Overcoming the Feminine Stereotype
By Andy Heath
If you saw me in public, chances are you would immediately know that I'm gay. That's not because I go around wearing peacock feathers and a flexing my wrist, saying, "Girl, I LOVE that dress!" As a friend of mine once put it, I'm not flamboyantly gay, but I'm obviously gay.
Being obviously gay, people often question my manhood. They say that I can't truly be a man if I am so obviously gay. Some former friends of mine used to always call me a woman. To be honest, - and I don't think I'm just saying this to defend myself - I don't think I act particularly like a woman. Yes, it's obvious that I'm gay, but I just don't think I act like a woman.
So what does it mean to be obviously gay? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the answer to that question is. I wear men's clothes. I walk like a man (a sophisticated one). I talk like a man; I have a middle tenor voice. I just don't think I act or look like a woman.
The idea that obviously gay men are effeminate, in my humble opinion, is incorrect. I think obviously gay men act like obviously gay men. People that are in tune to issues of homosexuality can point us out. That is, as I said, because we act like gay men, not like women.
Those that would say we act like women do so because they strive to take from us the fact that we are men. They try to take our manhood away from us as a form of snobbery, saying that our sexual relations are not equal to theirs. Since these same people often do not believe that women are equal to men, they put gays in the same "inferior" category as women.
Let me make this perfectly clear. Gay men do not necessarily act like women. Our conditioning over time has led us to this highly illogical conclusion. It's amazing that we will believe anything we are told if we are told long enough. Gay men simply do not act like women - but even if we did, that would not make us inferior. Women are not inferior to men anymore more than gay men are inferior to straight men.
