This is something I've been thinking about for a while, but Stephen Fry's recent blog post really brought it to the forefront of my mind (scroll down to "The Pink List").
The Independent on Sunday posted "The Pink List", which was a celebration of British gay icons and Fry was the third on the list. He didn't pay much attention to it until a friend of his pointed out that at the bottom of the list there was a "rogues gallery". One of the entries read like so:
Yes, apparently we're all for gay rights and gay visibility, just not, you know, the ones who are too gay.Louie Spence
Choreographer and TV star
Had this been a list for the greatest reinforcers of gay stereotypes, the star of Sky 1’s car-crash reality show Pineapple Dance Studios would obviously mince it. Alas, as it stands, we can’t help but hear the clock ticking on those 15 minutes of his.
Then there is the transphobia. With Stonewall came greater visibility and suddenly the desire to create a new queer mainstream. Jim Fouratt and his friends pushed Sylvia Rivera and other trans people out of New York's Gay Liberation Front. Jim Fouratt went on to make many transphobic remarks over the years, but the worst was when he spoke at a Stonewall observance in 2000, where he stated that trans people were "misguided gay men who'd undergone surgical mutilations".
This idea that to gain acceptance we must become indistinguishable from the heteronormative ideals continues. The gender policing from "straight-acting" gay men toward those who dare be anything less than a red-blooded manly stereotype is probably the most frequent example that I've seen first hand, but I know there are other manifestations of it.
Is there a political sense to this? Are LGBT people really better off trying to meet the behavioral expectations of society? Is it counter-productive for the cis-gendered, straight-acting LGB people to associate themselves with the flaming, the flamboyant and the transgendered?
My personal feeling is that the disassociation from those who are "too gay" and trans people is a mistake. Aside from leaving a lot of queer people out in the cold, trying to appeal to bigots instead of facing them head on only concedes ground to your enemies.