One particular professor at my school, the type who would embrace the “militant atheist” label, steadfastly describes religion plus children as equallying child abuse. He points to cases of Jehovah’s Witness kids dying because they (or their parents) don’t allow blood products, Christian Science kids dying because their parents opt to pray them better instead of taking them to a doctor, young boys being molested by priests who can’t turn off their sexual drives no matter what God wants. He also points to the smaller things: the damage done to a young mind by parents who insist that it is good and right to hate homosexuals, who teach that science is the devil’s work and the world was intelligently created, who inflict the mental trauma and anguish of constant guilt and fear of fire and brimstone.

I don’t feel comfortable going as far as to claim that religion as a whole is child abuse, but I have seen particular manifestations that sure would qualify. I know others will say that these people would probably be bad parents regardless of religion, but I don’t know. I mean, if you don’t have the belief that god would rather have your child die than get a blood transfusion, what the hell would stop you? Seems that some bad acts really only have religious motivations.

Other things, well, as much as I hate that religious people will tell their kids that I am not even human, I kind of have this strange feeling that they ought to be allowed to. As much as I think it is wrong to hate gays, to disbelieve in evolution, to have strongly prescribed gender roles, who am I to dictate other’s values? I’m not quite a moral relativist, but I wear the uniform occasionally.

My partner, AB, is working this summer for an agricultural company. She is leading a team of twenty Mexican Mennonites and hand-weeding various canola fields. Her crew is comprised of girls and women, aged 14 to 40-something, and a few 14 year old boys who are too young to work with their dads yet. AB has a lot of fun with her crew, most of them are friendly, chatty, and good workers. The exception of course is the 14 year old boys, who, when AB talks, look at her as if she is some sort of disgusting effluvia they found on the street, but when her male co-lead talks, jump. These boys are rude to her, refuse to work, will not follow orders, sneak around, and generally act like jerks. For the male lead, though? They do whatever they can to impress him. I know, part of this is just that 14 year old boys are jerks, but a lot of it is that they have never really had to obey a woman before. No, really.

AB was asking the girls about their chores, and they all responded that on top of this job (for which their family gets at least $90 of her earnings), they have to go home, weed their family patch, cook, clean, do their brother’s laundry, and clean their brother’s rooms. Clean their brother’s rooms? Oh yeah, even their older brothers. If they are lucky, they only have a few brothers but since these families tend to have ten kids….

One of the girls asked AB if she is married. AB had decided earlier not to come out to her crew - she’ll never see them after this job and she’ll never change their mind about gay anyway. AB answered that yes, she was married. “For how long?” Nine years. “How many kids?” None.

“None?”

None.

The girl asked AB how old she was, and explained that by the time her mom was 27, she had six kids already. AB asked how many kids the girl wanted and it was like her personality turned off and a script-reading-robot turned on. “As many as the Lord will give me.” Then she went back to roguing, singing a song with the rest of the crew, a song that had a lyric (I kid you not) that said something like “We don’t believe in evolution, creation is the only truth.”

It was like all the kids had their own shiny personalities one-on-one, but that could turn off at any moment and they would turn into script-robots. Ew! Boys! I hate cleaning my brother’s room! *beep* *whirr* But a woman’s role is to be submissive to men *beep.* Babies are noisy and smelly! *clink* *boop* *beep* But my only purpose is pump out offspring until my body gives out *whirr*

I am trying to be a cultural relativist, here. They must get a great satisfaction from their religious lives, and their strict gender roles are part of those religious lives. Still, I can’t help but think that these girls are being suppressed and erased by the uniform and unchanging demands put on them. They have no chance to be or do anything else. They have no opportunity to develop interests, hobbies, selves. They’re just squashed by religion and culture, but culture that would have no reason to make these demands if not for religion.

These exchanges were enough for my partner to change her mind, to fully identify with the “religion is child abuse” side of the argument. She describes these kids as brainwashed. I want to agree, but my inner sociologist keeps coming out, saying “they are no worse than you, just different. The concept of the self is a relatively new one anyways, developed only recently in certain areas. It’s not a universal requirement for being human. And their religion is important to them, they get a sense of security and maybe even happiness from being a part of that, and a part of their culture.” Another part of me just feels so sad for all these girls, relegated to anonymous slavery and perpetual child-bearing, in the name of someone’s imaginary friend. The boys too, as privileged and arrogant as they are, only get to remain so if they fit into a pretty small definition of masculinity. Woe on the gay Mennonite, on the artist, on the musician, on the mechanically-inclined girl or the culinary-talented boy.

