Posted on 03/01/2020 2:30:58 AM PST by fwdude
As we are all told, it is wrong, wrong, wrong to stereotype gay men as sexually insatiable and indiscriminate. If you have a negative or even somewhat critical view of gay male culture, you are not entitled to notice things like this Salon article. Excerpt:
If you’ve ever pulled over to a rest area, you’ve been near men having sex. I’m one of those men, I’ve done it a hundred times; we go into the woods or a truck with tinted windows, in a stall under cold light. It never stops, not for season or time. In the winter, men trudge through snow to be with each other, in the summer, men leave the woods with ticks clinging to their legs. Have you ever stopped at a rest area and found it completely empty? There’s always one man there, in his car, waiting to meet someone new.This has been going on for a long, long time. The new ways that men meet — endlessly staring into phones, searching on hookup apps like Grindr or sites like Manhunt — haven’t changed the fact that we’re still having sex at rest areas, because they offer something different. For the man who is unsure of his sexuality, or unsure of how to tell others about it, for the man who has a family but feels new desires (or old, hidden ones) unfolding inside of him, the website and the phone apps are just too certain of themselves. They’re for gay men who want to have gay sex. Sex at the rest area, instead, abolishes identity; there’s a sort of freedom there to not be anything – instead, men just meet other men there; men who want the same sort of freedom.
The writer celebrates having sex in the bushes and public bathrooms as an existential act:
After awhile I began to develop a strange feeling at rest areas, like I was giving myself to someone. Not that I gave my full self, but that the part of myself I did give was complete. There was no pretense, no awkward conversation or dancing around whether or not I should be attracted to somebody. There was no wondering if someone was straight or gay; there was no sexual orientation at all. We were just there, together, as ourselves.
Years ago, a gay friend showed me a copy of a popular gay travel guide. It included listings for gay bars, gay-friendly hotels, gay-friendly restaurants and attractions. The usual. But it also included information about the best places for men to go to have anonymous sex in public. I thought that was so bizarre. But this was presented in the guidebook as if it were a normal thing for the gay male traveler (but not, of course, lesbians) to want to know about a city.
What I don’t get is why it is only permissible within our media culture to observe things like this guy’s celebration of the rest-stop liberty if you find it something worth celebrating, or at least morally neutral. If you read this and make a negative judgment on this guy and the culture that celebrates his kink, then you are some sort of bigot. In the past, gay friends who want nothing to do with this kind of thing have told me there’s intense pressure within the gay male community not to criticize it, at the expense of being labeled “self-hating,” or some sort of Uncle Tom.
The same dynamic happens when it comes to thug culture and young black males. It is fine to observe thug culture and celebrate its transgressive qualities (valorizing “bitches,” “hos,” pimps, murder, materialism, and so forth), but you can’t look at it and say, “That’s a degenerate way of looking at the world and other people, and anybody who embraces it is messed up.” That would be bigoted.
It all reminds me of my 16 year old self dressing up in New Wave gear, and going to the grocery store in my hometown. If anybody stared at me strangely — which would have been natural, given that most teenagers here didn’t wear get-ups like mine — I seethed inside over how prejudiced, how judgmental they were. But if they didn’t seem to notice me, that bothered me too. For teenaged me, the only acceptable response from others was some form of, “Wow, you’re so cool, you’re such a rebel. I admire you for attracting the scorn of others. They only show how bad they are by judging you negatively.”
Well, I grew up. Most of us do. And growing up means coming to understand that there are consequences for the choices we make. Of course people may judge us unfairly, but we can’t expect to defy social convention and avoid all consequences for our freely-made choices. It may strike you as unfair that the corporation you’ve applied to work for makes you put on a suit and take the ring out of your lip in the workplace, but honestly? Nobody really cares. Because we are social creatures, and have evolved to be social creatures, conformity to a certain degree is inevitable. If you don’t wish to conform, if you wish to despise and reject society and its morals and conventions, you have that right. But own it. You can’t tell ordinary people to go to hell, so to speak, and then expect them to not pass judgment on you. You can get away with that when your 16, if you have parents who love you and are willing to tolerate your nonsense, knowing that it’s just a phase, but the act wears real thin. If you dress like a thug, for example, you should not be surprised when people judge you a thug. If you seek out anonymous sex in rest stops and a significant part of your culture considers that normal and even positive, you should not be surprised when people outside your culture form a negative opinion. That’s how the real world works.
And yes, if you wear a Confederate flag on your shirt and walk into a black neighborhood, or even just into a public place where people may not appreciate the semiotical nuances of your garb, you should not be surprised when people think, however mistakenly, that you’re a racist redneck. That judgment, though, is acceptable in mainstream media culture, in a way that scorning Rest Stop Guy or Thug Teen wouldn’t be. Some rebels are more rebellious than others.
UPDATE: No, I’m not saying that Trayvon Martin brought his killing onto himself by the way he was dressed, if that’s what you’re thinking. I actually have no idea how he was dressed, other than the hoodie. I have a hoodie myself. My white, small-town, middle class 13 year old niece wears hoodies. That means nothing.
