ARE GAY MEN WOMEN'S NEW OPPRESSORS?
I went to my first pride parade when I was 7. Yes SEVEN! When I was little I was obsessed with Pier 39/Fisherman's Wharf in SF, so much so that I insisted that my dad take me there every weekend. While I didn't make it there quite as much as I would've liked to, I did go an awful lot. One day when we were walking to that area we saw a parade. Now, anyone who has ever lived in SF knows that they have at least one parade every week, I'm not even joking, so this wasn't anything unusual. As my dad and I made our way through the crowd, trying to get on the other side of the street, we ended marching in the parade for awhile. Since I didn't know what it meant to be gay, I concluded that the parade was for people who liked rainbow flags, and pleather.
Fast forward to a handful of years later, when I was taking a summer course at Nordstroms which taught middle schools girls all the techniques of being a model. It included make-up classes, hairstyling, how to walk on the runway and even a fashion show at the end of the course as part of our graduation. An upscale local salon decided to do all of our hair for free, and as part of it two male stylists came to sort of give us a sneak preview. At that time I was old enough to start to understand that some people were attracted to the same sex, and I kinda caught on that our hairstyles were in that group. Overall though, what I remember more than anything is that they absolutely flaunted over me. They could not stop talking about how adorable and pretty I was, and they made a much bigger deal of me then they did with any of the other girls. I remember how good they made me feel. As someone who mostly had had up until that point negative abusive interactions with men, and was a racially mixed girl who felt that I couldn't be pretty, its was a big (and unfortunately rare) deal for me to be treated like that.
Its probably no wonder then that a handful of years after that I would start to become interested in LGBT rights work. The gay men I had interacted with always were so respectful, celebratory, and positive towards me, that I wanted to support them too. I imagine this is the exact reason a lot of straight women became involved in LGBT rights. This feeling continued through college in which myself and my friends like to attend the dances put on by our LGBT center (they had the best college dances!) as well as through having friends from that community. Given that San Diego was very conversative, and I was from the "liberal" bay area, I had more than one closeted gay man sort of gravitate towards me and kinda hint at his secret, just assuming I wouldn't think it was a big deal.
However, the more I was in that community and the more men I met in that community I realized two things. That they had some of the most amazing respectful men that I'd ever met, and they also had a lot of misogynistic assholes who have said some of the most disgusting things about women's bodies that I've personally ever heard. I realized that misogyny exists in that community, yet for some reason they as men are being giving passes in that regards, even though there's a lot of things that's been done by Gay men towards women that straight men aren't able to get away with. I started to find that my views on supporting them were becoming ever more increasingly difficult to maintain while simulatenously devoting my life to women's and girl's rights.
For instance, there's been more than one gay man, I can personally think of two cases off the top of my head (one woman appeared on Oprah the other was written about in Vogue), in which they chose to marry straight women, which in itself is fraud seeing that they could never love her and she thought that he did. In both cases these men then chose to cheat on their wives with other men, became infected with HIV and then infected her. Now their ex-wives are living with the consequences of their exs actions. Or the countless women who married gay men thinking they were straight only to find out a number of years later, and a number of children later that they weren't capable of every really loving them and more importantly they knew that a long time before they had proposed. One woman, a commentor on a news story about this topic and who had been in that situation had a theory that men who knew they were gay were marrying straight women so that they could have biological children. Some people might say that it's only cause they weren't allowed to marry another man, but keep in mind that a man or anyone who knowingly commits fraud, sleeps with someone under false pretenses, and decides to cheat on them numerous times is most likely a psychopath. Same-sex marriage can't fix that.
Said another way it's entirely possible for gay men to victimize women and quite easily, because in the context of our society their gender (being male) puts them in an immense power position over women, and in some cases their race (if they're white) puts them in an even more extreme positions of power over women of color. This has played out in a lot of ways. Women being sexually harassed or sexually assualted by gay men (see the story below) and it not being taken seriously because he's clearly not sexually attracted to her, so its no big deal. Then we have the more recent cases of surrogacy and adoption. The people who have been pushing for surrogacy to become legal across the U.S. are in fact not straight couples who are having trouble conceiving as most people would probably assume it is, but rather from gay men and their advocacy groups. Surrogacy has allowed gay men to go overseas in which they quite literally purchase a women of color from the developing world of India,Thailand or elsewhere, and then take her child after she's given birth. Most of these women aren't able to read or write and can't even understand the contracts they are signing. They've never heard of IVF, and aren't even able to understand how they are going to get pregnant, which really shows the level of exploitation. It also usually involves a donor egg, which means there is another woman who had her body violated and possibly could've died in order for these children to be created. Then you have the issue of these children being raised without a mother, seeing that their Mother was thrown away, and that being hailed as the "new normal" for families, somethting that I as a woman am horrified by. Moms are the center of the family, you can't just get rid of us!
Then you might argue well everyone is entitled to children, which first off no one is entitled to another human being. Second you could say that adoption is a great way to give a child who has no home a chance, at one, which I would absolutely agree with if these children were actual orphans. The problem is in almost every adoption case the Mom is a woman who is either poor, young, of color or all of the above. She tends to have no support system in her life, and the adoption agencies and the adoptive parents not only exploit her entire situation but a lot of these adoptions turn out to be through illegal practices. Then there's foster care children, which once again we're getting into taking kids out of homes that are usually poor, but aren't always abusive, instead of helping their families so that they can fix whatever issues are going on.
