the word "nigger" used by African-Americans as a friendly term in pop culture while it's considered offensive otherwise. I can't speak to the issue around that term, but to my fellow gays, it's something to think about in our own actions.
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