Dan Savage Stereotypes Gay People

Dear Dan Savage,

I just heard your piece on “Fresh Air” and I hope you will give me an opportunity to voice my disappointment with a few of your comments. As an LGBT person, I am, of course, very grateful for the work you do and the ways that it helps LBGT youth who are in need of hope about their futures. However, I am very frustrated with the stereotyping of gay people that you engage in. In your segment on “Fresh Air”, and in other places throughout your work, you regularly equate youthful gender non-conformity with gayness. You talk about the “gay” behaviors you engaged in as a child—liking musical theater, being friends with girls, being in to typically girly interests—as indicators of your adult sexual orientation. While it may have been the case in your experience that these typically gay behaviors and interests were bellwethers of your homosexuality, you have a tendency to generalize this viewpoint, equating gender non-conformity with gayness. This widely held belief that gender inverted behavior is linked to homosexuality—girly boys must be gay men, boyish girls must be lesbians—is damaging and counterproductive for a number of reasons:

First, it promotes gay stereotypes in a way that hurts gay people. It hurts them because it sends strong messages to gay youth about what gayness looks like, how to be gay properly, and what their interests and behaviors should be. In those fragile years of trying to find themselves, many young gay men engage in performances of gayness based on extremely limited ideas about what gay men are like. What if you are a gay man who likes football, hates to talk, has no female friends, thinks Glee is stupid? There is no place for these people in your worldview, and they end up not fitting into the world twice over, once as gay and again as not being able to be gay “properly.” I see this all the time in young gay men—exaggerated performances of “faggyness” that stem, I believe, less from their true personalities and more from a desire to be recognized as gay in the eyes of the world according to extremely limited acceptable personalities for gay people. While there are many gay men for whom this behavior is completely honest, there are others who are in need of other models. We need to create a culture in which there are as many ways to be gay as there are gay people. Let’s not recreate the limited behavior norms that plague straight people.

Second, it promotes gay stereotypes in a way that hurts gender non-conforming straight people. How many sweet sensitive aesthetically inclined little boys have been labeled as gay based on their behaviors and had to struggle against endless assumptions about their sexuality based on the “gayness” of their personalities? The world needs more straight people who embody their heterosexuality in all sorts of different ways, and your stereotyping sends a message to these people that they must be confused, or in denial of their true orientations, making them the object of gossip and ridicule. There need to be more feminine straight men, not less, and your views make it even harder for these gender non-conforming people to be themselves.

Third, it injures transgender people by equating gender non-conformity with gayness, as opposed to with being transgender or gender queer. While there are of course links between gender and sexuality, they play out very differently for each unique individual, and your comments leave out the possibility that childhood gender inverted behavior might be primarily about gender identity and not about sexuality. Let gender non-conformity mean all the different things it can mean when it is not tethered to serving as a sign of impending homosexuality.

Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts on these issues, and I hope you will take them into consideration.

Sincerely,

R. E. H. Gordon
Chicago, IL