ugh so turns out queer activism is horrible

I went to this discussion organized by my school’s Pride group on allyship, because basically I figured it would, I don’t know, provide ways to approach supporting friends who are having a really hard time with their sexuality in really traditional households, or at least something like “we are trying to organize a group to educate law enforcement about transgender people, and we need someone with a van and someone to run the website”. Because, you know, I benefit from all this activism and I probably should be somehow giving back, right?

Nope. Presenters were two young white gay dudes who spent most of the time talking about how hard it was to be a masculine gay guy when everyone assumes you’re going to be passive and effeminate. Everyone who wasn’t a gay guy left immediately at this point. I was tempted, but my seat was really far from the door.

Anyway, then they wrote a list of negative gay stereotypes on the board, as follows (verbatim):

  • effeminate
  • drug addiction
  • HIV+
  • promiscuous

Which… okay, fuck the entirety of that list for so many reasons. I was going to start arguing with them, but I’d already argued with a shitload of the other stuff they’d said and it didn’t make any difference and clearly anyone who wasn’t actively getting up to leave was totally engrossed by all this. I made about a dozen people push their chairs in to leave. While I was leaving, a guy started saying something about how hard it was for him to be gay and blind and Arab at the same time, and the presenter shut it down with an anecdote about a gay bar he’d visited while travelling the world.

And these two are both social workers! Like, in addition to the activisty stuff, this is their job! And still they can’t produce anything useful or helpful or not really jarringly offensive. Apparently real-life social justice is just like Internet social justice, but marginally more awkward to step out of the room.

31 Notes/ Hide

  1. canucks-at-heart said: I…really don’t get it though…? the guys should have included other LGBT demographics? and being social workers they should have known better?
  2. morethis said: UBC Pride is pretty much the worst.
  3. namemefish said: The one at my school talks about “radical queer” a lot. /insertseyeroll I went to the meeting once and all I could do was wait to get out of there.
  4. oldkingcrow said: My brother does a lot of volunteer work and apparently the “lets make this more about me” attitude is a pretty common among the students majoring in Social Work. Kind of disheartening.
  5. sanfo said: This… Is awful, but not surprising. At Mount Royal, in Calgary, the queer group (called Diversity!, or something) handed out pamphlets that said homophobia = heterophobia, because hate is hate. Good thing they self-destructed.
  6. how-to-kiss-distinctly-american replied:
  7. convincingindie said: ugh. the worst.
  8. vaguelyus reblogged this from jakke and added:
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  9. undercoverangryangel said: o.O
  10. chrishasaflavor said: Well holy shit, Batman.
  11. anedumacation said: wow.
  12. jakke posted this