Homophobia on M4M

[Chuck50]

Where is Marie when you need her to keep Donnie in Line!! HUGS

[Chuck50]

I don't care what Les says. It is what he does with those wonderful pictures. I sometimes think we get into too much "Oneupmanship" on here oh well just my queer as a 3 $ bill thoughts. HUGS Chuck

[IamI2002]

RE: Fin Fang Foom & Homophobia on M4M

 

There is little room in this forum for lightheartedness. I love the absurd. I made one absurd statement, just for the hell of it (see Brazil, under Escorts South of the Border) and, to my shock, it elicited response after response of pure jibberish.

 

Recently I read someone describing his experience on an RSVP cruise and referring to the non-gay crew as the breeders who were now serving the gays. What a hell of a way to practice self-isolationism. I think I'll stay away from this message board as the reactions are too strong and symptomatic of other ailments.

 

If you went a little overboard, so be it! Personally, I appreciate your sense of the absurd and applaud your ability to laugh at yourself and our? "gender."

[taylorky]

RE: Fin Fang Foom & Homophobia on M4M

 

OH shit.................well i still like reading FFF'S stuff,despite the fact that TB the ROID likes him

[Donnie]

>FFF would win hands down. He is witty, amusing,

>succinct and very refreshing in his viewpoints

 

Don't get out very much, do ya, Thunderbun? A queen who hates escorts is 'refreshing'?

[Will]

Caveat lector: Before reading further, be aware that this thread is long and not remotely amusing. If you want to joke around and have a good time, you'll be happier if you find another one. What I want to write about here is no joking matter for any man – whether he calls himself gay, bi, straight, or all of the above – who has sex with other men.

 

On a thread started by Fin Fang Foom in the Deli, Rick Munroe has posted the following questions: "Do we really need fag-bashing jokes on this site? What's next...wacky, crazy jokes about Matthew Shepherd? Will and some others got grossed out when nude pics of Madonna were recently posted by Les, and yet they silently allow this homophobic stuff to get posted without a word. Our self-hatred runs deep." I came across this thread, and Rick's remark about my silence, only a few minutes ago and want to respond right away.

 

None of us chose his parents, or where he was born, or when. None of us chose his sexual orientation. Yet each of us was conditioned from birth by powerful attitudes about "masculinity" and "femininity" already deeply ingrained in our families and in the culture that surrounded them. Those attitudes not only molded the way we learned to understand other people, they were among the most important categories in which we came to know and value ourselves, for better or worse.

 

We have traveled over an infinite variety of paths to arrive where we are today, sitting before our computers and reading threads on the M4M Message Center. For all but a few of us, the journey itself has been more painful and more difficult than most are able to acknowledge. One of the reasons gay men can be both so funny and so vicious is because they have suffered so much.

 

Wherever we set out on the road, and however long we walk, all of us want to reach a place where it is not life-threatening openly to acknowledge and even to embrace our sexuality. Surely, as beneficiaries of the immense efforts by at least three generations of U.S. gay men and lesbians to win our right to life (liberty and the pursuit of happiness still evade many of us), we have the moral obligation to root out homophobia in ourselves and to point it out in each other.

 

Make no mistake about it: the moral agenda of homophobia is to kill gay and lesbian people, or at least to diminish in every possible way the quality of their lives. Homophobia tries to murder gay and lesbian people outright, either directly as in the case of Matthew Shepherd or indirectly in every suicide over sexual despair. When it fails that way, it besets us through clinical depression, through alcoholism and other kinds of chemical dependency, through addictions to food and sex, through compulsive spending, through the remorseless obsession with trying to keep our bodies young, and through all other forms of behavior that play out, in real time and space, the fight-to-the-death in which the soul of every gay man I have ever met has struggled and continues to struggle.

 

Therefore, when on our life's path we come to an oasis, like M4M, blooming in the desert of public hostility or, at best, indifference, we not only need to be able to lie down in safety, but we have won the right. We have won the right to be free from the fear of being attacked, of being abused, of being ridiculed, of being humiliated and belittled simply because of the "style" in which we live our gay lives.

