Saturday, April 13, 2013

The LGBT Sandwich

Yeah, yeah. I know that lots of people who are attracted to people of the same sex hate the acronym as much as I do. So, probably, do lots of men who think of themselves as women, or women who want to be men. And so on.

But really-- it's the accepted term now, so I think it's fair to criticize it.

And what struck me about it recently is that it really means everybody except heterosexuals who are happy with the sex they were born into. It's a clumping together of various persuasions which are very different and whose only commonality is that they are not the traditional norm.

Exclusion, anybody?

(I remember, the first time I heard the terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual", as a kid, I thought the first meant someone who sleeps with lots of people and the second meant someone who stuck to one lover. I'm kinda proud of the guess, in retrospect. I also remember that the first time I became aware of the sexual meaning of the term "gay" was when I was about ten, in school, when we were learning a poem with the lines:

And all the world went gay, went gay
For half an hour in the street today

Lots of kids started tittering and the teacher started probing as to why they were tittering, obviously curious as to what their level of knowledge was. I don't think I even really got it then, though.)

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