Queer 101: A Guide for Heteros

By Cameron Scott, AlterNet. Posted March 1, 2007.

As last November's election neared and a Democratic victory appeared more and more likely, Republicans warned that Speaker Pelosi would impose her "San Francisco values" on average Americans. Americans to the right of the left coast felt in their gut that San Francisco values were a shameful thing, without really knowing what they were.

Even San Franciscans scratched their heads a bit. The local paper's sex columnist, Violet Blue, pointed out that it meant sex. She argued that the twist in conservatives' panties resulted from San Franciscans' sex-positive outlook. Blue offered a paean to some of the city's sexual rituals, several of which, such as the Folsom Street Fair, are primarily gay.

But even Violet Blue didn't tell the whole truth: The phrase "San Francisco values" came directly from the right's well-worn gay-baiting playbook. In a story called "San Francisco Values Front and Center," the right's faithful warrior Bill O'Reilly shifts from talking about the city's ousting of ROTC clubs from several high schools into a discussion of gay marriage. He includes standard playbook comparisons of gay unions to polygamy, "triads" and incest.

So why hasn't anybody called a spade a spade? Many in Middle America have come to believe homosexual values must be abhorrent, based on the right's insistence that all homosexuals are radical perverts.

Blindness to difference has allowed the right wing to invent a sinister stereotype of "homosexuals" that has only tenuous links to reality. Radical right groups generate bogus statistics by conflating gay men and lesbians (the claim that homosexuals are more likely to have STDs should more accurately say that lesbians have the lowest rates of STDs of any group) and gay men and men who molest boys (imagine if they consistently referred to men who molest girls as "straight men"). The right gets away with their smears because it has persuaded Americans that sex and desire have no role in polite society.

Queers understand that desire, like hunger, is inexorable and beyond reasoning with. Policy should work with that assumption, not against it or it will always fail. And as the good clean fun of bootlicking at the Folsom Street Fair demonstrates, the only aspect of sexual behavior that is subject to moral judgment is consent between adults. What would happen if every minute and every dollar spent limiting the rights of gays and lesbians was instead spent on prosecuting sexual harassment, rape and child molestation?

But before we can even begin to think about policy changes, the public needs to become much more educated about queer culture -- a difficult task considering that even San Franciscans, who are tolerant of queers, often don't understand the nuances of their lifestyles.

And because queer culture is vibrant in San Francisco, any meaningful discussion of it would have to include a variety of perspectives and a list of exceptions to every rule. After all, taking exception to the rule is a -- or the -- fundamental aspect of queer culture. This is especially true of lesbian culture, transsexualism or any other kind of gender deviance, which are not even mentioned in Blue's tribute.

After all, Speaker Pelosi is far less likely than the local sex columnist to know exactly what queer values are, and we certainly can't expect her to trumpet queer values to Middle America if she doesn't fully understand them. So, I offer Speaker Pelosi -- and you -- the following primer to help understand the people behind the values and what they stand for.

Begin the binaries

It is important to remember that the gays whose greatest desire is to get married and live behind a white picket fence don't represent the whole community. Some of us enjoy being different and indicate as much by calling ourselves queer. In the world of gay women, those of us who are distinctly proud of (and political about) our differences are more likely to refer to ourselves as dykes. Those who don't like to ruffle any feathers generally prefer the less-threatening term "lesbians."

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Cameron Scott is a senior editorial fellow at Mother Jones. His work has also appeared in the Texas Observer, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, and AlterNet. He blogs at Gender 3.0.

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