Last week I was in Banff while my partner organized and ran a conference on sexual offending, mainly pedophilia, there. The biggest stars in the field of researching sexual offending were there and, while I did not attend the conference, I spent a week drinking with them afterward. To my surprise, I came out of that experience a little changed. My biggest epiphany was this: more than anything, I feel sorry for pedophiles.

Now let’s be clear: I am not saying I feel sorry for child abusers or molesters, I am not diminishing the trauma of sexual abuse, and I am not excusing pedophiles who act on their urges. Well, maybe a little bit on that last point, but I’ll get there. Pedophiles are people who are sexually attracted to children, whether or not they actually act on such attractions.

So what do I mean by asserting my sympathy for pedophiles? Think of whatever it is that turns you on, that really gets you going. A particular sex, body type, sexual act, fetish object, whatever. Take a good while to really imagine that thing. Now imagine that was the only thing, the absolutely one and only thing, that turned you on. Now, what if that thing was illegal, immoral, harmful, and all around you? Tough huh?

We don’t know what causes pedophilia, but we definitely know it’s not a choice. These researchers and others are working on it, but their efforts are often stymied by the ignorant public. Here’s an example: a research group based at a Canadian university wanted to see what made pedophiles who acted on their pedophilia different from those who didn’t and victim’s rights groups got upset that these research participants would be compensated for their time. These participants would be volunteering their time, something that we pay any other participant for, to look at images of clothed, computer-generated people (no children were exploited in the making of these images), and the ignorant public phrased it as “paying pedophiles to look at porn.” If we don’t pay them, what is going to entice them to out themselves for science? Remember, these are not convicts, these are regular guys who have never actually done anything to a child. Recruiting was halted and the research was force canceled. Why was the reaction so fierce? It’s because rather than seeing them as people with a problem, people see pedophiles only as “monsters.”

Turning them into de facto monsters has important consequences. A colleague told me about an ad he saw in Germany which shows a young man sitting on a bus or train, when a family with a child gets on and sits opposite him. We hear the heartbeat of the man slowly beating faster and faster and faster until eventually the family gets off, the man covers his lap with a binder, and the voiceover says “Like children too much? We can help.” The ad was for a therapy clinic or somesuch.

This ad would be impossible in Canada or the United States, because of the fact that we prefer to see pedophiles as monsters who should be, as a friend recently told me, “dragged out and shot in the street.” Do you see the problem here? By demonizing pedophiles to the extent that we do, we make it impossible to identify them before they offend. No one with pedophilic tendencies is going to come forward himself, because he knows how vilified he is. This actually increases the amount of sexual offenses against children, because since we can’t find and treat pedophiles before they offend, we have to wait until after they have hurt someone.

So when we, as a society, make it impossible for pedophiles who have not committed a crime to get treatment, we are partially to blame when they can’t take the pressure anymore, crack, and abuse a child. It’s already a hard enough lot to be born with or to develop an inappropriate and harmful sexual attraction (this “harm,” by the way, is what makes pedophilia different from, say, homosexuality. Culture changes over time as to what is appropriate or inappropriate, but acting on homosexual urges involves consenting adults while acting on pedophilia involves people who are not able to consent). Besides being born with this, though, you can’t even tell anyone for fear of being treated like a criminal for thoughtcrime. Untreated, you may eventually succumb to the constant and devastating pressure, doing untellable harm to a child in the process, and being labeled a monster by everyone else.

So yeah, I am sympathetic. Don’t take this to mean that I am unsympathetic to victims; I hope I have been clear that acting on pedophilia is wrong and harmful. It’s not a crime to have desires, though, it’s more like an illness. What happens in places where HIV is demonized? People don’t get tested because they don’t want to know the results, and the disease spreads unchecked. We need to make it easier, not harder, for people who think they have a problem to come forward and get helped, and we can’t make this happen by stopping research and by talking about pedophiles as if they are monsters instead of who they really are: people.