The other side, the side that demands our acceptance, I believe has a different goal. If our social customs, norms and (hate the word) culture, are forced to accept the things demonstrably outside or in conflict with ours, we then have no social customs and culture.
Nothing to bind us.
Isn’t that right, Pope Francis?
“Imprinting”
“This used to be taught in basic psychology, prob not anymore because ...” it was WHACKED then and is even more WHACKED now! (pun intended)
Sorry Charlie, we are not chickens or Tuna for that matter.
The only human imprinting I know of is on my T-Shirts!
So, aids was spread like that. The rational way to stop aids would have been to stop that kind of activity. But nooooo, it was encouraged.
“...a normal thing for the gay male traveler...”
Homosexuality has been a real confusing effort. The travel guides you mentioned are a way of trying to create an appearance of normalcy to the lifestyle. Yet the gay parades, deviate gay days at recreational facilities like Disney properties, and displaying social media actions like movies and television disparities purposely separates and tries to polarize the difference and try to force one into acceptance rather than keeping it in the bedroom in private. It is all badly mishandled.
rwood
They’ve ruined a bunch of natural areas and State parks in Florida. Can’t bring your kids there because you’re apt to run across a guy giving another guy a hummer. disgusting
Maybe most parents don’t, but some do. Witness the proud parents of 9 year old drag queens. I have a co-worker whose marriage broke up because her husband didn’t approve of their son being homosexual.
It's a digression from the main point of the article … but Trayvon Martin's clothing was irrelevant. He was killed because he assaulted a man who happened to be armed, and who resorted to deadly force in self defense when St. Trayvon pinned him to the ground and tried to pound his head into jelly on the sidewalk.
Wait, he’s married but hooks up at rest stops?
My father was a shy man. He had health issues and on a trip to visit me, he stopped at a large truck stop on I90 to use the rest rooms.
He was propositioned by a person he called “some freak” and it upset him for the entire trip. He never traveled after that episode.
“From what I see being gay is about having complete control of the other person and the ability to be irresponsible and arrogant with no repercussions”
Exactly and that is why although they claim they just want to be “accepted” what they really want is to be applauded for their homosexuality.
I remember stopping at the Boston Commons in ‘74 as I was on a trip to visit a friend in Rhode Island...lost count of how many took notice of a (back then) decent looking, well-built stranger and tried to pick me up.
I’ve been hit on many times by gay men...not just hit on but offered sexual favors right of the bat.
Drunk guy on Key Marathon on New Years Eve night offered me a BJ.
Elementary school teacher in Hyannisport, Ma offered me a BJ after i believe he tried to drug me.
16 yr old kid on the walk back to hotel in South Beach Miami at 5am offered me all kinds of favors.
Naked guy jumps out of bush at me runs circles around me repeatedly screaming “Don’t Touch ME!!” on same walk back to hotel.
You should have heard all the moaning going on out in the darkness of that beach..
those were the extreme examples but there’s been a bunch more.
Must really suck having to live with such a mental disorder.....and Dangerous.
Those fruits were lucky that i’m for the most part a peaceful guy.
I’d think it preferable to claim one was just minding his own gay business when he was set upon by a group of violent homophobes, than to admit the real circumstances of the assault
I’ve been to rest stops where the damn pay phone rings when you walk by it. It’s some homo in a froth watching from his car and calling the pay phone number. I presume a gay man on the prowl picks it up and gets directions to the hook up vehicle. I was with a buddy who didn’t get it, he was like “who the hell is calling a rest stop pay phone, should I pick it up?” I told him he would be mighty disappointed in the conversation.
Freegards
Stereotypes do not hang around unless they have an element of truth to them.
If you are a guy, try just lingering in your vehicle for a while. They’ll soon come out of the woodwork.
I've learned the hard way not to do this in rest areas! Instead, I typically park at a Dunkin' Donuts and go inside to check email there. Rest areas are creepy places. Especially after dark.
Hate to say this but from my observations many straight men would be acting like this if they could. They can’t because women don’t act like this.
If Mary and Lisa decided to go down to the local park and start blowing any guy that showed up the park would be filled with straight guys.
Men’s sexual urges are very destructive if not restrained. Women restrain straight men’s urges. Gay men are the results when these urges aren’t restrain.
Public sex, even semi-public sex, should remain illegal for gays and straights. A person’s right to have sex does not trump the right of the rest of society not to see that sex.
As far as the health factor I would agree with you. Even though gay men are much more likely to get diseases and such they are a miniscule portion of the population. If we are going to say government can interfere with the activities of adults because of how much those activities can drain the health system then we empower government to tell us what we can eat and how much we should exercise. Because obesity related health problems are a much bigger drain on the health system then gay men.
In the 1980s “gay related immune deficiency” (GRID) was renamed AIDS in order to disguise the genus and largest impacted group contracting the disease.
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