Lessons Learned From ‘She Called Me Woman’ (Entry 9)

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LESSON 9

From the chapter, ‘What Is Happiness’, ZH says:

“People focus too much on the sex that others have and forget the fact that those people are human beings.”

This is the bane of our existence as gay people: the preoccupation straight people have with the sex we have.

We have heard it all: from the eyeroll-worthy taunts about how they need to protect their nyash with the blood of Jesus, to the very tired perplexity about the joy gay men derive from sticking their dicks into an ass or having a dick getting stuck into their asses. From the outraged disbelief that there are women out there with vaginas they do not want penetrated by a man’s penis, to the snide “Why not come to a real man” entitlement that comes from learning that lesbians use sex toys for penetrative sex.

Straight people never stop wondering about the sex of gay people have. And by so keeping us under this perpetual haze of sexualization, they forget that we are human beings.

Boy George once said: “There’s this illusion that homosexuals have sex and heterosexuals fall in love. That’s completely untrue. Everybody wants to be loved.”

There is this monopoly they seem to think gay people have on sex that they turn into a distortion that demonizes and dehumanizes us. Forgetting that all the terms existing in the English Language that intimates too much sex comes from the heterosexual world: “playboy”, “Don Juan”, “Lothario”, “whore”, “slut”, “womanizer” – all these are words that originated from the overly sexual nature of straight people.

And somehow, gay people are just the worst for the sex they have.

The day straight people stop seeing us as sex-craving animals whose only definition of their sexuality comes from how fast they can get into the pants of everybody, themselves included, that will be the turning point in this fight for the recognition of LGBT rights.

Written by Pink Panther