I forgot to mention that I’m way on vacation this week. My partner is coordinating a conference on Sexual Offending in Banff, and I’m along for the ride. Well, the hotel room and (window) shopping, anyway. Look for new posts next week, but keep commenting on older posts and don’t forget to submit articles to the Carnival of Sex and Sexuality, or volunteer to host an upcoming edition.

At an in-law family event recently, I was expressly not introduced to a particular family friend. She is, it seems, one of those Christians who is offended by homosexuality. My partner went and said hi to this person and when her friendliness was gently rebuffed, decided she’d enjoy her time more if she spent it with other guests. No harm, no loss.

In talking about this woman later, an aunt defended her by saying “To give her credit, she is a good Christian. She firmly believes in ‘love the sinner, hate the sin.’ You can’t fault her for that.” My partner’s mom agreed, and my partner and I changed the subject.

I changed the subject because I firmly believe that “love the sinner, hate the sin” is bullshit. It is condescending and patronizing, and it excuses hating people while denying to do so.

What’s more, it’s not even Christian. Now, I’m going to do something here that I have never done before. I am going to encourage you all to go and read a sermon posted on a church’s website. It is a fabulously fantastic sermon and, although I’m only going to quote a tiny bit here, the whole thing is worth reading. In “‘Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin’ is not Christian,” Reverend Cheri DiNovo says this:

Did you know that the saying, “Love the sinner, hate the sin” has absolutely nothing to do with our faith? It is not to be found anywhere in the Bible. It was said by Mahatma Gandhi on one of his not so good days and it has been used to beat people up. It has been used to do violence to people ever since. Something Gandhi would never ever have wished. When I was sparring with the person who helped organize the rally against same sex marriage at Queen’s Park a couple of weeks past, I heard those lines from his mouth. So that’s why I thought we should talk about them. He said we should hate the sin, meaning in this case, homosexuality, but we should love the sinner. Now in the Bible there’s no place for that kind of noise. In the Bible there is no separation ever between the sinner and the sin. You can’t separate them out.

ExChristian.net does a good job of tracing the Bible verses which assure us that the sin and the sinner are one, that God does not love sinners, and that “love the sinner, hate the sin” cannot be a Christian concept.

Beyond the Bible, in life you can’t separate them out either. It’s not a coincidence that the above sermon was prompted by a talk on homosexuality: fully 60% of the Google searches on “love the sinner hate the sin” also include the term “homosexuality.” Considering there are maybe two Bible verses which may or may not condemn homosexuality (for men, nothing is said for women) that’s a heck of a lot of attention given to it, isn’t it? As long as you are defining homosexuality as a sin that deserves to be hated, how do you avoid hating homosexuals? If you hate Islam, how do you not hate Muslims? On the flip side, are you really supposed to hate war but not warmongers? Hate pedophilia but love pedophiles?

How can you hate someone’s sexual orientation to the point where you refuse to meet their partner of nearly a decade, and still claim to love them? How can you hate someone’s atheism so much that you accuse them of being immoral and threats to the foundation of a state, and still claim you love them? Easy: you redefine “love” as this: “We love the sinner by being faithful in witnessing to them of the forgiveness that is available through Jesus Christ.” That’s not love.  That’s condescension.

Furthermore, why should the actor and the action be separated? I hold the actions of President Bush against him, and I think I am justified in doing so. If he walked in here I would feel no desire to say “I hate that you started this war, I hate that you did this and that, but I love you.” No. He is the person who did all those things that I hate. I feel legitimized in hating the actor for his actions. Am I wrong?

You know what, though? If he did walk in here I would be polite to him, shake his hand and offer him a seat. If what “love the sinner, hate the sin” meant was “be nice to people you disagree with” I would have no trouble with it. It’s not, though. It means “Tell people you love them even though you hate everything that makes them who they are, that way you can exert your moral superiority and no one can call you on being a bigot.”

It is impossible to love the sinner and hate the sin. It all comes down to that. If you think it is possible, then I’m betting you’ve redefined love to something that the “sinner” wouldn’t even recognize.

Check out these great carnivals! Yes, yes, I do have posts in them (I did say they were great, didn’t I?).