 

Contemptuous, abusive remarks about the manner of other gay men – or about their age or physical condition -- are not, I think, simple expressions of preference or personal taste. To the contrary, they are actions of public immorality in the strictest sense. Such actions ought not to be prohibited or banned, and not only because of First Amendment considerations; they provide vivid evidence of the degree to which gay men have learned to hate themselves and each other. On that view, we should read threads like the one regarding an "effeminate" Miami escort as a clear indication of how far some of us still have to travel. At the same time, we ought to condemn such threads outright for the hateful, destructive, and vicious force they unleash in a place that, one hoped, was secure.

 

Rick Munroe is a man of many virtues. On his own initiative and with the willing cooperation of many members of this board, he mostly shows us his virtues as an erotic entertainer. Every now and then, though, he reveals something that is not only deeper, but will probably prove to be longer-lived than his interest in being an escort. In my view, he provides an inestimable service to this site when he calls our attention to the hypocrisy into which our sexual desires can seduce us. I fully and, as you can see, enthusiastically support his condemnation of any thread that simply reinforces the stereotypical prejudices that have hurt, and even killed, thousands and thousands of gay men and lesbians. It is shameful – there's no stronger word – that such filth has been littered on this ground.

 

Thanks, Rick, for speaking out. When a youthful, intelligent, and verbal gay escort raises an ethical alarm on this site, each of us should sit up, take notice, and have a good, long look in the mirror.

[BuckyXTC]

Will:

 

As I tend to avoid FFF's posts, particularly following the Trent Fosters thread, I hadn't checked out his latest diatribe until a few minutes ago after reading your impassioned and thought provoking plea for sensitivity and civility. I'm grateful that Rick threw down the moral gauntlet, because it served as the impetus for your response, and your response is just what was called for.

 

There's a concept in Freudian thought called "reaction formation". In a nutshell, reaction formation is the tendency to deride, demean, and denigrate some attribute or factor in another person's being because we have unresolved issues related to that factor within ourselves. It is a form of self-loathing or self-hatred, with fear as its basis. When we castigate someone else as being "effeminate", we are really speaking volumes about our own fear of the feminine dimensions of our own personhood, and we all have that feminine side, and thank God for that, because it is essential to our total makeup as a human being.

 

Making fun of someone because they exhibit behavior deemed "effeminate" is not qualitatively different from making fun of someone who is mentally handicapped, or coming from a different cultural or racial background. In the end, it is prejudice, and prejudice generally involves ignorance, stupidity, and evil.

 

Will, thanks for what you've posted here. I wish I could say that it would positively affect those who need to hear it most. Hope springs eternal, but in some cases, I suspect it will only provoke more venom. Anyway, it needed to be said, and you said it well.

[Guest Les]

Hi Will, :7

Nice sermon. Nobody would accuse you of having a sense of humor.

Isn't this carrying PC a little too far. In the black community they call each other nigger and can laugh at each other's foibles but we gays are not allowed the same freedom? Don't get me wrong I should never be allowed the freedom to call an African-American a nigger but...

I find nothing wrong with the terms nancy boy, fruit, pansy, mary, queen, sissy, swish or any of the hundreds of epithets we use to describe each other...but that's the point...it's being used by gays to describe other gays. If you advocate taking away my right to call him a her you'll reduce me to tears.

[Guest sdmuscl4hire]

And still even after all the suicides, nervous break downs and addictions, these heart felt speaches fall on deaf ears and do what seems not an ounce of good.

[+ Cock Eyed Optimist]

Will,

 

BRAVO!!

[Will]

Michael, I've learned a few things about situations like this that have helped me a lot, and I'll pass them on to you in the hopes that they'll help you as well.

 

1. I cannot control what other people think, say, or do. If I say, "Two plus two equals four," and somebody accuses me of being an idiot because they say I said, "Two plus two equals five," there's not a thing I can do about it.

 

2. When I try to say or do something in public that I hope will be helpful (such as writing that post about homophobia), I can never know how effective it has been, one way or the other. People will respond to it in their own manner. Sometimes, it's the people who never say anything who are most deeply affected, both positively and negatively.

 

3. Because of #1 and #2, I try to say what I say because I want or need to say it. I can't speak my mind if I'm trying to calculate how people will react.

