The Land Of The Free?

The one and only Internet forum which I occasionally participate in has a thread currently that ... puzzles me. Makes me feel a kind of combination between general sadness, slightly perturbed, somewhat agog, and a tad bit of "oh for the love of all that is holy, is this STILL so shocking, people?!??"

There was a poll recently taken in very well known magazine (that is pretty embraced by the readership it targets) that identified the "Gayest Cities in America". I've read that article and, taking into account the way in which they came to their final list, I have no issues with it, informationally. If the criteria they've listed is how they choose to measure to come up with "most gay city", that's their call. It's their sandbox, after all. (Now WHY they'd want to assign that - or ANY - label is a puzzler to me, but anyway ...)

No, my hackles were somewhat raised by the responses in the thread I mentioned in the first sentence of this posting. Here's a bit of how I wanted to respond - unedited for language so fair-warning:

*without trying to start a turf war and hopefully not coming off as being overly offended or offensive*

May I ask for what-all the rest of the country expects to see when they travel to SF that would identify all 49-square miles of it as flamingly gay? Do you expect to see individuals of the same sex groping each other in public? Blocks and blocks of florists with lisps and weak wrists swishing down the street hitting on anything that moves? Piles of writhing flesh in the back of cable cars? Traveling flocks of dykes on bikes? People on leashes wearing nothing but ass-less chaps and feather boas? Hoards of Ethel Merman and Barbra Streisand wannabes starting slap-fights with Liza Minelli and Bette Midler twins?

'Cause while its true SF does have weekend events (*ahem* the Folsom street fair) that celebrate those suggestions, most of my friends who are gay enjoy the same simple pleasures that a lot of non-gay types do ... liiiiike wandering through farmers markets, having a beer on the wharf, raising children together, having brunch with friends in a busy cafe, catching the symphony for cheap while they go through rehearsal, going to watch the Giants loseerrrr play, etc.

I realize that there's a long-standing "SF is gay" stereotype but come on - have we not evolved just a little bit? I'm just saying that, to me, identifying any city as "the gayest" seems ... kinda ... well, it makes me feel sad, just like identifying any city as "the ugliest", "the fattest", "the dumbest", or "most bigoted". All of those labels say far more about those assigning them than those receiving them, and what they say is "close-minded, judgemental, elitist, snooty". "SF is gay" may have been shocking when being gay was shocking - somewhere around 1975, I guess. That was about the same time that I realized that the word "fag" was in the dictionary ("a student at a British public school who is required to perform menial tasks for a student in a higher class"). I've just checked and it's 2010. Is being gay STILL all that ... different? I mean - really?

(It was after the word "snooty" in that last paragraph that I realized writing a response like this would get me banned for life from ever even USING a computer again. That's why I'm writing this here. If I HAD continued, it'd probably read something like this ...)

And while I understand that a "gay" magazine conducted this poll so it can't possibly be viewed as slanderous (I could argue that too), let's reverse this for just a second. Hmmmm waddya know - I found my imaginary latest edition of "Big Sky Blurb" and wow - here's an totally made up article entitled "Most Close-Minded Cities in America". Oh and the completely unreal "Wyoming Monthly" has a fictional scribble labeled "Places Where Gay People Don't Exist" and hey!!! - it's empty! MY GOD - "THEY" ARE EVERYWHERE!!!!! And, while I've got my stereotype busting rant-pants on, here's a little shout-out to Billy Joe Bob and his cousin/brother and Peggy Sue and her sister/aunt - ya' ain't exactly the sun, moon, and stars to the opposite sex so don't flatter yourself in thinking that the gay community wants ya', either.

In my mind, this ugly label - no matter which city it is attached to - is the same kind of biasedness and bigotedness that is somehow tied together with the life of Emmett Till. Ya' probably don't know that name, but I remember researching the story of Emmett back in the early 90s while working on a high school textbook. Emmett Till was a 14-year old black teenager from Chicago who was visiting his great-uncles home in Money, Mississippi in 1955. Emmett ... who, again, was all of 14 years old ... whistled at a white woman. Nothing more. He whistled at a white woman. But this was the deep south and this was 1955. Emmett was abducted and he was lynched. His killers - white men - were acquitted the following month. His mother decided to have her son presented in a glass-topped casket ... she wanted the world to see what had been done to her child, whose behavior had been oh so offensive that he was required to pay for it with his life. His murder and the images of his body in that casket helped to galvanize the civil rights movement.

Is "Billy Joe Bob" so insecure about being straight that he has need to be concerned about what his neighbors are doing and who they're doing it with? If "Peggy Sue" winds up living in a "gay"borhood, does she need to move?

Or perhaps the better question is this: Is it possible that people who are perceived as somehow different from "us" (whomever "we" are) could want the same freedoms as everyone else ... that they'd like to hold hands with those close to them without being taunted? That they'd like to perhaps kiss their loved ones hello or goodbye without drawing stares? That they'd like to have families and to celebrate and mourn and laugh and cry in the same situations and the same locations as anyone else, sans label?

Can you possibly think of reasons that people who are perceived as somehow different from "us" WOULDN'T want - or shouldn't get - those freedoms?