The 14th Carnival of Radical Feminists, over at Meta Watershed. Some of my favorite posts from that carnival:

In Cover Girls, Take 2, at unconventional beauty, the blogger deconstructs magazine covers, noticing in particular how male celebrities are “allowed” to have lines, wrinkles, and undereye-bags, while female celebrities are digitally sandblasted into oblivion, without even pores.
How Male Violence Against Women and Children Continues to be Defined as ‘Isolated Incidents’ - whereas Female Violence is Interpreted as Deviancy, by Jennifer Drew on At the Root, is a thoughtful and well written explanation of how media outlets reinforce the stereotype that violence is innate to masculinity, and women need to be held to higher standards.

The Humanist Symposium #19 is up at Letters from A Broad. Some faves:

Right in time for Mother’s Day, (ok, ok, a day late) here is an absolutely fabulous post With Thanks to my Atheist Mother, at Elliptica. I love this one, and I hope that someday my (future) children will have similar things to say about me.

In A Question to the Carnivorous at Disillusioned Words, the blogger takes on the ethical issues of… in vitro meat. Would I eat it? I honestly don’t know.

The Carnival of the Godless #91 is up over at State of Protest. Some favourite articles:

In The Theistic Me vs The Atheistic Me, at An Apostate’s chapel, the blogger laments the lost idealism of his/her theistic days. S/he is not necessarily missing the particular elements s/he was idealistic about, but rather the ability to be so.

The Trouble With Prayer at Aaron Ross Powell is a well-written and succinct explanation of how belief in prayer problematizes belief in free will.

I just listened to the recent Point of Inquiry interview of Chris Hedges, author of “I Don’t Believe in Atheists,” in which he argues that the new atheist movement is a fundamentalist movement, on par with fundamentalist Christianity and Islam. His argument, on the podcast anyway - I haven’t read the book, is that new atheism is

“a fundamentalist mindset. What is that? It is a binary worldview of us and them, it is elevating ourselves to a higher moral plane, and relegating others to positions of moral inferiority. It is an embrace of catatrophic, even apocalyptic violence as a cleansing agent to remove human impediments towards, if not a perfected world, a world made more perfect in their vision. [...] The dehumanization of others is very much a fundamentalist position.”

He summarizes his position in this perfectly composed soundbite:

We have nothing to fear from people who don’t believe in God. We have everything to fear from people who don’t believe in sin.

While I do agree with Hedges on several matters, notably the danger in several outspoken atheists’ pro-violence attitudes, and the necessity to stop referring to “Islamic society” as a monolithic whole (although I wonder how he can say this one line after saying “I know the middle east intimately”), I disagree on most points. There are a few in particular that I want to talk about here.

To start, we need to be careful about terms. I’ve written before about the flawed application of the term “fundamentalist” to atheism. Fundamentalism is a particular religious movement that espouses a return to the origins and fundamentals of the religion. Atheism, which is by definition a lack of belief, has no original beliefs to return to and so by definition cannot be fundamentalist. Perhaps Hedges means “extremist” or “radical.” I’m not jut being a linguistic prescriptivist here, there is real importance to this word. “Fundamentalist” has a particularly religious meaning, which “extremist” and “radical” do not necessarily carry. By calling new atheism “fundamentalist” he is not-so-subtly describing it in religious terms, playing into that tired out debate that atheism is a religion too. If you want atheists to take your message seriously, as indeed he must by agreeing to be interviewed on a notoriously atheistic podcast, you can’t start out by insulting them.

Also, I’m confused by his use of the terms “atheists” (as used in the title of his book) and “new atheists.” His book title suggests that his problem is with people who do not believe in God, but his discussion focuses specifically on Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. At one point he identifies Hitchens and Harris as the new atheists, while regular atheists (those he has no problem with) are those who “don’t embrace the neo-con agenda.” If he doesn’t care about us regular atheists, why does he not believe in us? Also, if Hedges is so concerned that the Muslim world is unfairly tarred by the actions of a handful of extremists, why is he so comfortable letting all atheists take the blame for a few outspoken radicals? So, if the “atheists” he doesn’t believe in are Hitchens and Harris (who many atheists themselves disagree with), then who are the “new atheists?” He seems unclear on “atheists” and “new atheists,” defining the terms separately and then using them interchangeably. This is disingenuous, at best.

