DEFINING BOUNDARIES AND IDENTITY
Sometimes when definitions are proposed there is a lot of analysis to find intermediate or exceptional cases and puzzle over them and made ever more complex definitions or invent taxonomic complexities. Though there is some advantage to problematizing words or categories to better understand them, sometimes this gets in the way of having useful categories and words.
Sometimes this serves ideological objectives and sometimes it is to deny a category or to reduce its credibility as a category to undermine a point of view and this can be intellectually valid. However, I am not going to have the Gay community denied identity through ideology or clever academic games.
The goal of this essay is to develop a working definition of what the Gay community is and who are its members that works for a Gay community.
I construct a definition that describes the Gay community as it is.
A Gay person is a biological man who is primarily sexually attracted to biological male bodies. The Gay community is composed of Gay men who conceive of themselves as Gay and members of a community of Gay men.
It is a definition that is descriptive of an actual functioning community of individuals who have a shared vital aspect of life which shapes their lives and often brings them together in many different venues.
It is a significant identity. Even without homophobia setting Gay people apart, even in some imaginary society without homophobia, Gays are significantly different than the rest of society in how they will live their lives and the choices open to them, comparable or more so than those differences between societies and religions.
The many systems and practices and customs surrounding and regulating heterosexuality don’t apply to Gay people nor generally do they fit in them. As Gay people there are many different ways they can exist that straight people, who compose almost all of society and dominate it, can’t exist, or rarely will exist, or are very unlikely to exist.
The Gay community incorporates all the social backgrounds of the society where it is located, and within the Gay community the social, sexual, and romantic interactions are much more common than in straight society. The boundaries in straight society are relatively very permeable in Gay society.
It is also a community that is global and has common shared practices and is conscious of being global. Unlike, nations, religions, political movements, it is present where ever there are people.
Being Gay starts as sexual desire, but through that sexual desire, it creates a Gay existence very different than being straight. Being Gay isn’t something carried around in a little black bag, and otherwise we are straight people. This is often not recognized since the organization of society around heterosexual desire, though pervading and encompassing, is also so every day it isn’t recognized.
The Gay community is a single-sex community. It will have social practices that differ because of that.
Now there are tiresome taxonomists who like to find the example that perplexes as to whether something is a member of a set of things. This isn’t entirely lacking in value; it is a way of problematizing words and understanding better what is the meaning of a word or how it might be classified. It is also useful to subvert the meaning of a word to show the word has an agenda. However, I think that sometimes, as I pointed out in the beginning of this essay, the discussion can be to subvert the Gay community’s existence.
However, we, Gays, are a body of people who have shared commonalities and we need a name for self-reference. Groups need a name to self-realize. Whereas a lot of people like to worry about labels when it comes to being Gay, no such nonsense is presented to Chinese, Koreans, French, African Americans, Lutherans, Catholics, Marxists, conservatives, etc. arguing that they can’t self-name or haggling with them telling them that their self-definition is flawed or they don’t really exist or that they don’t exist as a category.
Critical Race Theory says that race is constructed. Based on mitochondrial DNA the three major divisions of the human species are not any of the racial categories of which people commonly think. However, African Americans constitute a real social group of people with a real historical experience and except for those arguing for transracialism few, if any, in the academic world would dare publicly question their existence as being real.
Further a community of shared interest defines itself for itself. How the Gay community defines itself can be subject to critical academic scrutiny, and that scrutiny could possibly be useful or provide insight, but what self-definition that the Gay community uses is its own decision. It isn’t for others, academic or otherwise, to dictate or condescendingly lecture the Gay community as to who they are and what constitutes their community.
This short piece above is part of preparing for a book about being Gay an operating policy for the Gay community.
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