 

4. Finally, I've learned that some people, some subjects, and some situations are "Tar Babies," as in the Brer Rabbit story. That is, they are really mounds of sticky stuff. If I hit the Tar Baby with one hand, I'll get that hand stuck; if I hit it with the other, I'll get that hand stuck, too. Before you know it, the Tar Baby has me in its power without moving an inch. The only way to deal with a Tar Baby is to avoid it altogether. For a list of Tar Babies who frequent this site, you'll have to send me a private message!

 

Cheers,

Will

[phage]

While beautifully said, I just don’t agree. Although the image of an oasis free from judgment sounds appealing, it’s just not reasonable in the real world. If people are looking for that kind of support from an Internet message board, I think they really need to evaluate their support systems. I can’t think of any group anywhere that has such a haven, so why should the lot of the homosexual be different?

 

We spend a great deal of time telling the straight world that being gay isn’t a big deal. That happens to be a philosophy I agree with which is why it seems contradictory to me when someone says being a homosexual is such an important characteristic that it must override everything else about a person. That it must unite us in spite of our differences. That a disparaging comment about one is a disparaging comment about all. I just don’t believe it is that big of a deal.

 

It is politically expedient to try to unite the entire gay population into a single movement, but I don’t think it will ever be possible, or even desirable, to unite us into a single happy and cohesive family.

 

In my opinion, internalized homophobia is a gay guy going out with straight “buddies” and beating up queers. It is a gay man going ahead with a heterosexual marriage when he knows he is gay. It is NOT a gay man acknowledging that homosexuals come in ALL flavors and he doesn’t have to like them all.

 

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say that someone who makes fun of effeminate men is not nice. He is not a kind person. He may even be a mean-spirited piss-ant. But to label it internalized homophobia just seems like political correctness.

[Guest Les]

sanctimonious

 

ADJECTIVE: Of or practicing hypocrisy: hypocritical, Pecksniffian, pharisaic, pharisaical, phony, two-faced. See: Will, male4male escort forum.

[Rick Munroe]

>why should the lot of the homosexual be different?

 

"The lot of the homosexual"...is that a box of used cockrings being auctioned on ebay?

[Rick Munroe]

>Sometimes, it's the people who never say anything

>who are most deeply affected

 

You're absolutely right, Will, and that's why we can never stop posting from our hearts. Thanks for this and the top post above. You truly are a good man (exasperating sometimes, but you've got my respect here).

[phage]

Okay. So that's funny AND at no one's expense. I'll admit that it is possible. ;-)

[BuckyXTC]

>sanctimonious

>

>ADJECTIVE: Of or practicing hypocrisy: hypocritical,

>Pecksniffian, pharisaic, pharisaical, phony, two-faced. See:

>Will, male4male escort forum.

 

 

Les:

 

Isn't it "special" that you have a dictionary. Now if you could offer some creative thought here, that would really be special.......but I forgot, your modus operandi is posting pictures.

[Guest Les]

Bucky, Glad to know you consider posting pictures to be a less honorable

than the sanctimonious palaver delivered by Will in his response to Michael...but to live down to your expectations:

http://216.40.241.68/otn/angry/nono.gif

[Guest Thunderbuns]

>Isn't it "special" that you have a dictionary. Now if you

>could offer some creative thought here, that would really be

>special.......but I forgot, your modus operandi is posting

>pictures.

 

Well if I had a choice to look at a dictionary or a picture of a naked stud........ anyone want to guess which I would pick?

 

Thunderbuns

[Guest Les]

Rick, Rick, Rick...just when I want to get mad at you...you turn around and make me laugh and show that beautiful butt. :7

[Guest Fin Fang Foom]

>You're absolutely right, Will, and that's why we can never

>stop posting from our hearts.

 

This, from a person who has a picture of his bare ass next to his post.

 

I'm off to an appointment but when I return I will take the time necessary to properly address Will's self-pitying, reactionary, lachrymose and why-can't-we-just-all-hold-hands-and-sing-Kumbaya screed.

 

(I wonder what my position will be)

 

Expectantly yours,

 

FFF

[Guest elwood]

Bravo, Will!!! (and Rick Monroe)

[Donnie]

Les's ignorance is both appalling and sickening. On so many levels.

[Guest Les]

>Les's ignorance is both appalling and sickening. On so many levels.

OOPS EVERYBODY!

I apologize. I must be wrong. Poor DONNIE is APPALLED!

[Guest sdmuscl4hire]

I appreciate the candor, however I was just commenting on the thread