Now lets talk about sin. Hedges defines sin rather creatively, referring to people who don’t believe in it as “people who don’t understand their own flaws and their own moral corruption.” Sin, then, is the innate capacity of humans to do ill. To understand sin is to recognize your capacity to do harm and (assumedly) to try to overcome it. Sin is a religiously loaded concept, however, usually meaning things like “estrangement from god.” To sin is to act against God’s will. Thus, by necessity, someone who does not believe in a god cannot believe that any act is against its will. If we remove God out of the definition, what we are left with is Hedge’s definition of sin, which anyone else would call human nature. A secular understanding of it could be called a moral code or an ethical system. Atheists assuredly can be ethical. So what we have here is Hedges claiming that atheists do not believe in sin, a religious concept, but giving sin a secular definition. He is saying that lack of belief in God isn’t the problem, lack of ethical value is. I could agree with him on that, but by using a word like “sin” to mean ethics, he is claiming (again, without explicitly saying), that lack of ethics is an atheist trait.

But that’s the crux of my problem with Hedge’s argument. None of his criticisms tie back to atheism at all. He criticizes Hitchens and Harris, Dawkins to some extent (but mostly leaves him alone because Dawkins is British), and the general category of atheists who “embrace the neo-con agenda” without giving any examples other than Hitchens and Harris, but he can’t tie any of the problems he points out to atheism as a whole. Yes, Harris is a warmonger, and I disagree with his views on torture. Are pro-torture views typical of atheists? No, just typical of Harris. Yes, Hitchens claims that religion ruins everything, and I disagree in general terms. Is vehement anti-religiosity a necessary view to be atheist? Nope, just to be Hitchens.

Let’s compare this to the other “fundamentalist” groups he cites, certain right wing Christian groups and Islamicists. If we take the main views of anti-homosexual preacher Fred Phelps and compare them to the views of the members of the Westboro Baptist Church, I have no doubt we’d fine a close correlation. If we look at what extreme Islamicist leaders teach and what their members believe, I imagine there are several necessary doctrines.

Atheism is different. There are no necessary doctrines, there is no organized group, our most outspoken members are not necessarily seen as leaders, and there is no pressure to take what they say as truth without critically examining it for oneself. So, what Hedges doesn’t believe in is the controversial political views of several outspoken scientists who do not believe in God. He’s more than happy, though, to say that these political views are common among the members of a group which doesn’t really exist as a group at all.

Am I mischaracterizing his argument? Remember, I haven’t read the book, just listened to an interview. If you have read the book please comment and let me know what I’ve got right and what I’ve got wrong.

The Day of Silence was this past month, with students at over 7,500 American middle and high schools, and more internationally, taking a vow of silence for a day to protest the systematic silencing of gay and lesbian voices in their communities. Participants assert that homophobic name-calling, threats and violence impose a terrified silence on lgbt youth, and bring attention to this through a purposive, communal, silence punctuated with speaking cards declaring their mission.

I was thinking about this while I was organizing the carnival this month. In part, my motivation for starting a carnival of sex and sexuality was to draw attention to the blog voices whose messages were important but not being heard loudly enough. A predictable challenge to this sort of topic, however, is the liminal nature of much blogging about sex. While I wanted to avoid anything that was outright pornographic, and indeed, many submissions were of that nature, the lines are not always clear. And as soon as I had to make personal decisions on the worthiness of a particular post, I was engaged in choices about promoting or silencing certain voices.

This is a decision a blog carnival must make early on in the process: will everything submitted be posted, or only the articles chosen by the host? What criteria will the host use to make these selections? I have decided, at least for the issues published by myself, that I will use my discriminatory faculties to chose among articles. I want this carnival to have a level of professionalism and integrity that I think would be undermined by posts written in prurient or salacious ways. Prurient and salacious topics are always welcome of course (this is a carnival about sex, after all!), but I want to be careful about how such topics are presented. If you submitted an article to this carnival and I chose not to include you, please send me an email and we can talk about it.

With that said, many (but not all) of the posts highlighted in this carnival take on the topic of silencing in one way or another. I hope you enjoy the selection of writing presented, and I encourage you to submit posts on any aspect of sex and sexuality for the next issue of the carnival.

Why the Day of Silence Exists on The Day of Silence Blog

The following is an unedited transcript of a series of phone messages we received in the days following Lawrence King’s murder. It tells you all you need to know about what students endure every day and why we need the Day of Silence. This will be very disturbing for some, so we advise caution in reading on.

