Please Stop Making Everything About Sex!
Tonight I attended a charity event here in Atlanta. It was held at a local gay bar that is located close to my house. Every Sunday they have a drag queen gospel group perform. I know it sounds odd and it is but usually they are quite good and I have a great time. Tonight the show was to benefit Childkind. It is a local charity that cares for children living with AIDS. There was to be an auction and many performers. The show started and all was fine. We start with a 300lb drag queen lip syncing to Faith Hill�s �Where are you Christmas� then on to a man who although his heart was in the right place was not funny at all and did sign language to �Somewhere Over the Rainbow� then on to a local MCC church choir. The choir was good but maybe if they had sang something that everyone knew they wouldn�t have been ignored.
Now we get to the part that sent me over the edge. They started an auction to benefit the charity. The items were obscure and the starting bids were way too high so there were no bids on the first three items. Apparently this was the reason the MC�s denigrated the auction calls by referring to the sexual attributes of the young man holding up the items. �Maybe you all will bid on this T-shirt if this fine young thing takes off his shirt and puts this one on?� The crowd of liquored up queens goes wild. This started a pattern. �Bid on this painting and he will hang it for you, if you know what I mean!!!� �Oh look, his pants are falling off. I guess it�s the candy in the front holding them up!� This went on and on. This was a charity event to benefit children who are dying! Can�t we put the sex on the back burner for just an hour or two?
Don�t get me wrong. I�m no prude, but I believe that there is a time and a place for everything. When I left it was announced that over 2,000 dollars had been raised. It was still early. I�m quite sure that much more would come in. One of the auctioneers was a local television newscaster and another was a local DJ. Do you think, given the behavior of the crowd and sexually charged auction that this event would receive mainstream press? No way! Here was a great opportunity for the general public to know that the gay community does care and does do good things and once again it becomes all about sex.
I get the same feeling about gay pride. Every year I think �well maybe this year there won�t be 25 shirtless women walking up tenth street in that nasty spectacle called the �dyke march�!� or �Please don�t put the guys with the leashes and dog collars on the news and in the paper!� But every year I see those women and every year I watch the news and am embarrassed to death by my own community. Can we just make a rule about taking off your clothes and the wearing of props for sexual titillation? Keeps it at home!! I couldn�t care less if you like to hang from the ceiling by your nipples and get zapped with a stun gun, I just don�t want to see it in public. I would love to take my 14-year-old son to pride with me but I just don�t want to have to explain that much.
I can just hear you now. You�re saying �lighten up, it�s just for fun!�. Well I think that, as a group that still experiences countless instances of violence and discrimination, we should rise above the public�s expectations. If you don�t like being lumped in with stereotypes then stop living up to them. We give the �religious right� all the ammunition that they need. They rarely have to make things up. We want people to recognize our relationships as valid family ties and we want legal support when we are discriminated against. Their argument is that a sex life doesn�t deserve support or protection. We rise up and say that it�s not just about sex it�s the way we were born. Yet if the general public stumbles into one of our events it clearly is about sex.
I think that the gay community has come a long way since the �Stonewall Riots� 30 yrs. ago. But we stopped short of the goal. We got lazy and stopped fighting. What would have happened if Martin Luther King had said �okay, let�s all relax. They said we could sit in the front of the bus.� He didn�t let them relax and they not only got the front of the bus but voting rights and job protection and hate crimes legislation. The African-American community stuck together on those issues and they won. There is so much infighting and bad behavior in the gay community that I feel certain that it will stop where it is. That is unacceptable! We need to grow up and start acting like a community that people would want to embrace and stop handing our detractors ways to turn us into the perverts that they think we are. |
