Monday, September 24, 2007

reason 2362374328 why i never joined a queer organization in college



okay, i hadn't figured out i was gay, but if i had... i would have started my own GLBT organization: "'mos with some fucking common sense."

read this drivel by the columbia queer alliance. um, if they are powerless to speak for themselves, then isn't it up to us to speak about and for them? silence is death, dodos. if there are people being harmed (like, not just being called a "queer" but being EXECUTED), it's not a time to get all p.c. about semantics. priorities. priorities!

i think that little turd crapped out by columbia totally surpassed the jada pinkett smith "heteronormative" incident at harvard in terms of being hopelessly tangential and unimportant. yay. columbia can be #1. go columbia!

4 comments:

QP said...

I would join your group, just to be in an organization with the words "fucking common sense" in the name.

Even though I am straight and have nearly no common sense.

Unknown said...

To be fair, they have an actual point. And I agree with them.

No, seriously. I do. I mean, we're all talking about men and women who love members of the same sex, but Persian does not have the linguistic or cultural references to these as a specific class of people, and a lot of Persians don't see themselves as gay/not gay. It's not just PC mumbo-jumbo.

There's a lot of sex that happens between members of the same sex, particularly in cultures where the sexes are more heavily separated. Participants might engage in same-sex practices and be punished if caught, but not classified as "homos" and subject to the same kind of social rejection as in the West.

This is evident in the fact that one of Ayatullah Khomeini's fatwas upon entering office (1980, I believe) was to permit trans surgeries while also condemning to lash or death those who engaged in cross-gender sex. To this day, those who are caught in man-on-man action are punished or pressed to take surgery to become a woman.

Western ideas are filtering in (as they always have) and the idea of homosexuality is arriving, but it's a new thing.

Of course, Ahmenijad is being totally disingenuous; he knows what fags are and is being a gasbag and a liar. But culturally speaking, most Iranians don't understand full-time gay lives as a kind of "thing" you do. Everyone eats, drinks water, marries, has children, prays; some people might tarry and do odd, socially unacceptable things, but that doesn't mean they stop eating or drinking water or getting married and having children. She drinks, he has sex on the side; they are punished but that doesn't make her "a Drinking Person" or him "a Gay", there are no existing cultural traditions.

FM said...

you said:

Of course, Ahmenijad is being totally disingenuous; he knows what fags are and is being a gasbag and a liar.

they said:

President Ahmadinejad's presence on campus has provided an impetus for us all to examine a number of issues, but most relevant to our concerns are the complexities of how sexual identity is constructed and understood in different parts of the world.

considering a-dog's gasbagginess and flat out lying and the fact that gays have been beaten, tortured, and hung (ran across an iranian blog with pictures of gays with lash marks on their backs - i can't find it right now), i don't think examining the meaning of sexual identity in iran is "most relevant to our concerns."

although, yes, they are and you are probably right about the cultural differences. i just thought their last paragraph was "WTF?!"

FM said...

one more thing... did andrew sullivan actually use the term "pomo"?

pfft!

i think that term is as ridiculous and fake hip as the term "netroots" (see emily1's rant)