Domestic Violence: Call for Primary Care Screening and Gender Issues - Part I on Brain Blogger

In this article, and some to follow, I will provide a glimpse into controversies and progress in the field of domestic violence (DV). Issues of mental illness, cognitive disabilities, personality disorders, unemployment, poverty, gender, politics, the legal system, and education loom large in DV, calling for a biopsychosocial perspective.

“Nearly half of women killed by their partners are seen in primary care settings prior to their deaths, but only 4% of them were in shelters.”

Memphis Principal Outs Gay Students on Feministing

Less than a week after the annual Day of Silence action, a principal in Memphis displayed a list of couples in the high school — including gay couples, outing some of the students. The ACLU is suing the school on behalf of two of the students.

Truth Wins Out Trumps Love Won Out on The Gaytheist Agenda

Rev. Sky stated that he is often contacted by churches that are supportive of the LGBT community and need advice on how to deal with the animosity they face from others for their support. Sadly doing the right thing often comes with a price tag attached. [...] He further stated that “seeing an Ex-Gay movement here opens old wounds”. He feels that it is “only the beginning of something that is going to be much bigger”.

WTF is Feminist Porn? on Violet Blue:: Open Source Sex, with the rest at the SF Chronicle

Still confused, I asked Alison Lee, Manager of Good For Her exactly WTF is a “feminist porn film” anyway? She tells me:

“A porn film can be classified as feminist, I think, as soon as women are taken into account as viewers, and that as actors within the film, their own desires are taken into account. This means basically showing that women have just as much right to erotic entertainment as men do, and their desires and pleasure is important, too. I don’t think that feminist porn has to show women at all though, and there is a growing body of excellent smut out there starring trans people (mostly trans men so far) that is looking to show genuine pleasure, consent, and loving relationships outside of the gender binary.

Born or Learned? Sexuality, Science, and Party Lines on Greta Christina’s Blog

But I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: We should not be thinking about this question on the basis of which answer we would like to be true. We should not be thinking about this question on the basis of which answer we find most politically useful. We should be thinking about this question on the basis of which answer is true. We should be thinking about this question on the basis of which answer is best supported by the evidence.

Sask MP Apologizes for Anti-Gay Slur on Slap Upside the Head

The videotape, which was made during a Saskatchewan election campaign, showed a younger Lukiswki boasting about how he stands out as a nominee:

Let me put it to you this way: There’s As and there’s Bs. The As are guys like me; the Bs are homosexual faggots with dirt on their fingernails that transmit disease.

Finally, my own post: Pick Your Battles on Homo Academicus

It’s for this reason that I get a little frustrated with well-meaning majority group members, but it is also for this reason that us minority members need them so much. I wish they could understand my hesitancy to act, after all, if someone loses their job over this it’s going to be me, not them. If someone gets in the newspaper and starts getting threats, if shit goes down, they can walk away from the situation. I can’t walk away from being gay, my classmate can’t just stop being black.

That concludes this month’s Carnival of Sex and Sexuality. I hope you enjoyed the articles and the blogs who posted them, and I hope you’re now brimming with ideas for your own blogs and conversations. When you get something written, or find something great, make sure to submit it for next month’s carnival. Submission details are here.

Oh! I almost forgot! Today is the National Day of Prayer (also known as the National Day of Futility) for our American friends. What is an atheist to do? Well, PZ Myers is up to his regular hijinks, while The Friendly Atheist describes a number of ways non-believers can act as a positive force in the world while believers are busy with their heads in their hands. Other groups prefer to call it the National Day of Reason.

Me? I’m off to continue a tradition started last year (sadly, with no campaign this year). I’m heading over to my local Canadian Blood Services to let them drain a pint. I encourage everyone else to do the same. Donating blood actually will help others, unlike coming together to talk to imaginary friends.

I remember my first gay dance. I was seventeen, had just started dating AB and identifying as bisexual, and was thrilled and terrified to be entering this whole new world. A group of us got ready for the dance beforehand, helping each other dress, do hair, put on makeup - blue eyeshadow and sparkles everywhere. We giggled and shrieked over everything. Remember, I was seventeen. We walked an hour to the building where the dance was held - none of us had cars, and the gay dances were always held out of town - and when we entered I was confronted by sights I had never imagined. Women dancing with women, men dancing with men. Really feminine women and men, really masculine men and women. Some people in between who were not easily identifiable. Men who looked like they could be my friend’s dads, or police officers, or librarians. Women who looked like… no, not just looked like, there was my English teacher. I watched everything, danced my head off, and felt like the scales had fallen from my eyes.

