Culture of care: gay edition

In light of IU Student Association’s Culture of Care initiative, I’ve been contemplating what this could mean for the LGBT community. I’ve found little media on IUSA’s move toward gay discrimination awareness save a bullying panel and one screening of “The Laramie Project.”

My friend and co-worker, Kelly Fritz, wrote a compelling column earlier this week about creating a greater awareness around mental health, and I’d like to not only endorse everything she said, but add my own gay addendum to it.

Members of the LGBT community, especially those that are still in the closet, experience higher rates of depression, anxiety disorder, substance abuse and other critical dysfunctions in their youth. About 30 percent of all completed suicides have been related to sexual identity crisis, as gay and lesbian teens are twice, if not three times, as likely to end their life before it really starts.

Bully statistics and evidence of discrimination are available, and I don’t need to spell them out for you. But there are still ways to better treat the gay person in your friend circle. Take these eleven precautions to care more.

1.  No one is the “boy” or “girl” in the relationship. We are far more versatile lovers than what you’d like to prescribe. Sure, people prefer tops and bottoms, femme and butch women, but not everyone has to prefer either. To presume so is not only rude and ignorant, but it permeates our free lives with your restrictive speculations.

2. When someone comes out to you, they are usually sharing one of the most intimate, terrifying moments in their life, and that trust is fragile. Do not shrug it off or say “I knew it,” because that doesn’t make it any easier.

3. I am not your “gay best friend.” I am not a “fun gay.” I am not an accessory. I want to relay the message (for gay men like me) that we will not help you pick out your shoes for formal or help you compose a passive aggressive text to send to your boyfriend, Brad. Ask your sorority sister to do that.

4. There is no singular “type” of gay person. If you ask someone to imitate a gay man, many could do it: lisping, feminine, loves musical theater. A lesbian: a hulking, low-voiced hardware-happy bull-dyke. But if I ask you to imitate a straight person, you say, “No, we’re all different.” Well, so are we.

5. The worst question I’ve been asked: “Doesn’t your sex hurt? Is it difficult?” I always say, for some, sure, but it hurts more not to have it.

6. And by the way, it’s not called “gay sex.” Or “gay marriage” or “gay equality.” It is called sex, marriage and equality.

7. Transgender is an umbrella term for those that are “other” than the conventions of their biological sex. “Sex” is what you were assigned at birth. “Gender expression” refers to how one communicates gender. “Gender” is the social constructed role. ““Transsexual” means the gender expression is different from their sex. Transsexuals can alter their bodies through hormones and surgery, but not all want to. And this is not the same as a “tranny” which is an offensive, pathologized term you shouldn’t use at all.

8. Sexual orientation is analytically independent of sex and gender. Just because we’re gay does not mean we hate the conventions of our gender role. Not everyone who is transgender is a homosexual and vice versa.

9. Heterophobia is not a real thing. It has no credibility nor argument in the deranged pseudoscience of victimology. Check your privilege.

10. Our love is not activism. Just because we’re kissing a boyfriend/girlfriend doesn’t mean we’re looking to make the front page of a newspaper. Tons of us are perfectly content and hold the right to live a passive, peaceful life. We don’t all want marriage. To assume so is to foreclose on our everyday sense of functionality.

11. Your call to action is not about holding up a picket sign or posting something on Facebook. It is merely about vocalizing support when someone asks you. Don’t stand quietly on the sidelines. A single encouragement could save a life.

Have you hugged a gay today?

­— ftirado@indiana.edu