When you look at the images of gay men in the media and those being pushed by their advocacy groups you are not seeing them pushing co-parenting in which a lesbian couple or a straight woman are having a child with a gay man or gay men. The stories you hear of adoption are always those in which them seem to either have a baby, or a child adopted from another country, versus an adoption in which say the child's mother passed away, and the only immediate family is an uncle who happens to be gay. In a case like that I think we could all agree that it's best to keep children with biological relatives if they are willingly and capable of taking care of the child regardless of the person's sexual orientation then to say place them with strangers. However, those aren't the stories you are seeing or hearing. We're seeing a lot of celebrities in general using and pushing surrogacy, which in itself is already very problematic and disturbing, but then the idea that on top of that you don't even think a child needs a mom is really upsetting. You're seeing the home void of the mom, which means she was used for her purposes of providing them with a child and then being thrown out. I personally think that the reason so many gay men are opting for surrogacy isn't even so much that they want biological children, as much as they want to be able to exert that they are able to control, dominate, and own a woman's body. Straight men usually express that domination through violent acts of rape or domestic violence, but since gay men typically don't do any of that stuff towards women, this is their way of showing that domination and control and thus exerting to society that they are in fact "men". Since men being in charge of women, specifically women's bodies, is typically how we as a society measure masculinity, you can see not only why surrogacy is so detrimental to women, but why gay men are jumping at that opportunity.
I think somewhere in all of this is a lot of confusion, because some of the only men I've ever met who do women's rights work (at least back in the day) were gay men, and yet when it comes to these issues I haven't heard anything coming out of the LGBT community other than support for all of this. I don't know if it's one of those things where it's a handful of activists are pushing this for the whole community, or if it's a general consensus within the community, but I'm not seeing a lot of specifically gay men writing articles or speaking out against all of this. That's something that is needed. It's sad to think that the one group of men who used to support us and make us feel better about ourselves, have now become the ones who are exploiting us and abusing us the most. No one is entitled to a woman's body and no one is entitled to take a child away from it's mother, that should be something that shouldn't even need to be explained.
***This article was written by a gay man who fights misogyny that is coming from gay men:
http://everydayfeminism.com/2013/03/gay-mens-sexism-and-womens-bodies/
Then you might argue well everyone is entitled to children, which first off no one is entitled to another human being. Second you could say that adoption is a great way to give a child who has no home a chance, at one, which I would absolutely agree with if these children were actual orphans. The problem is in almost every adoption case the Mom is a woman who is either poor, young, of color or all of the above. She tends to have no support system in her life, and the adoption agencies and the adoptive parents not only exploit her entire situation but a lot of these adoptions turn out to be through illegal practices. Then there's foster care children, which once again we're getting into taking kids out of homes that are usually poor, but aren't always abusive, instead of helping their families so that they can fix whatever issues are going on.
When you look at the images of gay men in the media and those being pushed by their advocacy groups you are not seeing them pushing co-parenting in which a lesbian couple or a straight woman are having a child with a gay man or gay men. The stories you hear of adoption are always those in which them seem to either have a baby, or a child adopted from another country, versus an adoption in which say the child's mother passed away, and the only immediate family is an uncle who happens to be gay. In a case like that I think we could all agree that it's best to keep children with biological relatives if they are willingly and capable of taking care of the child regardless of the person's sexual orientation then to say place them with strangers. However, those aren't the stories you are seeing or hearing. We're seeing a lot of celebrities in general using and pushing surrogacy, which in itself is already very problematic and disturbing, but then the idea that on top of that you don't even think a child needs a mom is really upsetting. You're seeing the home void of the mom, which means she was used for her purposes of providing them with a child and then being thrown out. I personally think that the reason so many gay men are opting for surrogacy isn't even so much that they want biological children, as much as they want to be able to exert that they are able to control, dominate, and own a woman's body. Straight men usually express that domination through violent acts of rape or domestic violence, but since gay men typically don't do any of that stuff towards women, this is their way of showing that domination and control and thus exerting to society that they are in fact "men". Since men being in charge of women, specifically women's bodies, is typically how we as a society measure masculinity, you can see not only why surrogacy is so detrimental to women, but why gay men are jumping at that opportunity.
I think somewhere in all of this is a lot of confusion, because some of the only men I've ever met who do women's rights work (at least back in the day) were gay men, and yet when it comes to these issues I haven't heard anything coming out of the LGBT community other than support for all of this. I don't know if it's one of those things where it's a handful of activists are pushing this for the whole community, or if it's a general consensus within the community, but I'm not seeing a lot of specifically gay men writing articles or speaking out against all of this. That's something that is needed. It's sad to think that the one group of men who used to support us and make us feel better about ourselves, have now become the ones who are exploiting us and abusing us the most. No one is entitled to a woman's body and no one is entitled to take a child away from it's mother, that should be something that shouldn't even need to be explained.
***This article was written by a gay man who fights misogyny that is coming from gay men:
http://everydayfeminism.com/2013/03/gay-mens-sexism-and-womens-bodies/