I don’t really go to gay dances anymore, and I’m trying to figure out why. AB and I used to be pretty frequent attenders, we would go with our friends and have a ball. Lately though, when we go, we feel bored and out of touch. I used to never care what music was played, the important thing was that I could dance with my girl and not feel like a freak. I never used to care what the crowd was like, 17 year old flamers on this side, feminine lesbians over here, butch dykes on that side, bears over there. Now I only dance to the songs I like, don’t feel like I have anywhere neutral to sit, and feel constrained by the cliques. Now that I’m a twenty-something I notice more clearly that the demographics at the dance are heavily bimodal: this side is the teenagers, that side is the over-forties. If I want to go dancing, I can go to any bar, any night of the week, and dance with my wife. Sure, we get comments, but we’re never unsafe and rarely uncomfortable. I used to feel like I needed the dances, now I force myself to go once or twice a year just to support the community.

Ah, community. My old foe. I think the crux of it is there: when I was seventeen I felt like there was a gay community and I was part of it. Now I’m a little disillusioned and feel quite sure that there’s no such thing as a gay community. Neither is there a female community, or a Black/Jewish/Croatian community. Sure, there are communities, but no monolithic big-C Community that encompasses everyone within it. Why is this?

I think it’s simple: being gay is not a solid enough basis on its own to build any sort of important relationships on. Neither is being a woman, or belonging to a particular ethic/national group. Maybe it can be when you’re seventeen and isolated, but once you get out into the big world you realize that people within that group can be just as different from each other than people from different groups. Just because we are both attracted to women doesn’t mean we have anything at all in common. Just because I (as a woman) am attracted to women and you (as a man) are attracted to men, doesn’t really mean anything about us at all.

I think there may be a demographic or generational effect here. I mentioned that the dances tend to made up of a mix of teenagers and over-forties, maybe this is why: to an isolated teenager, the simple fact of being gay might be enough to form a friendship over. Adolescence sucks, and the drive to not feel alone is pretty strong. They need the dances to reassure them that gay people can be normal, and we can act however we want to. On the other hand, for those homos who are in their mid-life and up, they have all had very different experiences being gay than I have, and many of them have followed a similar life-course. Most of my lesbian friends of that age were all married to men for years or decades, they all have kids my age-ish. Gay men and women who grew up in the generation or two ahead of me all faced much higher hurdles to identifying as gay and living they way they wanted to. I think many of them are still afraid or uncomfortable to just go out to a bar and dance. Many are still in the closet to family and co-workers. They need the dances as a safe place they can go with their partners or to find a partner, a place they can let down their constant guard and be openly gay.

I’ve talked to many friends of my age about the dances and almost without exception they say something like “I used to go, but I don’t really go anymore. I don’t know, it’s just boring.” How could it be boring when just a few short years ago it was the thrill of my life? I think I belong to a very lucky cohort of gay/bi folks. Most of our parents know we are gay and have known since we were teenagers. We are comfortable being out at school, comfortable going on dates in public, comfortable with minor PDAs, and just generally nonchalant about our homoness. We can get married if we want to, we can have kids if we want to, jobs aren’t allowed to discriminate against us, some of our doctors are even gay. Being gay has been normalized for us, and we live normal lives. At least I, and most of my gay friends, do. Exceptions, of course, come from highly religious or traditional families. Acceptance of homo- and bisexuality has come quick. Really quick. So quick that the gap in life experiences between myself and a lesbian twenty-years my senior is so wide that we really have nothing in common. Nothing able to sustain a community anyways.

So there it is. people like me just don’t need the dances anymore, not the way teenagers and older homos need it. They can use the dances as a place to pretend to be “normal.” A place where they don’t have to hide their attractions, their identifications, their preference for dress and behaviour. The need for this is so great that they can put up with (happily) the half-and-half mix of brand-new techno and 80s pop-country that is played at the dance, trying to appeal to both demographics. I don’t need to put up with it, I already feel normal. Everyone knows I’m gay, and I don’t really care anyway. Rather than hang out with a bunch of people whose only commonality is their definition as sexually deviant, I don’t feel that definition, and so I can go hang out with people I actually have something in common with: other couples, other academics, other internet geeks, other novice foodies, whatever.